Dead of Veridon (38 page)

"These are relevant historical notes. Thank you for entering them into the archive. Will user be available to supplement the archive following the events at the Church of the Algorithm?"

"Supplement?" I asked.

"This line of history is not complete. We would like our records to be accurate."

"I'm not recording this for history. I want to know if there's anything you can do about it."

"Record. Archive. Report," the Mother said. "What we have always done."

"Is there anything you can tell me about how to stop it?"

"Disambiguate. Stop recording. Stop archiving. Stop ambient lighting function. Stop communications..."

"Stop it," I snapped, then realized that would just require further disambiguation. "I need to know how to stop Crane from destroying the city. I need to know what he's done to Camilla, or what he plans to do."

"Conjecture. Outside of parameters. Restate."

"Gods in hell, this was a valuable outing." I rubbed my face, then started when I opened my eyes. The slugs had formed a circle around me, leaving only a few feet in all directions. "Get these damned things away from me!"

"Clarify range requirements."

"Away!"

"Estimating," the Mother said, then rotated slightly. The slugs backed off. Four inches.

"Much, much farther away," I snapped. The slugs fled to the far corners of the room. I sighed. "Good enough. Now. What was it that Valentine said about you. That you were something like a library, only a mad little bit of one? That seems pretty accurate. Mother, what do you know about Crane's plans for Camilla?"

"Cross-referencing previous user with queries regarding the servitor colloquially known as Camilla. Result. Transcript begins..."

"Summarize," I said.

"Summary. There are three hundred fifty three direct instances of nodal activity on this subject. Fifty-two additional instances can be related to similar..."

"Never mind. Give me the transcript."

"Verbal or printed?"

"Printed?"

Paper appeared. For all the world, it looked like a pile of slugs in the corner vomited a neat stack of papers, and there were fewer slugs in that area afterward. It was as creepy a bit of administrative work as I've ever seen.

But the transcript was fascinating. Crane spent a lot of time struggling with the Mother's peculiar way of communicating. He kept interrupting her and restating his questions in continually more complicated ways. I lost the train of their conversation frequently. But so did Crane, if the number of times he had to start his line of questioning over from the beginning was any indication.

A pattern emerged. There were two lines of inquiry. First, Crane asked a lot of questions about the connection between how cogwork and the Artificers' magic worked. Apparently they were the same discipline, differently practiced. I didn't know enough about that to really understand it, other than to say that Wilson's theory was correct. Ezekiel's crows served the same purpose as the maker beetles, providing material and schematics to whatever the user was trying to create. Where he lost me was the connection between the maker beetles and foetal metal.

Cogwork was created through the use of foetal metal, a silvery liquid similar to mercury, only more pewter in color. Some sort of pattern was imposed on the metal, usually through the use of memorized calculations and other near-mystic mental techniques. Understanding how those patterns were formed was the Wright's talent, supposedly gifted to him by his years of study in the revelation of the Algorithm. The metal was then injected into the subject, and cogwork formed like crystals in suspension. This was why cogwork only functioned in living creatures, why the zepliners required the living machine of the pilot to function. Something about the blood, or the flesh.

And apparently the Artificers worked in similar ways, except they seemed to believe that the foetal metal was already in all living things, and only needed to be tapped. I would call it crazy, but I had lost track of the meaning of that word in the last couple days. After all, I was having a conversation with a ball of light and a pillar of slugs. Crazy was relative.

Crane's second line of questioning involved the workings of something called a servitor. The Mother Fehn had referred to Camilla as a servitor, I recalled. There was nothing about her that seemed very servant-like to me. Then again, when we had spoken two years ago she referred to herself as a messenger, and the one pursuing me as a destroyer. As though she had been built for one purpose, and he had been built for another. And the key to those roles had been their cog-hearts. The pattern of their design depended on those hearts. Without them, they could not hold together for long. With them, they could rewrite themselves into different tasks, depending on the heart. Camilla had wanted the destroyer's heart, so she could free herself and wreak a little vengeance on the city.

The connection hit me like a bolt out of the sky. Camilla and her angel-kind used the most complicated patterns the city of Veridon had ever seen. Every technology, every bit of cogwork, was simply a derivation on those patterns. A cutting from the mother tree. We had never been able to access the true pattern at the center of the heart. Never would, since it was far too complicated for the memorization tricks that the Wrights employed. The pattern had to been held in your mind, while the foetal metal was applied.

But if the foetal metal could be applied directly to the pattern, what then? What would come of that? And if the Artificers were right, and that metal was really just a distillation of something that existed in all living creatures, who's to say that you couldn't apply someone directly to the pattern? That must be how the Artificer's magic was done. It explained how Crane was able to possess my father, even though dad didn't have any cogwork. Usually Artificers had to perform their tricks on carefully cogged and manipulated volunteers. To forcefully take over a creature without the assistance of cogwork implied that the pattern was being applied directly to the flesh.

Crane must be trying to get his hands on the angel's heart. To apply it to his flesh. To become something else. But what? And more importantly, how to stop him? I didn't even know where he was. Camilla was relatively free, powered by the foetal metal provided by Crane's murder of crows, surrounded by his cog-dead Wrights, and intent on disassembling the Church of the Algorithm. What was he waiting for? Was the pattern of the heart somehow incomplete, from having been separated from Camilla for so many years? Or was he simply waiting to strike when she was distracted with other tasks?

Whatever happened, it was going to happen at the Church of the Algorithm. I had a vague sense of what was going on, and what it implied. I imagined that if I could get this information to Wilson, or that mad bitch Veronica, they could do more with it than merely speculate. But I was trapped here. The suit was fried, and even if I could get it to work again, I had no way to fight my way against the current.

I put the papers down and rubbed my eyes. The Mother was looming over me.

"Don't you have something else you could be doing?" I asked. "Something not quite so creepy?"

"Restate."

I sighed and stood up. How long had I been sitting there, reading? How bad had things gotten up top, while I hid in an underwater bunker with a room full of slugs and made up stories about what might be happening?

"I think Crane is trying to make himself into a god. Or a reasonable pattern of one."

"Your superstitions are of interest to me. Would you like to sit and record them for me?"

"No, I wouldn't. I don't want to add to your archive, any more than I already have." I tried to walk around it, but the Mother had placed itself in an awkward place in the room, so I couldn't get past without stepping on its rubbery carpet of slugs. "You don't get many guests here, do you?"

"Very few who are still cognizant of their situation." The globe followed me as I tip-toed around it. "You are done with the record?"

"Unless you have something that can get me up to the Church," I said.

"You are lost. Recommended actions include retracing your steps. Alternatively, shelter where you are and wait for help to arrive."

"There are people up there, sheltering, waiting for me to arrive. I'm the help, get it?"

"Confirm. Recommend return via previous path."

I laughed. Like I was getting in that suit after it had been covered in slugs, even if it worked. I gave the helmet a kick.

"Suit's busted," I said.

"Assessment incomplete. Scanning. Evaluation negative due to primitive condition of the sample set. Do you require an analog?"

"You can fix the suit?"

"No. Archival samples must remain pristine, for future reference."

"You can't fix the suit, so what the hell can you do?"

The globe passed its gaze over me a dozen times in half a breath.

"There are many broken things. All of them can be repaired."

I rubbed my face. I was beginning to regret not drifting off in the pleasant blackness of oxygen deprivation, out there on the river floor. That seemed so much simpler.

"Whatever. Fix what you have to. Just get me up to the Church."

"Disambiguation. Do you want to go to the Church of the Algorithm, or do you want the suit to go to the Church of the Algorithm."

"I haven't seen the suit in a fight, but I'm willing to bet I could lick it. I need to get up there, Mother."

"Clarified. Please remain still."

The whole pillar of slugs shifted toward me. I took a step back.

"Clarification. Any movement on your part could result in severe and permanent damage, including but not limited to death." The globe paused for half a breath, then repeated. "Please remain still."

"What the fuck?" I yelped. The next time it slithered forward, I practically ran away. Not a lot of room to run, but I made up for the lack of distance with speed. "Get away from me."

"Clarification. Do. Not. Move."

The globe pulsed, the plates and pipes that clasped the core of light rattling like a windchime, and then the room was pure light and heat. And then blackness, and I was gone.

Twice in a row. I got in here with my lights out. I was getting out the same way.

Chapter Nineteen

Burning Bright

I
FELT ALIVE
. Alive like I'd never been, alive like a star falling out of the sky. Burning alive. My lungs were on fire, and my blood was glowing in my veins. The rational part of my mind said this was all very bad, but I didn't care. Everything felt good.

I rode a column of wriggling black slugs up out of the river. They got me to the shore, miles downriver of the city's gate and within sight of the waterfall that had nearly claimed my life. The far horizon was filled with the broad fields of the Arbarra Rare, the distant land that we had seen for generations but never reached until the invention of the zepliner. I pulled myself onto the muddy bank of the Reine and turned my face to Veridon. And ran.

I don't know what the Mother Fehn did to me, but it was amazing. Didn't get tired, didn't hurt. My hands were clean and new, like she had washed them clean of a lifetime of scabs and calluses and work. That's how I felt, all the way down to my bones. New. Clean. I trotted down the river road toward Veridon, and my legs ate up the distance. In no time at all I was passing through the scattered homes leading up to the city, and then the city gate itself. The broad gate was closed. Rare enough, in these days of zepliners and automated carriages, long years since siegecraft was even practiced. The gate was no challenge. I took it hand over hand, scaling the iron grating and hauling myself over the unmanned gatehouse. Didn't stop to think how unlikely that was, how it was a good ten feet from the top of the gate to the top of the wall, and that I had just swung myself up there like it was nothing. Of course I could manage that. Feeling as good as I did, I could manage anything.

From the gatehouse I could see the city laid out in front of me, the streets still empty in the wake of the curfew. All of my fatigue was gone, all my doubt. Three things caught my eye: the column of smoke that rose from the Manor Burn; the black, circling bands of crows around the Church of the Algorithm on the far side of the city; and, finally, the cracked husk of the Manor Tomb. A grand tree was growing out of it, wretched and knobbly, poking through the windows and shrugging aside walls like a giant. The tree was bare, and stood half again as tall as the Manor itself. It looked like a seed pod that had burst its shell.