Madame Celeste Gearhart's Arc

Chapter 24 of 24

The engine hummed all night, and by dawn the spirits arrived in a flood. Celeste stood before the machine and watched its windows blaze. Faint dead sighed through the walls first. Then stronger ones came, shoving, roaring, wearing the shapes of drowned men and burned crews. They forced their way toward the totem at the machine's heart. Weak spirits scattered before them like minnows before a pike. Celeste felt her hold thin. The strong ones would swallow the weak, then tear loose together. One vessel could not sort them. She needed something that separated the powerful from the faint, or the flood would shred her grip and free everything at once. She sent her crow across the marsh for the boy. Gideon came fast, wrench-arm swinging, goggles glowing blue over his small brass face. He had built her valve and her poison engine before, and he never pretended to like it. He climbed into the cottage, saw the windows flaring, and set his jaw. "You let it pull too hard," he said. "They're stacking up. The big ones are crushing the small ones." "I know what is happening," Celeste said, gripping her cane. "Build me a sorter. Something that catches them by strength before they reach the totem." He pulled tools from his belt without arguing. "Rows of chambers," he muttered. "Weak ones fill the small windows. Strong ones drop to the heavy ones below. Gears meter the flow." He tapped his gear-leg. "Give me till dark." They worked through the day. Gideon raised a tall brass frame beside the engine, ringed with little arched windows and studded with dials. He ran pipes from the machine into its top. Inside, spinning gears weighed each spirit as it entered and dropped it to its proper row. Celeste fed poison sap through the seams to hold each cell shut. The tower filled window by window, faint blue at the top, deep violet and red below where the strong ones sank. Celeste locked her totem to the sorter's base. She opened the flow. The flood poured in through the top and split apart. Weak spirits filled the high windows. The strong ones dropped, chamber by chamber, separated and pinned. No wave crushed another. Her hold steadied. She pressed her palm to the totem and felt each spirit sitting where it belonged, waiting. Gideon wiped his wrench-arm and stepped back. "Now they can't gang up on you," he said. "Sorted. Held apart. You can pull them one row at a time." Celeste breathed out. For the first time the flood obeyed. But the strong ones glowed hot behind their glass, thick and crowding the lower rows already. The sorter kept them apart. It did not keep them weak. The most powerful dead of Everblack now sat stacked in her cottage, each one straining its cell, and the machine kept dropping more beneath them.