Servants of the Nexus (Wayfarer Chronicles #1)

Chapter 8

Dawn was breaking by the time they left the workshop, and in the rose-gold glow Howl finally slept. The streets were quiet, subdued and heavy with dew, automatons powered-down and early rising workmen shuffling along as though not to wake last night’s revellers. Through it all, Cam trudged in Saenu’s wake, biting back his fear and anxiety, trying desperately to focus. He needed to concentrate, to send what scraps of extra-human senses he had out into their surroundings. He had to find Aly.
In the end, it was simple: Aly found them. Saenu had suggested they climb onto the rooftop of a nearby watertower, and when they did so, the angel was waiting. His wings were jewelled with damp, his dark hair swept back, and he looked as carefree and relaxed as though nothing in the world could trouble him.
Cam breathed a sigh of relief, which even from across the rooftop, Aly heard. The angel got to his feet but remained balanced on the roof’s edge, nothing but the dawn-glowing city vista behind him.
“Cameron.” He was smiling, a sight that could have broken hearts, if anyone else could have seen it. “This place is magnificent from the air. I wish you could see it as I do.”
Cam swallowed his worry. Suddenly, faced by Aly’s exuberance, he didn’t want to voice his fears. Out here in the dawn, everything seemed different: maybe the drawings were a coincidence, a fantasy or a dream - or even if Gaesten did know of Aly’s existence, maybe they were just some passing whim. He’d fixed on the automaton and the Tremontine Box, hadn’t he? What could an angel have to do with that?
So he didn’t speak, even though Saenu stared at him in surprise and Aly arched an eyebrow, aware something wasn’t right.
“Where have you been?” Aly asked. He flexed one wing, water cascading off his feathers.
Cam scrubbed a hand through his hair. “We’ve been looking into the Box that was stolen from Saenu’s home. Another Wayfarer took it, a man named Gaesten. He’s hidden it inside an automaton, somewhere in the city.”
At that, Saenu stirred. Her gaze settled close to Aly, somewhere around his left shoulder. “Alessandro, might we ask your aid? You could track the automaton far faster than we might.”
 Aly huffed, folding his arms across his chest. Though he’d accompanied Cam across dozens of worlds, always in the name of their protection, he’d always held himself above such work. Cam liked to joke the angel was just terribly lazy, but in truth he knew better - though Aly was bound to him, a Wayfarer, he didn’t like to get involved.
“Please, Alessandro,” Saenu said, as though sensing Aly’s reluctance. “It would be of great help to us.”
Finally, Aly sighed. “Sweet Saenumandua, I can never resist your charms for long. If only there was a way you could repay me.”
Cam rolled his eyes. “He says yes.”
“Thank you.” Saenu gave a bow which Aly - though she couldn’t see it - echoed. A moment later, he swooped across the rooftop, wings spread like the canvas of some vast sail, and landed lightly at Cam’s side.
When the angel pressed a finger to Cam’s temple, there was a crack like lightning and a spark that even Saenu could see. Cam yelped and leapt away, a storm of protestations rising to his lips. In the end, faced by Aly grinning at him, he could only mutter, “Do you have to do that?”
“If you want my aid, yes. I need to know everything of import about this automaton, everything you have learnt.”
“You could have just asked.”
“This way is quicker, and it works better if you’re unaware it’s coming.” There was that grin again, which said there probably was an easier way, or at least a less painful one, if Aly had been so inclined.
Cam rubbed his stinging head. “Well, there you go. Now you know everything I do.”
Aly raised an eyebrow as if to imply that was very little indeed. For one taut moment, Cam feared the drawings of a dissected angel would also have passed to Aly, but his supreme unconcern suggested that wasn’t the case. He closed his eyes, one finger pressed to his lips in a thoughtful pose, before beating his wings to rise into the air.
“Well?” Cam shouted after him, through a hurricane wind only he could feel. “Can you track it?”
“I can.” Aly’s voice rang beside his ear. “I hope you can keep up.”
And he was off, skimming across the watertower roof and plummeting over the edge like a dropped stone. Cam’s stomach dropped with him, then rose with his pulse into his throat as Aly soared back up, as weightless of a mote of dust.
Cam turned to Saenu. “We need to get off this roof.”
They followed Aly across the city, Cam trailing brief glimpses of his winged shadow against the ground, even briefer glimpses of his silhouette against the morning sky, seen between towering buildings. Once, Aly vanished into the shade of a silver-skinned zeppelin, reappearing again through the fog of its exhaust fumes like some lofty spectre.
“Do you think he’s going the right way?” Saenu asked, just once.
Cam shrugged. “I suppose we’ll find out.”
They reached Howl’s northern fringes, where shops and homes gave way to a grimy industrial district. There was none of the quiet of the warehouses here - instead, everything was smoke and steam, pounding hammers and the sizzle of hot iron plunged into water.
“The beating heart of the city,” Saenu said, as they slowed to a walk.
The beating heart indeed. Cam could feel it through the soles of his boots, a deep, resonant thrum that tingled its way up his spine and into the base of his skull. It truly was as if another, bigger heart was thundering alongside his own, matching itself to his pulse, or his to its. Except... This wasn’t the pounding of the anvils, he realised after a time. This had to be something else.
Because, as they left the workshops behind, then crossed a wide, grubby plaza, still the beat continued to build.
“Can you feel that?” he asked Saenu.
She looked at him strangely, then shook her head. It was all Cam could do not to march in time to the ground’s heavy pulse; overhead, weaving around towering metal pylons, Aly’s wingbeats had taken on the same rhythm.
And then he heard it, a low rumbling overlaid with a soaring crescendo of a whine, a cry loosed to the Heavens as though in pain. Cam stopped, gaze fixed on the horizon, but could see only Saenu halted in front of him.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
Saenu looked uncertain, though eventually she nodded. “Faintly but... there was something.”
The noise came again, more subdued than before, but still enough to send a shiver through Cam’s bones. He couldn’t be the only one who could hear it, either - Howl had got its name somewhere, after all.
Ahead, Aly had handed, perched on the sill of a boarded window as though it were wide as a rooftop. Cam came up beside him and felt the angel’s anxiety, setting the air quivering with every shift of his wings.
“I’m not sure, Cameron,” he said, “that I want to go any further.”
“You don’t have to,” Cam replied. How could he say anything else when he felt exactly the same? “The automaton’s ahead?”
Aly nodded. “Over that ridge. I believe it to be stationary now. Good luck in your search.”
In the next heartbeat, he launched himself into the air, winging back towards the city as though demons were chasing at his heels. Cam watched him go and Saenu glanced in the same direction.
“He’s gone?” she asked.
“Yeah. Can you blame him?”
Saenu shrugged. Clearly, whatever produced the noise and the thunderous beat affected her far less powerfully, but still she looked uneasy. “Shall we continue?”
They went on up the hill, the road rising toward a ridge from beyond which the sound had to have emanated. The street leading out of the plaza was quiet; neither human nor automaton, stray dog or even bird crossed their path.
Just before they reached the ridge, Cam paused, then began to head off the road. “I think we should get out of sight, don’t you?”
Saenu looked as though she’d have preferred to meet their Fate head on, but she followed Cam anyway. They took an alley to the west, then shinned up a drainpipe onto the flat roof of what might have been an abandoned workshop. Cam almost felt the need to crawl across the roof, but Saenu had no such compunctions and only crouched when she reached its edge. Cam joined her, and together they took in the extraordinary sight below.
The ridge dropped away sharply into a bowl-shaped valley, ridged like an amphitheatre’s seats. The walls of the depression looked like the cliffs of a quarry, and sure enough workmen crawled over its sides, carrying buckets and manoeuvring tools. If they’d been carting loads of stone or ore away, Cam wouldn’t have been surprised, but instead the whole valley glowed, a sunset yellow light as though the workers were quarrying away the inside of a star.
“Aetherflesh,” Saenu breathed, and in a flash of understanding Cam saw what she did. The substance being loaded into carts wasn’t just glowing, it was soft and pliable as though it really were flesh. And perhaps, Cam thought, it was.
“A void beast,” he murmured, unable to stop himself.
Saenu shot him a look. “And what might that be?”
Cam shook his head, in bewilderment more than anything. “I... don’t exactly know. Sometimes, when I’m repairing breaches between worlds, I think I can feel something... alive. Something huge, living in the spaces between realms.”
Saenu raised an eyebrow. “Are they sentient?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if they’re aware of me. It’s more like they’re just drifting past, minding their own business. Like I’m just a speck in the void to them.”
“And you call them ‘void beasts’?”
“Only because I had to call them something. I’m not sure they’re animals at all.”
“I see.” Saenu looked away. “What, then, do these beasts have to do with this mine?”
Cam took a deep breath, preparing himself for how strange he knew his answer would be. “When I sense the beasts, out in the void, they feel just like this. The pulse, the noise, the... the feeling they give off. I didn’t put the two together before because it just didn’t make sense.” And because he’d never been so close to one of the beasts. Out in the void, they were always distant, a faint heartbeat he might almost have imagined. This, rumbling through air and ground, was far more potent.
“I think this is a void beast,” he went on. “Somehow, it got through into this world, and it’s buried under this hill.”
“And now the people of Howl mine its flesh to power their machines.” Saenu looked nauseous. “Is it alive?”
“No, I’m sure it’s not,” Cam replied, glad he could say at least something with such certainty. Powerful though the sensations, and indeed the noise, created by the beast were, they lacked something - a certain electricity, a vitality - that he felt from the ones passing in the void. “I think I can just feel the energy that’s left because I’m used to it. You can hardly sense it, right?”
Saenu shook her head. “Nothing more than a tingle and a few static sparks. I could barely hear the noise you mentioned, either. This creature must still possess a great deal of energy, though, or aetherflesh would have no value.”
A ‘great deal of energy’ indeed, if he could sense it even from a dead beast. How had it got here? Cam wondered. If it had come through from the void, as it must, did that mean there was somewhere a breach, even though he couldn’t feel it? Or had the beast been here aeons, via a tear that had long since closed? Might there be other beasts stranded like this - or had it been stranded at all? Cam couldn’t shake the feeling that a creature like this wouldn’t leave the void for any purpose other than to die.
Saenu was staring off along the ridge, where it curved to the east and then the north, circling the quarry. Cam followed her gaze, catching a glimpse of shadowy figures shuffling over the crest and down into the valley below. They were too distant for Cam to put a name to them, but Saenu’s expression told him all he needed to know. Gaesten and his agents, and they were heading down into the aetherflesh mine.