Rebellion

CHAPTER 55

Wil’s plan had failed utterly.

After weeks of labour he had succeeded in erasing the story Lyf had written on the iron book called The Consolation of Vengeance. He had melted the book down, using trickles of heat from a perilous source near the Engine. He had even recast the heavy covers of the book, and the thirty individual cast iron leaves that made it up, and succeeded in binding them together so the pages would turn.

Now he hurled it down in disgust, for it was a lumpen travesty of the beautiful original. Wil knew true beauty when he saw it, but he was utterly incapable of creating it. And his calligraphy was worse. Though he had been practising it on the walls of the Hellish Conduit for weeks, his best attempts were hideous scrawls. He was useless at everything.

Everything save strangling Pale slaves up in Cython.

He was very good at that, very quick, when the need became unbearable and the only way to ease his own pain was to crush the throat of someone smaller than himself. Wil’s fingers, hard as the iron he had spent so much time working, closed around their slender necks and squeezed the life out of them. Though none of them was the one he wanted to squeeze. He should have done it when he was with the one, out in the Seethings. It was all her fault.

But that was not what he was here for.

He was here for the book — and the story it told. He had to rewrite the book. The story mattered more than anything. He would keep searching until he found a way.

In the meantime, Wil had something else to worry about. The Engine had developed a tiny, intermittent wobble, hardly noticeable, but it bothered him. He had tried to fix it by altering the flow of water through the myriad conduits that flowed through the Engine, but that had made it worse. It had also sent clouds of alkoyl vapour billowing up the fan cracks in the rock above, towards the Abysm.

Wil froze, staring at the cracks, his heart crashing back and forth. What if this changed the story yet again?

But then a tendril of alkoyl drifted towards him, and ah, the chymical bliss.

All his troubles went away.