“You hear that, Sammy? That’s the sound of commerce. Of product being made. I tell ya, it’s music to my ears…”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to smile, and winding up with more of a pained grimace. “Catchy.”
He nodded toward a door up ahead, another iron job that, if anything, was heavier and better reinforced than the one through which we’d entered. “You wanna see?”
I didn’t. I told him so. He showed me anyway.
I really shoulda seen that coming.
When he heaved open the door, the sound doubled in intensity. The pressure in my eardrums seemed to spread. My intestines fluttered like I’d eaten a bad burrito, and the fillings in my meat-suit’s teeth began to ache. It was all I could manage to keep my feet. Dumas was mock-oblivious, clapping one arm over my shoulder and ushering me through the doorway, his features ablaze with malignant delight.
The room was small and dark, and the air inside was thick with sulfurous steam; it billowed outward through the open door like hot breath on my face. No torches graced the close stone walls. Aside from the firelight that spilled in through the open door, the only illumination came from somewhere in the center of the room, a ghostly gray light that appeared at first to emanate from the very steam itself. But as the steam dispersed, I caught a glimpse of the machinery behind the awful racket —and the true source of the room’s sole light.
It appeared to be some kind of massive lathe, sitting at table height and fastened to the floor with bolts as thick as my arm. A hodge-podge of tarnished brass fixtures —wheels, knobs, cranks, and levers —jutted from its cast-iron shell, and several grime-caked gears transmitted power to the spindle from a thick rubber belt that extended upward to a diesel engine above, running at full bore and fixed to the ceiling by a series of heavy chains. Angling downward from the ceiling, as well as upward from the floor below, were several copper pipes, which snaked their way around the room from a cistern in the corner and converged on the object mounted on the rapidly turning spindle.
The object itself was scarcely larger than an acorn, and obscured from view by the steam that billowed off of it —steam generated by the water jetting toward it from the copper pipes. But as it turned, it flickered with familiar light, and beneath the clamor of machinery, I could just make out the melancholy wail of its song.
It was a soul. A human soul, reduced to a mere commodity by Dumas and his ilk.
The machine’s attendant —a hulking mass of demon-flesh clad head-to-cloven-hoof in thick, coarse leather —threw a lever, and the engine chugged to a halt. The spindle slowed and stopped, and, with a squeak of turning valves, the flow of water petered out as well. My head was grateful for the silence. My heart ached to see a soul treated so callously as this.
The machinist shook free of his gloves and stripped off his mask —a grotesque parody of the face beneath rendered in leather and brass, with a lens of ambercolored glass where the demon’s sole eye proved to be. Don’t get me wrong, the demon beneath was hardly a looker —picture a rabid, mangy, cyclopean Rottweiler, and you’re more or less there —but that mask? That mask was the stuff of nightmares.
“Nice getup,” I said.
The dog-beast eyed me with the sort of disdain you’d expect from a blue-blood stepping over a puking wino. “Boss,” it said with a voice a good octave lower than any human one I’ve ever heard. “There some kind of problem?” The words seemed unwieldy in the creature’s mouth, as if it were unaccustomed to speaking in a human tongue, and though it was speaking to Dumas, its eye never left me. The eye itself was black and glistening and rimmed all around with red. Its corners were crusted with dried mucus, sickly white against the creature’s pitch-black face. I could see my reflection in the surface of that eye, smaller and more frightened than I maybe would have liked.
“Problem? Nah —just giving Sammy here the nickel tour!” Then, to me: “You wouldn’t know it to look at him, Sam, but old Psoglav here is the best skimmer in the business. A real surgeon with his blade. Ain’t that right, Psoglav?”
Psoglav said nothing, instead plucking said blade up from where it lay atop the stilled lathe —so quickly that I scarcely saw him do it —and testing the set of its edge against the ash-gray callus of his thumb. The blade itself was flat-topped like a chisel and very fine, with a tapered stem and a handle fashioned from what appeared to be a human bone. I confess I didn’t like the way Psoglav was looking at me while he held it.
Psoglav smiled at my obvious discomfort, flashing what looked to be a set of crude iron teeth jammed willy-nilly into his mottled gray gums, and then his hand flicked out at me, placing the tip of the blade under my chin so fast I didn’t even have time to exhale, much less react. Every muscle in the demon’s body was tensed, but the blade barely grazed my skin. Still, it was sharp enough to draw blood —I felt it dripping warm down my chin.
I wanted to move. To recoil. Hell, to take a fucking breath. But Psoglav could kill this meat-suit with a lightning flick of his wrist, so I didn’t dare. Instead I stood there, bleeding in the darkness.
“This monkey,” he said to Dumas, who seemed for all the world not to notice the drama unfolding before him, “he our new Collector?”
I said nothing. Dumas answered, “Perhaps.”
The pressure on the blade increased ever-so slightly, and my bleeding quickened. The damned thing was so sharp, though, I barely even felt it.
“I hope for his sake he proves more reliable than his predecessor.”
Dumas smiled. “You hope no such thing. I know you’re still chomping at the bit to have a go at Daniel, and it looks to me like you’d be more than happy to exact your revenge on Samuel in his stead.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was full of steel. “Though if I were you, Psoglav, I wouldn’t.”
Though Dumas’s words were conversational enough, Psoglav’s eye widened in sudden fear, and faster than my own eyes could even register, he recoiled. The blade gone, I raised a sleeve to my bleeding chin and resisted the urge to collapse into a puddle on the floor.
“My apologies,” Psoglav said —to Dumas, though, not to me.
“Think nothing of it,” Dumas replied, the tone of levity in his voice restored.
“With your permission, boss, I think maybe I should return to my work.”
“Of course, of course,” Dumas replied. “The machinery of capitalism stops for no one —not even me.”
We took our leave of Psoglav, and Dumas shut the door behind us. I heard the diesel engine cough and sputter, and then roar to life once more. Soon, the awful racket of the lathe’s turning resumed.
“That Psoglav’s a real charmer,” I said, dabbing at my chin.
“Oh, he’s a tad excitable, I’ll admit, but he’s damn good at his job.”
“Not a fan of Danny’s, huh?”
“Seems there’s a lot of that going around lately. Although in Psoglav’s case, I’m not surprised. Most of the Collectors in my employ can’t stay far enough away from him, but Danny? Danny pestered poor Psoglav any chance that he could get. Always asking questions, bugging him to watch the skimming process, and generally following him around like some yippy little toy dog. Maybe Psoglav worries you’ll pick up where Daniel left off.”
“He’s got nothing to worry about. I’m never going to come work for you" —again, I added mentally —"and what’s more, I’m pretty sure you know it. So you wanna tell me what that little dog-and-pony show was really all about?”
“I just need you to understand the skill required to maintain an operation such as this, and the consequences of any lapse in said skill, so that you can begin to understand the severity of the situation in which we find ourselves.”