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

done, and as long as she had worship on her mind, she could catalog some more of antidogmatic stories told in and about the City Unspoken. She could sort through drivel about gods and goddesses and find truth there, somehow.
    What truly irritated Sesstri was the idea that any knowledge might be barred to her because she was somehow lesser, and this struck her as the ultimate copout. Not to mention insulting. Give me a week in the library of a goddess, she knew, and I’ll come out with conclusions. Give me an hour with a demiurge and I’ll return with citations and cross-references that are perfectly analogous to any other quarter of historical or empirical study.
    What’s a god but a man behind a curtain?
    Curtains burn.
    For a while after Asher left him in the Guiselaine, Cooper didn’t really pay attention to where he wandered. Dead, abandoned, alone, and lost— it made his chest tight and his eyes too watery to see well. By the time he could breathe, he’d found himself hassled on a dusty thoroughfare where everyone seemed to be in a hurry and nowhere seemed an acceptable place to be. He found an exception in a clearing at the side of the road, where pedestrians went out of their way to avoid what looked like a wounded airman from the First World War, hiding in a barrel of beer.
    “Hi there.” Cooper said, peering down into the beer. “Are you, by any chance, from a place called Earth?”
    “Nerp,” the pilot bubbled.
    Cooper nodded, aiming for sanguinity and missing. “So you’re not a fighter pilot from the First World War? The Great War, I guess you would have called it, only you wouldn’t have, since you’re not from it. From there. From Earth.”
    “Nerp.”
    “Ah. I see.” He tried again. “It’s just that you’re dressed a lot like a fighter pilot.”
    The man lifted his head out of the beer enough to shake his head. “Oh, I’m a fighter pilot. That’s why I’m dressed like one. I’ve just never been to Erp.”
    “Earth.”
    “Sky!” the pilot cheered. “I like this game. Your turn.”
    “Um.” Cooper nodded again. “Why are you hiding in a barrel of beer?”
    “I’m not hiding.”
    “You’re not?”
    “Nerp. I’m drowning myself in beer. It’s the thing to do.”
    Cooper almost pointed out that drowning oneself in drink was not supposed to be a literal thing, but he remembered Asher’s admonitions and checked himself. Perhaps, in the City Unspoken, death by beer was perfectly acceptable. That wouldn’t be the weirdest thing Cooper had learned today.
    “Where do the lost go?” Cooper asked the pilot, not intending to sound like a confused fortune cookie. The man sank a little, and his answer was not intelligible.
    “I’m sorry, I don’t quite follow.” Cooper squinted his face and squeaked out an imposition: “Might you be willing to stop drowning for just another moment? I really am very, very lost.”
    With a sigh of superheroic effort, the pilot stood up in his barrel, raining lager onto the cobbled gutter, pointed down the road, and said: “Bridge. Music. Mountain.” And then, as if to clarify: “Over bridge, through music, under mountain.”
    Then the pilot replaced his aviator’s goggles, tugged at the red beads clustered at his suntanned throat, and submerged himself in beer again. One hand emerged from the pale yellow foam like a parody of the Lady of the Lake, holding an oversized beer stein brimming with ale. Cooper didn’t stand on ceremony—he took the proffered pint and walked away as swiftly as his feet would carry him. He had the pint halfdrained by the time he rounded the bend. Afterlife beer was stronger than he’d expected.
    So when he stumbled, drunk, from the bridge built of giants’ bones and reinforced concrete, Cooper hoped he saw what the beer-marinated fighter pilot with the red beads had described. He faced a pointed hill, odd and steep, where the crust of the city had been pushed up like an anthill or a volcano, wrinkling the weft of