“You’ve no right to be here!” The Wright yelled. His voice was a quiet roar among the machines. “This is a holy place.”
“It is,” I said. “We’re only here to show our devotion.”
“Then put the gun away,” he said, nodding to Emily. “And let me call my brothers.”
“No.” I shook my head. “We won’t need your brothers. Not today. But, my dear,” I placed a hand on Emily’s shoulder. “Maybe the gun is unnecessary.”
“What?” she asked, her neck still craned towards the ceiling. I leaned close to her, let my cheek brush hers.
“The gun.”
She stashed it sulkily, then returned to the cogwork.
“She sees the glory of it, son.” The Wright looked pale, but stern. “Not you. Where’s your awe in the presence of God?”
“I’m unable to contain it, Wright. It fled. Now. The Pillar of Deep Intentions,” I said, reciting what Morgan had told me. “Near the Tapestry of Hidden Ambition. I have a deep… fervor… to see it.”
The Wright paled even more. “That is… there is no such miracle in the house of the Algorithm.”
“There is. I believe, brother.” I grasped him by the shoulders and looked deeply into his eyes. “It was revealed to me. Prophecy, call it. Now where’s the pillar?”
“It is not… not for people. Not for the unholy. The pillar is a very peculiar gift of God.”
“Yes, it is. That’s why I must see it. You must show me. Surely you wouldn’t deny a pilgrim?”
He set his lips, looked down and shook his head. Emily hit him.
“Fair enough,” I said. “Morgan gave me an idea. Just hoped to do the easy thing.”
“We can’t stick around,” Emily said, looking down at the fallen Wright. He had crumpled at her touch, and was curled up around his chest. “Make it quick.”
I ignored her. Memory served, and I found the old family pews. Without sermons and choirs, services of the Algorithm were less structured than the older ceremonies of the Celestes. Ironic, if you thought about it. The pews were scattered around the room, facing different directions, arranged in different ways.
I ran my hand over the soft wood of our pews, sat and closed my eyes. That was familiar. My heart seemed to sync up with the room, rumbling in my bones. When I opened my eyes, I saw the pillar, off to my left and across a haphazard aisle.
“Emily!” I yelled, and crossed to the pillar.
“This is it?” she asked. I nodded.
Up close I saw that it wasn’t really a pillar. More like two closely fit camshafts, sheathed together and turning very quickly, so that it looked like a single column. There were carvings on the pillar’s face. The rapid cycle of the shafts animated them, so the patterns danced and crawled up the cylinder. It looked like water flowing, like rivers twisting and slipping through the steel. The air was hot, rushing up from the floor where the shafts disappeared into the stone.
“I know you!” I turned. It was the Wright, his mouth bloodied, holding himself up on my family pew. “Burn, the child. Your father sent you!”
“Not for a long while,” I said.
“He did, I know. The brothers will know.”
“What can you tell me about this pillar?” I asked. He clammed up, then sat on my pew. I looked up the length of the pillar. There was something familiar, near the top.
“I need to get up there,” I said. Emily nodded and looked around for some way to make the climb. The whirling pillar wasn’t something you just shimmied up.
“The pews,” she said.
“Oh. Dad’ll hate that.” I smiled and crossed the aisle, dragging the Wright from his seat.
We tipped the pew up on end. It took both of us. We leaned the heavy wood against a nearby mural. The gears chattered against the wood, then seized up. Something deep in the wall broke, and gears plinked across the stone floor.
“That’ll get some attention,” Emily said. The old guy was gone anyway, snuck off while we struggled with the pew.
“I’ll be fast.”
I scrambled to the top of the pillar, my hands slick against the polished wood. At the top I bent as close to the pillar as I dared, the speed of their cycle a hot breath on my face.
“You aren’t going to believe this,” I yelled down.
There was a cog, meshed between the shafts, driving the pillar. It had many teeth, many gears, concentric circles that slipped together and flowed like quicksilver.
“It’s the Cog. The fucking artifact,” I yelled. Though it wasn’t. Similar, just as complicated, just as beautiful. I realized that its cycle was matched in every mural. The room meshed with it. “It’s running the whole place.”
“Can you get it out?”
The door banged open. There were Wrights carrying ornate hatchets and hammers. I slipped, the pew slipped. It banged onto the central pillar and shattered. I fell, landed among the stacks of cogs that hadn’t yet been distributed to the Algorithm, cracking my head on the stone floor and scattering the gears. I lay there, the world buzzing around me. People were shouting. There was a boom, yelling; I heard Emily’s voice. I rolled onto my side and fought through the haze.
Emily was standing in the narrow aisle, pistol in her right hand, hammer in her left. There was blood on her face and oil on her dress. She glanced at me, concern etched across her eyes. She was shouting. I nodded. She fired at someone unseen, shook the hammer in the air, and disappeared for a second. When she came back there was blood on the hammer, and more on her. She looked at me again. Everything was so loud.
The bullet entered at her shoulder. Just above the meat of her breast, blood puffing up, misting across her face. The hammer slipped from her hand. She gestured weakly with the pistol. Her lips were slack, and she fell.
I rolled to my feet, revolver out. There was a crowd of Wrights, carefully approaching Emily’s body. There were others, on the floor. One had his face caved in, blood and mucus running across shattered teeth. They looked at me. They hesitated.
I shot the first two, bullets into their chests, a slug for each lung. Walking past Emily, I emptied my chamber, dropped the pistol and scooped up her hammer. I didn’t even see the next three, just put the heavy, dead metal through them, crushing them, moving on. A bullet skipped past me. Found the guy, cowering behind a boiler, fumbling with the lever on an antique hunting rifle. Spent some time on him. When I turned around the room was empty, just bodies and smoke. The gear walls were slick with blood, the filth passing from cog to cog, tooth to tooth, each cycle spreading it farther and deeper into the pattern.
I cradled Emily against my chest. She was light, like a bundle of twigs. There was a lot of blood. I picked her up and headed for the door. Just before I got there it irised closed. I heard hammers, and iron. A lot of yelling in the hallway beyond. The door wouldn’t open.
I turned back to the chamber. So many cogs, walls and walls of gears flashing and spinning in a cacophonous roar. There had to be another way out. I set Emily gently on the floor next to the toppled pew and looked around.
Every natural door in the place was sealed shut, clogged with accretions of cogwork. Some of it spun quickly, some creaked lazily, but all of it moved, and none of it allowed passage. In places the original walls had been removed, tunnels burrowed out by camshafts and long boiler pipes that clawed into the foundations of the Church. There were gaps around the pipes that went deep into darkness, but there was no way I could crawl through there, much less carry Emily out.
I went to check on her. She looked okay, I told myself. She was going to be okay. I stuffed her chest with some clean rags and told myself it was going to be okay.
Outside the door the hammering had stopped. Were they getting the Badge, or did the Church have its own security measures? What sort of horrors did they keep in the cellar of this place? Childhood stories bumped around my head. I went back to searching.
If Wilson had been here, we might have been able to climb up to the dizzy heights of the chamber. There were more gaps there, and I could see natural light filtering in from the cathedral’s original stained glass windows. I began to regret leaving him in the cistern to guard the Cog. I looked over at Emily’s still form, breathing slowly. I began to regret bringing her, too.