Tim Akers - Heart of Veridon

“Seems fair.” I ate a mouthful of eggs while I watched him pace the circle of chairs. “You weren’t going to tell me anything useful, not willingly. First you act like there’s no problem in the Council, then you offer to shelter me? So who do you stand with, pop? Sloane or Angela?”

“Would it matter?”

I shrugged. “Sloane hasn’t shot me, yet.”

“You’ll be lucky if, when he finds you, all he does is shoot you. He’s an unpleasant man.”

“Sure. So who are you with, Alexander? Who has your loyalty?”

He set his shoulders and leaned against the chair opposite me. He was still angry, but the anger was trimmed in shades of cold pride and desperation.

“The Family Burn. Always, Jacob, always my first loyalty is to the Family. As yours should be.”

“I lost track of loyalty about the same time you threw me out on my ass, Alexander. So tell me what this is about, or tell me to get out. I don’t care which way it goes.”

He let out a long, slow sigh, then sat down and drank from his cup of cold coffee. He stared at me with his wet eyes while I ate. When I set the plate aside he laced his fingers together and set them in his lap.

“Angela Tomb came to me, a couple years ago. Probably three years now. She was talking to someone inside the Church. Maybe someone who had access to the Church, but whose purposes lay in direct opposition to the Algorithm. This person had an artifact that they wished to sell.”

“Those guys are a pretty devoted lot, father. I have trouble believing that a Wright would be negotiating with the Council to sell a bit of his God.”

“We had trouble believing it, too. And the deal itself was complicated. Many proxies, many dead drops. A deal of many hands. But the deal was made.” He stopped and took a drink of coffee, grimacing as he swallowed. He set the cup aside. “But the deal came up in open session. At first it was just us, just the Founders. What’s left of them. But the others found out. The industrialists. They were… very interested. And they held enough sway in the Chamber to force their way into the deal.” He reached for the cup, paused, then wiped his brow. “That’s how Sloane got involved.”

“He was the representative for the Young Seats, then?” I asked.

“Yes. He put a couple of his own men on the team. Some marines-”

“Wellons?”

“I don’t remember the names.” He squinted at me. “How do you know them?”

“After the fact. I found Wellons’s body, shortly before I met the Angel for the first time.”

“Ah. Angela mentioned that. Anyway. We had a map to something… something marvelous, Jacob. And we sent a group of people after it.”

“And they never came back.” I said.

“Until a couple weeks ago, correct. By then, the Young Seats had split from us. They were already organizing another party to head down. When Marcus made contact with us via messenger, both sides started maneuvering. He must have been in BonnerWell at the time.” BonnerWell was the furthest of the messenger stations, barely a scratch of dirt on our maps. “He was coming in. And he had trouble.”

“I’ll say. So you brought him in?”

“On the contrary. We told him to stay put. We’d send someone. Whatever was following him, we didn’t want it in the city. So, Marcus stopped talking to us. Maybe he started talking to the Young Seats. Maybe he stopped talking at all. We don’t really know. And then,” he shrugged, “he just showed up. Sent a message from Havreach. Nothing but the name of his ship.”

“ Glory of Day.”

Father nodded. “We had teams on the shore, waiting. I can’t properly express my shock at how things went. We were going to quarantine the ship until we had Marcus and his artifact in hand.”

“Looks like he found a way around that.”

“Probably not how he planned it. Anyway. We wrote it off, figured he had died in the explosion, and the artifact destroyed. And now we’re learning that we were wrong.”

I nodded my head, and doubted. Alexander told the story like Angela had come to him with the artifact, but Patron Tomb had been pretty clear that my father had initiated whatever plan was being undertaken. I’m sure there was some truth in what my father was telling me. I just didn’t know which parts were honest, and which were careful lies.

“And all this business in the meantime. Angela shooting me, the Badge chasing me out of Emily’s apartment, and then Wilson’s place. That’s just you guys trying to recover the artifact?”

“I can’t speak for the actions of the Badge, Jacob. Or for Angela, for that matter. But yes, we’re just trying to get that artifact.”

“You couldn’t ask?” I smiled.

“You would have answered?”

I shook my head. He was right, of course. I wouldn’t have listened, wouldn’t have trusted. Didn’t trust him now.

“So what is it, this artifact?” I asked.

“You tell me. We haven’t seen it.” He stood up and went back to the window. Angela has seen it, I thought. For that matter, Angela has held it in her hands. I put another check in the careful lies column. Or maybe the Tombs weren’t being as forthright with their allies as old Alexander thought. “But it’s something to do with the Church’s power. Something that will shake them off our backs.”

“By our backs, you mean the city? Or the Council?”

“The Families.” He put his hands in his pockets and sighed. “They have too much favor with the Young Seats. They have too much power. They’ve helped, of course. Without the Church there would be no zepliners, no cogwork. We’d still be dealing with the Artificers Guild. But they need to be put in their place. Restrained.”

“Good luck with that. Suppressing religion always goes well.” I stood up and wiped my hands on a spare napkin. “Thanks for the answers. And the breakfast.” I started to leave.

“Just like that? You’re going to walk in here, demand answers, and then walk out?”

“Looks like it,” I said.

“And give me nothing in return. You know I can’t let you do that, Jacob.”

“You know you can’t stop me, either. I don’t have the Cog with me. I’m not going to tell you where it is. You can’t call the Badge, because they’ll take it to Sloane and the Young Seats. Are you going to stop me? Is Billy?”

He folded his arms and looked at me. He was tired, I could tell. I shrugged and walked out.

No matter how I felt about my father, about his lies and his betrayals, I had the feeling he had mostly been straight with me back there. Nearly the truth was the best kind of lie. And the bit of the story that had me most interested wasn’t the stuff about Angela and the Young Seats and Sloane. That was all development, complication. What interested me was the seed of it. Someone in the Church, he had said. Someone with access to the Church of the Algorithm.

The holy men of the Church of the Algorithm, the Wrights dedicated to the machine’s maintenance and liturgy, were devoted to their clockwork deity. They didn’t break ranks, and no one left the service intact. I had seen the hobbled Wrights in the street, their peaceful faces, the smooth machine of their skull pumps. I shook my head. They went in to the service knowing that there was no out. The Algorithm was jealous of its revelation. For there to be someone inside who was willing to sell bits of that revelation to the Council; it was unthinkable. There were no former Wrights. Well. There was one, and he had gotten out in a very unconventional way. He had died, drowned, and ended up among the Fehn. I swung by the cistern first, to pick up the map. I thought it would interest him.

He drank water like I breathed. He kept a glass in his spongy hand, and every time he stopped talking he lifted it to his blistered lips and drank. His voice gurgled.