Anu had cut out Shabis’s fangs. The ultimate symbol of the vachine.
“No!” wailed Shabis, blood-oil pumping as the cogs in her head, in her heart, ejected precious blood-oil. “What have you done to me, Anukis?” She climbed to her feet, ran to Vashell, who put out his arms to comfort her as she sobbed, her blood-oil leaking into his clothing and his eyes lifted to read Anukis who stood, face bleak, as she retracted her single claw.
“Now you need another assassin,” said Anu, triumph in her eyes.
Vashell nodded. “You are correct.” With a savage shove, he pushed Shabis away, drew his brass sword, and with a swift hard horizontal swipe, cut Shabis’s head from her body. Blood and blood-oil spurted, hitting the ceiling, drenching the walls and bed in a twisting shower of sudden ferocity. Shabis’s head hit the sodden carpet, eyes wide, mouth open in shock, pretty features stained. Anu could see the clockwork in her severed neck, between the fat and the muscle, the veins and the bone, nestled and intricate, bonded, and it was all still spinning happily, now slowing, as cogs could not mesh and a primary shaft failed in its delicate spin. Shabis’s eyes closed, and her separated body folded slowly to the carpet, as if deflating. Her vachine aborted. Shabis died.
“No!” screamed Anu, running forward, dropping to her knees beside the corpse of her sister. Her head snapped up. “You will die for this!” she raged.
“Show me.” Vashell still held his sword; it was a special blade, specifically designed for slaying vachine; for the killing of their own kind. It had a multi-layered blade, and carried a disruptive charge. It wasn’t so much sharp as…created to cut through clockwork.
Anu’s eyes narrowed. “You are a V Hunter?” she said.
“Yes.” He smiled. It was a sickly smile, half pride, half…something else. Amongst the vachine, the V Hunters were despised; it was a rank handed out by the Watchmakers, and a V Hunter’s sole role was to hunt down and exterminate rogue vachine…to cleanse and, essentially, betray their own. Amongst the population they were feared and loathed. Their identities were kept secret, so they could work undercover throughout Silva Valley. They reported directly back to the Watchmakers, and indeed the Patriarch, and answered to no Engineer.
“You have been hunting me all this time?”
Vashell laughed, and sheathed his sword. He turned, running hands through his hair drenched in the blood-oil of Shabis. He turned back, and stared down at Anu. “Don’t be so naive. What would I want with you, pretty little plaything?”
“What do you want, then?”
“I want something much more precious. I want your father, Anukis. I want Kradek-ka. He has gone; fled. Left you to suffer, along with…that.” He stared, a snarl, at Shabis’s corpse. “Now, you will take me to him. By all that is holy, by all the relics of our ancestors, you will take me to Kradek-ka.”
Anukis overcame her fear, and snarled with fangs ejecting, and leapt; Vashell dropped his shoulder, and with an awesome blow backhanded Anukis across the room where she hit the wall, cracking plaster, and hit the floor on her head, crumpling into a heap. She groaned, broken, and her eyes flickered open.
“I’ll leave you to clean up the corpse,” said Vashell, and leaving footprints in Shabis’s blood, he stalked from the room.
Anu stared for long, agonising moments, her eyes seeming to meet those of her dead sister. Tears rolled down her cheeks, her body slumped to the ground, and her eyes closed as she welcomed the oblivion of pain and darkness.
It began as a ball. A tight ball; white, pure, hot like a sun. And that ball was anger, and hatred, and rage so pure, so hot, that it engulfed everything, it engulfed her concept of family and name and honour and duty and love and spread, covering the city and the valley and the Black Pike Mountains; finally it overtook the world, and the sun, and the stars, and the galaxy and everything broiled in that tiny hot plasma of rage and Anu’s eyes flickered open and it was dark, and cool, and she was thankful.
She lay on a steel bench. She was dressed in plain clothes, and boots. She looked down, and started, and started to weep. Her vachine claws had been removed, the ends of her bloody fingers blunt stumps. She reached up, and winced as she felt the holes where her fangs should have been. Inside her, she felt the heavy tick tick tick of clockwork, in her head and in her breast; and she cursed Vashell, and cursed the Engineers, for they had taken away her weapons and she would rather be dead. It was what they once did to criminals before the Justice Laws, and just before a death-sentence was meted out. It was the lowest form of aberration. The lowest form of dishonour; beyond, even, the transformation to canker. Even a canker had fangs.
Winter sunshine bled in through a high window, and Vashell emerged smugly through a door. He wore subtle vachine battledress, skin-armour, they called it, beneath woollen trousers and a thick shirt and cloak. His weapons, also, were hidden. His eyes shone.
“Get up.”
“No.”
“Get up!” He ejected a claw, and held it to her eye. “Anukis, I will take you apart limb by limb, orb by orb, tooth by tooth. I will massacre you, but your clockwork, your mongrel vachine status, will keep you alive. We know Kradek-ka made you special; you think us fools? You think the Engineers haven’t been inside you? Examined every cog, every wheel, every tiny shaft and pump? Kradek-ka did some very special things to you, Anukis, technology we didn’t even know existed. First, we were going to kill you. It was fitting. You are an abomination. But then a specialist discovered…the advanced technology, inside of you. You will help me find Kradek-ka. I promise you this.”
“I don’t know where to look,” she said, voice low, staring at the razor tip of Vashell’s claw.
“I have a start point. But first, I want to show you something.”
Vashell tugged on a thin golden lead, almost transparent, and scaled with a strange quartz mesh; sometimes, it could be seen, rippling like liquid stone; other times it was completely invisible, depending on how it caught the light. Anukis felt the jolt, and realised it was connected to her throat. Another humiliation. Another vachine slight.
Vashell tugged, and Anukis was forced to stand. She growled, tried to eject her fangs by instinct but only pain flowed through her jaws. She wept then, standing there on the leash. She wept for her freedom; but more, she wept for her dead sister, wept for her lost father.
“Follow me.”
Anukis had little choice.
“Where is this?”
“Deep. Within the Engineer’s Palace.”
“I did not know these corridors, and these rooms, existed.”
“Why should you? Even Kradek-ka would not tell you everything. After all,” he smiled, eyes dark, filled with an inner humour, “you are female.”
The corridors were long, and the more they delved into the Engineer’s Palace, the deeper they penetrated, conversely, the more bare and more undecorated it became. Gone were carpets, silk hangings, works of oil-art. Instead, bare metal, rusted in places, became the norm. Deeper they travelled, Anukis trotting a little to keep up with Vashell’s long stride.
They walked for an hour. Behind some doors they heard grinding noises, deep and penetrating; behind others jolts of enormous power like strikes of lightning. Behind others, they heard rhythmical thumping, or the squeal of metal on metal. Yet more were deadly silent beyond, and for some reason, these were the worst for Anukis. Her imagination could create Engineer horrors worse than anything they could show her.
Vashell stopped, and Anukis nearly ran into him. She was lost in thought, drowning in dreams. She pulled up tight, and he looked down, his look arrogant, his eyes mocking, and she thought: