Waybound
Authors: Cam Baity
Copyright © 2016 by Cam Baity and Benny Zelkowicz
Cover design by Marci Senders
Cover illustration © 2016 by Michael Heath
All rights reserved. Published by Disney ⢠Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney ⢠Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.
ISBN 978-1-4231-9038-7
Map illustration by Kayley LeFaiver
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Chapter 25: Beginnings without End
Chapter 31: Darkness Made Flesh
Chapter 32: Picking Up the Pieces
Chapter 38: Surrounded by Wings
For Minky and Binky
âCB
For my parents, who have always blazed the way
âBZ
I
n the time before, nothing was all.
It stretched vast and fathomless, a den of infinity.
Alone in the void dreamed Makina. Everseer was She, Divine Dynamo brooding in the dark of absence. Yet loâwithin the Forge of Her mind flickered a spark of life. The first light of the Way.
The Everseer looked upon this nothingness and was not content. Thus She spake, calling into the void the first word.
“BE.”
And Makina set about Her work.
She laid out Her infinite and infallible plan as a foundation for all things, seen and unseen, known and unknown. Across this, She stretched the Expanse, which was the course of all-time. And to drive existence forward, Makina crafted the gears of fate. Then smiled the Great Engineer upon this, Her sacred machine.
Yet Her creation had no function. And She was not content.
So Makina did take of Her own flesh, tearing out a piece of Her heart of Ore. And from this did She form Mehk, from its grandest peak to its lowest crevasse. And from the rent in Her body poured forth Her lifeblood, glistening silver flux, and it pooled upon the world to become the mighty seas.
Lo, the Everseer did weep, for She loved Her creation.
And Her tears were embers, scattering across the world. From Her mouth a sweet breath did blow, stoking the embers with life. And from the living Ore did sprout the first mehkans, embers bright, and they went forth to see Her work.
Thus, with a spark of life, Her sacred machine engaged.
Praise be to Makina, Divine Dynamo, beloved Mother of Ore.
Accord I: Edicts 01â09
H
ieromylous T.R. Pynch was snoring on the patchwork floor, puddled like a deflated tire, when the building around him shifted with a weary groan. He snorted awake and found himself surrounded by gray, decomposing walls. It took him a groggy moment to remember where he was.
Right. He and the Marquis were in Sen Ta'rine. Imprisoned.
Mr. Pynch scratched at his bushel of spiny hair, which matched the scraggly mess of his muttonchops and brows. The fat nozzle in the middle of his lumpy face rotated like the cylinder of a revolver, and his mouth crumpled into a scowl.
The lanky Marquis was still bustling about on his telescoping limbs, just as he had been when Mr. Pynch passed out. The Marquis scrubbed with a tattered hanky at the array of lenses wreathing his signal lamp head and plucked at his metal-threaded tuxedo. Damnable busybody lumilows barely ever slept, Mr. Pynch noted. No wonder they were so uptight.
A wash of early light bled through the tattered skin of the walls, exposing its shadowy, bat-wing scaffolding. The suns were already up? That would mean they had been confined in this blasted, dilapidated tower for nearly fourteen clicks.
“If yer gonna tromple about like that,” grumbled Mr. Pynch, “at least try and peep us out an escapement.”
The Marquis narrowed the shutters on his opticle eye and flared back an illuminated message:
Flick-flick-flash
.
“Don't you go scapegoatin' me, ya puffed up muteling!” Mr. Pynch blustered. “I forewarned ya. âBest lay low after our little transaction with the bleeders,' I said. And what do you do? Jaunt over to the nearest Sliverytik parlor, lose our hard-won gauge in a single toss, and then make a grandiose spectacle of it!” Mr. Pynch rose and puffed up his belly, causing his spines to nudge out from the flaps of his overcoat. “If it wasn't for you, we never would have gotten ambushed and incarcified.”
The Marquis pointed at Mr. Pynch with a tainted white glove and blasted back a glaring argument.
“Oh, puddlemudge!” Mr. Pynch retorted. “I didn't encourage you one smidgeon!”
Flickery-flash
. The opticle blasted an even brighter message.
“Well, if I did, it was just the viscollia talking!”
Blinkety-flash-flash!
“Look now, I've had just about enough o' yerâ”
FLASHY-FLASH!
“ME? You be the one that's yelling!”
The partners threw up their hands and stalked away from each other. Mr. Pynch grumbled to himself, irritated.
He thought back to their abduction. At first, he had assumed it was the Foundry, but then his nozzle had detected the distinctive musk of their captors. There was no doubtâthey were in the custody of mehkies.
But who? And why?
All they could tell was that they were still somewhere in the slums of the Heap. Mr. Pynch and the Marquis had been blindfolded in transit, but left alone in their cell, they had peeled up the shriveled skin of a wall to find themselves looking down on the city, teetering at the top of a skeletal sendrite skyscraper.
Only two ways outâa barricaded door or a long drop down.
A click came from the nearby hatch, then a dull grind like an axe being sharpened as the door swung open.
Five figures entered. The first was a volmerid, his tremendously oversized right arm barely fitting through the door. Even though they knew his imposing bulk was mostly shaggy brown steel wool, Mr. Pynch and the Marquis couldn't help but backpedal. His fist of a face was hard and curled, glaring out from behind his matted coat. Like most simpleminded volmerids, this one was probably nothing more than a grunt and a thug. They would find no ally in him.
Spilling in behind the vol was a trio of identical shapes that melted into the shadows like liquid jets of black. Aios. Mr. Pynch didn't mind untrustworthy typesâin fact, they made up the majority of his clienteleâbut the aios' inscrutability and cultish secrecy was something else altogether. Glimpsing an aio's cloaklike form or its gnarls of stabby limbs usually meant someone had hired the spook to kill you.
Three
aios, well, that was an unheard of kind of bad.
Then Mr. Pynch saw the last figure enter the room and breathed a hearty sigh of relief. “Jubilations and salutations,” he beamed. “Immoderately pleased to make yer acquaintance.”
The newcomer glided across the floor, the supple belt of her lower half humming through a glinting framework of rollers. Her body was draped in flexible metal bands that wound through her sprocketed figure like a helical gown. A pair of keen coppery eyes perched high on the long mask of her face.