“So…we all begin as human?”
“Yes.”
“But we feed from human blood! The refined mix of blood-oil! That makes us…little more than cannibals!”
Vashell shrugged, and smiled. “Blood of my blood,” he said, sardonically. “I find it hard to believe Kradek-ka never explained it to you. He kept you in a bubble, Anukis. He created this; this structure, this schedule, he elevated the systems of clockwork integration to make us better, superior, to elevate us above a normal impure flesh. With vachine integration we are the perfect species. Can you not see this, Anukis? This is your family’s life work. This is the creation of the vachine.”
Anu sagged, leaning against Vashell, her mind spinning as she watched a thousand babies undergoing vachine integration. She saw scalpels carving through flesh, through baby chests and into hearts, replacing organic components with clockwork, replacing valves and arteries with gears and tubes. Babies cried, squealed, and their wails were hushed by pads held over mouths until they lost consciousness. Blood trickled into slots and was carried away to be further refined and fed back into Blood Refineries in order to create the blood-oil pool.
“We are vampires,” said Vashell, staring down at Anu who was pale and grey, a shadow of her former self. “Machine vampires. We feed on the human shell; revel, in our total superiority.”
“What we’re doing is wrong, ” snarled Anu.
“Why? The creation of a superior species?” Vashell laughed. “Your naivety both astounds and amuses me. Here, the rich noble daughter, blood-line of our very own vachine creators-and you do not even understand the basics?”
A babe squealed and there was a chopping sound. Anu saw the flash of a silver blade. The tiny head rolled into a chute and was sucked away. The corpse was thrown into a bag, and an Engineer moved to a distant cart and slung the body aboard, along with all the other medical waste.
“So,” said Anu, fighting for air, “every babe that is born, here in Silva Valley, it comes here? It comes to be formed into vachine?”
“Yes. But more than Silva; the vachine have spread, Anu. We are breeding soldiers in other valleys. We are growing strong! We grow mighty! Our time for domination, for expansion, for Empire, is close.”
“But-” said Anu.
Vashell frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Something is wrong,” said Anu, with primitive intuition. “What’s going on, Vashell? What’s happening here?”
“We need to find Kradek-ka.” He scowled. He would say no more.
For an hour Vashell dragged Anukis through the Maternity Hall, and she saw things so barbaric she wouldn’t have believed them possible. The babies were operated on, implanted with clockwork technology-in their hearts, in their brains, in their jaws, in their hands. Even at such a young age they were given weapons of death, using blood-oil magic, clockwork, and liquid brass and gold, silver-quartz and polonium, in order to control and power and time the mechanisms of the vachine.
“How many work?” she said, at last, exhausted.
“I do not understand?”
“How many babes…become vachine? Successfully?”
“Fifty five in a hundred successfully make it through the-shall we say, medical procedures. Fifty five in a hundred accept the clockwork, accept the fangs, and can grow and meld and adapt and think of themselves as true machine.”
“What about the others?”
“Most die,” said Vashell, sadly. “This is a great loss; if we could improve the rate of melding, our army would be much larger; we could advance so much more quickly.”
“And?”
“The cankers?” Vashell laughed. “They have their uses.”
“Take me away from this place,” said Anu, tears on her cheeks, fire in her part-clockwork heart.
“As you wish. I thought you needed to know, to understand, before we set out on our quest.”
“Quest?”
“To find your father. He was working on a refined technology. In trials he had pushed acceptance from fifty- five to ninety-five in a hundred; we barely lost any babes. You see, Anu, why we need to find him? If you help me, if we pull this off for the Watchmakers, for the whole of vachine-kind, then you will be saving hundreds, thousands of lives, every year. You understand?”
“You bastard.”
“Why so?”
“You have played me like a jaralga hand. I must help you. I must help end this atrocity.”
“Your father’s atrocity,” corrected Vashell.
“Yes,” she said, face ashen, voice like the tomb.
Anukis walked down long corridors of stone. She walked down long tunnels of metal. She became disorientated by it all; by the directions, the elevations, the dips and curves and banks, the smells of hot oil and cold metal. In weakness, she resigned herself. She was a puppet now, a creature to be controlled by Vashell. He had taken away her gifts, taken away her special gifts. She felt hollow. Abused. In pain. But more…she felt less than vachine, less than human, a limbo creature of neither one world or the next. She was a shadow; a shadow, mocked by shadows. Tears welled within her, but she would not let them come. No, she thought. I will be strong. Despite everything, despite my weakness, despite my abuse, I will be strong. I need my strength. I will need it as I hunt down my…father.
“Good girl,” soothed Vashell, misunderstanding her compliance, and keeping her leash tight in his gloved fist. Anukis did not struggle, did not pull, did not fight her taming.
She smiled inwardly, although her face was stone. She was beyond the displaying of hatred. And when she killed him, when she massacred Vashell, as she knew, coldly, deep down in her breast and heart and soul that she would, it would be a long and painful death. It would be an absolution. A penance. An act of purifying like nothing the Engineers had before witnessed.
They walked, boots padding.
“Where are we going?” she asked, eventually.
“You will see.”
Gradually, the stone and metal walls started to show signs of the Engineers; symbols replaced numbers, and decorations became evident as the wall design became not just more opulent, but more instructive. Anukis found herself staring at the designs on the wall, the artwork, the very shape of the stones. Many were fashioned into toothed cogs, gears of stone, and the whole corridor began to twist with design as the stone gave way to metal, gave way to brass and gold, laced with silver-quartz mortar. Slowly, the walls changed, became more than walls, became machines, mechanisms, clockwork, and Anukis recognised that this was no longer a corridor, but a living breathing working machine and the Engineer’s Palace was more than just a building: it was a live thing, with a pulse of quartz and a heart of gold.
“Stop.”
Vashell held something, what looked like a tiny circle of bone, up to a mechanism beside a blank metal door. There came several hisses, of oiled metal on metal, as the object in his hand slid out pins and integrated with the machine. The portal opened, but in the manner of nothing Anukis had ever seen; it was a series of curves, oiled and gleaming, which curled around one another, twisted like coils as the door didn’t just open, it unpeeled.
They stepped through, into a working engine.
The room was crammed with a giant mechanism of clockwork, a machine made up of thousands and thousands of smaller machines. Brass and gold gleamed everywhere. Cogs turned, integrated, shafts spun, steam hissed from tiny nozzles, brass pistons beat vertically, horizontally, diagonally, and everywhere Anukis looked there were a hundred movements, of rockers and cams, valves and pistons, and she shivered for it reminded her of the clockwork she had watched inserted into babies…only on a much, much larger scale; a vast scale. A terrible scale.
Vashell led her forward, through a natural tunnel amidst the heart of the vast machine which stretched above them for as far as the eye could see, away into darkness. She could smell hot oil, and the sweet narcoleptic
