the top of the tower, spinning in a near silence that was actually a roar of movement just below the range of my ears. My skull ached to hear it, but could not. At the top of the column was a giant cylinder, like the head of a war hammer. It turned more slowly than the column, though it seemed dependant on its action. Each face of the hammer was made up of dozens of open drums, their skin glowing an arcane blue, each drum fed by a dozen conduits that coiled and were themselves fed by larger tubes that burrowed down into the column. The whole thing looked like something that had dropped out of the sky, to be worshipped.
I wondered how Amon had built such a crooked thing, based on that smooth, clean Feyr artifact that we had fished out of the cistern. Not a logical jump. Then again, for all that Amon was the Scholar, the Feyr were something more. Something different. I shrugged, then went to find someone in charge.
Wasn't even a Healer. Just a guy in city blues, peering at gauges and checklists through a pair of uneven wire spectacles. His hair was rusty gray, sticking out all around and bald on top, his naked scalp spotted with moles. I had to tug on his shoulder to get his attention. There wasn't much about me to keep his eyes, so I showed him the gun under my cloak. He took in the whole package, the hidden sword, the revolver, the poorly covered uniform, then nodded once.
'Yeah?' he asked.
'There are some people here I'd like to talk to.'
'Those people are probably busy.'
'I'm sure they are,' I said. 'But I'm sure they could be spared.'
'What's it about?'
'Kidnapping. Murder, maybe.' I picked up one of his checklists, flipped through a couple pages, then put it down somewhere else. He didn't like that. 'Maybe a grand conspiracy to topple the Cult of Morgan.'
'You're the Paladin,' he said finally, after a long pause. 'The heretic.'
'That's what they're saying. Does that matter to you?' I asked, flashing the bully again. 'Or this?'
'Neither, really. Were you hoping to threaten your way through this conversation?'
'Does it matter to you that someone has killed all my friends, burned the house of my god, and now falsely accuses my Cult of siding with the Betrayer?' I took the revolver out and placed the barrel squarely on the table, like I was pointing something out in his ledger. 'Does it matter that I'll kill anyone who gets in the way of me hunting those people down, no matter who they are, or on what throne they sit?'
'Yeah?'
'Yeah.'
He looked up at the catwalks, like he was doing a mental count of his crew.
'It wasn't any of my people,' he said. 'Whatever you're talking about, it wasn't these guys. I know where they go, where they sleep, what they eat. Who they love. It wasn't any of them.'
'And if any of them are involved, I guess that makes you complicit?'
He snorted. 'You're trying to threaten me. That's cute, little girl warrior comes in here to threaten me.' He plucked the glasses off his face and tossed them on the table. 'I'm not going to scare. You pull my people off that machine, you maybe put the Harking line out of commission. How you like that?'
I scraped the revolver along the edge of the table and passed it across my body. One long arm stroke and I backhanded him with the heavy tip of the weapon, the reinforced barrel taking him along the jaw. He spun away, drooling teeth.
'Took you long enough to lose those godsdamn glasses.' I holstered the bully, shattered the mat of reeds, and drew the blade. I put the tip on the floor and leaned against the crossbar. The blade slid into the hard stone of the floor like a hot knife into ice. 'Now, I'd like to talk to some of your crew.'
He stood slowly, anger boiling off him in sheets. His voice was a barely controlled cauldron.
'I said, it wasn't any of my damned people.'
'It's not your damned people I want to talk to. It's your damned Feyr.'
He looked at me with steadying calm, wiped the blood off his chin, and laughed.
'Not my call to make. Those buggers come when they want, go when they want. And if they do a godsdamn thing while they're here, that's their business. No. They want to talk to you, they'll talk to you. Not my problem.'
'How do I-'
He dropped like a cut puppet. I leaned away, surprised, then heard other things: tools falling, glass breaking. Above, an Amonite slid heavily against a railing, then spun over and fell against a lower platform like a bag of flour. No one to catch him, because all of his mates were out, too. I left the sword where it was, swaying slightly in the floor, and drew my bully.
The Feyr was standing behind me and slightly higher, up on a piston array. He was wearing a robe, white cloth wrapped tight around his tiny form. He had a hand raised in benediction, looking all around the tower with his wide, black eyes. He noticed me and nodded.
'We thought you should know,' he said. His voice was tiny, small as his delicate, pinched face. His palm came around and I twisted, drawing a bead on his little chest. He shook his head and I faltered, though if that was something he was doing to me or just my own unwillingness to put lead into a child-sized target… who knows? Point is, I didn't shoot and he put his hand down.
'Know what?' I asked.
He didn't answer immediately, didn't even seem to be paying attention to me any longer. He looked around the room at all the fallen people, their eyes open, breathing steadily. Even the broken ones seemed comfortable, regardless of which direction their legs were facing. For the longest time he meditated on the silence, his eyes turned up toward the top of the impellor, breath shallow. He looked back at me.
'You wished to talk to us?'
'Yeah, about-'
'Then we shall talk. Your friend. You should give her the signal, now,' he said, then turned and walked away, disappearing behind the array. I ran to the door and opened it, almost banging into Cassandra.
'Couldn't wait?' I asked.
'I heard something. Noises.'
'Yeah. Just don't look around.' The street was empty. Dusk was falling. 'It's kinda weird.'
We went around the thudding cylinders and caught sight of the Feyr ducking into a maintenance shaft. I snatched up my sword and fed it into the sheath's grasping mitts, then followed. Cassandra didn't say anything, though her eyes must have seen a lot of blood and a lot of sleeping bodies.
The corridor wasn't meant for big people. It made me wonder as to its origin. Amon, for all that he was a murderer and a mad assassin (and I corrected myself even as I thought it, but the thought came naturally), probably wouldn't have designed his engines to depend on child-labor parties. And he certainly didn't design anything for the Feyr. No one did.
I went to the impellor because I knew they would be there. Something about the energies that washed out of those machines attracted the little creeps. I had the beginnings of an idea why that was, now that I knew something of Amon's research into the impellors. If the stuff Cassandra was reading from the archive was true, of course. Whole little creepy Feyr villages gathered ramshackle beneath each of those towers, filling in whatever space they could find with clapboard buildings and driftwood catwalks. They even built little rafts to anchor around the water-bound impellor towers between the horns. The crews tolerated them because sometimes they were helpful, calling the Amonites' attention to things that were on the verge of breaking, or clearing out in advance of some disaster. Like little canaries. Some people thought they could see the future. I preferred to believe that they were simply very aware of their surroundings.
'What did you do back there?' I asked. It was hard to talk, bent over and squatting along with my knees in my face. I could crawl, but that was a bad position to try to react from. Not that this was much better.
'I made it night. For them, of course.'
'Then why didn't they wake up, the ones who fell?'
He shrugged. 'Night is when you sleep. When you wake, it is morning.'
'Huh.'
He stopped and looked back at me. 'You would like a demonstration?'
'No, no. Just curious.'
'It is good to be curious,' he agreed, then continued on his way.
