For years I thought myself the greatest possible fool, but I am now convinced that my original premise was not incorrect. Experience and experiment have revealed the relation between life and candle remains every bit as complete as I had proved. It was life that outfoxed me; and enumerated more variety in her means of perseverance than I could have ever conceived during a single lifetime.
-Michael Faraday, A Course of Nine Lectures on the Chemical History of a Candle Killilly leaned into the wind that had arisen from nowhere and now streamed out of the Dome in all directions. From her vantage at the southwestern corner of the cobblestone desert that surrounded the Dome, the commander of the Undertow forces examined her prize. The Dome loomed like a G.o.d-sized soap bubble, lit from within by a thousand shades of green and gold, looping whorls of oxidized copper and bronze, anodyne steel and t.i.tanium, spanned by curved gla.s.s that even at this close range looked like a bauble she should be able to reach out and pluck. Soon enough she would do just that.
The gargantuan hemisphere had begun to move, splitting down the sides. Five Dome- sized wedges began to open, achingly slow and with a sound like the ground was coughing itself to death. From between the cracks, air and light spilled out.
The skylords had ridden south to war, and their pa.s.sage left ink-black contrails in the morning sky. Already the sky above the Dome darkened with their gathering presence, still seething at the loss of their paper queen in Purseyet. Killilly had no idea how the Lady of La Jocondette had Died, and she was thankful for it: destroying the praetors and conquering the Dome had never been a sane quest, and the sooner abandoned the better. Taking advantage of the sudden opening of the Dome, now that was the kind of crazy Killilly could support, policywise- she could soften up a few cage-weakened praetorian turkeys, or at least throw fresh Undertow recruits at them long enough for her to decently sack the place.
Conquest was a sucker"s game. Looting, on the other hand, was the sport of survivors.
Killilly cut off her giggle when a lone skylord veered away from the procession above and plummeted toward her position. She stood up straight and watched a quiet meteor of black fog and fur streak across the cobbled plain, speeding in her direction until it landed in a cloud of dark vapor at her side- and then a prince of freedom rose, lifeless and ever-living, to gape at her from eye sockets br.i.m.m.i.n.g with green fire. Acid green, antifreeze- green, obsinto fumes and pond slime. As always, Killilly sensed a mocking undertone to the skylord"s lingering glances.
Most of her was terrified- another part, small and much- abused, stared longingly at the silver- striped black pelt the skylord wore. Those furs cost a fortune, Killilly knew; did they warm the skylord"s frost-cold bones? Killilly thought that she would like a coat like that.
Like all of its siblings, the skylord"s elegance remained irrefutable. Silver hair curled under its naked jawbone, sc.r.a.ps of flesh fluttered in the breeze and made the skylord"s skull look feathered. Gold hoops hung where its earlobes must once have been, but despite the jewelry and the frosty wig the lord"s gender remained unspecified. Killilly supposed gender became little more than a footnote once your flesh flaked away and your generative organs melted off in a slurry of rot.
"Emily?" it asked, not having bothered to learn Killilly"s name since she"d replaced the last Charnel Girl captain.
"Yes, Lord?"
"I sssee we ssstill haven"t begun the charge," the skylord observed, breaking its wry silence.
"No, Lord." Killilly nodded in obeisance.
"Ah." It glanced at her booted feet, then at her leggings, and Killilly imagined it lifting a spectral eyebrow at the cut of her tattered black top. She tugged at her clothes in a largely symbolic attempt to tidy herself. "Are you, perhapsss, expecting usss to provide you another army to lead?"
"No, Lord." Killilly stared at the ground and felt her face flush. It"s never good enough, is it?
"I sssee . . ." The skylord looked upward, its bony neck parodying grace. "If you don"t lead my army into the Dome as it opensss, girl, I"ll have to a.s.sssume you aren"t ssseriousss about your future. In thisss organization. . . orin the worldsss themselves."
"Oh G.o.d, Lord, no, I"m . . . I"m completely serious, I swear!"
"I sssee." It coughed a lick of green fire into its claw and dismissed her from its thoughts. "That"sss all."
Killilly raised her fist- she wore Hestor"s spiked gloves-and whooped with joy as she led her troops to their deaths. The afterbirth bore fruit queer and wondrous.
The Cicatrix flexed the polyvinyl chitin corsets of her segmented abdomen, trying to perform the old womb-workings that were once her highest form of magic. That was long ago, now, before she abandoned a strictly biological existence-she had always accomplished the walk- between-worlds with a visceral adeptness, flexing her instrument of creation to initiate a number of arcane tasks-from controlling the weather before a hunt to dilating a window into another world, as she tried to do now. She could almost conceive of herself as a being with womanly abilities again, after a fashion. She was like Rousseau"s b.u.t.terfly, the autumn- leafed lovewing whose pattern persisted beyond the end of its original existence, made of ash and shadow, inverted but there.
These days, her pattern persisted within a synthetic body that snaked around her lair in coils as thick as the eldest oak, and her female parts were less . . . womanly. Still, she commanded more than enough power in her graphene pudendum to open a path to the City Unspoken. What she did not expect was the rush of life from the svarning- all she"d fed it and more- so much life it touched her synthetic womb array and kindled within her a kind of maternal instinct for the machine.
The Cicatrix had planned to pluck up her daughters as she arrived, so she could draw upon their wholeness, such as it was. Now she would do so simply to awe them with her dominance. She herself would need time to pa.s.s the sheer length of her physical body across the worlds, let her daughters midwife her as she birthed herself into the heart of the Dome She grunted and bore down to initiate the transit. The air stretched thin, and thinner, until she pushed through the wall of reality with a snapping sensation; it came as a relief even as it stung what remained of her flesh and stressed the systems that monitored her physical integrity. As she pa.s.sed through the no-place that swaddled the worlds, the Cicatrix flickered her forked tongue and scented her way toward her goal. There was the Sea of Remembered Skies, there the beast that migrated through its starry shoals, and there the city bound to its back. And all of it stank of CooperOmphale, the trickster who"d invaded her body. Corrupter of the sacrosanct. She would suck the marrow from his bones as a digestif, after she glutted herself on the ancient engine, or cracked it like an . . .
What? Closer at hand, as she slithered into the amniosis of the world, the Cicatrix readied her systems to pierce the veil that protected the Dome and the prize within it, only to discover that the signal was gone. The vivisistor buried beneath the Dome had died. Her life, it no longer bled out toward hidden secrets. That. That was . . .
That was not right. That met not with her wishes. A vivisistor-bound pixie screamed a trochaic error report that streamed across the narrow log window on the left side of her field of vision: open syslog // opened window // closed Dome: event badapple.
She sensed the perfumed biosigns of her daughters and reached for them, even as she screamed fury through her systems-electricity arced between her eyelashes, her horns, her clawed fingers. The fey spirits inside her vivisistors cried out in tandem, at once enraged and tortured; every circuit of her systems fried itself with hunger for the energy signal that had vanished, and the slow dying that felt like love. The chains had plucked the pin from the pixie, and the song from the machine beneath the Dome- so long and so constant a presence in her head-ceased.
Woe. Woe. Woe. W0e. W03. VV03.
Something feral had grown from the integration of her native self into her amendments, and the Cicatrix liked to think it was a presence not unlike her soul.
Perhaps what she felt from the ancient vivisistor beneath the City Unspoken was nothing more than the attraction of two similar souls. Fated machine souls.
Wurk of wundr.
When the soul of the ancient vivisistor died, the Cicatrix screamed.
It was a w0rk of w0nder and you know it.
Involuntarily she gnashed her silver teeth. She let her weapons systems rant, as she could ill-afford to silence them before battle. At least they praised the patchwork wonder that was her soul. Yes, praise. Yes, soul. Yes.
W3 sh0uld ch4ng3 th4t. . . .
Lallowe"s fury expressed itself in a brittle exact.i.tude as she walked from her dressing room into her workshop and, in quick succession, whipped the back of her fist through the precise center of every clock and clockwork device that hung on the wall. Gla.s.s shattered, tinkling as it fell to the parquet-and shattered again, and again. Over thirty smashed gearworks of her own design crunched under her booted heel, mingling with pulverized porcelain clock faces and pins capped with flea-sized sapphires and rubies.
Lallowe slapped her Cooper-powered vivisistor down on her worktable and considered reducing it to a similar fate. All that work for nothing, only to bring her back.
That her mother had known how the vivisistors worked this whole time was no upset-but bringing her sister back to life, that stung. Was it really necessary to force Lallowe to endure the dismissal of her hard work and the return of her compet.i.tor in the same moment? Misdirection was a useful tool, of course, it made sense that her mother would want to test her abilities- after all, if she hadn"t been capable of reverse engineering the vivisistor, Lallowe wouldn"t have considered herself fit to replace her mother as queen.
Watching Almondine"s return, seeing her stroll through into the bathing room-her bathing room-made Lallowe so angry that she couldn"t feel her face. All she wanted was to destroy, a favorable temperament for an Unseelie ruler: unstoppable chaos paired with the turbulent egotism that fueled the trebled pursuits of glory, freedom, and vengeance.
Was Lallowe so disposable that she could be given a fool"s errand- an intricate, arduous one at that-only to have all of her work dumped into the rubbish bin at the last minute? To clear the way for the Cicatrix"s true heir? Lallowe wanted nothing more than to smash her vivisistor, gut her f.u.c.king sister, and leave this city to its dogs.
She stopped for a moment as a sharp bolt of pain pa.s.sed through her temples, and then again. The marchioness put one hand to her head when the pain took her breath away, but the ache pa.s.sed. She was overwrought, that was all. That had to be all.
Lallowe looked at the spurs of turquoise that grew from her nail beds, filed and buffed to resemble the lacquered nails of a wealthy lady. She wanted nothing so much as to slip off her clothes and sprint through the streets, garlanding herself in the entrails of anyone unlucky enough to cross paths with her. She"d cloaked her true nature for too long, and now it gnawed at her, demanding to be released.
But that was not a yen she could satisfy, was it? Not with her mother and sister bearing down on her, crowding her city and disrupting her carefully crafted life. Dismissing all of her efforts, which were of course heroic.
Pain shot through her head again, more tellingly. She even felt a pain in her gut, which could only mean one thing. She hadn"t much time.
Mother.
With grim humor, Lallowe congratulated herself on her foresight; she had written herself an exit strategy, after all, antic.i.p.ating that no endeavor between her mother and herself could end without some fraction of betrayal. Lallowe thought the embryonic program quite clever, although she wasn"t at all certain what good it would do her now.
She would find out. Linking her reengineered vivisistor to the coding sh.e.l.l with small-gauge silver chain, Lallowe clipped the chain to contact points on either side of the device as well as to the polished abalone ports on the underside of the cabbage- sized sh.e.l.l. Inside, Cooper"s severed finger twitched in protest as the glyphs and circuits his blood powered accepted the connection and were updated with the final code.
Using a turquoise nail, Lallowe sliced open the flesh of her upper arm-nearly to the bone. She slipped the disc- shaped ovoid into the wound, not wincing as it burrowed between her bicep and triceps; the biomechanics had been easy to program-the machine was designed around living tissue and seemed to want to incorporate itself into living systems. Blood called to blood through a matrix of electricity and enchantment, knitting together the function of her body with the vivisistor.
She felt it slide into place at last, finding a home inside her body, then a tingling sensation as the vivisistor integrated itself into her neuromuscular wiring, extruding filaments that wove themselves into her nerves and bones. It really was a marvel she"d created-Lallowe knew without undue hubris that she"d improved upon the original design in several critical places. Through her still-burning resentment she realized that had likely been Mother"s hope, to keep the full truth from her daughter and allow Lallowe an opportunity to excel.
Perhaps she should feel grateful for that. Perhaps in her way she already did.
She waited for something to happen, but nothing did. She sat at her vanity for a long time, staring into the mirror at her own reflection. Jadegreen eyes, pouty lips, skin like porcelain, eyes tilted just a degree too steep to be fully human. Even as a half-breed, Lallowe Thyu had always considered herself the consummate faerie- at least as reckoned by the Unseelie side of the fey divide. She sometimes wondered how true the tales of the original feykin could possibly be, or the schism between Seelie and Unseelie fey. Both factions had long ago ceased to exist, their descendants scattered across the worlds. There were dozens of fey civilizations now, and the ruins of twice that number, from worlds- spanning kingdoms like the Seven Silvers to small communities interwoven with their human counterparts. What use was a war between chaos and order when both seemed requirements for even the most basic existence? And yet her Unseelie heart beat in double-time to the thrill of the hunt, the wild whirling dance of death that marked the children of the Airy Dark. Oak and thorn, blood and wine, starlight and firelight, and the smells of s.e.x and murder. Earth, sky, rain.
How had her mother wandered so far from these ideals? Over the years, Lallowe had watched the faerie queen butcher herself: replacing her heart with a boiler, then a fuel cell, and finally a box of carbon with a piece of a star inside. She"d torn her jaw from her face and given herself a pair of silver lips instead, encrusted her hands with steel knuckles and pneumatic wrists. The pale dancer"s legs Lallowe remembered as a girl had gone too, hacked off to be replaced by a modular cha.s.sis that could be endlessly upgraded and extended. Then followed the dark coils of a polyvinyl wyrm, articulated manipulator arms, and still less recognizable amendments. The black monstrosity that replaced her mother"s hair was all curved horns and ablative plating, armor against a threat the Cicatrix had never been able, or willing, to articulate-knotted cabling that fell past her shoulders only to reenter her cha.s.sis at intervals between segmented scales.
Lallowe tried to clear her thoughts, but the ghost of her mother hovered out of sight, taunting her. She tried to refocus her attention on the new heartbeat pulsing inside the flesh of her upper arm, but found herself distracted by the reflection of a row of jewelry necks on the worktable behind her. A string of heirloom emeralds seemed particularly offensive, so she commanded Tam to move the lights. But that only caused a string of lilac sapphires to annoy her, so Tam thought to throw a bedsheet over the whole wall and tie the corners around unlit sconces.
Lilac and emerald, emerald and lilac. Since she"d inserted the vivisistor, the colors seemed to sparkle in her head, in time with the pain. But nothing else.
It was a shame to obscure such beauty, especially the gems that came from the earth itself-the natural world of her childhood that she felt so determined to restore-but she needed to concentrate, and her head and womb throbbed. Somewhere between the worlds, the Cicatrix slithered toward the City Unspoken; the pain grew to a pitch, and Lallowe"s vision began to blur.
This is transit, she thought as her mother"s magics plucked her from her home-and, no doubt, Almondine as well. Where are you taking us, Mother? And what will you force upon us when we get there? Nixon, Sesstri, and Cooper jumped off the Barge Brightly and clambered up the levee to the edge of the Dome plaza. Sesstri dragged Cooper toward the monstrous thing at a clip, but Nixon stood his ground, a.s.sessing the scene.
Above the Dome swirled a spiral of black clouds. Away from their everburning towers, the ama.s.sed lich-lords of the Undertow seemed a smaller force; Nixon had little trouble imagining the light from the Dome extinguishing that curl of dark smoke. Beneath the circling lich-lords, he saw an army of black-clothed youth clashing with a regiment of Terenz-de- Guises house guards followed by what looked like a pack of revelers.
The Dome itself looked wrong. It still dominated the city like a half- buried moon of garden light, casting the now-barren piazzas that surrounded it in a leafy golden glow- but it looked odd-bigger? No, Nixon could see trees and buildings through slits in the thing. Why?
Because it"s opening up like a G.o.dd.a.m.ned flower. Father, Son, and the Holy a.s.s-raping poltergeist, it"s open. The place f.u.c.king opens.
The Dome eclipsed the sky, but the scene playing out on the grounds surrounding the capitol struck a more immediate note: the Undertow threw themselves with gleeful abandon against the red-and-black guardsmen and their contingent of citizens, the Undertow drummers beating out a walking ba.s.s, and some crazed few played horns that blew a calypso melody.
Neither host had reached the eastern approach yet, and Nixon saw Cooper and Sesstri run that way, skirting the battle. Good.
Nixon shook his head, not certain whether to save his skin or join the fray. His little heartbeat had become a war drum of its own, and for the first time in his lives Nixon found himself drawn to the abandon of violent self-destruction. He shook his head to clear it; why did he feel that way?
That thought was interrupted by a rallying cry from the forces battling the Undertow. There in the midst of the melee, Nixon recognized no less a personage than Oxnard Terenz-de-Guises, dripping sweat and smiling fiercely as he battled the liches" fools.
Nixon crept closer. Terenz-de-Guises held one arm behind his back as he fended off two attackers at once. The marquis held an oiled leather blackjack with red-enameled studs, and wore what looked to Nixon like some kind of official uniform, a red jacket plated with medals and gold trim at the epaulets and wrists, and black boots that came almost to his thighs. With a chivalric effortlessness, he dodged and parried the blows of the Death Boy and Charnel Girl who beset him, though even Nixon was unimpressed with the sc.r.a.ppy fighting style of the Undertow forces. The children looked pressed, to him. They kept darting their eyes to the sky, where the lich-lords circled in a vortex.
Oxnard fended off a flurry of blows from a sandy-haired Death Boy while keeping his a.s.sailant between himself and the snarling Charnel Girl. While he spun and feinted, the marquis kept up a string of prattle that distracted his opponents.
"Young sir, please! I only want to dash inside-dash, mind you-and find a trinket that once belonged to my grandfather. I"ll only-girl, less slashy- slashy, if you don"t mind-" The Charnel Girl, a gangly thing with wide- set hips, lunged past her compatriot only to have the dirk knocked from her hand. She winced, shaking the sting from her fingers.
Oxnard continued, dancing away from a third attacker, a Charnel Girl who dove for his feet, "-I"ll only take a moment for myself, and then you lot can have at the place. I"ll even tell you where the praetors hide the good beer if only-you, other girl, stop stabbing my at my boots-if only you"ll forget to see me as I sneak inside, permiso?
The girl on the ground rolled away into the melee, and Oxnard kneed the Death Boy in the face as he bent down to retrieve his comrade"s fallen dirk.
"We could have had a nice chat, couldn"t we?" Oxnard lamented, spinning to kick the gangly Charnel Girl in the gut. She fell back. "But you lot refuse to be pleasant. I am an admiral, you know. I shan"t be kind."
Darting into the fray, Nixon waved at the lord, then covered his head with his hands as he ducked behind the Charnel Girl"s knees. Oxnard took the proffered opportunity and feinted a lunge; the girl tried to step back but tripped over Nixon and fell, hard, onto the cobbled stones. Nixon looked up just in time to see the marquis" steel-toed boot crack the fallen attacker"s skull. And again. Blood burst across the white of her eye.
"Much obliged and many thanks, small gentleman." Oxnard swept the sweat from his brow with a ringed hand and nodded to Nixon.
"No problem," Nixon grunted from the ground.
"I had a bit of a mood, but then I got the strangest feeling that my mother-in-law might be stopping by for a visit." Oxnard squinted at the Dome. "So I threw together an army, just in case my hunch was correct. Do try not to die." He strode away from the fighting, toward the capitol dominating the sky.
Nixon crawled across the cobblestones, met the gaze of the dying girl, and tried to smile. Her fingers twitched upon the hilt of her knife, unwilling to release her weapon even as her blood ran between the stones like miniature red ca.n.a.lworks. Gold light flooded out from the Dome, casting them all in sunset colors.
"Nice knife," he said, running his finger along the blade. She made a drowning sound and blood bubbled from her nose and mouth.
f.u.c.k.
"Look, doll." Nixon put one hand on the girl"s shoulder. She doesn"t look a day over fifteen, Nixon thought. But G.o.d knows what that means, right?
"Hey, don"t tell anybody I said this, but, ya know . . . you"re gonna be okay, okay?" He pointed at the black clouds that whirled above the Dome. "Don"t be such a sucker next time, though. Those p.r.i.c.ks used you, and now they"re f.u.c.ked and you"re dead. Sorry."
Then he lifted the looted knife and ran into the golden light, his pointy nose smelling glory below.
"Kaien, no. You can save lives here, or die out there." Purity stabbed her finger into the mason"s barrel chest, not even remotely appreciating how firm and solid it was with each and every poke. "I know I always sound like I"m right but please, this time I really am."
They stood at the gate to the Maidens" Keep, which shuddered as the Dome gla.s.s that formed one whole wall fell away slowly. Kaien argued, but not with much conviction. He knew he"d be needed in a dozen places at once to save all the lives at jeopardy from structural collapses.
"You stay here, Purity. Let me keep you safe."
She smiled. "You and I both know that"s absolutely not going to happen, and that you have to say it anyway."
He kissed her. "I"ve never felt stupid for protecting a girl before."
"I can"t die. I tried a lot. Worry about the people who can."
The First Mason"s son was far too practical to argue with that. Purity ran from the Keep, surprised to find herself legitimately concerned for her peers. The Dome gla.s.s in Bitzy"s salon would be pulling away from the rest of the room, from the building, and even Kaien couldn"t say for certain that the Keep, or any of the other buildings that shared a wall with the Dome, would not collapse. What could he do? But a structural collapse would incur far more casualties than a silly old battle.
Just moments ago, she"d been arguing with Kaien about the unacceptable level of dust in the secret pa.s.sage beneath the Dome, with Kaien insisting that the house keeping staff shouldn"t be faulted by virtue of the pa.s.sageways being secret, when obviously that meant only that there was a secret house keeper, who should be sought out and reprimanded.
Now she"d left him behind to scurry on ahead, and grime was the last of her problems. She could see the battle as she ran along the garden path: Death Boys and Charnel Girls fighting ordinary citizens and, to her surprise, the house forces of Terenz-de-Guises. Already the praetors were a.s.sembling, trampling the gra.s.s with their perfectly square formations, platinum helms gleaming beneath direct sunlight for the first time in five years. The ground continued to shake violently beneath them all.
And then. Dead G.o.ds, the Groveheart. The Dome above had split into five identical slices, save for one which remained attached to the spike, the ma.s.sive central column that had supported the Dome for aeons. As the leaves of the Dome opened, the spike lifted up and out of the ground, pulled at an angle by the tip of its slice of Dome.
But the damage to the primordial forest was beyond anything Purity had imagined. In the center of the forest, trees as tall as towers had been pushed up and toppled over- great banks of earth pushed up and fallen away, like a giant"s fist had punched through the forest.
And so it had. As she picked her way through the underbrush, Purity felt stronger vibrations abuse the ground, and something that looked like a golden ball pushed itself up from underground, rising in a straight line as the spike that had pierced it, now nearly horizontal, succ.u.mbed to its own weight and snapped off its portion of the opening Dome, crashing through the already-tortured forest below.
But the gold sphere kept rising, as big a mansion. Purity hurried closer, and saw that it rose atop three tiers of telescoping platforms made from the same yellow metal. Higher and higher it rose, and Purity saw stairs spiraling up the platforms. She had to take the long way around, and found herself skirting the muddy length of the fallen spike, the portion of it that had been underground. Its tip, she noted, was not gold but corroded iron, slick with some kind of black grease. She shuddered, and found the first step.
Like a wedding cake, the three-tiered platform rose above her, and overhead there circled a dark vortex she knew all too well from her many hours of staring longingly at the city that Fflaen had denied her. The liches were here, of course-their slaves waging the battle outside so the lords could invade from above.
Climbing the roots of a fallen sequoia to reach the foot of the stairs, Purity saw something wet and leathery, person- sized, that glowed like a faint moon and shook on the naked dirt.
"Help me," croaked the wet leather, shuddering.
Purity pushed her way past fallen slabs of earth-clay and approached the thing. It was lit from within, and she saw the bones of a person curled up inside.
"Help," it said again, and Purity recognized the voice as female. Desperately willing her intuition to be true, Purity tore off something she would have called a yolk sack if it hadn"t been as large as a person and covering a creature made of light, but who spoke with the voice of a woman. Her flesh streamed light, once Purity scooped away the amniotic muck, and as soon as she"d worked an arm free, the woman helped to free herself.
Purity verged upon a question, but she knew with a thunderbolt that it could be only one person in all the worlds, thought Dead before birth, like her sister Parquetta"s miscarried child. The woman confirmed Purity"s hunch when she turned her head toward Purity-who saw the cyclopean face and the bone-crested skull, blinked, and then nearly fainted from the force of the recognition.
As soon as she regained control of herself, Purity dropped to her knees with the speed of a thunderclap. "Oh my, oh oh my, you"re alive. You"re alive!" Purity covered her face with her hands.
"Who is?" the aesr asked, wounded and disoriented.
"You are!" Purity was shaking, and she hovered her hands over the glowing body. "Fflaen"s daughter, the last living aesr and the only woman in the worlds who could restore our city. f.u.c.k me upside down, this is a day!"
She held out her arms with reverence, lifting the creature"s enormous head by the chin and wiping off the last of the restorative mucus. Her eyes were wide.
"Oh Prama," she said. "We thought you Dead for so long."