Servants of the Nexus (Wayfarer Chronicles #1)

Chapter 7

Cam was well away from the warehouse and loitering in a district of respectable middle-class homes when the call finally came. Its peal in his mind almost startled him out of his skin, and he had to press his back against a cold stone wall, breathing deep against his hammering heart, before he had the composure to heed it. Saenu, of course, would never resort to something as simple as a phone, whether one would have functioned in Howl or not. Instead, her call was like a bell ringing in his skull, a rapid burst of near-garbled information repeated just enough times for him to make sense of it.
The gist was clear enough, at least: Saenu was safe, and she had a location at which he was to meet her, somewhere on the other side of the city. With a sigh, Cam set off. He had a long walk ahead of him.
Only when he was nearly there did he manage to shake off the tension that clutched at him. He’d been worried about Saenu, of course, because there was a wide gap between believing in her capabilities and actually knowing she was alive. What really wormed under his skin, though, was that Aly was nowhere to be seen, and hadn’t made contact since the Aurora Tower. He could take care of himself, and of course the fact that no-one else could see him helped, but Cam couldn’t escape a nagging worry at his absence.
He found Saenu exactly where she’d said she’d be, in a rundown warren of buildings on Howl’s north side. They might once have been warehouses, or workshops; now the district seemed to be inhabited by nothing more than weeds, mice, and the crooks who were no doubt lurking in the shadows, trying to keep their business private.
Saenu must have felt his arrival: she leaned out of the doorway of a ramshackle building, waving Cam into a dusty, low-ceilinged space. A flickering lantern had been set on the corner of a bench; the rest of the room was in shadow. In fact, it wasn’t until Cam almost tripped over her that he realised there was a woman, bound and apparently unconscious, stowed in one corner.
“Who is she?” he asked Saenu.
The Wayfarer shrugged. “One of Gaesten’s cronies. I followed her here, despite her efforts to the contrary.”
“Has she told you anything?”
“Not a thing.” Saenu pulled a sour expression. “She tried to gut me, before threatening to turn the knife on herself. I knocked her out for her own safety.”
By Saenu’s weary posture, he thought there was more to their encounter than that, but it seemed rude to pry.
“Where’s the angel?” she asked abruptly, glancing around the room as though Aly might already be with them.
Cam tried to look blase, to hide his mounting worry. “I don’t know. Exploring, I think.”
“Good,” Saenu said, but didn’t elaborate further. Cam supposed the workshop would be rather cramped with all three - wait, four - of them milling around.
His pushed his anxiety down, turning to a workbench littered with lumpen objects. Despite the darkness, they each had a brassy gleam, a line of brilliance streaked across their curved surfaces. Cam leaned closer, gingerly running his fingers over a smooth plane of cool metal.
“What are these things?” he asked.
When Saenu didn’t reply, he turned, only to start backwards and almost crash into the nearest bench. Even when he realised the bulbous automaton head was actually disconnected and raised in Saenu’s hands, it took minutes for his heart to slow.
Saenu was peering at the thing, oblivious to his fright. “Automaton parts,” she said, as if he couldn’t see that. “What do you make of them?”
Stilling his breathing, Cam turned back to the bench. He could see it now, how the pieces were linked by their common purpose: a foot there, a piece of leg, a shoulder joint. And the head, bigger than his own, still in Saenu’s hands.
“Well?” she pressed.
It occurred to Cam that, for all her competence, Saenu simply wasn’t accustomed to dealing with technology much more advanced than her sword. Another reason, then, to have him along. Well, at least he was proving himself mildly useful.
He took a second look at the bench, letting his gaze rove across the pieces. “All automaton parts,” he mused, “and none of them broken. They could be pieced back together... Wait, no, they couldn’t. Look at this.”
Saenu abandoned the metal head and moved closer as Cam retrieved what looked like a piece of shoulder and another of arm. Saenu peered at them. “What am I looking for?”
Cam held them together. “They don’t fit, see? This arm is far too big to connect to this joint.”
Saenu stepped away again, casting round the workshop. “So they’ve dismantled numerous automatons. What might they be planning to build?”
“Not ‘planning’,” Cam said, as a sheet of parchment tacked to the wooden wall caught his eye. “I think they’ve already built it.”
The diagram on the sheet was hand-drawn in black ink, spidery but detailed. It quite clearly showed an automaton in human form, with notes describing how the pieces slotted together. There was something strange, though, about the creature’s midsection, where it had been drawn with an open chest compartment, like an open cupboard.
Saenu peered closer at the sheet with a dubious expression. “They want to give it a heart?”
Cam almost laughed at the macabre suggestion, though he could see where she was coming from. “No, I don’t think so. The inside of the automaton is like a box, see? No wires, no joints. It’s more like a place to store something.”
“All right.” Saenu nodded, though she didn’t look convinced. “And what might that be?”
Cam shrugged and stepped away, moving further along the workbench. Flat sheets of metal lay there, far darker and heavier than the stuff from which the automaton was made. He tried to pick one up but succeeded only in bruising the ends of his fingers. “This stuff might line the box,” he suggested. “It would certainly protect whatever’s inside.”
Saenu was pacing, back and forth across the workshop, boots ticking across the floor. “Yes, but what? What is this automaton’s purpose? Is it a weapon?”
“It might be, but I’m not sure how. It’s a... a walking cupboard, as far as I can see. A box on legs, hidden inside the shell of an automaton.”
“Hidden.” Saenu froze, one hand raised. “Are you sure about that?”
Cam groped for understanding. What was she getting at? “Well, presumably once the box is closed up, it looks like any other automaton. And there are thousands of them out there - hidden in plain sight, so to speak.”
“And even more efficiently hidden if it was moving.” Saenu reached for another parchment on the wall, ripping it down to study it better in the dim light. “Such an... individual might never be found.”
She tossed the sheet aside and Cam took it, finding a map of the city, too sketchy to make such sense of. Dotted lines traced a complex path around buildings and down streets, circling and back-tracking and spiralling back and forth. Cam looked up. “You think this is the path the automaton will take?”
A nod from Saenu.
Cam dropped the sheet back to the bench, frustration bubbling up in him. “Then it could be anywhere. Even if we knew which district of the city that map is supposed to show - and it could be anywhere - it might take days to track down.”
“We don’t have days.” By lamplight, Saenu’s face was a grim mask, all sharp edges and shadows. “You were right to call this thing a ‘box on legs’.”
She was one step ahead of him again. “Wait, you mean... You think the Tremontine Box is inside the automaton? Gaesten’s hiding it keeping it walking around Howl?”
“That is my supposition, yes. Such a convoluted solution would be just like him.” Saenu shook her head. “To go to such lengths to keep it from me... He can’t even know himself where the Box is.”
There was a pause as Saenu continued to pace, and Cam, equally restless, idly turned over automaton parts on the workbench. “I don’t think this is just about hiding it,” he said finally. “I think it’s a way of protecting it from degrading in this world.”
Saenu cocked an eyebrow. “Explain.”
Cam groped for words to put his theory into. “The core of the automaton is lined in this heavy stuff, right? Like lead, but moreso. And all the automatons are powered by this aetherflesh, which is supposed to contain a huge amount of energy. If you were going to move an object between worlds and keep it there, what do you think you’d need? Protection, from the outside world, and energy to hold it together.”
“I see.” It was clear Saenu didn’t see at all, but she didn’t doubt him either. “And this despite the fact that the Tremontine Box has already passed between realms?”
“Once, sure, but who’s to say it’d survive another crossing on its own? Gaesten won’t be taking any chances. Even if we don’t know what he wants it for.”
And there was the crux of the matter, of course: what Gaesten planned for the Tremontine Box. He’d gone to quite extraordinary lengths, first to steal it, then to keep it from falling back into Saenu’s hands; he’d even recruited a whole network of cronies and agents, willing to fight and die for him. But what did he want?
Cam pushed that matter aside. He was here as hired help, or near enough - it was Saenu’s business to figure out what Gaesten was up to.
Or so Cam wanted to think, but when he turned around to study the wall above the still-unconscious woman’s head, he was forced to think again. The Tremontine Box was nothing to do with him and neither were Gaesten’s motives - but Aly was.
There was no mistaking the sketches and charts pinned there, in stark black ink on pristine white paper. Though his face was always a blur, a smear, a blank circle, every picture showed Aly in a fresh pose, right down to anatomical sketches in which he’d been dissected, pinned like a butterfly dead and dried.
It took all Cam’s concentration not to scramble into a corner and heave up his guts until nothing was left. Though he managed to remain standing, his clenched fists shook and his legs felt paper-thin, light enough to float away.
A hand on his shoulder steadied him, Saenu’s presence a rock against which he might lean, in spirit if not in person. “These depict your angel?” she asked, her voice grim as a bloodied blade.
Cam nodded, then cleared his throat and found the will to speak. “Yes. Every last one of them.”
“I thought no-one else could see him.”
“They can’t. They couldn’t.” Cam couldn’t find meaning in this terrifying strangeness. Aly had always been invisible, not even so much as a phantom presence to anyone but Cam himself; Saenu was the only one who’d ever been able to approximate his location, and even she didn’t always know he was there. This simply didn’t make sense, and worse- “What does Gaesten want with him? Even if he knows about Aly, what is this?”
Neither of them had an answer. In the end, Saenu clasped his arm, leading him towards the door. “If we encounter Gaesten again, we shall ask him. Come, we need to find the automaton - and your angel.”