‘I am godsdamned fed up with these fucking possessed bastards,’ Lina said, drawing her six-guns. Sapientia and I followed suit.
‘Inside,’ I said, keeping my voice low. Unlikely the daemon-gripped did not know we were present, but I saw no need to ring a dinner bell. We pushed inside the tavern, through the swinging doors.
Rubi’s Confidence was a ruin. Tables and chairs lay in broken heaps, dark stains on the floor, a pool of oil. Sapientia unshuttered a small daemonlight lantern and moved its narrow band of light about the room. Overhead the roof beams creaked. Dust filtered down from the ceiling and made the daemonlight swim with particles.
‘They’re moving,’ I said.
‘No shit,’ Lina said. ‘Look.’ She pointed to a crumpled heap in a corner.
There stood three casks of what appeared to be rum in the gloom, and draped across them was the body of an elderly man. Rough clothing, knobby knees and arthritic hands, stubbled grey head. Had enough blood still moved in his sanguiducts, and he been able to stand, we might’ve seen eye to eye. But his body was pure wreckage – lifeless. The puddle of blood around him had darkened to black.
‘Fucking awful how those things always go for the face,’ Lina said.
‘Hate is focused on the seat of expression: the eyes. The smile,’ I said, absently.
‘What the Hell is that supposed to mean?’ Lina said.
‘You hate what you see,’ I said. ‘And you hate what sees you.’
More rumbling footsteps above. A darkness whipped by in the open frame of the tavern’s door. I trained both barrels of my six-guns there.
Sapientia emerged from the kitchen (or back room behind the bar, I couldn’t tell).
‘No tools,’ she said. ‘But I did find this.’ She held up a medium-sized amphora. She set her daemonlight on the bar’s counter. ‘Oil.’
A leering face appeared in the doorway.
I fired, the report of Hellfire massive in the enclosed space of Rubi’s Confidence. It’s one thing to let loose Hellfire and damnation under the Hardscrabble sky, on the plains, where the noise can float over the shoals. But inside? It becomes deafening.
The face disappeared in a welter of blood. My ears rang. It was long moments before my hearing returned, and when it did, wordless screams and guttural vocalisations came from outside the tavern. One higher pitched than the others.
‘At least three more,’ I said. ‘A woman.’
Lina nodded grimly. ‘Don’t think her sex really fuckin’ matters any more, old one,’ she said.
‘True,’ I responded.
‘Help me,’ Sapientia said. ‘The tables and chairs.’ She was pulling all the wrecked furniture onto the thick wood of the bar.
‘I’ve got the door,’ I said to Lina. ‘Go.’
Lina frowned but holstered her guns and helped Sapientia pile up the broken furniture. I fired once as a daemon-gripped passed in front of the open door of Rubi’s. The roof rattled.
‘They’re looking for another way in,’ I said.
‘They’ll come in through the windows, when they think of it,’ Lina said.
‘We’ll be gone by then,’ Sapientia said. She snatched up the amphora and dumped the oil in a slick rush on the bar and over the stacked ruin of wooden furniture. When the amphora was empty, she tossed it aside and set the daemonlight lantern on the bar in a puddle of oil. She dug in one of the many pockets of her apron and withdrew a small vial, unscrewed the cap, and poured a small amount on the lantern.
‘We must go,’ she said, looking at us. ‘Quickly.’
‘They’re out there,’ I said.
‘Back door,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a little surprise here waiting for them.’ She gestured at the lantern. The top of it began to send acrid wisps of smoke toward the ceiling. She’d used some sort of caustic, I assumed.
Looking over my shoulder, I could see shadows shifting and dancing past Rubi’s storefront. They were coming.
We moved, following Sapientia’s lead, guns out. As we pushed through the wooden rear entrance, a daemon-gripped woman dropped from above to land in front of us, crouched, bloody hands out and ready to claw, with the wicked grace of all bedevilled. Her black mouth worked, gnawing at something I did not like to think about too much. Lina, with her own deadly grace, whipped out a longknife, and as the daemon-gripped woman lunged forward, she grabbed her by her long hair from the back of her head, and slung her with amazing force against the brickwork of Rubi’s rear kitchen wall. In a flash, Lina had sunk the longknife into the daemon-gripped woman’s throat. She pawed at the blade’s hilt and then shifted to pawing at Lina with blackened, scabrous hands. Then she stilled.
There came a soft whoosh, and guttural screams. Yellow light framed the rear door of Rubi’s Confidence, and heat poured out onto the street – the lantern had released its imp, the oil had gone up in flames, and the tavern began to burn.
We paused only long enough to see black figures thrashing in the firelight. And then we moved back through the streets to circle around to the wharf.
The piers were gone, some burned away, some splintered from large-bore Hellfire shelling. Far out, on the bay, a single light.
As we watched, it disappeared and the waters went dark.
‘Medieran?’ Sapientia said.
‘No idea,’ I said. ‘Possibly.’
‘Probably,’ Lina said.
We waited in the shadow of a warehouse. The waves rolled up onto the flotsam-filled shore, sluggish and low. Behind us, Rubi’s Confidence became a great conflagration, reflecting yellow light on the low night clouds scudding across the heavens now. The smell of burning cedar filled the air, fragrant. Smoke poured into the sky to join the blanketing whiteness above.
‘Are there great wyrms in the West?’ Lina asked. The way she asked, the timbre of her voice, the innocent rise and fall of it, made me think of a child asking her parent if magical creatures existed.
‘Dragons?’ Sapientia said, quietly. ‘I’m afraid they are just a myth.’
‘Not true,’ I said. ‘Livia has seen them, with her own eyes, when she was in Kithai. But they are very small and they call them lóng.’
‘And sea serpents?’ Lina asked.
‘No,’ Sapientia said. ‘Sailors would often confuse large sea creature—’
‘Look there,’ Lina said, pointing at the surface of the bay. ‘A serpent approaches.’
Something was moving under the water, approaching the Wickerware wharf.
The Typhon.
TWENTY-EIGHT
That Would Be A Bad Idea
A SHADOW UPON the water, sleek and deadly. Guns shrouded. We approached the Typhon on a dinghy, tossed by waves and uncomfortable in the night. Behind us, Wickerware had caught aflame – as incendiary as its namesake – and the smoke of the city filled our nostrils, caught in our hair, and only the smell of salt water washed the stink of it from us.
Sumner bent his back to the sea, tugging oars. Livia’s face was devoid of all emotion as she looked back on the receding shore, her skin painted in oranges and pinks from the fires. She held Fiscelion, who looked wide-eyed at the conflagration – the dancing flames and smoke and shifting shore. He was calm, silent and entranced. Fisk sat below them, his arse in the hull water, unsteady on his feet now. His arm might have been infected, I couldn’t tell.
Lina was tearless, fierce and implacable. But I found my face wet, and Sapientia, who sat next to me, put her hand on mine and squeezed as I watched my homeland become smaller and indistinct. A shifting, inconstant horizon.
When we finally reached the Typhon, Gynth raced across the face of the bay, his great feet churning a shining wake behind him. His foot touched the hull of the ship and he vaulted high into the air and landed with grace and terrifying agility on the deck and moved to help us on board.
Lupina leaned in close to me and said, ‘Thank you.’
‘Why do you thank me?’
‘You wept for us both. I do not have to,’ she said. ‘I don�
�t like you. I have never liked you. But we are the same.’
‘Of this place,’ I said.
‘No longer,’ she said. ‘Get used to it.’
‘It’s like coming home,’ Livia said, stepping onto the deck of the Typhon.
Carnelia was ecstatic. She gave Fisk a brief acknowledgement, Lupina and Livia terse hugs, and Fiscelion she covered in kisses. Tenebrae came above deck and greeted Fisk formally and offered him the captain’s berth and command. Fisk, still carrying the box containing the daemon hand, waved off Tenebrae’s formality.
‘I know jack squat about ships, sir,’ Fisk said. ‘The command is yours, if Livia lets you keep it.’
Catch Hands was nowhere to be seen. When I asked about him, Carnelia said, ‘I have never seen anyone so small vomit so much. We left him, half-dead, in Covenant.’ She hid a smile. ‘He was quite glad to remain on solid land, once more.’
Tenebrae hustled us below decks – it was supremely uncomfortable for Gynth, who had to literally crawl through the hatch and down the stairs into a stinking, central metal chamber that was close and pressing even for someone of my stature. I worked fields east of the Eldvatch when I was very young, those years when I wanted to see everything in Occidentalia – Rume, Fort Lucullus, the thousand-acre wood. In those years, I would pick cotton or tabac, work orchards and vegetable farms, with teams of itinerant dvergar, where we’d sleep in hot beds and shared bunks – groups of grown males sharing very little living space. The Typhon smelled the same as those flophouses.
Very quickly, berths were reorganised – Fisk with Livia and Fiscelion were placed in the captain’s, Tenebrae and Sumner in the lascar officer’s bunk, Sapientia with Carnelia and Lupina in the engineer’s cabin. The four lascars Tenebrae had recruited from Covenant had to string hammocks in the deck gun controls both forward and aft. This left the most spacious room (other than the command area) to Gynth and myself – the engine room, where the devil Typhon burned.
Carnelia laughingly called it Typhon’s Bower and hoped Gynth and I found in it a bliss of the nuptial kind, and then she stopped. ‘That was unkind, Shoe. I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m always saying things I probably shouldn’t.’
‘I know, ma’am. Not a problem,’ I said. ‘You’ve said worse.’
‘And probably will again in the future. I am just so happy you are all safe,’ she said, and then gave me a kiss on my whiskered cheek.
That one had changed. No longer the wasted wine-soaked harridan. She was robust, her arms and figure strong, her heart and demeanour full of life. With some, privilege and indolence can be cruel, hardship can be a boon, a furnace fire to smelt away all of the impurities, leaving only steel behind. I was happy to see Carnelia was one such person, even though the steel in her could be pointed. Sharp enough to draw blood.
As Gynth and I made pallets from stinking rough wool blankets and cloaks, a voice sounded through the interior of the Typhon. It was Mister Tenebrae.
‘Attend me, attend me – debrief in the command. Debrief on the second hour in the command,’ Tenebrae said. The sound of his voice was faint, coming from a small grate above the door. It was a curious sound, as if something rattled sympathetically to the sound of his voice. ‘That is all.’
Gynth said, ‘I will stay here.’ He sat on the metal floor and stared at the pulsing glow and intricate wardwork. He drew up his knees and wrapped his arms around them as if he was back in the Eldvatch caverns and burrows on the way to Wickerware. He was shutting down.
‘Anything I can do for you, pard?’ I said.
‘No,’ he responded. ‘I am too large for this place.’
‘It won’t be forever,’ I said.
‘If it is, I will just sleep,’ he said, covering his face. ‘I will take the long sleep.’
‘The long sleep?’ I asked.
He did not respond.
Fisk looked at Sapientia when we had all gathered in the command, save Gynth. ‘What do you know about this Terra Umbra?’
‘It holds the Emryal Rift,’ she said. ‘Terra Umbra, land of shadow. Where the cut between worlds occurred.’
‘Its location?’ Fisk said. ‘I realise there is knowledge that you as a member of the College of Engineers possess that even Tamberlaine himself might not be privy to. And I will be asking you to make a sacrifice. A great one,’ he said, looking at her meaningfully.
She chewed her bottom lip. Eventually she nodded. ‘Yes, I know its location.’
‘And will you tell us where it is?’ Fisk asked. Beside him, Livia had gone still and I noticed that her hand was at her side, close to where she kept her sawn-off.
‘I must think—’ Sapientia said. ‘I don’t know if it is realistic to—’
‘Allow me to say something,’ Livia said. ‘We have just had our whole world turned upside down and unleashed Hell upon the earth. Thousands have died.’
‘The Medierans—’ Sapientia said.
Livia was not having it. She held up a hand. Carnelia had changed. But so had her older sister. I loved her, as always, but there was something less likeable about her now. She was fearful, and willing to do horrible things. Or maybe she had always been that way and I was just seeing it now. A beautiful contradiction. But her husband, my partner, was the same. A deadly pair they made. I do not know why I was suddenly getting finicky about my friend’s willingness to use force – except that this time it was upon another of my friends.
Thankfully, Livia moved her hand away from the sawn-off and resorted to reason to persuade Sapientia.
‘This use of the infernal,’ Livia said, slowly. ‘It will leave the world in ruins. We have in our possession, through providence, or luck, or fortune, the ability to close this rift, to stop the city killers. To end this proliferation of Hellfire. And you have reservations?’
‘Of course I do!’ Sapientia said. ‘It’s my way of life.’
‘But it’s the world’s cancer and must be cut out.’
‘I do not like being forced into anything,’ Sapientia said.
‘That is unfortunate. But do not feel singled out,’ Livia said. ‘We have all been forced to this.’ She shifted her weight and stilled once more. It was the stillness of someone about to strike. ‘Disclose the location of Terra Umbra.’
Sapientia bowed her head. I felt terrible for her – no one should be the hand that kills their own profession.
‘Have you charts of the north seas? Beyond Heingistr and the Occidens?’ Sapientia said.
‘Yes,’ Livia responded. She gestured to Tenebrae, who retrieved the chart. He spread it out on the small command table, where I imagined lascars and their commanders might take food or coffee while on duty. It was a strange vessel, this Typhon. Windowless yet over-lit with daemonlights. Offering us great freedom now, a chance for life, but prison-like. And terribly close.
We examined the map. Sapientia moved her finger to the north, between the land masses of Occidentalia in the west, and Terra Omnia in the east, comprised of Teuton, Gall, and Latinum. The smaller Northlands, fractured states, worn as a crown.
‘Mare Congelatum,’ she said. ‘The frozen sea, and Terra Glacies, here. There is an island off the south-west coast, thirty days’ sail west and south.’ She said. ‘There lies Terra Umbra.’
‘In the frozen north,’ I said. ‘How ironic.’
‘It is ironic. The rift itself seethes, casting up great plumes of steam and vapours. For hundreds of miles to the east, and most of the isle itself, is wreathed in clouds and even though it is cold there, the heat issuing from the rift gives it a singularly warm and out of place climate for an island in the Mare Congelatum.’ She scratched at her cheek. ‘Or so legend has it. Very few alive have ever ventured there. It’s rumoured that the land is guarded by devils made flesh. And the great wyrms.’
‘And do you believe this to be true?’ Fisk asked.
‘Possibly,’ she said. ‘Engineers – summoners – tend to be unstable and prone to either self-debasement or grandiose summits of self-wor
th. Like Beleth and his folly. It goes part and parcel with the raising of devils. Most of the histories of the time of Emrys, who cut the rift, are fanciful. Also,’ she said, a bit sheepishly, ‘engineers are secretive and do not like sharing knowledge. So dressing up the origins of power seemed reasonable, at the time, for those early practitioners.’
‘How did you gain the knowledge of Terra Umbra?’ Livia asked. ‘It seems that they would want to keep that for the most select few.’
‘You might think so,’ Sapientia said. ‘But you’d be wrong. There is great secrecy in the College, but that secrecy involves summoning and the physical aspects of engineering. Trade secrets. To protect these, we make up rituals for entry into the College and for initiation into the deeper studies.’ She shrugged. ‘I became fascinated by the rituals and did what I could to discover their histories and origins, once I became initiated. The location of Terra Umbra …’ She smiled. ‘When I asked them about it, they looked at me blankly. “Why do you care?” one of my professors asked.’ She looked at Livia. ‘And of course, I responded that I was curious.’
‘Congratulations,’ Livia said. ‘Your curiosity will be answered.’ She turned to Tenebrae. ‘Set a course out of the Bay of Mageras, east. We sail for Terra Umbra.’
Gynth did not stir on the long voyage. He remained still, and seemingly a statue, and I began to understand some of how he appeared when I first met him and he rescued me from the other marauding vaettir. He seemed a revenant, raised from a grave, clad in mouldering garb. Illva and Ellva too had ancient clothing, as if they had just awoken from centuries-long slumber – which they had. It is just hard to countenance, even for me, a dvergar. I have seen a hundred-and-fifty-five seasons, but my life is but a moment to a vaettir.
With such long lives, there are those that turn to cruelty, mischievousness – like Berith’s band that terrorised the Hardscrabble. Others deal with the immemorial passage of days to years to centuries by taking the long sleep and waking when they are ready. The progression of their soul might be the alarm to wake, or great need. Or their dreams might become dark, or whatever senses they might possess even in slumber (and I fancy these might be considerable) might sense great change moving in the world. So they stir. Or, loathing it, dive deeper into the benthic depths of slumber. But the veil of much of their nature has been pulled back and now more understanding of them comes with that unveiling – they are myriad, they are complicated, they are multitudinous.
Infernal Machines Page 30
