Kell's Legend

dully.
    “Hello, Daughter of Vachine,” said the woman, smiling, her eyes shining, her hands still constantly merging and integrating with the almost organic clockwork. “My name is Sa. I am Watchmaker.”
    Anukis could not hide her amazement; nor her distaste.
    The Watchmakers were clinically paranoid, in Anu’s opinion. They never walked amongst the people, instead hiding away in the Engineer’s Palace and issuing orders many of the vachine population found detached from the real world, divorced from the society in which a modern vachine lived, operated, ate and drank.
    “You have abused me,” said Anu, simply.
    “We have strengthened you,” said Sa.
    “What do you want of me?” said Anu.
    “We have a problem,” smiled Sa, her golden brass eyes kindly, her fangs peeking just a little above the lip of her mask. She was beautiful, Anu realised, in a vachine way. Despite her lack of stature, despite an athletic and powerful appearance, Anu realised this small dark-skinned woman exuded energy and she noted Vashell’s subservient stance. An ironic reversal, considering the behaviour she’d witnessed back in her cell: it had been a stage-act, just for her benefit. Anukis scowled. She was a pawn. Manipulated. Played for a fool. A tool in somebody else’s workbox.
    “You need my father,” said Anu, voice now cold, eyes hardening.
    “Our problem goes far, far deeper than your father,” said Sa, head tilting to one side. Still her hands played, sinking into a mist of spinning gears and wheels. “It is the blood-oil.”
    “What about it?”
    “We are running dry,” said Sa, watching Anukis carefully. “As you know, to the north we have the Fields, out past the Organic Flatlands. But the cattle are dying, have ceased to breed, and our refined blood-oil supplies are nearly exhausted. We have sent a scouting force south, beyond the Black Pike Mountains; they are searching out new possibilities for fresh cattle.”
    Anu gave a single nod.
    “Do you understand the implications of what I am saying?”
    “If the blood runs out, it cannot be refined into blood-oil; then the vachine will begin to seize. And die.”
    “Yes. This is a threat to our civilisation, Anukis. But more than that, the Blood Refineries your father helped build…to develop and engineer. They have contracted, shall we say, a fault. Something endemic to his math, his engineering, his blood-oil magick, and subsequently an element only he can put right. Kradek-ka was a genius.” She said it low; with ultimate respect. “He was Watchmaker.”
    “What happens if the Refineries fail?”
    Sa smiled, but there was no humour there. “We will return to a state of hunting and savagery. But how can eighty thousand vachine satiate their blood-oil lust? We will devolve, Anukis. Our society will become decadent, will crumble, will fade as we turn on oneanother, revert back to clans and tribes. It does not even bear thinking about. The dark ages of our civilisation were a bloody, evil time, where the only vachine who suffered was vachine. Now, we are fed by the blood of others. Our population is fed by cattle, bred for the purpose. The age-old war with the albinos from under the mountain, all that is in the past. We conquered, we dominated, they became our slaves—and all because of our culture, our civilisation, our evolution! I cannot allow this be taken away. I cannot let this hierarchy, this religion, fail.”
    “I am impure-blood,” said Anukis, voice low. Her eyes were fixed on Sa. “You have cast me out from your vachine world. Why should I care if you perish? Vashell has abused me, humiliated me, murdered my sister, and I am cast out by my own people because of a twist of genetics over which I had no control. I hate to be crude, Sa, but you meat-fuckers can suffer and die for all I care.”
    Sa smiled. Her eyes glittered behind her mask. “Did your father ever tell you about the origin of the cankers, sweet Anukis?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Cankers are…Kradek-ka’s greatest achievement. They are, shall we say, a method of utilising waste product. They are bred, and nurtured, deformities; a mish-mash of twisted clockwork and flesh, and put simply, the insane end-product of when a vachine goes bad. We keep them apart from vachine society; so you know the term, I am sure, as insult. But you have never seen the end product.” She took a deep breath. “However…”
    The pause hurt Anukis. She could not describe why she felt