“Stop.”
Vashell held something, what looked like a tiny circle of bone, up to a mechanism beside a blank metal door. There came several hisses, of oiled metal on metal, as the object in his hand slid out pins and integrated with the machine. The portal opened, but in the manner of nothing Anukis had ever seen; it was a series of curves, oiled and gleaming, which curled around one another, twisted like coils as the door didn’t just open, it unpeeled.
They stepped through, into a working engine.
The room was crammed with a giant mechanism of clockwork, a machine made up of thousands and thousands of smaller machines. Brass and gold gleamed everywhere. Cogs turned, integrated, shafts spun, steam hissed from tiny nozzles, brass pistons beat vertically, horizontally, diagonally, and everywhere Anukis looked there were a hundred movements, of rockers and cams, valves and pistons, and she shivered for it reminded her of the clockwork she had watched inserted into babies…only on a much, much larger scale; a vast scale. A terrible scale.
Vashell led her forward, through a natural tunnel amidst the heart of the vast machine which stretched above them for as far as the eye could see, away into darkness. She could smell hot oil, and the sweet narcoleptic essence of blood-oil. And another smell…a metallic undertone, acidic, insectile, the metal perfume of a million moving parts.
Vashell’s boots stamped to a halt, muffled against the brass floor, and Anukis looked up, blinking in the poor golden light. There was a simple metal bench, and behind it sat a woman. Her hands toyed with a complex mechanism, which moved and spun and gyrated and morphed, even as her hands moved endlessly around and within the machine. It was like watching a doctor performing high-speed surgery inside an organism, a living, beating, functioning organism. Anu looked to the woman’s face. It was perfect and distorted at the same time. She seemed to wear a brass mask, which glittered dully.
“Hello, Daughter of Vachine,” said the woman, smiling, her eyes shining, her hands still constantly merging and integrating with the almost organic clockwork. “My name is Sa. I am Watchmaker.”
Anukis could not hide her amazement; nor her distaste.
The Watchmakers were clinically paranoid, in Anu’s opinion. They never walked amongst the people, instead hiding away in the Engineer’s Palace and issuing orders many of the vachine population found detached from the real world, divorced from the society in which a modern vachine lived, operated, ate and drank.
“You have abused me,” said Anu, simply.
“We have strengthened you,” said Sa.
“What do you want of me?” said Anu.
“We have a problem,” smiled Sa, her golden brass eyes kindly, her fangs peeking just a little above the lip of her mask. She was beautiful, Anu realised, in a vachine way. Despite her lack of stature, despite an athletic and powerful appearance, Anu realised this small dark-skinned woman exuded energy and she noted Vashell’s subservient stance. An ironic reversal, considering the behaviour she’d witnessed back in her celclass="underline" it had been a stage-act, just for her benefit. Anukis scowled. She was a pawn. Manipulated. Played for a fool. A tool in somebody else’s workbox.
“You need my father,” said Anu, voice now cold, eyes hardening.
“Our problem goes far, far deeper than your father,” said Sa, head tilting to one side. Still her hands played, sinking into a mist of spinning gears and wheels. “It is the blood-oil.”
“What about it?”
“We are running dry,” said Sa, watching Anukis carefully. “As you know, to the north we have the Fields, out past the Organic Flatlands. But the cattle are dying, have ceased to breed, and our refined blood-oil supplies are nearly exhausted. We have sent a scouting force south, beyond the Black Pike Mountains; they are searching out new possibilities for fresh cattle.”
Anu gave a single nod.
“Do you understand the implications of what I am saying?”
“If the blood runs out, it cannot be refined into blood-oil; then the vachine will begin to seize. And die.”
“Yes. This is a threat to our civilisation, Anukis. But more than that, the Blood Refineries your father helped build…to develop and engineer. They have contracted, shall we say, a fault. Something endemic to his math, his engineering, his blood-oil magick, and subsequently an element only he can put right. Kradek-ka was a genius.” She said it low; with ultimate respect. “He was Watchmaker.”
“What happens if the Refineries fail?”
Sa smiled, but there was no humour there. “We will return to a state of hunting and savagery. But how can eighty thousand vachine satiate their blood-oil lust? We will devolve, Anukis. Our society will become decadent, will crumble, will fade as we turn on one another, revert back to clans and tribes. It does not even bear thinking about. The dark ages of our civilisation were a bloody, evil time, where the only vachine who suffered was vachine. Now, we are fed by the blood of others. Our population is fed by cattle, bred for the purpose. The age-old war with the albinos from under the mountain, all that is in the past. We conquered, we dominated, they became our slaves-and all because of our culture, our civilisation, our evolution! I cannot allow this be taken away. I cannot let this hierarchy, this religion, fail.”
“I am impure-blood,” said Anukis, voice low. Her eyes were fixed on Sa. “You have cast me out from your vachine world. Why should I care if you perish? Vashell has abused me, humiliated me, murdered my sister, and I am cast out by my own people because of a twist of genetics over which I had no control. I hate to be crude, Sa, but you meat-fuckers can suffer and die for all I care.”
Sa smiled. Her eyes glittered behind her mask. “Did your father ever tell you about the origin of the cankers, sweet Anukis?”
“What do you mean?”
“Cankers are…Kradek-ka’s greatest achievement. They are, shall we say, a method of utilising waste product. They are bred, and nurtured, deformities; a mish-mash of twisted clockwork and flesh, and put simply, the insane end-product of when a vachine goes bad. We keep them apart from vachine society; so you know the term, I am sure, as insult. But you have never seen the end product.” She took a deep breath. “However…”
The pause hurt Anukis. She could not describe why she felt such a sudden, indescribable terror, but she did. Her eyes grew wide. Palpitations riddled her clockwork breast. Her hands clenched together, and fear tasted like bad oil in her mouth.
“What are you saying?” she said.
Sa stood, and placed her fluid clockwork machine on the bench. She walked around its outskirts, hand trailing a sparkle of clockwork slivers, gold dust, blood-oil. She stood before Anukis, looking up into the pretty woman’s beaten face, deformed now by the removal of vachine fangs. She stood on tip-toe and kissed Anukis, her tongue slipping into her mouth, fangs ejecting and biting Anukis’s lower lip, a vampire bite, a tasting, a savouring, a gentle taking of blood…
Sa stood down. Anukis’s blood sat on her lips, in her fangs, and their eyes were connected and Anukis, finally, understood. Her hate fell, crushed. Her anger was crumpled like a paper ball. Her sense of revenge lay, stabbed and bleeding, dying, dead.
“You will help us find Kradek-ka. You will help us repair the Blood Refineries.”
Anukis nodded, weakly. “Yes,” she said.
“There are some things far worse than death,” Sa said. Then turned to Vashell. “Show her the Canker-Pits on your way out. Only then will she truly understand the limits of her…future potential. And the extremes of her father’s twisted genius.”