The doors were plain. The Wright standing to one side didn’t pay us any mind, bobbing his brown robed head at the clink of our coin. He didn’t even ask us which door, just cycled the Citizen’s Gate.
The heavy wood clattered behind us. The corridor was dark and smelled of coal smoke and overclocked engines. The only light was from the altar manifolds around the corner. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust. Emily was tugging on my sleeve. She had the gun out, close to her body. The air around us was heavy, the walls slithering with barely perceived clockwork, deep vents puffing and groaning in the darkness.
“Let’s get this over with.” She glanced back at the door behind us. “It’s like being eaten by the city.”
“You would have been a terrible Pilot,” I said.
“Like you would know.”
The closer we got to the mural room, the clearer we could see the walls around us. Everything shuddered with the constant grinding of the engines. The very blackness seemed part of it, vibrating at an incredible pitch. The air in my lungs felt like hydraulic fluid, crashing, surging, driving me forward.
The Citizen’s Room was little more than display. It was a long, thin hall that ran through the width of the building like an axle through a wheel. The walls were alive, cogs instead of bricks, shafts instead of pillars, sunk into the floor or powering intricate murals on the ceiling.
That was all show. The true mysteries were clustered at the altars. Waves of cogwork bulged out into the hallway, like some great sea beast that burst from the wall and beached itself on the stone floor. These were the most active parts of the room, highly articulated, nearly sentient in their complexity.
“Is that a face?” Emily asked, motioning to the nearest altar. I had a brief flash of Patron Tomb, possessed beneath the Church and communing with the Algorithm, but then the vision passed.
“More than that.” I pointed over. The altar was a long tongue of cogwork lolling out from the wall, pistons and gears convulsing in tight waves. The tip of the protuberance ended in the shoulders and a head, a metal man who struggled against the floor. With each convulsion he was swallowed a little, drawn into the tongue like an egg being swallowed by some enormous snake. He gasped and clawed his way forward, scrambling against the stone until the next convulsion; drawn back in, and the struggle continued.
“That’s foul,” Emily said. “People worship these things?”
“They worship the pattern behind them.” I left the cog to its eternal struggle and went on to the next altar. “These things are salvaged from the river, Em. Pieces and bits, dredged up from the depths, sometimes arriving in whole parts. So the Wrights say. The fact that they fit together at all is pretty amazing.”
“The fact that the Wrights spend years piecing them together, now that’s amazing.”
“Obsession is a powerful thing.” I stopped at the next display. It seemed dead, a complicated mouth of pistons that glowed with some inner fire. Waves of heat rolled off it.
“So where’s this pillar?”
“Different room. We’re going to have to sneak through.” The hallway was fairly empty at this hour. Most supplicants paid their awe after work. “For now, just look suitably devout. And put the gun away.”
“This can’t be coincidence,” she said.
“Hm? The gun, Em.” I turned to look at her. She was across the hall, the pistol dangling from her thin hand. “Hide it.”
She grimaced at me, then folded the shawl around the revolver and tucked the bundle under her arm. She motioned me closer. I went to look.
“What is it?” I asked.
“This.” She pointed at one of the altars, a smaller display that looked like a puzzlebox. Sections of it slid and shuffled, disappearing into the box and re-emerging elsewhere. There was some iconography on the tiles, so that it looked like an animated story, but I couldn’t find any rhythm.
“What?” I asked. “It just looks obscure to me.”
“Here, right here.” She had her hand close to the box, as though waiting to pluck up one of the tiles. “No, it’s gone now. Hang on.” Her hand drifted. “There!”
A box shifted out of the central structure of the altar, sliding along the top. It was a music box, the fragile fingers of its comb dancing along a cylinder as it went. Seconds later it was gone, but the music lurked through the hallway.
“It was that song,” I said.
“The music box, that I gave you to take to Angela Tomb.” Emily turned to me, played with her lip nervously. “It’s the same song.”
“And where did you get it?”
“Some guy. He hired me to hire you. I thought it was a Family thing, but it could have been the Tombs, trying to get you up on the Heights-”
“Or it could have been someone from the Church,” I finished for her. “Same as the two who visited your office. And maybe the people who hired Pedr to toss my place, too.”
“Are we sure we want to be here?”
“Oh, I’m sure I don’t, actually. But Morgan said-”
“He’s a Wright. Or was,” Emily said. “You sure you can trust him?”
I sighed and looked nervously back at the altar. The music box made another pass, the same song, faster this time. Emily gripped the bundled mass of the pistol tighter, working her hand under the cloth to touch the grip.
“Can I help you, citizen?”
We whirled like children stealing candy. There was a Wright standing there, the guy from the door. He had his hands folded beneficently at his waist.
“It’s all… it’s just.” I gasped, trying to work up the kind of dull awe the guy expected. “It’s amazing.”
“Oh, I understand. The pattern is such a thing to behold. Do you often make the trip to the Algorithm?”
“Frequently,” Emily said. “I mean, every chance we get. In the city. Tell me, uh, Wright. We’ve heard that there are deeper chambers. Where the pattern is more… more raw.”
“Purer miracles,” I quickly added, tapping into my childhood to summon the correct wording. “The raw stuff of the pattern.”
The Wright raised his eyebrows at me, but shook his head. “The inner chambers are reserved for the glorious, my children. The Elders of the Church and the Founders of the city. Now, unless you’ve found a way onto the Council, I don’t think I can take you there.”
“I do,” Emily said. She had the pistol in hand. “We’re very serious about our enlightenment.”
I swore under my breath. Wrights like to talk about their little miracles. I felt sure we could have talked our way in. Emily’s eyes were wild.
“Now, child,” the Wright said, raising his hands and backing away. “There’s no need for violence.”
“Look, holy man. I seek the godsdamn pattern. Show it.”
He paled, glanced at me. I nodded. We got our way.
The Church of God, the Church of the Algorithm. The church of pistons and gears, angles of driving pulleys, escapements clicking, cogs cycling in holy period; a temple of clock and oil. The chamber of my youth.
We stood in the central sanctuary. The room was a geode of machinery, walls of cogs spinning, meshing, divine murals of clockwork that moved across the walls, generations of timed gears scrounged from the river and reassembled. The Wrights searched for the holy Algorithm, the hidden pattern, the divine tumble of tooth and groove that would reveal itself only to the purest, the most humble. Ages of Wrights had worked this building-engine, fitting axles and aligning screws. Always working. Devotion was measured in oily hands and callused fingers.
The room was loud and close. It had been large once, a grand hall dedicated to the study of the hidden mysteries buried under the city. Time had taken that away, layers of cogwork accreting on the walls, clenching tighter and tighter until the ceiling was close and the air was closer. The floor shook with the clashing pistons, the grinding gears.
I steadied Emily. I remembered that I had been overwhelmed myself when I first came here as a child. My father had prepared me, in his way.