“Good girl,” soothed Vashell, misunderstanding her compliance, and keeping her leash tight in his gloved fist. Anukis did not struggle, did not pull, did not fight her taming.
She smiled inwardly, although her face was stone. She was beyond the displaying of hatred. And when she killed him, when she massacred Vashell, as she knew, coldly, deep down in her breast and heart and soul that she would, it would be a long and painful death. It would be an absolution. A penance. An act of purifying like nothing the Engineers had before witnessed.
They walked, boots padding.
“Where are we going?” she asked, eventually.
“You will see.”
Gradually, the stone and metal walls started to show signs of the Engineers; symbols replaced numbers, and decorations became evident as the wall design became not just more opulent, but more instructive. Anukis found herself staring at the designs on the wall, the artwork, the very shape of the stones. Many were fashioned into toothed cogs, gears of stone, and the whole corridor began to twist with design as the stone gave way to metal, gave way to brass and gold, laced with silver-quartz mortar. Slowly, the walls changed, became more than walls, became machines, mechanisms, clockwork, and Anukis recognised that this was no longer a corridor, but a living breathing working machine and the Engineer’s Palace was more than just a building: it was a live thing, with a pulse of quartz and a heart of gold.
“Stop.”
Vashell held something, what looked like a tiny circle of bone, up to a mechanism beside a blank metal door. There came several hisses, of oiled metal on metal, as the object in his hand slid out pins and
integrated with the machine. The portal opened, but in the manner of nothing Anukis had ever seen; it was a series of curves, oiled and gleaming, which curled around one another, twisted like coils as the door didn’t just open, it unpeeled.
They stepped through, into a working engine.
The room was crammed with a giant mechanism of clockwork, a machine made up of thousands and thousands of smaller machines. Brass and gold gleamed everywhere. Cogs turned, integrated, shafts spun, steam hissed from tiny nozzles, brass pistons beat vertically, horizontally, diagonally, and everywhere Anukis looked there were a hundred movements, of rockers and cams, valves and pistons, and she shivered for it reminded her of the clockwork she had watched inserted into babies…only on a much, much larger scale; a vast scale. A terrible scale.
Vashell led her forward, through a natural tunnel amidst the heart of the vast machine which stretched above them for as far as the eye could see, away into darkness. She could smell hot oil, and the sweet narcoleptic essence of blood-oil. And another smell…a metallic undertone, acidic, insectile, the metal perfume of a million moving parts.
Vashell’s boots stamped to a halt, muffled against the brass floor, and Anukis looked up, blinking in the poor golden light. There was a simple metal bench, and behind it sat a woman. Her hands toyed with a complex mechanism, which moved and spun and gyrated and morphed, even as her hands moved endlessly around and within the machine. It was like watching a doctor performing high-speed surgery
inside an organism, a living, beating, functioning organism. Anu looked to the woman’s face. It was perfect and distorted at the same time. She seemed to wear a brass mask, which glittered dully.
“Hello, Daughter of Vachine,” said the woman, smiling, her eyes shining, her hands still constantly merging and integrating with the almost organic clockwork. “My name is Sa. I am Watchmaker.”
Anukis could not hide her amazement; nor her distaste.
The Watchmakers were clinically paranoid, in Anu’s opinion. They never walked amongst the people, instead hiding away in the Engineer’s Palace and issuing orders many of the vachine population found detached from the real world, divorced from the society in which a modern vachine lived, operated, ate and drank.
“You have abused me,” said Anu, simply.
“We have strengthened you,” said Sa.
“What do you want of me?” said Anu.
“We have a problem,” smiled Sa, her golden brass eyes kindly, her fangs peeking just a little above the lip of her mask. She was beautiful, Anu realised, in a vachine way. Despite her lack of stature, despite an athletic and powerful appearance, Anu realised this small dark-skinned woman exuded energy and she noted Vashell’s subservient stance. An ironic reversal, considering the behaviour she’d witnessed back in her cell: it had been a stage-act, just for her benefit. Anukis scowled. She was a pawn. Manipulated. Played for a fool. A tool in somebody else’s workbox.
“You need my father,” said Anu, voice now cold, eyes hardening.
“Our problem goes far, far deeper than your father,” said Sa, head tilting to one side. Still her hands played, sinking into a mist of spinning gears and wheels. “It is the blood-oil.”
“What about it?”
“We are running dry,” said Sa, watching Anukis carefully. “As you know, to the north we have the Fields, out past the Organic Flatlands. But the cattle are dying, have ceased to breed, and our refined blood-oil supplies are nearly exhausted. We have sent a scouting force south, beyond the Black Pike Mountains; they are searching out new possibilities for fresh cattle.”
Anu gave a single nod.
“Do you understand the implications of what I am saying?”
“If the blood runs out, it cannot be refined into blood-oil; then the vachine will begin to seize. And die.”
“Yes. This is a threat to our civilisation, Anukis. But more than that, the Blood Refineries your father helped build…to develop and engineer. They have contracted, shall we say, a fault. Something endemic to his math, his engineering, his blood-oil magick, and subsequently an element only he can put right. Kradek-ka was a genius.” She said it low; with ultimate respect. “He was Watchmaker.”
“What happens if the Refineries fail?”
Sa smiled, but there was no humour there. “We will return to a state of hunting and savagery. But how can eighty thousand vachine satiate their blood-oil lust? We will devolve, Anukis. Our society will become decadent, will crumble, will fade as we turn on one
another, revert back to clans and tribes. It does not even bear thinking about. The dark ages of our civilisation were a bloody, evil time, where the only vachine who suffered was vachine. Now, we are fed by the blood of others. Our population is fed by cattle, bred for the purpose. The age-old war with the albinos from under the mountain, all that is in the past. We conquered, we dominated, they became our slaves—and all because of our culture, our civilisation, our evolution! I cannot allow this be taken away. I cannot let this hierarchy, this religion, fail.”
“I am impure-blood,” said Anukis, voice low. Her eyes were fixed on Sa. “You have cast me out from your vachine world. Why should I care if you perish? Vashell has abused me, humiliated me, murdered my sister, and I am cast out by my own people because of a twist of genetics over which I had no control. I hate to be crude, Sa, but you meat-fuckers can suffer and die for all I care.”
Sa smiled. Her eyes glittered behind her mask. “Did your father ever tell you about the origin of the cankers, sweet Anukis?”
“What do you mean?”
“Cankers are…Kradek-ka’s greatest achievement. They are, shall we say, a method of utilising waste product. They are bred, and nurtured, deformities; a mish-mash of twisted clockwork and flesh, and put simply, the insane end-product of when a vachine goes bad. We keep them apart from vachine society; so you know the term, I am sure, as insult. But you have never seen the end product.” She took a deep breath. “However…”
The pause hurt Anukis. She could not describe why she felt such a sudden, indescribable terror, but she did. Her eyes grew wide. Palpitations riddled her clockwork breast. Her hands clenched together, and fear tasted like bad oil in her mouth.
“What are you saying?” she said.
Sa stood, and placed her fluid clockwork machine on the bench. She walked around its outskirts, hand trailing a sparkle of clockwork slivers, gold dust, blood-oil. She stood before Anukis, looking up into the pretty woman’s beaten face, deformed now by the removal of vachine fangs. She stood on tip-toe and kissed Anukis, her tongue slipping into her mouth, fangs ejecting and biting Anukis’s lower lip, a vampire bite, a tasting, a savouring, a gentle taking of blood…
Sa stood down. Anukis’s blood sat on her lips, in her fangs, and their eyes were connected and Anukis, finally, understood. Her hate fell, crushed. Her anger was crumpled like a paper ball. Her sense of revenge lay, stabbed and bleeding, dying, dead.
“You will help us find Kradek-ka. You will help us repair the Blood Refineries.”
Anukis nodded, weakly. “Yes,” she said.
“There are some things far worse than death,” Sa said. Then turned to Vashell. “Show her the Canker-Pits on your way out. Only then will she truly understand the limits of her…future potential. And the extremes of her father’s twisted genius.”
“Yes, Watchmaker.” Vashell bowed, and dragged Anukis on her leash.
Alloria, Queen of Falanor, sat in the Autumn Palace looking out over the staggered flower fields. Colours blazed, and the trees were filled with angry orange and russet browns, the bright fire of summer’s betrayal by autumn and a final fiery challenge to the approaching winter.
She sighed, and walked along a low wall, pulling her silk shawl a little tighter about her shoulders as her eyes swept the riot of colours stretching out, and down, in a huge two-league drop from the Autumn Palace to the floodfields beyond. Distantly, she could see workers tending the fields; and to the left, woodsmen cleared a section of forest using ox to drag log-laden carts back to the palace in readiness for the harsh snows which always troubled this part of the country.
“There you are!”
Mary ran along the neatly paved walkway and gave a low curtsy to her queen. Alloria grinned, and the two women embraced, the young woman—Alloria’s hand-maiden for the past year—nuzzling the older woman and drinking in her rich perfume, and the more subtle, underlying scent of soap-scrubbed skin and expensive moisturiser.
Mary pulled back, and gazed at the Queen of Falanor. Thirty years old, tall, elegant, athletic, with a shock mane of black hair like a rich waterfall, now tied back tightly, but wild and untamed when allowed to run free without a savage and vigorous brushing. Her skin was flawless, and very pale; beautiful in its sculpture as well as translucency. Her eyes were green, and sparkled green fire when she laughed. When
Alloria moved, it was with the natural grace of nobility, of birth, of breeding, and yet her character flowed with kindness, a lack of arrogance, and a generosity which ennobled her to the Falanor population. She was not just a queen, but a champion of the poor. She was not just queen by birth or marriage, but by popular consent; she was a woman of the people.
“You are cold,” said Mary. “Let me bring you a thicker shawl.”
“No, Mary, I am fine.”
Mary gazed out over the splendour of fire ranged before them. It was getting late, the sun sinking low, and most of the workers were finalising their work and walking in groups along pathways through distant crops. “The winter is coming,” she said, and gave an almost exaggerated shudder.
“I forgot,” smiled Alloria, touching Mary’s shoulder. “You hate the ice.”
“Yes. It reminds me too much of childhood.”
“Never fear. In a week Leanoric will have finished his training, and the volunteer regiments will be standing down for winter leave; he will meet us back at Iopia Palace and there will be a great feast. Fires and fireworks will burn and sparkle for a week; then, then you will feel warm, my Mary.”
Mary nodded, still very close to Alloria. “I will never be as warm as when I am with you, my queen,” she said, voice little more than a whisper.
Alloria smiled, and placed a finger on Mary’s lips. “Shh, little one. This is not the place for such conversation. Come, walk with me back to my chambers;
I’ve had a wonderful blue frall-silk dress delivered, and was wondering how well it will fit.”
They walked, arm in arm, along stone and marble paved walkways, between sculpted stone pillars and under roof-trellises filled with roses and winter honeysuckle. Scents filled the air, and Alloria closed her eyes, wishing she was back with her husband, her king, her lover, her hero. She smiled, picturing his smile, feeling his hands on her body. She shivered, then, as a ghost walked over her grave.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I am just thinking of Leanoric. I miss him.”
“He is a fine husband,” said Mary. “Such strength! One day, perhaps, I will find such a man.”
“Erran has been watching you, I think.”
“My lady!” Mary blushed furiously and lowered her eyes. “I fear you are mistaken.”
“Not so. I have seen him watching you, watching the way you walk, the sway of your hips, the rising of your breast when you have run an errand. I think he is in love.”
Erran was the Captain of the Guard at the Autumn Palace, thirty-two years old, single, muscular, attractive in a dark, flashing way. He was gallant, noble, and one of the finest swordsmen in Leanoric’s Legions; hence his placement of trust in protecting Queen Alloria.
“You jest,” Mary said, eventually.
“Come, let us ask him!”
“No, Alloria!” gasped Mary, and Alloria let out a giggle, breaking away from the younger woman and running up a flight of marble steps. At the summit two
guards stood to attention carrying long spears tipped by savage barbs. They stared, eyes ahead, as Alloria approached and swept between them, skirts hissing over inlaid gems in the gold-banded floor.
“Erran! Erran!”
He arrived in a few heartbeats, at a run, hand on sword-hilt. “Yes, my queen?”
“Do not worry, there is no alarm. I have a simple question for you.”
Mary arrived, panting a little, and Alloria saw Erran’s eyes drift longingly over Mary, then flicker back to her face, a question in his eyes, a sense of duty restored. “I will do my best, my queen.”
“No,” whispered Mary.
“I wondered if you’d found replacement guards for the two men taken sick last week? It leaves us with a force of only eighteen in the palace grounds.”