Tim Akers - Heart of Veridon

“Two things. One was given to me, one I took. A friend of mine, guy I hadn’t seen in a few years. He died, on the Glory of Day. Seemed pretty desperate to get away from someone, desperate enough to crash a Hesperus class zepliner.”

“Sabotage? I thought it was an accident. Faulty PilotEngine, just like…” he stumbled to a halt, awkwardly aware of how close he was to old wounds. He refilled his glass to cover the silence. “Who was your friend?”

“Marcus, the guy I wanted to talk to,” I said, letting him off the hook. “He was coming home from a long trip. Gave me a Cog.” I held out my hands to show the size. “Like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh,” he said, and leaned back. “I see. And do you… do you have any idea where your friend might have been coming from?”

“Sure.” I slipped the map-artifact out of my coat and put it on the table. Wright Morgan looked stunned, tried to cover with a long drink of water. His bloated hand was shaking. I spun up the map. He nearly dropped the water in his rush to cover the mechanism.

“No need.” His voice was quiet. “So you have it?”

“I do.”

Morgan was troubled. He wouldn’t look at me, and his hands kept moving from the table to his face, pausing to tug at his slowly drying robes.

“So, so. Hell of a thing to bring to me, a man like me. And he gave it to you.”

“He was dying. He asked me to bring it to Veridon.”

“And Tomb? What did they have to do with this?”

“The map comes from their house. They sent him down the falls. I don’t know what they hoped to find.”

“They had no idea. All these years, nothing.” He picked up the map, held it gingerly in his hands. “All these years, and then Tomb gets it. She gave it to them.”

“She?”

He stared wistfully at the map, then set it on the table.

“Do you keep up with your services, Jacob? Does the Family Burn still honor the House of the Algorithm?”

“It’s been years. But my father still goes.” I didn’t bother mentioning the Icon of the Celestes he kept in his pocket every time he crossed into the Church’s corridors.

“You should return. Find a seat near the Tapestry of Hidden Ambition. There is a pillar there, the Pillar of Deep Intentions. North center of the room. Near the old Burn pews, if I remember.”

He stood. Water sloshed from his chair onto the grated floor. He touched the map one more time.

“I’ve been here too long,” he said. His face was looking a bit soft, like a leather balloon half-filled. “Best to you, Jacob Burn. And good luck with your legends.”

I watched him turn and go. He left a rapidly drying trail of water, sloshing out from his river-logged feet.

The Church of the Algorithm is the heart of Veridon. It sits on the south bank of the Ebd river, a gnarled fist grasping the current in fingered bridges, the water flowing over its open palm. Most of the Church is above the river, but the water is harnessed by flow channels, and unknown depths of the holy building exist under the river-turbines and boiler rooms that belch and hiss in the middle of the water.

From the outside, the Church looked like a cancer of architecture. It grew, walls expanding, roofs adding domes and towers that grew together until they became walls. The whole structure bristled with chimneys leaking oily smoke, smoke that pooled in the courtyards that surround the Church. Everything around its bulk was smudged black. The ground rumbled with the hidden engines of their god. I could feel it in my heels as we walked up.

Emily and I stood outside the penitent’s gate, watching the line of beggars huddled in the flank of the Church. These were men and women who couldn’t afford the upkeep on their cogwork, people with clockwork lungs and oiled hearts who could no longer pay for the licensed coggers in the city. They came to the Church, the source, the holy men of cog. They paid in blood and time, lent their bodies to the Church’s curious Wrights. They came out changed, or not at all.

My father had suggested that I come here, when the Academy’s doctors failed, when the best money my father was willing to spend couldn’t find a cure. He had meant it as a threat. I took it as surrender, and left.

“They creep me out,” Emily said. She stood close to me, her hands inside the wide shawl we had purchased that morning. She had a gun in there, to my dismay.

“Not their fault. Rotten people, with rotten hearts.” We went across the stone courtyard to one of the strangled gardens, passing through to the next little courtyard. “What should creep you out is inside.”

“I’ve heard it was beautiful. Or at least impressive.”

“Those are very different things.” I ducked my head as we approached the Church’s hulking flank. “You’ll see.”

Like so many things in Veridon, the presence of the Algorithm was a privilege you had to earn. Beggars stayed outside. Citizens approached the murals, the finished mysteries of the pattern. To reach the heart, the ever changing center of the Church, you had to be a Councilor, the blood of Veridon. Today, we were citizens.

The pillar that dead Wright Morgan had described to me was near the heart, in the privileged audience of the machinery. I wanted to get there, but things were too dangerous at the moment. I didn’t know what role the Church was playing in all this. If they were part of the shadowy pursuit that I seem to have attracted, I didn’t want to walk into their parlor and present my credentials. That hadn’t gone too well with the Tombs, and I thought I knew what to expect of Angela. The Church I didn’t understand.

The doors were plain. The Wright standing to one side didn’t pay us any mind, bobbing his brown robed head at the clink of our coin. He didn’t even ask us which door, just cycled the Citizen’s Gate.

The heavy wood clattered behind us. The corridor was dark and smelled of coal smoke and overclocked engines. The only light was from the altar manifolds around the corner. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust. Emily was tugging on my sleeve. She had the gun out, close to her body. The air around us was heavy, the walls slithering with barely perceived clockwork, deep vents puffing and groaning in the darkness.

“Let’s get this over with.” She glanced back at the door behind us. “It’s like being eaten by the city.”

“You would have been a terrible Pilot,” I said.

“Like you would know.”

The closer we got to the mural room, the clearer we could see the walls around us. Everything shuddered with the constant grinding of the engines. The very blackness seemed part of it, vibrating at an incredible pitch. The air in my lungs felt like hydraulic fluid, crashing, surging, driving me forward.

The Citizen’s Room was little more than display. It was a long, thin hall that ran through the width of the building like an axle through a wheel. The walls were alive, cogs instead of bricks, shafts instead of pillars, sunk into the floor or powering intricate murals on the ceiling.

That was all show. The true mysteries were clustered at the altars. Waves of cogwork bulged out into the hallway, like some great sea beast that burst from the wall and beached itself on the stone floor. These were the most active parts of the room, highly articulated, nearly sentient in their complexity.

“Is that a face?” Emily asked, motioning to the nearest altar. I had a brief flash of Patron Tomb, possessed beneath the Church and communing with the Algorithm, but then the vision passed.

“More than that.” I pointed over. The altar was a long tongue of cogwork lolling out from the wall, pistons and gears convulsing in tight waves. The tip of the protuberance ended in the shoulders and a head, a metal man who struggled against the floor. With each convulsion he was swallowed a little, drawn into the tongue like an egg being swallowed by some enormous snake. He gasped and clawed his way forward, scrambling against the stone until the next convulsion; drawn back in, and the struggle continued.