Heart of Veridon (25 page)

“But could that happen? Enough money or shiny beads or whatever you people trade in, someone could ask for a specific thing?” I leaned forward. “Get one of you to fetch it?”

“Fetch.” He curled his lip. “Fetch. Yes, I suppose. If it were important.”

“How would I find out? If this had been… retrieved. And who paid to have it done?”

“The way you talk about these people, it seems they would pay a great deal to have it done. And a great deal more to keep that transaction from public eyes.”

I sniffed, then regretted it. He smelled like stagnant water and the sickness of swamps.

“How do I find out?”

He waved his hand, spreading the fingers like a fan. “Is that all this is about? This gun? Really, Jacob, you’re usually so much more interesting than this.”

“It’s important, Morgan. I can pay.”

“No, Jacob. You can’t. Just because we live in the river doesn’t mean we don’t hear things. And you’ve been making a lot of noise. The Council, Valentine, some of the Founding Families.” He drank a long and slow glass of water, savoring my discomfort as much as the slosh. “I was looking forward to this discussion, Jacob. I thought you might come to me for something interesting. This?” He tapped the revolver, then shook his head.

“There’s more than this involved, Wright. Your old buddies, they’re in on it, too.”

He paused, just as he was reaching for the pitcher to refill his glass. Just a second’s hesitation, then he completed the action. When he set the pitcher down, he stared at me with cold eyes.

“The concerns of the Church are much deeper than this. You can’t claim to have caught the attention of the Algorithm, Jacob. Unless there’s much more to this than I’ve heard.”

“Do the Church concerns include angels, Wright Morgan?” I picked up the pistol. “There’s something in the city. Hunting.”

“How dramatic,” he said glibly, but he had the glass halfway to his lips, and showed no sign of moving it.

“A friend of mine, an anansi familiar with the Artificer’s Guild, says it looks like a cross between the cogwork of the Church and the Artificer’s biotics. It’s killing people, and it’s looking for something. Looking for me, too.”

“Well.” He set his glass down, then rubbed the slack skin around his eyes. “Your friend is a heretic, comparing the holy pattern of the Algorithm to those Artificers and their damn beetles.” Drink. “But he has a lot correct, as well. The pattern, as manifest in the seedcoin, is the body of God. Longing for the pattern in us. Together, we are becoming something more complex. More beautiful.”

“Minus the theology.”

“Cog needs blood, and it needs our mind.” When he talked I could barely see the writhing pool of flat, black worms that replaced his organs, squirming at the back of his throat. “That is the layman’s version.”

“So this Angel?” I asked.

He crossed his arms and stared just above my shoulder. Several long drinks later, he refilled the glass from his pitcher and then steepled his fingers.

“That interests me,” he said.

He was quiet for several moments, not even drinking. When he spoke, his voice was still, like a deep pool.

“I had heard, of course. The events at the Manor Tomb have been spinning the rumor mill. To think, another of the Brilliant would visit us, all this time later.”

“Another?”

“Camilla. Jacob, you know your books.” He was reproachful, disappointed. “Her gifts raised the city up. I wonder what this visit portends.”

“Camilla’s a story, Morgan. A parable.” I took a drink of water, to fit in.

“A story? A story.” His voice rose gradually, like the tide. “Scripture, Jacob. Truth. True enough to end worship of those ghosts.”

The Church liked to bring up the usurpation of the spiritual reign of the Celestes whenever possible. Especially in the company of the Founding Families, who held the ethereal creatures holy for the longest time, held out against the encroachment of the Algorithm. My childhood home had been littered with the Icons of the Celestes, hidden away whenever Churchmen were to visit.

“Not even your own Master Wrights acknowledge that story anymore. Camilla is an origin myth, a convenient vehicle to describe the Church’s ascendancy, and its mastery of the Cog. A child of the Angels, really? No one believes that’s real anymore.”

“The child?” he asked, a grin leaking across his face. “Or the Angels?”

I grimaced. “Two weeks ago, no one believed in Angels.”

“Of course not.” Morgan sniffed, a strange sound in a river-logged head. “Such an enlightened age for Veridon. Clearly absurd to think she was the child of Angels. Right?” Drink, a messy slurp that drained his glass and sucked air. “Because then there would be such a thing as Angels. Which brings us, Jacob, back to your question. What was it, again? What did you want to ask me?”

Morgan’s bond to the Algorithm may have dissolved when his boat capsized and his life washed away so many years ago, but it was clear they still had his loyalty. Strange, but it was probably that fierce devotion that kept him so animate. So many of the Fehn simply faded into the dark current of the Reine, bumping against the piers and scaring children.

Still, he had me. Deny as I may, the problem at hand was an Angel. Mythic or not, propaganda or not, I had seen it twice and killed it once. It was real.

“Yes, okay,” I said, shifting in my seat. “Okay. But it wasn’t just at the Manor. I saw it before, a couple days ago. Up on the Heights.”

“The Heights?” he asked. “The Tombs again? What have they done to attract its attention?”

“That’s what I’m looking into. Though, to be honest, he seemed pretty interested in me. In something I have.”

“I am an old man, Jacob, and dead. Stop playing around with me. What do you have, and what do you know?” He leaned forward. “I can’t help you out if you’re not honest with me.”

“Two things. One was given to me, one I took. A friend of mine, guy I hadn’t seen in a few years. He died, on the
Glory of Day
. Seemed pretty desperate to get away from someone, desperate enough to crash a Hesperus class zepliner.”

“Sabotage? I thought it was an accident. Faulty PilotEngine, just like…” he stumbled to a halt, awkwardly aware of how close he was to old wounds. He refilled his glass to cover the silence. “Who was your friend?”

“Marcus, the guy I wanted to talk to,” I said, letting him off the hook. “He was coming home from a long trip. Gave me a Cog.” I held out my hands to show the size. “Like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh,” he said, and leaned back. “I see. And do you… do you have any idea where your friend might have been coming from?”

“Sure.” I slipped the map-artifact out of my coat and put it on the table. Wright Morgan looked stunned, tried to cover with a long drink of water. His bloated hand was shaking. I spun up the map. He nearly dropped the water in his rush to cover the mechanism.

“No need.” His voice was quiet. “So you have it?”

“I do.”

Morgan was troubled. He wouldn’t look at me, and his hands kept moving from the table to his face, pausing to tug at his slowly drying robes.

“So, so. Hell of a thing to bring to me, a man like me. And he gave it to you.”

“He was dying. He asked me to bring it to Veridon.”

“And Tomb? What did they have to do with this?”

“The map comes from their house. They sent him down the falls. I don’t know what they hoped to find.”

“They had no idea. All these years, nothing.” He picked up the map, held it gingerly in his hands. “All these years, and then Tomb gets it. She gave it to them.”

“She?”

He stared wistfully at the map, then set it on the table.

“Do you keep up with your services, Jacob? Does the Family Burn still honor the House of the Algorithm?”

“It’s been years. But my father still goes.” I didn’t bother mentioning the Icon of the Celestes he kept in his pocket every time he crossed into the Church’s corridors.

“You should return. Find a seat near the Tapestry of Hidden Ambition. There is a pillar there, the Pillar of Deep Intentions. North center of the room. Near the old Burn pews, if I remember.”

He stood. Water sloshed from his chair onto the grated floor. He touched the map one more time.

“I’ve been here too long,” he said. His face was looking a bit soft, like a leather balloon half-filled. “Best to you, Jacob Burn. And good luck with your legends.”

I watched him turn and go. He left a rapidly drying trail of water, sloshing out from his river-logged feet.

Chapter Eleven

The Chamber of the Heart

T
HE
C
HURCH OF
the Algorithm is the heart of Veridon. It sits on the south bank of the Ebd river, a gnarled fist grasping the current in fingered bridges, the water flowing over its open palm. Most of the Church is above the river, but the water is harnessed by flow channels, and unknown depths of the holy building exist under the river-turbines and boiler rooms that belch and hiss in the middle of the water.

From the outside, the Church looked like a cancer of architecture. It grew, walls expanding, roofs adding domes and towers that grew together until they became walls. The whole structure bristled with chimneys leaking oily smoke, smoke that pooled in the courtyards that surround the Church. Everything around its bulk was smudged black. The ground rumbled with the hidden engines of their god. I could feel it in my heels as we walked up.

Emily and I stood outside the penitent’s gate, watching the line of beggars huddled in the flank of the Church. These were men and women who couldn’t afford the upkeep on their cogwork, people with clockwork lungs and oiled hearts who could no longer pay for the licensed coggers in the city. They came to the Church, the source, the holy men of cog. They paid in blood and time, lent their bodies to the Church’s curious Wrights. They came out changed, or not at all.

My father had suggested that I come here, when the Academy’s doctors failed, when the best money my father was willing to spend couldn’t find a cure. He had meant it as a threat. I took it as surrender, and left.

“They creep me out,” Emily said. She stood close to me, her hands inside the wide shawl we had purchased that morning. She had a gun in there, to my dismay.

“Not their fault. Rotten people, with rotten hearts.” We went across the stone courtyard to one of the strangled gardens, passing through to the next little courtyard. “What should creep you out is inside.”

“I’ve heard it was beautiful. Or at least impressive.”

“Those are very different things.” I ducked my head as we approached the Church’s hulking flank. “You’ll see.”

Like so many things in Veridon, the presence of the Algorithm was a privilege you had to earn. Beggars stayed outside. Citizens approached the murals, the finished mysteries of the pattern. To reach the heart, the ever changing center of the Church, you had to be a Councilor, the blood of Veridon. Today, we were citizens.

The pillar that dead Wright Morgan had described to me was near the heart, in the privileged audience of the machinery. I wanted to get there, but things were too dangerous at the moment. I didn’t know what role the Church was playing in all this. If they were part of the shadowy pursuit that I seem to have attracted, I didn’t want to walk into their parlor and present my credentials. That hadn’t gone too well with the Tombs, and I thought I knew what to expect of Angela. The Church I didn’t understand.

The doors were plain. The Wright standing to one side didn’t pay us any mind, bobbing his brown robed head at the clink of our coin. He didn’t even ask us which door, just cycled the Citizen’s Gate.

The heavy wood clattered behind us. The corridor was dark and smelled of coal smoke and overclocked engines. The only light was from the altar manifolds around the corner. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust. Emily was tugging on my sleeve. She had the gun out, close to her body. The air around us was heavy, the walls slithering with barely perceived clockwork, deep vents puffing and groaning in the darkness.

“Let’s get this over with.” She glanced back at the door behind us. “It’s like being eaten by the city.”