'I meant for the river to have you, Jacob. But it might be better this way. More honest.' Struggling to his feet, the body hunched forward as he addressed me. 'This way, maybe you can be more than just a joke I tell myself.' Straightened up and looked me in the eye. 'Maybe this time around, you'll be the one wearing the mask.'
Wilson jumped forward and put his knife once, twice, three times, fast, into the chest. The body laughed, staggered, and then swatted the thin anansi aside. His knife clattered between the pipes, out of reach.
'I'm not going to kill you. Tried that, and it didn't work. So maybe you're some kind of cosmic gift, Jacob. Jacob and his annoying bug friend. Maybe, in time, you'll understand what I'm doing. Why I'm doing it. You're not the one I expected to come here, although I'm sure they're on their way.' The body rested his hands on his hips and looked toward the door. 'We can wait, if you want. Not what I would do if I were you. But it's your call.'
'We'll wait,' I said. 'Whoever it is, at least they don't hide in dead bodies and try to kill me.'
The body smiled and cocked his head at me.
'Don't they? Isn't that exactly what they do, Jacob? Isn't that exactly what they've done?'
I fired again, this shot hitting his throat. The eyes bulged for a second as the soft column of flesh reformed. I swear I saw the briefest vision of wings, fluttering across the gaping wound.
'You've got to stop doing that, Jacob. I'm patient, but it won't last forever. Maybe I reset this encounter. Kill you and your friend, and let the proper people find the mask. I try to not question the universe, but you're proving to be a little difficult.'
'Summer Girl,' I said, realization washing over me as I lowered my revolver until it was pointing at the glass plug in his chest. 'But I've heard that song.'
Three fast shots, then the hammer fell on an empty chamber. The lead buried itself into the glass. It was the second shot before Crane realized what I was doing, dead hands jerking over his chest. Too late. Just a bit too late. The pipe burst, and his life came fluttering out on dry paper wings.
The room filled with a cloud of insects, pouring from the body's newly reopened wound. Smooth, black and shiny, like jeweled honey, buzzing angrily out of his chest. The body flailed and jerked, but the face was supremely calm. Almost pleased. He gave me one last look, utter satisfaction, and then the illusion fell away in sticky slabs of false meat. The facade collapsed, pulled away from the animated flesh, and the body tumbled once more to the floor. The cloud of insects swarmed across the pipes, sucking the last whispering madness from their echoes, then fell to the ground. Dead.
'Maker beetles,' Wilson said, running his toe through the dry husks. 'Huh.'
'So he's some kind of cogwork carrier?' I asked, kneeling down by the body. A few stragglers crawled up out of his mouth. The wounds Wilson and I gave him were back, ragged flesh torn open by bullet and blade. 'Some kind of artificer trick?'
'Not like any trick I've ever seen,' Wilson answered. He pried open the mouth with curious fingers, then felt around the bloody plug in his chest. The brass tube came free with a sucking pop. Nothing special about it, just a glass vial sheathed in metal. Only thing of note was that it had been driven violently into my friend's chest. 'Nothing but what you'd usually find inside a dead man. No cogwork, no foetal metal. Nothing to run… whatever that was.'
He tossed the vial to the ground and watched it roll away.
'What are we doing, Wilson?' I asked. 'What the hell is happening here?'
'From the sound of it, someone is coming to find this mask.' He fished his knife out from the machinery, gave the body one last look, and then headed to the door. 'And I'd like to be well gone before they get here.'
It was Gray's face looking back at me, once again. I cycled the chamber of my revolver, dumped the shells onto the floor, and then reloaded. I wasn't a good friend. Wasn't a good person to be friends with. You end up dead, then you end up coming back from the dead, and I have to shoot you in the chest. Not a good friend.
Wilson was already downstairs before I left the room. I think I was the only one who heard the pipes laughing as I clattered down the stairs. But I probably didn't hear that. Probably just in my head.
A Maker Beetle is kind of a leftover miracle. A scrap from something that came before us, that we don't fully understand. The only people who had any knowledge of such things belonged to the Artificers Guild, and they only knew the bare minimum. There was a time when the Guild was a broader interest, with offices at the Academy of Thought and Practice, and apprentices and masters and a bustling trade of scientific inquiry. Now all that was left of that was the Council-sanctioned Guild. They were mostly for entertainments, like The Summer Girl or the other engram singers, who performed a very specific series of songs or plays, the memories clipped from the original players and recreated for generations.
Those memories were somehow stored in the beetles. Wilson tried to explain it to me, once. How Wilson knew is its own mystery, and maybe he didn't really know, because I couldn't really understand it. But basically, a memory could be engraved in the queen beetle, the pattern of the singer and the song, what it felt like to be that person and do that thing. And then the queen could be implanted in an engram singer, and her hive of maker beetles would… well… remake the singer into that memory. There was a lot of cogwork involved, since the singer need to be able to accommodate a whole hive of scuttling beetles. The details of how those machines worked was a closely guarded secret within the Guild. Understandable. The Academy didn't advertise how they made the PilotEngine, either.
The end result was a memory that could be played out in flesh. With the help of the beetles, an engram singer could become a specific singer, and perform a song exactly as it was sung decades ago. Even hundreds of years, as long as the queens were well bred. That's what the Guild did these days. Breed queen beetles, maintain hives, and teach little girls to sing like memories.
We watched them arrive at Crane's house from a couple blocks away, sitting in the second floor of an atrium bar. An automaton pillar in the center of the atrium was playing out all the bawdy scenes from 'The Fifty Nights of Winter' in clacking, whirring earnest. Even the painted wooden whores looked embarrassed. Wilson and I drank coffee and looked out the window.
They arrived in a sealed carriage. The engine was nice and new, brass plates shuffling behind the baffles in quick time. Not the kind of carriage you usually saw in this district. Which was sloppy. It was memorable. Unless they didn't care if people knew they were dealing with Crane.
Three figures went inside, dressed in heavy black coats and hoods. No-one I recognized, although at this distance I wouldn't have recognized myself in a coat and hood. Not a minute later one of them came out and signaled down the road. More carriages, bearing the sigil of the Badge.
'Council people, then?' I asked. There weren't a lot of other patrons at this hour, but I kept my voice low.
'Could be. Badge has become awfully mercenary in the last couple years.' Wilson drank from his cup and grimaced. 'Could just be someone with the right amount of coin.'
I murmured something about getting a price list and finished my coffee. The waitress came by to fill the cup, all smiles and bust. When she was gone I turned back to the window.
'So where next? To the Artificers? I don't know anyone in that set.'
Wilson held his cup about halfway to his mouth, staring idly out the window. Not sure he was seeing anything.
'I'd rather not. We have other leads to follow. The mask, for example.'
'What was that about, do you think? What Crane said?'
Wilson shrugged. 'Maybe you'll be wearing the mask this time? Who knows. I think our friend Crane may be a little insane.'
'Yes. A little,' I smiled. 'It was the bit where he animated my dead friend so he could have a conversation with us that sold me on it. Before then, you know, with the thing where he changed all the Fehn into mad corpses, that wasn't quite insane enough.'
'You have very high standards, Mr. Burn,' Wilson said.
'I have to. Look at the people I hang out with.'
Wilson snorted and put his coffee down. 'I take it you've recovered fully from looking into the mask, then?'
'Not at all,' I answered, shivering. 'Not even a little.'
