Beneath Ceaseless Skies #47 Read online

  Jeris dispatched a runner to their headquarters. An hour later, those too injured to walk or wield a weapon were sent back on stretchers with a nominal escort. Later, he hoped, they would have the opportunity to retrieve and cremate their dead.

  “All right,” Jeris said. “Let’s move on out.” Most of those remaining looked pale, determined, or both. He, too, would be glad to escape the smell of the newly dead, and the strange, sharp, dusty odor that always accompanied the city’s outbreaks.

  They picked their way over the debris. Jeris blinked at the ghosts and thought, they’re mine, of my own making. If the ghosts faded away, it was up to him to bring them back. The thought sobered him.

  * * *

  The next territory was Six Bells, although some histories referred to it as Six Bridges. Jeris assumed the name had fallen into disuse when a lieutenant destroyed two of the bridges, which had never been rebuilt.

  At their approach to the White Bridge, a chord reverberated through the air. Jeris could have sworn he saw the bridge vibrating in sympathy. It stood tall, its immense supports contrasting with the filigreed fineness of its aboveground latticework. Wrack claimed to have run the figures on the structure, but refused to say how they added up. That told Jeris all he wanted to know.

  “The Horologer’s expecting us,” Wrack said.

  “When do you think he expects us?” said Vertu, whose relationship with clocks and deadlines was tenuous.

  “Whenever we arrive,” Jeris said. He was the first to step onto the bridge.

  Color washed away. On the White Bridge, people became outlines of themselves. Jeris had occasion to wonder if they became likewise light of weight, or more easily punctured. Their staggered footsteps sounded no less solid than usual and set up a low, ominous thrum. His own felt the way they always did.

  The smell of the river was ameliorated by the White Bridge’s influence: clean, light, like certain spring fruits. They marched past several people standing politely to the side, and a woman pulling a cart filled with patterned umbrellas.

  The return of form and color would have reassured him had it not been for the sudden abundance of clouds, thick and dark. There weren’t enough smokestacks in the city to account for them, either.

  Jeris asked, “Did we have any localized weather warnings?” He had checked them this morning as part of his routine but didn’t remember anything dire.

  No one remembered any such warning. “We’re being tracked,” said Rogen, who was gamely keeping up with them despite a splinted leg. “And not just by things from the sky.”

  The river’s gurgling was interrupted by a splash. The spray misted across their faces. Jeris hoped it wasn’t toxic. They drew weapons. Things that spawned in the river had a habit of growing teeth.

  Afterward, if Jeris had had to describe the creature to an ossuarist, he would have said it was a jawbone attached to a vestigial skull, with sutures but no holes for eyes and no nasal cavity, and a whippy, spiked spine that clattered as it flung itself out of the water. Over one too many drinks, he would have gestured to indicate its teeth and swiftness, knocking over his drink in the process. To himself, in the depths of his dreams, he admitted that it came as a white blur, with no more dimension than thread.

  Jeris barked something to the effect that this one didn’t look like a sinkhole construct. Which was probably true, but irrelevant. The thing was all bone and glistening sinew, and it didn’t like them. In the first heart-stop moments, Jeris noticed that no more people stood on the bridge.

  He had his sword out and swinging without pause to choose a weapon. Wrack had flanked the boneworm, insofar as one could flank something that moved in ever-shifting curves. Her crossbowmen had followed her lead.

  That incongruously small head with its incongruously long teeth moved more slowly than the rest of the boneworm. It seemed as if the two danced separate dances, perceived separate fights. “A graft!” someone yelled at the same time that Jeris did.

  Seeing the dances was different from adapting to them. When the head lunged for him, Jeris stabbed the juncture where jaw met skull. He barely threw himself aside before his arm would have been bitten off. To his side, a guard hissed and clutched her side.

  More attrition. He was down three guards. Water splashed into the air. Under a less ominous sky, it might have made a rainbow. Coughing and sputtering followed, although Jeris didn’t dare check to see who had been swept into the river. Not all the guards could swim.

  A clitter-clatter-clink came from the lonely streets before them. A cat yowled as it streaked past. Knee-high clockwork soldiers, all painted in white uniforms and pale red trim, marched in formation toward the riverbank.

  Jeris swore as he pulled one of the guards out of the path of the boneworm’s spines. They were surrounded. Given the boneworm’s origins, he wasn’t going to ask anyone to dive into the river to escape.

  A voice like the chirring of crickets rose up from the clockwork soldiers: “We will dismember it. Run!” They advanced on the boneworm.

  “Do it!” Jeris barked. Wrack repeated the order when some of the guards hesitated, staring at the spectacle. The clockwork soldiers had begun to climb the boneworm, white-red seething up the bones like eager mouths. Jeris shuddered and sprinted faster, past the bridge and into territory he hoped was safe.

  The soldiers’ voice swelled behind them, speaking a language none of them recognized. How could mechanical devices have a voice?

  It came to him that the voice was merely an outgrowth of the Horologer’s skills as an artificer. Spine had its summers and its seasonal insects. In some parts of the ward, musicians trained troupes of them to sing eerie, high-pitched chorales. The clockwork soldiers must, like crickets, be able to produce sound by friction, and in concert, to simulate a voice.

  They slowed down when they reached Six Bells’ market square, a good while after the river and boneworm were out of sight. Jeris was glad to see that his eyes hadn’t fooled him: various guards, including himself, were rank with sweat and river water, and two of them had unpleasant wounds, but they had left no one behind.

  The Brass Bank overlooked the market square. As far as Jeris had ever determined, not a single object or ornament of brass was to be found in or on the bank. The bank’s imposing, severe style informed the appearances of those who ventured near it. Among the men and women in brocade, velvet-hooded falcons and songbirds in gilt cages, the guards would have looked shabby no matter what. With the stink of exhaustion and battle clinging to them, not to mention the fact that their uniforms had come from a bad dye lot and were starting to lose color, they looked even worse.

  The Brass Bank also housed one of the territory’s bells, which had a massive baritone toll that had been known to cause people to stutter for days while their teeth settled. He hoped it didn’t ring.

  “Captain,” a woman said to him, “could you take your squadron elsewhere?”

  The woman was half a head taller than Jeris, or he would have glared at her. “We’ll go elsewhere when we damned well please,” he said. “Your patrons are going to have to wait.”

  “That’s not the issue,” the woman said, although her expression suggested otherwise. “It’s the possibility of property damage that concerns our organization.” She smiled coolly and turned on her heel before anyone could get in a retort.

  “Well,” Vertu said, “she’s not wrong.”

  “You’d think the financier would give more of a damn about the rogue who’s instigating all this,” Wrack said. She uncapped her canteen and took a measured sip.

  “We’re here,” Jeris said, “and the rogue isn’t. Which is a problem. But first we need to pay a call on the Horologer to give him our regards.”

  “Is that wise, sir?” Yared asked. Yared came from a family of minor artificers. After an unexplained incident, the family had abandoned the trade. “No one rescues us without expecting something in return.”

  “We don’t have much choice,” Wrack said. “I don’t fancy fa
cing those clockwork soldiers, myself.”

  “I don’t fancy facing their larger brothers,” Jeris said. They were sure to exist. “Only one way to find out.”

  “The Clocktower, then,” Wrack said.

  “The Clocktower.”

  The crowd in the market square had discreetly started to melt away since their arrival. This should have reassured Jeris that they had a grain of good sense but instead irritated him.

  Wrack, who didn’t have to be notably observant to guess his mood, cocked her head. “Should I be the one to knock?”

  “By all means.”

  They followed the last known route to the Clocktower, which involved too many corners and sun-shaded streets. Jeris had always hated the proliferation of tall buildings.

  “They should install gaslights,” he said after they flushed out an adventurous urchin who had crossed their path.

  “Tried,” Vertu said. “Then the pipes blew at the juncture on Suicide Twenty-Eight”—crossroads had their own nomenclature—”and they decided to hold off.”

  “You have family here,” Jeris said, remembering. Vertu’s sisters and brothers, all younger, stopped by periodically with baskets of pastries and newly polished needles.

  “The guard’s home now,” Vertu said. He looked like he preferred to believe it, in this place of shadows.

  “Nowhere’s home,” someone said glumly as the Clocktower loomed above them.

  “Let’s not get maudlin,” Wrack said.

  Mechanical birds stirred from their positions about the belfry, performing a grotesque dance of welcome or warning.

  By fiat, the buildings around the Clocktower were a few stories shorter. They did nothing to block off a visitor’s view of the soaring structure and the handsome stained-glass windows. As a corollary, the Clocktower commanded its surroundings. Jeris had seen worse defensive setups. If the Horologer had more of those wind-up soldiers, he also had a way to handle the narrowest alleys and the grimiest sewer pipes. The thought made Jeris twitch.

  Just as they crossed the street, with its oblivious rooftop starlings, the bell tolled. It had a high, pure tone, the kind that would wake you up in wonder before you realized that you’d shrugged off your sleep. Other bells called out to each other in an arpeggio. Jeris could have sworn it was a different chord from the one he had heard the last time, even from the same bells.

  “I guess he really expects us,” Wrack said.

  “Because we’ve been so inconspicuous,” Jeris said dryly.

  Wrack went straight for the double doors, but they opened before she had a chance to knock. A man and a woman, hands stiffly bandaged, bowed in unison. Jeris hated that. He never got over expecting the greeters to be automata of some sort, with painted smiles.

  “Sir guards,” said the man.

  “Captain,” said the woman.

  I am a guard, Jeris thought.

  “The Horologer apologizes for the hour,” said the woman.

  “He invites you to dine with him,” said the man.

  “Down the hall and the second door on the right,” said the woman.

  Nonplussed, the guards looked at the man.

  The man spread his hands. “That’s all, sir guards.”

  “It would be out of character for him to poison us, right?” Yared asked loudly.

  “That’s assuming someone else hasn’t bribed a junior cook,” Jeris said.

  “We might as well die with our stomachs full,” Wrack said.

  The others laughed politely.

  Jeris looked back and forth between the walls, which were painted a soothing shade of green. “Indeed.”

  The directions, at least, were easy enough to follow. Beyond these walls, Jeris imagined, men and women in drab clothes, and perhaps their children, labored at shaping wire or grinding gears or fitting together components passed down hand to hand. He supposed his existence would seem just as appalling and alien to them. On his first visit, under Captain Terco, the Horologer had offered them a tour of the workshops. The captain had refused. Jeris wondered who had been hiding what.

  Two more greeters, both men, awaited them at the second door, after a walk that dragged out due to the guards’ predilection for jumping at every new noise. Wordlessly, the men opened the door.

  The aroma of roasted meat was suddenly strong. Jeris’s mouth watered. The individual servings lay in neat metal trays on a long table. Instead of chairs, there were benches. The food itself was unpretentiously presented. It still smelled tempting.

  “Well, this is better courtesy,” Wrack said. She took a seat at one end of the table. Jeris took the opposite corner.

  The guards’ muttered conversation as they waited had a definite tinge of approval. Some of them licked their lips unselfconsciously, while others folded their hands in an imitation of upper-class manners. Armain, who had spent several of her early years as a pickpocket, had fished out an unpleasant strip of dried meat and was gnawing it without any sign of noticing her seatmates’ wrinkled noses.

  A chime sounded. The Horologer appeared in the doorway. “Please, eat,” he said. He was a stout, balding man with nimble hands. Jeris looked at him and remembered the clockwork soldiers beginning to dismember the boneworm.

  Vertu shifted aside for the Horologer without comment. His gaze shifted back and forth.

  Jeris dipped the flatbread into the stew or sauce or whatever it was, and bit in. Pleasantly savory. Armain, never wasteful, had taken to dipping the dried meat into her stew. Jeris shuddered and tried not to watch her.

  They ate quietly. Casual conversations about the cost of good boots or the best place to find dumplings because awkward. Jeris paid attention to who sat where, a subject of perennial fascination. Junior officers and guards segregated themselves. People avoided Wrack and made no attempt to hide it, which she accepted with her usual bland disdain. Armain they regarded as a little sister. She flitted over to whoever had last spoken with her, especially if they offered her leftovers that no one else would touch. Here, the injured sat between those more able-bodied, though everyone was moving stiffly. Yared hunched over his tray, isolating himself from the others.

  The Horologer did no more than exchange pleasantries until the last guard had finished. “Amenities are the next door down,” he said, precipitating a rapid ordering based partly on seniority and partly on last night’s gambling.

  When Jeris returned, the trays were already being removed. The Horologer was almost done clearing the cups onto a cart to be taken away, something Jeris hadn’t expected him to do himself. Jeris raised his eyebrows.

  “I’d like to speak with you privately,” the Horologer said. He looked unimposing, but there was nothing deferential about his manner.

  Jeris’s hackles rose. “I’m bringing my lieutenant.”

  “Alone would be better.”

  Wrack’s face was carefully expressionless.

  “My lieutenant is eminently qualified,” he said.

  “I ask that you trust my reasons,” the Horologer said.

  There was something to be said for leaving Wrack in charge of the uneasy guards. On the other hand, he couldn’t think of any good reason the Horologer would suggest that anyone but Wrack accompany him.

  Jeris nodded toward Yared, who was best able to pick out any peculiar mechanical details that might warn them of trouble. “You too,” he said to Wrack. They rose as one to stand by him.

  The Horologer’s mouth pursed, but he accepted the decision. A pair of servants had arrived to serve tea, which the guards regarded regretfully.

  Leaving the guards behind, they went up a flight of stairs whose railings featured ornaments of cast bronze. Jeris had seen similar flower-and-bone motifs in the houses of ossuarists and pharmacists. Most of the Clocktower’s interior was sparsely furnished, the plainness showcasing the clocks mounted at regular intervals on the walls. At one point Jeris spotted an hourglass, automatically rotated at the proper time by another device. “It detects the shifting center of mass,” t
he Horologer said offhandedly. “There’s no sense in having a clock run a clock.”

  To Jeris’s relief, in case of emergency escape through a window, they didn’t ascend any further. Instead, the Horologer led them to a room with a balcony overlooking the central square. The light washed everything in unnaturally rosy tones, and a breeze blew through without bringing anything more unsavory than a moment’s dust, which Jeris blinked away.

  The chairs were the overstuffed kind that caused you to lose all will to get up for the next five hours. The Horologer remained standing, hands folded behind his back, so they stood, too. Yared was sagging, despite his brave expression.

  “There’s a traitor among you,” the Horologer said.

  “There always is,” Jeris said. Then the words penetrated, although his response would have been the same. His skin prickled. “Who?” Did the Horologer mean to accuse Wrack of treachery?

  “I don’t have that information,” he said heavily, “but I believe it is accurate.”

  Jeris shook his head. “Without details, there’s not much I can do.”

  “I am certain that a guard is working with the rogue territorialist,” he said.

  The only guards who should be in Circle Circle Six belonged to the Sunken Squad, and that was because they were unable to leave, thanks to an agreement that Captain Terco had made with the territorialist at the time. Some of the best guards, including Kel, had been ruined by that decision. “I see,” Jeris said carefully. “I’ll remember that.” He couldn’t blame the Horologer for his alarm, given this territory’s adjacency to Circle Circle Six.

  “Sir captain,” the Horologer said, then stopped. “Do not say, when you return, that you had no warning.”

  When, Jeris thought, hardly reassured. “Is there anything else you have to share?”

  “Aside from the phenomena that have tracked you?” The Horologer sighed. “Certain of my most sensitive clocks and mechanisms have begun to diverge from their synchronicity. This may not seem a great matter to you—”

  Did I say anything? thought Jeris, who had his own appreciation for precision.