Heart of Veridon (9 page)

I stood. There was a lot of business at the other end of the room, a lot of voices and movement. Most of the Corpsmen were there, standing by a hastily constructed barricade that cut off the wing that held my former room. They were variously dressed and armed, very drunk men in pajamas wielding hunting rifles and croquet mallets. When they saw me, several of them formed a firing line. They couldn’t see what was above, what was coming down.

Just a flash, but I saw several Councilors standing nearby, their faces cold and terrified. Angela stood with them, still in her complicated dress, her knuckles white across the barrel of a shotgun. She looked at me and blanched. The Corpsmen were getting closer.

“What did you summon, Jacob Burn?” Lady Tomb yelled, her voice shrill. “What darkness followed you into my house?”

I shot a look at the Corpsmen and their rifles, then up at the angel. He was almost through, his wings unfolding to descend. I couldn’t see his face or his body, just the swirling mass of wings. I jumped, hit the balcony door and rolled outside. My bones were screaming with pain. Maybe I was screaming too.

I kept my eyes up, but the rain was too much. I couldn’t see anything, not even the roof. I stumbled across the deck until my hand brushed the rough stone of the railing. I crouched and started to follow it. For now I just wanted to get away from the main house. Whatever the thing hunting me might be, I’d rather face it alone than worry about getting shot in the back by some sloshed Corpsman.

I turned to look at the house. The glass windows looked like a fogged aquarium, little more than shapes moving across the bright field of the Manor Tomb. As I watched a form fell from the ceiling, spreading out as it descended into the Great Hall. The Angel. The storm swallowed any sound, but there was a staccato brightness, gunshots, and tiny cracks appeared in the window. I was up and running, found the stairs to a lower balcony. They were narrow, with a small gate separating them from the balcony. I vaulted and clattered down the steps. Maybe the Corps and their rifles could manage the angel. Maybe not, but at least they’d buy me some time.

The central window shattered outward, spilling glittering glass and light out onto the balcony. A dark figure scurried out, disappearing into shadows. A line of Corpsmen appeared, bristling with rifles. They began to drag furniture and torchieres into the Manor’s newest entrance, shining light into the storm.

I kept moving. These stairs were rickety, clearly not meant for running down in the rain. The ground fell away below me, and I got the feeling I was moving between terraces. I lost sight of the Manor, though I could hear voices yelling out into the darkness. They hadn’t finished the thing, that’s for sure. It was still out here. I was shivering with damp and adrenaline.

The stairs led to a small ledge, with a shed and a steep set of stairs leading down. A maintenance area of some kind. I kicked open the shed door and went inside. It was a gardener’s storage shed, all right. A tiny frictionlamp clicked on as I opened the door, the mainspring sparking up. The light glittered off a wall full of tools, blades and shovels and spikes. I doused the light and took a hammer, then went back outside. I had just started on a downward stair when the thing landed, impacting the ledge hard. I froze, the hammer in my hand. Without looking at me, he rushed the shed, tore it apart. In the noise I clambered down, falling as I went. I ended up in the broad garden I had visited earlier that night. I ran for the path that had brought me here the first time.

The lawn was very wet, a spongy green plain. Up the hill I could see broken light from the Manor, wondered if the Corps would venture out into the dark to hunt me or help me. Plenty of people in that room wouldn’t mind seeing me dead, people who might take advantage of the current chaos to put me down. I looked up at the sky, found a trace of moon among the jagged clouds. The storm was breaking down the valley, though rain still fell hard on the Heights.

He was waiting at the broad stone path that snaked up to the balcony above. I had the pistol in my left hand, the hammer in my right. I thought about running, but his wings were clenching and unclenching above his shoulders, like a giant fist waiting to strike me down. He looked at the pistol and shrugged. I raised the hammer.

“You are Jacob Burn,” he said.

“Yes.” Water was streaming down my face. The flooded lawn was reaching muddy fingers between my toes. I felt ridiculous and cold, and I was too tired for a game of question and answer. “And you?”

“They are looking, Jacob Burn. They are waiting for you.”

“Who is?” I gestured with the pistol. “Is that what this is? Some kind of warning?”

He shook his head, slowly, once. He reached across the space between us, stepping forward until his open hand was near my heart.

“Give it to me, and this will end. I thought the man Marcus was the end of the chain, but it has come to you.”

I listened to the rain hammering against my shoulders, watched it form a puddle in the shallow cup of his palm. The artifact, the Cog, sitting on Emily’s desk.

“I don’t have it.”

“Who does?”

I smirked and shrugged. “Beats me.”

“Yes,” he said, gathering my collar in his fist. “It does.”

I swung the hammer in a short, tight arc, keeping my elbow bent. The metal head buried into his temple. His hand fell from my coat, and he staggered backwards. I raised the pistol and got two shots off, pounding slugs into his right shoulder, before he lunged at me. We rolled across the lawn, hydroplaning on the grass, ending up side by side. I lost the pistol.

He screamed and came to his knees. It was an inhuman sound, a boiler bursting, metal torquing. His face was shattered in pain. He raised an arm and hidden mechanisms whirred, the hand folding and collapsing. I didn’t give him the chance. I brought the hammer around, swinging wide, smashing at his wrist and knuckles again and again. Metal popped and bent, gears and pistons tearing apart as axles came out of alignment and tore the machine apart. Then something else broke, meat cracking under the hammer and his hand hung limply at an awkward angle. His scream changed, pitching through agony and frustration into animal terror. He put his other hand on me, but I elbowed it aside then drove the hammer’s claw into his cheek. There was blood and bone, his skin came off in lumps that hit the wet ground and scurried away.

Shocked, I backed away. Half its face had crumbled, but there was something else behind it, pale white and bleeding. He threw himself at me, clubbing me with the ruined stump of his arm, the iron fingers of his other hand around my throat. I fell backwards. Twisting, I was able to get the hammer hooked against his chest. There was resistance, then blood, and I flung him over me. I struggled to my knees, gasping for air. When I looked up, he was throwing himself at me again, the wings beating and flailing, falling apart as he rushed me. I met him with the hammer, again and again, stumbling backwards as I struck, just staying out of reach of his hand, the whirring bloody machine of his stump, the hammer arcing back and forth, head then claw, head then claw, each blow hard and wet with gore.

The end was sudden, like a light being switched off. He fell to his knees, then his hands. His whole body seemed to pour off him. A glittering tide plunked into the water of the drowned lawn and swept out, tiny smooth shells like a ripple in a pond. When they had scurried away, they left behind a body, a girl. I turned her over with the hammer’s claw, red blood smearing across her white dress. It was the Summer Girl, the performer, her mouth open. The delicate machines of her mouth were clenching in the rain.

I fished out my pistol and headed back to the Manor. The lights were still on, the Corpsmen running around shouting and pointing rifles. I snuck along the side and went to the carriage house. I stole one of the Tomb’s cogdriven carriages and crashed the gate, rumbling down the road, the long way to Veridon.

Chapter Four

Survive or You Don’t

I
TOOK THE
carriage to Toth and left it in a stable under the Tomb family name. It was still raining when I got to the Soldier’s Gate and my clothes were soaked through. The blood and oil had stopped leaking from my chest, but my heart had developed an awkward grind that I could feel in my teeth. Dawn was still an hour away, though the city’s earliest and latest denizens were already on the streets.

I finally pried the hammer out of my coldstiff fingers and left it in a gutter by the Bellingrow, then caught a ride on the pneumatic rail that circled the city’s core. I ignored the stares of the factory boys and businessmen, took a seat on the pneumatic and rested my head against the glass as we tore over the city, the car rocking around the corners. The pipe that ran between the tracks breathed in loud gasping sighs of steam and heat as we ripped along. Below us the city dropped away as we went over the terraces. The farther we got from the Bellingrow, the newer the buildings. Everything smelled like fire and energy, up here in the ambitious orbits of Veridon.

My mind was numb. A storm of concern gathered around my temples, but I couldn’t get through it yet. The Corps would be looking for me, asking questions about Prescott and the angel. Whoever sent the Summer Girl too, whoever had burned a killer’s pattern into her head and remade her body into a weapon out of myth. The gun must also lead somewhere, must have someone behind it. There were a lot of troubles rising out of the
Glory
’s wreckage.

The storm was still tearing up the sky when the pneu, let me off at the Torchlight extension. I walked the Bridge District, bought some kettle soup and ate it as I went. I felt thin, like the night’s trouble had calved me over and over, leaving splinters of me behind with each step. My remnants drifted up into the Torchlight.

While I walked I fished the ID card out of my pocket. Wellons peered up at me, clean shaven, young. It was hard to match that with the overripe face I had seen up on the Heights. No matter. Someone must know who he was, and how he got into the Tomb’s summer estate. I put the card away and thought about it. Calvin, maybe? Would he be up yet?

Calvin’s place was an off-base barracks, really, an apartment block that the Corps hired to keep all the senior staff that it couldn’t stuff inside the walls of the fort. The building was old clapboard, thin planks peeling away from their nails, stains and pitch leaking down their warped sides. Nothing’s too good for the Corps.

Staying close to people like Calvin was why I kept my room on the Torch’. My contacts in the Corps were really all I had. That and a good name, but they could only get you so far. There was a guy out front, a guard, but he knew me. We smirked at each other, as I went inside. Calvin wasn’t up, at least not before I started pounding on his door. He opened it eventually, wearing his dress coat and little else.

“You look like shit,” he mumbled.

“You look like an ensign who’s been fucking sheep all night. Let me in, Cal.”

We went way back. Academy together. Expelled, for completely different reasons, together. I think Cal blamed me at some karmic level for his own fall from the ranks of Pilot. He had settled into a desk job, and I had settled into a life of crime. We both had our moments of envy, but we got along well for all that.

“Fair enough,” he said, and let me in. His room was a mess, but inspections outside the walls of the fort were infrequent. I sat on most of a chair while he spun up a tiny frictionlamp and scrounged up a largely empty bottle of rum.

“What’s eating Jacob Burn, at this hour? Unless this is a social call?” he asked, tipping the bottle my way. I shook my head.

“What are you into these days, Cal?”

“Debt,” he said with a smile. “And loose women. Less often than I’d like.”

“I mean professionally. Last we talked about work, you were overseeing requisitions for the downfalls campaign.”

“So, not a social call at all,” he said. He looked a little glum. “You never come around anymore, just to chat.”

“It’s because I no longer love you, Calvin. I’m in a very satisfying relationship with a signpost. Now, will you focus for a second and listen. What are you doing these days?”

“Why do you want to know?” he asked.

“There’s someone I need to find. A marine by the name of Wellons. Need to know his last assignment, maybe where he is.”

“Not a lot to go on. But,” he stood up, finished the bottle and tossed it on his bed, then started looking for some pants. “I know where to look. What do you know about him?”