The Mother Fehn was farther down the river than I expected. Quite near the waterfall, in fact. Near enough that I was nervous. The current tugged at my suit, the great mass of water rushing over me, dragging silt and debris along the river bottom like a sandstorm. Vaunt and his companions would only take me so far. Abruptly, their hands were gone and I was drifting in the current. I looked back and saw their rapidly receding forms. I panicked.
What if they just brought me out here and dropped me in the current? Valentine wasn't tracking my progress. There was no way for him to know that I failed because his associates dropped me off the waterfall, rather than because I took a bullet in some subterranean chamber or something. Maybe I shouldn't have told them that I might have to kill the Mother. My mistake.
The water here was much darker, the silt stirred up by the current clouding my vision. The lights on my helmet were nothing more than cones of cloud in front of my face. It was like walking through a fire. I quickly lost all sense of up or down. All I could tell was that I was falling forward, ever forward, the waterfall sucking me down to its horrible mouth.
My boot bounced off something hard, and I spun head over heels. A brief flash of stone and iron, then I was past it. I thrashed my arms, trying desperately to sink to the bottom of the river, but I could no longer tell which way that was. I finally got my feet aligned to the direction of the current. This meant I was either facing straight down, or straight up. Or sideways, I suppose. I was lost. Completely lost.
Faces flittered past my lights. Crushed heads, mouths gaping in horror, teeth bright in the fog of silt and sludge. I grabbed out for them, and my fingers crushed them like they were china-delicate. The bones turned to dust and joined the current, falling down. I scissored my legs and found purchase. Like a strongman towing a train, I strained against my feet, leaning forward, slipping in the raging current. My hands and feet found the river floor. It was littered with bodies that were barely husks. Ribs and skulls burst when I touched them, only their skin left. The hollow husks of beetles burst out from the crushed remains, slipping downstream like bullets. I was still losing ground, barely able to find any sort of purchase on this terrain. My hands were digging through the hollow remains of the Fehn like plows. Their skin was soft under my hands, and no matter how deeply I thrust into them, all I found were more bodies, more yielding skulls, more beetles. The river was choked with the dead.
Just as I was making enough traction to slow down, my feet fell off the edge. I looked back, expecting to see the bright edge of the waterfall. But no, the current wasn't that strong, not yet. I was on some kind of ledge, the river bed falling away for some distance before slowly sloping up. The water was clearer here. Before I could figure out what was going on I was over the ledge and in open water again. The current eddied down and I sank, the force of the water driving me into the pit. I landed flat, driving the air out of me. I gasped into the burning hot air of the suit, trying to choke down even a breath of that forge. Slowly my breathing calmed, and I forced myself to my hands and knees.
The floor here was just as morbid as it had been before the gap. Crushed bodies around me, the hollow shells of the Fehn scattering from my impact. They were all lying face up, arms reaching back upriver. I looked up, and the beams of my lights played off an iron door, round and black, inset below the ridge I had just fallen over. There was almost no turbulence here, despite the current all around. Unnatural. The Fehn lay here in perfect, dead, peace. They were all reaching for that door, the ones closest to it even dying with their fingers scratching at its cold metal. Trying to get in, trying to get away from the river, from the virus I had apparently unleashed upon them.
Trying to get back to the Mother.
This part I hadn't really planned for. Since the Mother was apparently so ancient, I imagined her living in some cave, deep beneath the river. Hadn't expected something quite so… technological. And this door was some serious technology. There were muted panes of frosted glass in the center, a circular window cut into slices like a pie, that undulated with warm blue light. Something like a piano keyboard lay flush beneath the pie. Everything looked clean and new, not as if it had been lying at the bottom of a river for the last dozen generations. Longer, probably. Unless Crane did something to clean them when he got here. I looked around at all the dead Fehn. No, this door was shut during the attack. Probably as soon as the Mother figured out what was going on, before these Fehn could get inside. Some kind of emergency procedure, like the pressure doors in warships. But if that was true, and Valentine's companion Fehn had somehow been in communication with those inside after the attack, only to lose contact later… how did Crane get in there? Assuming he was in here at all, that I wasn't wasting my time down here while Camilla picked the city apart up top.
I rested my hand against the door. Valentine said that Crane got access to the Mother because he controlled some critical mass of the Fehn, what I had taken to calling the cog-dead. I thought about the rows of them standing along the shoreline beneath Water Street. Maybe I was wrong about them. Maybe they weren't guarding the shoreline, but rather projecting Crane's consciousness into the river. Into this bunker, deep beneath the Reine.
There was a sudden vibration in the door. I jerked my hand back, even though I could barely feel the movement through the iron suit. As soon as I was out of contact with the door, the vibration stopped. Carefully, I returned my hand. The vibration started up again. It was like the scratching of a record, the sound you might hear if a towel was stuffed down the speaker horn. I closed my eyes and listened.
A voice. Voices. It was Crane. I remembered that whenever we were near a possession, his voice would come scratching through those pipes. Which meant he was either in there, projecting out, or he was somewhere else, broadcasting into the bunker.
Neither of which mattered, if I couldn't get this door open.
Traveling hand over hand, I pulled myself along the edge of the door to see if there was a seam between the metal and the rock. In the suit it was impossible to get any tactile sense of my surroundings, but it seemed like the join was smooth. As my hands drifted over the door the vibration-voices continued. I paused when it seemed like they were getting louder. Sure enough, the higher I went, the louder the voices and the clearer their words. By the time I got to the top of the door, the words were clear enough for me to be sure it was Crane talking. Crane, and something else that spoke in perfect monotone. I couldn't understand the nature of their conversation. Something about servitors, and initiation sequences.
My search brought me quite close to the top of the ledge. Just feet above me, the current ripped along. Securing myself to the door with a piston-run grapple, I stuck my fingers up into the current. Quite strong. I really had no idea how I was going to get out of here. But I noticed an odd thing. The suit had a pincer arm in the wrist of the left arm, a slow grapple powered by heavy gears that could seize onto the lip of the door. With the pincer firmly gripping the door and the other up in the current, my whole suit hummed with the monotone voice.
"Calibration is dependent on noetic impression of the operator," it droned. "Sufficient interference will recalibrate, regardless of impression."
I snatched my arm back, and the voice subsided. The rock here was knobbly, offering enough grip to secure the grapple higher up. I set the vise firmly into the rock, then hauled my head over the edge. The current battered me, but I held firm. My lights were dim in the silt, but I looked around. Hard to make anything out upriver. I turned and looked downstream. The pit sloped gently up to the normal level of the river, but other than that there wasn't much to see. I was about to turn back when something reddish and brassy caught my eye. The voices had stopped, but as I was peering downriver at this flicker of light, they returned. With my helmet and lamps over the ledge, I touched my boot to the door. The voice returned, and a surge of power pulsed through the suit. My lamps flared into impossible brilliance for a half breath, then faded.
In that fraction of a second I saw pipes. A dozen of them, arranged into two rows perpendicular to the current, their heights and arrangement staggered in almost random ways. They were a new construction, the rock at their bases raw, their brass untouched by time or river.
Crane had installed them. There was his broadcasting facility. That's how he was getting his voice into the Mother.
I pulled myself back down into the calm waters of the pit. Step by step, I worked my way up the sloped incline toward the pipe array. About halfway up I noticed that the ground clutter of smashed skulls and hollow ribs was mostly clear. Here, the rock floor was a webwork of conduit. It was flush with the rock, and freshly laid. More of Crane's work. I felt nothing when I touched it, though, so it must have been insulated. The voices diminished the farther I got from the door, and the current was dragging on me again, now that I was out of the lee of the pit. This was beginning to look like a bad idea.
A gust of the current lifted me and slammed me back into the rock. I gasped, then slammed the slow-closing grapple into the conduit. Another rope of current got under me, and again I was nearly cast back into the river. The grapple finally closed on the metal and I was able to secure myself. The suit only had the one pincer arm, though. What I wouldn't have done for a drill, or a jacksaw.
If I left my hand grappled and bent my legs, so that I was standing in a threepoint stance, I could clearly see the pipe array. If I had something large enough, a net or a log, I could have thrown them down river and tangled them in the pipes. If they were just brass, the additional drag from the log would have… never mind. It was just hopeful thinking. There was no 'log' accessory in the iron suit. I sighed and craned my neck for a better view.
The current almost took me, lifting my feet off the ground and flipping me over like a see-saw. My wrist torqued, and I heard the grapple groan unhappily against the metal conduit. The current slammed me onto the riverbed, nearly dislodging me. I hung there like a flag in a hurricane, screaming at the top of my lungs. Eventually I was able to pull myself down and, dragging along with both arms and the cog-assisted strength of the iron suit, got back into my original situation. I was about to release the grapple and scurry back into the safety of the door when I noticed that my little accident had done a great deal of damage to the conduit. It was pried free of the rock and the thick sheathing had burst. Its metallic guts were exposed to the river. They looked like jellybeans, clear and red and smashed together. I brushed my hand against them.
The suit glowed, the lights flaring again before popping out. The voice came back to my head, loudly.
"What was that?" Crane asked the air. I pulled my hand away, and the lights inside my suit died back to their tranquil glow. The externals didn't come back at all.
Crane wasn't inside. He was in the city, somewhere, communicating with the Fehn via these pipes. And something about the conduits that connected the pipes to the Fehn interacted with the suit. Well. Time to go for broke.
I grappled myself to a different part of the riverbed, then thrust my hand deep into the bubbly red material inside the conduit. There was an immediate snap as the suit surged, all of the systems redlining, the heat sudden and unbearable. Even the grappler creaked as it began to crush the rock beneath it. Crane's voice filled my head, urgent and frightened and then in pain, such pain. Between my fingers the smooth red pebbles in the conduit shivered and grew. The grappling hand snapped shut, grinding the stone into dust that was swept away in the current.
And then the suit went dark. Completely dark. The systems shut down, the internal lights faded into nothing, and I was crushed by an incredible weight. Without power-assisted joints, the iron suit crushed me to the riverbed. The last thing I saw as the glass dome of my helmet cracked into the rock was the bubbly red material in my right hand. The smooth pebbles shivered once more, then went dark, fading from brilliant red to black in the blink of an eye. The fingers of that hand were suddenly cold, and then I was on the floor and couldn't turn my head. Had more important things on my mind.
For example, the air quality quickly went from poor to intolerable. Wilson had said something about the oxygen being recycled and refreshed by something in the suit. If that wasn't happening anymore, I only had the small pockets of air between my body and the suit. If the quality of the air I was gasping right now was any indication, that wouldn't hold out for long.
And the suit itself was heavy. Now that the initial shock of losing control had passed, I was able to push myself up a little. Easier in water, would have been impossible on land, but even in the river it was quite a task. Every joint met with resistance. Getting my hand uncurled so I could get a proper pushup going used muscles in my hand and wrist that I didn't even know I had. And I had to fight against the current as well as the suit. All this effort was using up my air pretty quick.
I thought about throwing myself into the current. That would at least get me downriver. Maybe a lucky eddy would wash me up on shore. That was unlikely. Lurch forward now and I'd end up over the waterfall, nine times out of ten. Well. At least I'd get to open my helmet and breath sweet, sweet air one last time.
Since I was on an incline, I just let my shoulder collapse and roll me down the hill toward the massive door of the Fehn. That would get me out of the current, at least. Of course, it also got me into the carpet of cog-dead who had perished on the Mother's doorstep. It was like a slow motion horror show as I tumbled through that detritus, bones popping as my limp arms thrashed through them. The water filled with a sediment of broken jaws and separated legs and scraps of hair. With the lights out, I could only see this as a patchwork against my helmet.
But there was light. Struggling and gasping for air, I propped myself up and turned toward the bluish glow of the doors. Those pie-shaped bits of glass were pulsing, brighter and brighter, until they locked into a constant brilliance. The rock beneath me shook, and the door separated into six wide slices that met in the middle and, like a fist unclenching, opened. There was a brief current as water was sucked toward the opening, and air belched out. Inside there was light and, apparently, the possibility of air. It was all I had.
Slowly, painfully, I pulled myself to the door and inside the bunker. My arms and legs were bleeding, pinched by the unpowered joints of the suit. My head was pounding. The air was nearly gone, each breath a long, thin gasp that left my lungs hungry. When I collapsed to the floor, the doors began to close. I thought it was too late. That I couldn't even move to unseal the suit and let air in. That the doors were closing too slowly. That I was going to die here, on the bottom of the Reine, with a carpet of the undead as my funeral pillow. That it was getting awfully dark, and awfully cold.
I woke up shivering. The light around me was even and warm. Very white. When I breathed in, the air was clean and cold. I opened my eyes. Still in the suit, but the seams were open. My helmet was unsealed, the glass leaves of the dome pulled back. The edges of my vision were spotted, but otherwise I felt okay.
Not spotted. There were tiny black circles on the glass of the helmet. I raised my arm, freeing it from the unbuttoned sleeve of the suit, and a rain of oblong black forms cascaded from my skin. I sat up and tried to shout, but my mouth was clogged. Hadn't I been breathing clean air, so sweet, just a second ago? I gagged, and wriggling black slugs fell into my lap. I screamed again, and this time got it off. A nice, high pitched shriek. I was sitting in the middle of a sea of the squirmy little bastards. They cleared away from me like I'd dropped fire on their heads, rippling away like a scabrous pond.
The room I was in was small, the walls and floor apparently metal. I say apparently, because all I could see was the small area around the suit, where I had just scared away all those little slugs. They were a couple inches long, about an inch wide. Black. They writhed over each other, blindly sensing each other. They clustered around the corners of the room.
These were the Fehn in their purest form. The walking dead that we usually referred to as Fehn were really just symbiotes. Carriers. Those who died in the river risked joining their ranks. The slugs filled them, choked their lungs and veins, ate out their brains and leeched onto their muscles. They maintained something like their living personalities, only infinitely older. Sadder. And they spoke as one, with the river.
You usually didn't see them naked like this. Every once in a while there would be a report of a vein of squirming blackness among the currents of the river. People would stay off the river for a week. Then everyone would go back to normal, and we'd forget about it.
The light in the room came from a globe, about three feet in diameter, supported on a pillar of the writhing Fehn-slugs. The globe was held in a carapace of silver, a framework of plates and pipes that looked like armor, only they did nothing to conceal the brilliant globe of light within. Perhaps it was some kind of containment device, like the filament structure that held the element in a frictionlamp. The pillar shifted liquidly, and the globe got closer. Turned to me, like a giant eye.
"Apologies, user. Certain subroutines are proactive." The voice came out of the room, as though the walls were talking. Perfect monotone, no inflection. And very few words that I understood.
"Certain sub-teens are damned creepy," I muttered. "I take it you're the Mother Fehn."
Globe-on-a-stick rotated slightly, precisely, then back, a dozen times. Like an escapement, each rotation very crisp.
"Acceptable," it replied.
"Right. Acceptable." I stood up, shivering as a handful of Fehn-slugs clattered to the floor, falling from hidden folds of my person. "Sorry about those pipes. Hope I didn't cause you any discomfort."
"The fetters. The user was disconcerted about their removal. His displeasure was measured corporeally." Rotate, spin, slither closer. "Remunerations are due."
"Uh, so." I backed away, stepping carefully out of the suit. "You're upset by this?"
"Remunerations are due, and the balance will be paid." The whole pillar undulated as the Mother approached, its base a carpet of slugs. As it approached, the carpet overran my suit. Halfway through consuming it the Mother paused and lowered her eye-globe to the ground. "New schematic. Processing."
The slugs in the room shifted, then dived for the suit. I pranced out of the way as they swarmed over the iron carapace. I wasn't going to be able to get back in there, no matter what. The memory of wriggling slugs in my throat was too much, and watching them treat the suit like a lunch buffet was disconcerting. That could be me, if I hadn't woken up.
"Archived," the Mother declared, then returned her attention to me. "Remuneration."
I held out my hands. I didn't want to be remunerated, whether that meant the Mother intended to pay me, or if it felt I owed it something. Didn't want to know what sort of currency the Mother of the Fehn dealt in.
"The man who fettered you — wait a second." She was still approaching me. "The man who installed those pipes and killed all of your children, his name is Ezekiel Crane. Or Maker, if you know that name."
That stopped her. If a giant globe of light on top of a pillar of squirming slugs could ever be called curious, then the Mother Fehn was curious.
"The Family Maker was exiled in the eightieth year of the Reclamation, as declared by the Founders of the city. Their kin was purged. Their tree was burned to the root."
Strange to hear such an alien creature speaking in metaphor. I shrugged, then explained what I knew of Crane. What he had done, and what he was trying to do. She waited attentively until I was done. I ended with my theory that Crane had allowed himself to be captured by the angel Camilla, although I could only speculate as to what end. The Mother didn't move for several seconds, then turned to face me with its broad, glowing eye.
"These are relevant historical notes. Thank you for entering them into the archive. Will user be available to supplement the archive following the events at the Church of the Algorithm?"
"Supplement?" I asked.
"This line of history is not complete. We would like our records to be accurate."
"I'm not recording this for history. I want to know if there's anything you can do about it."
"Record. Archive. Report," the Mother said. "What we have always done."
"Is there anything you can tell me about how to stop it?"
"Disambiguate. Stop recording. Stop archiving. Stop ambient lighting function. Stop communications…"
"Stop it," I snapped, then realized that would just require further disambiguation. "I need to know how to stop Crane from destroying the city. I need to know what he's done to Camilla, or what he plans to do."
"Conjecture. Outside of parameters. Restate."
"Gods in hell, this was a valuable outing." I rubbed my face, then started when I opened my eyes. The slugs had formed a circle around me, leaving only a few feet in all directions. "Get these damned things away from me!"
"Clarify range requirements."
"Away!"
"Estimating," the Mother said, then rotated slightly. The slugs backed off. Four inches.
"Much, much farther away," I snapped. The slugs fled to the far corners of the room. I sighed. "Good enough. Now. What was it that Valentine said about you. That you were something like a library, only a mad little bit of one? That seems pretty accurate. Mother, what do you know about Crane's plans for Camilla?"
"Cross-referencing previous user with queries regarding the servitor colloquially known as Camilla. Result. Transcript begins…"
"Summarize," I said.
"Summary. There are three hundred fifty three direct instances of nodal activity on this subject. Fifty-two additional instances can be related to similar…"
"Never mind. Give me the transcript."
"Verbal or printed?"
"Printed?"
Paper appeared. For all the world, it looked like a pile of slugs in the corner vomited a neat stack of papers, and there were fewer slugs in that area afterward. It was as creepy a bit of administrative work as I've ever seen.
But the transcript was fascinating. Crane spent a lot of time struggling with the Mother's peculiar way of communicating. He kept interrupting her and restating his questions in continually more complicated ways. I lost the train of their conversation frequently. But so did Crane, if the number of times he had to start his line of questioning over from the beginning was any indication.
A pattern emerged. There were two lines of inquiry. First, Crane asked a lot of questions about the connection between how cogwork and the Artificers' magic worked. Apparently they were the same discipline, differently practiced. I didn't know enough about that to really understand it, other than to say that Wilson's theory was correct. Ezekiel's crows served the same purpose as the maker beetles, providing material and schematics to whatever the user was trying to create. Where he lost me was the connection between the maker beetles and foetal metal.
Cogwork was created through the use of foetal metal, a silvery liquid similar to mercury, only more pewter in color. Some sort of pattern was imposed on the metal, usually through the use of memorized calculations and other near-mystic mental techniques. Understanding how those patterns were formed was the Wright's talent, supposedly gifted to him by his years of study in the revelation of the Algorithm. The metal was then injected into the subject, and cogwork formed like crystals in suspension. This was why cogwork only functioned in living creatures, why the zepliners required the living machine of the pilot to function. Something about the blood, or the flesh.
And apparently the Artificers worked in similar ways, except they seemed to believe that the foetal metal was already in all living things, and only needed to be tapped. I would call it crazy, but I had lost track of the meaning of that word in the last couple days. After all, I was having a conversation with a ball of light and a pillar of slugs. Crazy was relative.
Crane's second line of questioning involved the workings of something called a servitor. The Mother Fehn had referred to Camilla as a servitor, I recalled. There was nothing about her that seemed very servant-like to me. Then again, when we had spoken two years ago she referred to herself as a messenger, and the one pursuing me as a destroyer. As though she had been built for one purpose, and he had been built for another. And the key to those roles had been their cog-hearts. The pattern of their design depended on those hearts. Without them, they could not hold together for long. With them, they could rewrite themselves into different tasks, depending on the heart. Camilla had wanted the destroyer's heart, so she could free herself and wreak a little vengeance on the city.
The connection hit me like a bolt out of the sky. Camilla and her angel-kind used the most complicated patterns the city of Veridon had ever seen. Every technology, every bit of cogwork, was simply a derivation on those patterns. A cutting from the mother tree. We had never been able to access the true pattern at the center of the heart. Never would, since it was far too complicated for the memorization tricks that the Wrights employed. The pattern had to been held in your mind, while the foetal metal was applied.
But if the foetal metal could be applied directly to the pattern, what then? What would come of that? And if the Artificers were right, and that metal was really just a distillation of something that existed in all living creatures, who's to say that you couldn't apply someone directly to the pattern? That must be how the Artificer's magic was done. It explained how Crane was able to possess my father, even though dad didn't have any cogwork. Usually Artificers had to perform their tricks on carefully cogged and manipulated volunteers. To forcefully take over a creature without the assistance of cogwork implied that the pattern was being applied directly to the flesh.
Crane must be trying to get his hands on the angel's heart. To apply it to his flesh. To become something else. But what? And more importantly, how to stop him? I didn't even know where he was. Camilla was relatively free, powered by the foetal metal provided by Crane's murder of crows, surrounded by his cog-dead Wrights, and intent on disassembling the Church of the Algorithm. What was he waiting for? Was the pattern of the heart somehow incomplete, from having been separated from Camilla for so many years? Or was he simply waiting to strike when she was distracted with other tasks?
Whatever happened, it was going to happen at the Church of the Algorithm. I had a vague sense of what was going on, and what it implied. I imagined that if I could get this information to Wilson, or that mad bitch Veronica, they could do more with it than merely speculate. But I was trapped here. The suit was fried, and even if I could get it to work again, I had no way to fight my way against the current.
I put the papers down and rubbed my eyes. The Mother was looming over me.
"Don't you have something else you could be doing?" I asked. "Something not quite so creepy?"
"Restate."
I sighed and stood up. How long had I been sitting there, reading? How bad had things gotten up top, while I hid in an underwater bunker with a room full of slugs and made up stories about what might be happening?
"I think Crane is trying to make himself into a god. Or a reasonable pattern of one."
"Your superstitions are of interest to me. Would you like to sit and record them for me?"
"No, I wouldn't. I don't want to add to your archive, any more than I already have." I tried to walk around it, but the Mother had placed itself in an awkward place in the room, so I couldn't get past without stepping on its rubbery carpet of slugs. "You don't get many guests here, do you?"
"Very few who are still cognizant of their situation." The globe followed me as I tip-toed around it. "You are done with the record?"
"Unless you have something that can get me up to the Church," I said.
"You are lost. Recommended actions include retracing your steps. Alternatively, shelter where you are and wait for help to arrive."
"There are people up there, sheltering, waiting for me to arrive. I'm the help, get it?"
"Confirm. Recommend return via previous path."
I laughed. Like I was getting in that suit after it had been covered in slugs, even if it worked. I gave the helmet a kick.
"Suit's busted," I said.
"Assessment incomplete. Scanning. Evaluation negative due to primitive condition of the sample set. Do you require an analog?"
"You can fix the suit?"
"No. Archival samples must remain pristine, for future reference."
"You can't fix the suit, so what the hell can you do?"
The globe passed its gaze over me a dozen times in half a breath.
"There are many broken things. All of them can be repaired."
I rubbed my face. I was beginning to regret not drifting off in the pleasant blackness of oxygen deprivation, out there on the river floor. That seemed so much simpler.
"Whatever. Fix what you have to. Just get me up to the Church."
"Disambiguation. Do you want to go to the Church of the Algorithm, or do you want the suit to go to the Church of the Algorithm."
"I haven't seen the suit in a fight, but I'm willing to bet I could lick it. I need to get up there, Mother."
"Clarified. Please remain still."
The whole pillar of slugs shifted toward me. I took a step back.
"Clarification. Any movement on your part could result in severe and permanent damage, including but not limited to death." The globe paused for half a breath, then repeated. "Please remain still."
"What the fuck?" I yelped. The next time it slithered forward, I practically ran away. Not a lot of room to run, but I made up for the lack of distance with speed. "Get away from me."
"Clarification. Do. Not. Move."
The globe pulsed, the plates and pipes that clasped the core of light rattling like a windchime, and then the room was pure light and heat. And then blackness, and I was gone.
Twice in a row. I got in here with my lights out. I was getting out the same way.