Read Online The Waking Engine by David Edison - Free Book Online Page A

promised.
    “He came!” The words were out of Nixon’s mouth before he could stop himself. He held the box behind his back and retreated a step toward the exit; his curiosity evaporated in the face of cash.
    A Cheshire grin lit the barefoot woman’s face, brightening even the abandoned building that decayed around them. She did a little dance and held her hand out in an invitation, one eye shining in the torchlight, the other dark. Nixon hesitated, then tentatively put his small brown hand in hers. Her skin felt feverish-hot and cold as the vacuum of space, and for half a moment her bright eye blinded him as the darkness in the other yawned vertiginously.
    She pulled the length of red ribbon from her ankle and tied it around Nixon’s thumb. “When you see him again, I want you to do me one little itty-bitty favor. I want you to give him this. He’ll be new and untrusting, but I want you to do it anyway. Use that disarming smile of yours.” Dropping his hand, the being shaped like a redhead stood back and admired the boy as she might admire a puppy in a shop. “Will you do that for me?”
    Nixon wasn’t listening, which was nothing new. Then he snapped himself out of it and nodded with an earnest grin even though he didn’t follow her logic—any newcomer should be untrusting, and what would he want with ribbons?
    “You’re a spicy one, aren’t you?” she asked with a trill of a laugh. Nixon didn’t know what she meant by that, either, so he looked at his feet. When he raised his eyes, he was alone in the hallway with a lantern and a ribbon and a boxful of dinner.
    The Apostery was as vast inside as it was outside. For a long minute the only thing Cooper could process was the hugeness of the space: a vaulted cathedral ceiling soaring higher than any he could recall seeing before; massive support columns the girth of small houses rising into the darkness above, etched with names and signs, inlaid with silver and steel; smoke-stained wheels of candelabra dangling from chains as thick as his torso; and the light—the light that came streaming from all angles ahead, slanted on an angle that caught in the air, veiling the enormity of the space in serene curtains of dust and smoke that wafted through the air, unlike the barometric fumes that billowed up the well of the courtyard. Any bishop would give his favorite catamite for a place of worship like this. But this, Cooper began to understand, was no cathedral—rather a mausoleum. A grave for buried gods and the stories they told.
    He and Marvin walked toward the light, their footsteps the only discernable sound in the enormous space. As they grew nearer, he saw past the columns to the source of the light, and that was the real glory. As the Apostery’s courtyard was a vault of doorways, here was a court of windows—stained glass portraits ringed about the walls and rising in layers to the ceiling. It appeared that the mountain was hollow. Each picture captured the likeness of some being—gods, it could only be—of every sort imaginable and more. A blue woman with severed breasts and eyes like sapphires glared down from a throne of ice; a man with stag’s horns crouched half-hidden behind a mask of leaves; a gray sword, point down, with garnet eyes staring impassively from the quillon. Panes of gold glass as tall as sequoias stretched upward beyond sight. On and on the windows shone, each more artfully worked than the next, and each was lit from behind as if by perfect afternoon sunlight, although it was eve ning already, they were far underground and, in any case, the sun could not possibly be in so many places at once. The light filled the air now, shading its smoke- strata a hundred colors.
    “Apostery.” Cooper repeated the name like an invocation. “Apostatic? You said? Like an apostle?”
    Marvin shook his head. “Like an apostate. I told you, these people have nothing left to believe.” Marvin indicated the visitors who sat with their own thoughts