She spotted Carrick. The chief liaison officer was untangling himself from the revelers, nodding greetings and heading this way, and so Harper shook out her hair and gathered it up to tie back. By the time he opened the armoury door below the hunting deck, she had replaced her cap.
“Glorious, they tell me,” Carrick said happily, climbing the narrow steps to join her on the platform. “The lights, mirrors, glass. Menoa has surpassed himself.” He was a solid man, hard-faced, but not ugly. One hand tugged, as always, at the neat viridian collar of his new uniform, where Harper glimpsed a length of the pewter chain he wore with such pride. It had been given to him by the same Pandemerian Railroad Company financiers he had just been entertaining below. “It’s fitting, I suppose,” he said, “if a trifle ostentatious. Must have cost a fortune. They’re burning enough aether back there to light up Heaven.”
He reached her and put an arm around her waist and pulled her close. His hand slipped inside her jacket and found her breast. His skin was hot, hers cold and dead. She breathed in a lungful of Mesmerist mist. Harper had learned not to flinch, but she couldn’t hide the way her jaw tensed, and she couldn’t smile for him.
“How can you be so cold?” Carrick said. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? To be among the living again…” He squeezed her hard enough to make her gasp, before releasing his grip. “Now why don’t you just loosen up and enjoy the party?”
Harper said nothing. She gazed across CogCity, and when she narrowed her eyes the sea of roofs and funnels became a different sea: of towering grey and black waves, vigorous and storm-lashed and angry. But then the vision faded and she was looking once more at the drowned ruins and rusting graveyard. Half a mile away, a pale blue rag, snared on a cable, snapped and fluttered. It might once have been part of a naval uniform.
“I already bought salvage rights,” Carrick said, inclining his head towards the piles of rotting steel and iron scattered throughout the city. “When Menoa issues claim edicts, I’ll have money, Alice, lots of it. I could buy you a house of your own in the city, a private place-”
“Out of sight of your friends.”
He didn’t look at her. “I’m offering you a comfortable life. You could get back your old job at Special Engineering. Keene would have to rehire you. You wouldn’t need to return to the ReadjustmentCenter.”
Harper gave his offer serious consideration. In the month since her departure from Hell, her life had felt like a leaf tossed about in a storm. She had not been spared the ReadjustmentCenter: the examinations, the mountains of paperwork, and the endless interviews with social integration officers.
Cog’s Readjustment Center had been built to accommodate a hundred and fifty citizens, but Harper’s room had been the only one occupied. The curtains, towels, and bed linen had all been brand-new.
Those souls before her had left the Maze via a different route.
Carrick was still gazing at the derelict ships. “That’s a gold mine,” he said. “It would be a shame to let it all go to waste.”
The ships had been forged in response to Rys’s rain: paddle steamers created for the Supply Effort; cruisers and pickets, cannon boats and destroyers-all built from the souls of Cog’s dead. Some wit had since named this place the Sea of Invention. Harper remembered when there had been nothing here but shops and taverns and homes.
Cog Island had changed so much in her life and deathtime: from urban sprawl to boiling sea to this weeping landscape of scrap. Rys had conjured the endless rain, his promise to wash away the Mesmerist Veil and restore human rule to Pandemeria. But his plan had failed. The waters were now draining, the pools and canals-poisoned and starkly beautiful in the failing light-sinking back into the earth, or perhaps back into whichever pocket of that god’s imagination they had come from. But wherever they went, they left in their wake a thick red scum.
And for all their glory
“Tomorrow will mark a turning point in history,” Carrick said. “No god has ever knelt at the feet of humans before. It’s a new beginning for us all. After Rys signs the treaty, you’ll see great changes around here. King Menoa has promised to reward his most loyal servants. He’s going to release two thousand souls in the first year. You won’t be alone much longer, Alice.”
Metal winds moaned in the distance.
“I’m not alone,” she said. “Can’t you hear the ships singing?”
“You know that’s not what I meant. I’m talking about the
Harper moved a hand to her chest, feeling for the empty soulpearl she wore on a cord inside her blouse. For a breathless moment she couldn’t find it, and then her hand closed on the familiar jewel and she breathed. The pearl was there, close to her heart, cold against her cold skin.
Carrick was gazing back along the ever-lengthening curve of steel track behind the train, to where the Mesmerist Eye towered over the concrete terminus building. The twin wheels, set back to back on opposing axles, revolved gradually in opposite directions. Even from this distance, the hourly shift-change klaxons could be heard blaring out across the drowned city. Crowds of administrators would be disembarking the lowest of the twelve Workwheel office gondolas, their own weight having helped to drag the mighty steel spokes through another 180 degrees. Now they would receive their food parcels and begin the long climb up the central scaffold to the uppermost gondola of the Sleepwheel. Other workers, their satchels full of paperwork and candles, were already leaving the bottom of the Sleepwheel to join them on the scaffold for their own ascent to the top of the Workwheel. In this manner the Pandemerian Railroad Company powered the machines in their Highcliffe laboratories, while maximizing return from the food issued to their staff.
“Another one jumped last week,” Carrick said. “I’ll never understand these people. They’re given a good job, decent food, and soft bunks. They get plenty of exercise, and the best damn view on CogIsland. And what do they do? Spit it all back in the company’s face and take the big leap.”
“Their lives are a constant uphill struggle,” Harper said. “Don’t you ever feel like that?”
Carrick pulled away from her suddenly. “Only with you,” he said, turning to face the bright curve of glass carriages stretching ahead of them. The train was now thumping across the NewSillBridge above what had once been Knuckletown Port District. Down below, the former bridge could still be seen below the murky waters, the stanchions and girders now furred with red weeds. “I need you back inside now,” he said. “We’ve had complaints of something dead aboard the train. God-awful gibbering noises coming from the heating ducts in car C, down near the slave holds. Likely it’s just a ghost one of the passengers brought aboard, so be gentle with it. If you send it screaming back to the Maze, I won’t be the one who has to tell them.”
Harper nodded and turned to go.
“Alice,” Carrick said. His teeth looked strangely bright in the uneasy light. “You will be gentle with it, won’t you?”
To reach car C, Harper had no choice but to walk through the crowd gathered in the music carriage. The party was in full swing and most of the guests appeared to be drunk or well on the way. The pianist saw her and broke abruptly from the waltz he was playing into a crescendo of notes that reached towards a climax as she approached, halting abruptly the moment she reached him.
“A toast,” he said loudly, for the benefit of the room. “To the first woman to return from Hell still wearing lipstick. I give you CogCity’s most beautiful corpse.”
The crowd closed in on Harper and she found herself pinned by the attention of a roomful of well-dressed gentlemen and ladies: the frocks all puffs of almond-, orange-, and rose-coloured silk, the suits in rich dark hues of plum and whalehide. The men wore snub-nosed pistols or Mesmeric rapiers at their belts, the blades sheathed in white leather, as had been the fashion since Adelere’s adaptation of
The pianist played a dramatic flurry of notes. “Perhaps I should have said most
