the grinding tear of my heart. Blood was leaking from my chest, mixed with the oily gunk of my secondary blood. I started coughing and couldn’t stop. Wilson put an arm around me, carried me down. I stumbled to the floor of the secret passage and vomited while Wilson paced nervously around me. He was talking, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Eventually I stood up and continued on. I smelled more smoke, but that might have been me. My mouth tasted like ash. Wilson kept looking at me nervously, moving ahead of me down the corridor, then coming back to make sure I was still moving. Twice we passed dead bodies, Badgemen who had been cut by Wilson’s knife. I no longer heard the angel behind us.
Wilson stopped us at the corridor where Angela had paused. He propped me against the wall and bent to my chest, poking and frowning. Actual smoke was coming up out of the metal of my heart, leaking in oily plumes out of my mouth.
“You’re looking bad, son.”
“Yeah. Feel it.”
“We can’t go much further. That dining room is clogged with Housies. Looks like that Harold guy got his balls together.”
“About time.” I held up the Cog and pushed it against Wilson’s chest. “Get out, bug. Figure out what this is, what they want with it.”
He took the Cog, looked down at it. His eyes looked like a child’s eyes, so full of awe and wonder. Finally, Wilson shook his head and slid the Cog back into my pocket.
“Not yet.” He nodded down the stairs. “What’s that way?”
“The old guy,” I said.
“Seems like a hell of a place to keep your senior citizens.”
“He’s a hell of a senior citizen.” I was feeling a little more stable. The smoke had cut back. I didn’t like that. I don’t remember smoking before. I spat and stood up. “Come on. Maybe there’s another way back here.”
“There’s not,” Wilson said. He took my arm and pulled me towards the stairs. “This is the only way.”
“Well, then. We go this way.”
We took the downward stairs. I could hear the angel behind us, distantly, smashing vases and tearing furniture. He was looking for the entrance to the secret passage. Wilson pulled faster, and we hurried down.
The stairs here were ancient, maybe older than the house itself. They were rock, but smoothly joined as solid stone, as if they had been grown in this form. The air was quiet and wet. The sounds of fighting passed, and I slowed down. Wilson stayed at my side. My legs were heavy lead, and my lungs felt as though they were full of broken glass. I kept one hand, revolver and all, over the hole in my chest, and the other clutched tightly around the Cog. Angela shot me, I thought. She shot me.
We came to a door. It was old and heavy, the hinges gummy with rust. I fell against it while Wilson ran his hands over the surface, looking for an opening mechanism. It was warm, and as I lay against it, the iron seemed to beat like an ancient heart. I was just summoning the strength to stand and try to give Wilson a hand when the door opened. I fell inside, and the door shut behind me. Wilson rushed to support me. He got in just before the heavy iron slammed shut with a tortured grind.
The room was like a bowl, terraced circles leading down to a pit at the center, a stage of dark, polished wood. On each level there was crowded refuse, like a scrap heap, machines that hissed and gurgled and twitched in the bare light. Stairs led down through this mess. There were frictionlamps at regular intervals. They spun up as we came into the room, covering everything in soft, warm light. There was a lot of brass, and a lot of deep, brown leather. The air smelled like a furnace that was about to blow. There was something at the bottom of the pit, something on the stage. It was swollen and alive, like an abscess of the architecture ready to burst. Light shone off metal and coils quivered. Something was breathing with the cold metal regularity of an engine and valve.
I walked down the stairs on stiff legs. The pain in my chest was a searing flare. I’m going to die down here, I thought. I approached the thing on the stage. Wilson hung back, his attention caught by the collected detritus of the pit. He looked at me nervously.
“I don’t think we should be here, Jacob,” he hissed. “I think this is the kind of place the Tombs would kill you for seeing.”
“Tried once, already.” I paused at the edge of the stage, my hand on my heart. “What’s the harm?”
“There’s always harm,” Wilson said. He crept up behind me. “What is it?”
It was a face, iron, huge. It reclined on the ruined wood of the stage, eyes closed, fat cheeks and lips relaxed. It looked like a giant, sleeping. My hand was on the chin. Cables spilled out from all sides, twitching with power and hydraulic currents. I stepped back.
The eyes opened, slowly. Behind the lids were eyes of glass, windows into a tank of green liquid. A body floated there, bloated and ancient, the flesh pale, cables making a ruin of the flesh.
“Patron Tomb,” I said.
Chapter Eight
“You are the Burn child.” The voice came out of a box, near my feet. Each word sounded like the final exhalation of an old man, dying of wasted lungs.
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes.” The Patron had signed over his family’s Writ of Name generations ago, to be enacted on his death. He lived on, here, always dying but never gone. “Angela speaks of you. Who is your companion?”
“This is Wilson, a friend.”
“He is anansi,” Tomb groaned.
“Yes,” Wilson said. He sounded nervous.
“Wilson, of the anansi. We have met before.”
“I think you’re mistaken,” Wilson said.
Tomb was quiet for a minute, the body in his eyes drifting slowly around the cold liquid of his chamber.
“Of course I am. Pardon an old man.” His machinery rumbled. “Burn, you are close to Angela? A friend?”
“She and I were friends, when we were younger.”
“And now?” The mausoleum’s voice was slow, each word weighted with time and patience.
“I couldn’t say. Times have been strange.”
“Times have always been strange, child Burn. Time in Veridon is a graceless thing, lurching through the city, leaving ruin and promise equal in its wake. And even its promises are ruinous.”
“Yes, well.” I held down a cough, cringed at the bright crimson pain that arced through my ribs. “This is the sort of strange where she shot me. It’s hard to get past that, childhood friends or not.”
The Tomb was silent for a moment. “When next you are offered the opportunity to die, child Burn, I would consider it more closely.”
“You threaten well,” I said, shifting away from the Patron, “for a body in a tank.”
“I don’t make threats.” He was silent for many long, metallic breaths. “It was advice, from someone who has gone on ahead.”
I waited in the silence, in the dark heart of the strange theater, listening to this living Tomb breath and remember.
“What’s going on, upstairs?” I asked. I had heard stories of how the Patron lived throughout the house, like a pilot on his ship.
“You said yourself, child.” The body behind the eyes seemed to shift. “Strange times.”
When he didn’t go on, I prompted. “Is it the Church? Are they moving against the Council, trying to leverage the Families apart so they can take over?”
He made a harsh noise, something that might have been laughter.
“The Church will never upset the balance. They are the balance. They are the power! No. This is the business of dead men. Their choices come back to tempt us.”
“If not the Church, then who? Someone in the Council?”
