Machine Read online

  A stepped wooden pyramid was nestled within this portable store. Through some mechanical wizardry Will didn’t understand, involving pieces of hardware Will couldn’t name, the structure could be pulled up with relative ease and secured in place, making it visible to passersby. It was on the display pyramid’s “shelves” that Will arrayed his products. He’d already set them up for today.

  His last order of business was to unlock a metal drawer affixed to the bottom of the cart, wherein his money box was concealed. If he became too busy, he’d simply put the coins in a pouch he could secure around his waist.

  Potential customers—women mostly, but several men as well—had already begun to mosey over, drawn by the pyramid’s twinkling temptations: lockets hanging from silk ribbon or fine, tightly braided gold and silver yarn; tortoiseshell hair combs; jet and seed-pearl brooches; cameos imported from across the sea. The men gravitated toward necessities rather than adornments: shirt studs and shaving razors, watch fobs and mustache wax. Both sexes eyed the macassar oil, tooth powder, and scented pomades.

  Business quickly became brisk. Buyers continually interrupted Will’s pitch. In fact, he didn’t even have to generate interest in his products; they were selling themselves. He soon had no choice but to secure the money pouch around his waist. At least it didn’t disrupt the smooth lines of his clothing, for the frock coat fell over it with room to spare.

  Happily doing what he did best, aside from loving Fanule Perfidor, Will lost track of time.

  Above the crowd’s noisy bustle and the cheery music issuing from a small, lively band, a voice boomed. “’Tis the Feast of All Saints, recognized and obscure, the holy dead, the martyrs to goodness and purity!”

  Will jerked his head up and almost dropped the change he was handing to a pretty young woman who’d purchased a pair of earrings. For a moment, he’d thought it was Fan’s voice he heard.

  But no, of course not. The man who was swaddled in foreign finery stood on his stool, proclaiming. How did he manage to balance while he shouted? He was much taller than average and wasn’t young.

  “I am here to honor them, and to help you honor them! Nay, I am here to help you and your loved ones join their ranks when you leave this earthly realm!”

  Will’s trade slowed as his customers, too, turned toward the voice.

  “Come to me, you who’ve been misled by false gods spun from lies! Come to me to discover the miracle Machine that works magic.” The dark declaimer swept an arm toward his wagon. “Or, if you will, the magical Machine that works miracles—delivery from evil, and subsequent salvation! And the boundless contentment that comes from assurance of both!”

  “What is he talking about?” a middle-aged woman asked a man who appeared to be her husband. When he shrugged indifferently, she looked up at Will, as if he were familiar with every huckster on the plaza. “Whatever is he talking about?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know, ma’am.” Although it did sound as if the richly garbed man was just another peddler of still another religion. Cults were always springing up—other preachers were probably here as well—but none had yet captured the public’s imagination enough to unseat the reigning Sensorians.

  Will concluded another sale as a pair of jugglers wandered past his cart. He tried to keep an eye on the balls they tossed about, lest one or more go astray and ruin part of his inventory. And keep an eye on the browsers who ogled his goods, lest one or more try to filch his products. And glance occasionally at the strange fellow hawking redemptive, machine-made magic.

  “If you long for happiness, come to me! Come learn what my Spiritorium can do to ensure your goodness in this life and your bliss in the next! Learn how I can purge your homes and your days of whatever rot blackens them, and bring you peace of mind!”

  More people drifted his way.

  “How can a blasted machine do all of that?” Standing at the foot of Will’s small platform, Simon Bentcross held out two handfuls of products for Will to tally up and wrap: hand-milled soap, a boar-bristle hairbrush, a bottle of sandalwood oil, and a tin containing essence-of-violet cachous.

  “Why, hello, Mr. Bentcross,” Will said, grateful for the diversion. He smiled when he saw what his friend held. Those weren’t the types of items a muscular man wearing battered brogans and a soiled brown slouch hat would normally buy.

  “What are you smirking at, Marchman?”

  “I’m not smirking. I’m amused, is all.”

  “By what? I don’t recall making a joke.”

  “By how you’ve changed.” Still smiling, Will handed Simon his change and arranged his unlikely purchases on a square of brown paper, which he carefully folded around them. “When we met, you didn’t give a deuce if your hair looked like a bramble patch and your skin smelled of day-old sweat.”

  Furiously, Bentcross blushed. Will still thought him quite handsome, especially when his lowered eyelids laid those dark lashes against the soft, rosy ridges of his cheekbones.

  “As I recall,” Simon murmured, “you didn’t give a deuce either.”

  Now it was time for Will’s face to redden. Remembered hunger, little more than a shade of its old self, blew through him. After securing the bundle with string, he handed it to Simon. “It’s quite astonishing,” he said, to himself as much as to his former lover, “how we’ve both changed.”

  Bentcross smiled. “All it takes is the right incentive. Speaking of which, why isn’t your spouse here to serve as your shill?”

  Will stiffened with indignation. “I don’t need shills,” he said haughtily. “My products are of the highest quality.”

  “Unlike that distillation of bodily fluids you used to sell.” Simon’s eyes glinted above his smile.

  Although slender, Will was actually an inch or two taller than the burly Bentcross. He took a few steps forward until their chests nearly touched. “I don’t appreciate your humor.” To Will, Dr. Bolt’s Bloodroot Elixir was no laughing matter. The mere thought of it still twisted his stomach in anger and revulsion.

  Bentcross rolled his eyes. “Oh, back off, lad. Don’t you realize you’re not nearly as intimidating as Perfidor? If you tried punching me, the only person you’d end up hurting would be yourself.” Simon slyly skated his fingers over Will’s knuckles. “Your hands weren’t meant for fighting… although they’re mighty good at other things.”

  The touch shivered up Will’s arm. He tried maintaining his glare but it was hopeless. Simon did have a damnable measure of animal magnetism, and they did have a steamy history together, albeit a short one.

  Sighing, Will relaxed his attitude. “You know, you’re a likable fellow and all, but when are you going to consider what you say before you say it? It would spare your face a good deal of abuse.”

  Simon tossed his bundle in the air and caught it. “I’m a plainspoken man, not a blasted diplomat.” He winked. “It’s part of my charm.” He continued to dawdle near the cart as Will served another customer. “So where is your occasionally better half?”

  Will waited until his customer walked away. “Working. He hates being indolent.” By the end of last winter, Fan had grown restless. Being the Eminence of Taintwell hadn’t been keeping him busy enough. He’d begun to miss physical labor.

  “Ah, that’s right. He’s gone back to plying his stonemason trade. I just might have a job or two for him.”

  “I know he needs repair work done on his transport,” Will said, “so maybe you can barter.” It was a common way of doing business in Taintwell.

  Simon had just opened his mouth to respond when a stentorian voice, pushed along by a sea breeze, rolled over them.

  “You foolish people forfeited both your sense and your spiritual well-being when you abandoned the Old Way, the true way! What are Sensorians but hollow hedonists, faithless fornicators, sin-stained sodomites?” The voice came from the owner of the Spiritorium.

  Will and Simon exchanged weighty glances, and Will knew Simon’s thoughts mirrored his own: that these words hearke
ned back to a time they’d hoped was long gone, a time when a man who was fond of men, and a woman who was fond of women, had to keep their proclivities a closely guarded secret. Just last week, Will had seen an elderly gent in Purinton with a ragged S-shaped scar on his forehead. Likely carved there when the man was younger, the letter stood for “same-sex,” and the bearer had at one time been shunned for committing crimes against nature.

  “I ain’t never heard a spiritualist talk like that before,” remarked Ernest Muggins. “Looks like ghosty man got his sights set on us good-for-naughts.” As if he weren’t aware of them, his fingers grubbed through a tin can he’d set on his table. When they emerged empty, he cursed. A piece of paper tied around the can with a bit of twine bore uneven block letters scrawled in pencil: FOR ME CHILDERNS SHOOS.

  Only if they come at the bottom of a bottle, Will mentally added.

  Simon lit a cigar and squinted toward the gilded wagon. “Now I truly don’t like him.”

  “You shoulda brung some rotten eggs and tomatas,” advised Muggins, still sullen about his empty can. “I always fill me pockets with ’em when I go to a music hall.”

  The preacher’s message wafted brokenly around Will’s ears as he tended to his own business. Why did those words trouble him? From all indications, the Sensorians had a firm grip on the religious scene.

  “A puritan in Purinton,” commented a young wag to his female companion.

  “I find him rather frightening,” she replied. She lifted a jar of bath salts and daintily sniffed it. “Stern men are always so unpleasant.”

  And dangerous, Will suddenly thought. When he glanced up, he saw Simon approaching the ornate gold ingot on wheels. More than ever, the wagon puzzled him. Was it indeed a machine? But how did it do what it was alleged to do?

  “Make no mistake, citizens,” the mystery man went on. “Grenda is not real. Grenda is nothing more than an illustration in a picture book—gaudily colored and pleasing to the eye, but no more capable of changing your lives than a child’s perfervid scribblings.”

  Will’s sense of unease grew. Too many people were paying too much attention to the man. Even Simon, who had a male lover he adored, was inching closer—not that he was in any danger of being swayed. If only the same could be said of the other listeners.

  The thundering sermon abruptly stopped. Even with music still playing and voices still lifting—in conversation and laughter, salesmen’s persuasions and song—the silence at that end of the plaza was immediately noticeable, like a large hole in a tapestry. Will looked up as he slipped three more coins into his money purse.

  The velvet-clad man was pointing at something. Or someone.

  Faces turned toward….

  Oh, no.

  Simon Bentcross.

  “You,” Mr. Spiritorium proclaimed, “are dancing with the devil.”

  “Then he must have the patience of one of your saints,” Simon answered with a laugh in his voice, “for I’d be stomping all over his cloven hooves. I can’t dance worth a shit.”

  Nervous titters rippled through the audience. A few women made small, startled sounds, probably at Simon’s profanity.

  The preacher glowered. “In making light of this, you’ve committed yet another grave error.”

  Simon dismissively flapped a hand. “The only error I made, you sour old windbag, was bothering to walk over here.” He repositioned his hat at a raffish angle, turned, and sauntered away, cradling his bundled purchases in one arm and swinging the other carelessly at his side.

  Much to Will’s consternation, the sour old windbag kept watching him.

  Bentcross stopped at Will’s cart. “It’s time I have some fun. I’m going into the circus. Then I must get home to greet… a friend.” Softening, his gaze seemed to turn inward. “How queer it is,” he said musingly, “to miss someone after a day’s separation. I’m not accustomed to it. Maybe never will be.”

  What he meant, of course, was that he wanted to be at his cottage on Whitesbain Plank Road by the time Clancy arose. They’d grown very close—in fact, would be as close as Will and Fan if not for one impediment: Clancy Marrowbone was a vampire, and Simon had had to endure missing him for periods much longer than a day.

  “Do you suppose—?” Will reconsidered his question. He didn’t want to offend or otherwise upset Simon. Worse yet, infect Simon with his own groundless anxiety.

  “Suppose what?”

  Will improvised. “Your friend will approve of your purchases?” He couldn’t say what he’d originally thought: Do you suppose Marrowbone is the devil you’re dancing with? But that was absurd. How could a cultist or huckster, or whatever the preacher was, have knowledge of strangers’ private lives? It wasn’t as if Simon wore a placard around his neck that declared, I am deeply in love with a beautiful male blood-drinker and we have intimate relations nightly.

  “I’ve no doubt,” Simon answered with a smile, “my friend will be very pleased.”

  THE PLAZA was all but deserted by midafternoon. Sellers and speech-makers had begun trickling away just after lunch, when the throng of browsers thinned. Some visitors sought further entertainment within the Marvelous Mechanical Circus. Others, their appetite for novelty sated, went elsewhere.

  The affable inebriant Ernest Muggins simply got up, walked away from his table, and never returned. All he’d taken with him was his tin.

  Will had just finished closing and locking his cart when a shadow fell over him, chilling the air. He looked up. Instantly, his breath caught.

  The owner of the Spiritorium loomed over him. As if that sight weren’t unnerving enough, the man fixed him with intense violet eyes. “You exude the scent of Quam Khar,” he said without introduction or preface. “It’s faint but still detectable. Yet, you’re not Quam Khar. You haven’t the depth or complexity. You haven’t the dark corners where broken wings beat.”

  What on earth was he talking about? Dumbfounded, Will stared. He tried to assume a neutral expression, but he’d always failed miserably at concealing his reactions. “I… no, I’m not Quam Khar.” Surely, Will thought, he looked far too ordinary to have such an unusual name.

  The man didn’t answer, didn’t move. “Who’s your wife?” He stated the question quite unabashedly, as if he had every right to ask it.

  “N-no one. I’ve never been married. I’m a bachelor.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. Will’s insides shriveled. Coldly slicing into him, layer by layer, that surgical gaze seemed to go on forever. “Not lawfully wed, eh? Then you’re a fornicator who preys on Out-dwellers. That’s what you are. A user of the Blessèd Damned.” He took a step forward. “What’s her name?”

  Will blinked as his befuddlement, and his discomfiture, deepened. “I beg your pardon?”

  “The woman. What’s her name?”

  “I’m afraid I have no idea to whom you’re referring.” Or what the hell you’re talking about! Trying to still his quaking hands, Will pulled up the handle of his cart. “Now I must take my leave of you, sir. I have other obligations.”

  “No doubt.” The man inclined his head. “Perhaps we’ll meet again, Master Marchman.”

  Not if I can help it, Will thought as he hastily pushed his much-lighter cart toward the circus’s employee entrance.

  He couldn’t wait to get home.

  Chapter Three

  “DON’T LET go. Not yet.”

  Fan chuckled into Will’s hair as their embrace continued. “William, I’ve been working all day. I need a bath. In fact”—his voice lowered suggestively—“we can bathe together.”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.” Will was glad he’d already shed his coat and vest and cravat. Appetite drove him now, and he had no patience for careful removal of clothing. Sometimes he found that stage deliciously erotic. Today he wanted Fan and himself instantly naked.

  “I’ll go fill—”

  “Wait.” Will reached for Fan’s face. Firmly cradling it, he claimed a kiss and made the kiss last, deepening it, enjoying the buff of
Fan’s whisker stubble against his own, relishing the flex of soft lips around sinuous tongue. Fan’s skin smelled of rock dust and his hair of burning leaves. His mouth tasted of fresh water. His muscles were hard from a full day’s labor.

  Will’s desire spiraled so rapidly, his cock hardened to steel in seconds.

  “I could kiss you all night,” he murmured against Fan’s mouth.

  “Just kiss me?”

  “Yes.” Will squirmed. Fan’s mouth steamed over his. Will pressed closer. “Or maybe not.”

  Fan’s laugh rumbled through the wall of Will’s chest. “I don’t think we’ll make it to the tub.” He traced the lines of Will’s body, sweeping his hands down Will’s back, fitting them to his waist, cupping and squeezing his buttocks. “Once I start touching you, I can’t seem to stop. Especially when you’re this hungry.”

  Will moaned. Fan noticing his hunger always honed it. He opened Fan’s shirt and ran his hands over an expanse of chest as fine as Simon’s, over skin that was flushed and damp beneath its embroidery of black hair. Will nuzzled it, slicking his face with Fan’s sweat, teasing himself with the nudge of Fan’s nipples against his nose and cheeks, teasing Fan by sucking at them.

  “Gods, William, you’ve turned into a satyr.” Fan thrust his fingers into Will’s hair and held his head in place. “But the prettiest satyr in history, I swear.”

  Will would normally have laughed at that, but his craving consumed him. “I can’t help it.” He had a strong urge to climb up and down Fan’s body, to scale it like a lumberjack would a tree. “I want you so much I ache from it.”

  “I can see that. I can feel it.” Fan pulled Will’s hips against his own, and the press of their cocks, equally rigid, sent a sharp current shimmying through Will’s pelvis and into his thighs. They kissed again, with greater abandon. Fan opened Will’s trousers and gave his cock and balls a tug, and Will cried out at the exquisite shock of it.