The Madness of Kings

by Gene Doucette

And then the High Hat stepped into the light.

  Battine gasped.

  “She said you would be here,” Alva said. “I thought her mad. Not until this man called you by name was I certain my ears told the truth. Battine Alconnot, you’re more foolhardy than I imagined.”

  Battine’s inner child recoiled at the sight of Vilto Alva, once more catching Batt in the midst of some new mischief. There was a time in her life in which she feared nothing—not the wrath of the Five, or the Outcast, her parents or the king—more than she feared High Hat Alva.

  Alva looked smaller now, and her voice weaker. It was something Battine hadn’t noticed on their arrival day, but that was because Battine had maneuvered them to be at the rear of the crowd and could scarcely see or hear the High Hat. (Likewise, Alva could not on that day see or hear them, which was the idea.)

  Now it was clear how old Alva had gotten. It still felt as if Battine was standing before someone truly formidable, but that was likely her inner child’s doing.

  “We came here because we needed answers,” Batt said in a voice that trembled slightly.

  Calm down, she thought. You have a sword, for Honus’s sake.

  “There are no answers here. The path you’re on is yours alone. Such is your curse. Although I see you’ve enjoined an outsider to walk it with you.”

  “Professor Damid Magly,” Damid said. “It’s nice to meet you. Would this be a bad time to ask for sanctuary?”

  “Put away that forbidden device,” Alva said. “Show at least the nominal respect this holy place deserves.”

  “You’re one to talk,” he said, “considering the tech in this door.”

  “That tech is older than the temple above us, sir. It’s not only not forbidden, it’s not even of this world. It’s of the Five.”

  “It is pre-Collapse technology!” Magly said.

  “As I said, it’s of the Five. The gods placed it here. Use whatever terminology satisfies your doomed soul.”

  “’She’,” Battine said. “You said she said we would be here. Who told you?”

  Batt knew the answer; there was only one person it could be. But she had to hear it for herself to believe it.

  It turned out she was wrong, sort-of.

  “Hello, sister,” Porra said, from Batt’s left. Battine had been looking at the High Hat’s face when the queen spoke, and found it interesting that Alva was as surprised that Porra was in the room as she was.

  Porra looked a lot different from the last time they’d laid eyes on one another. She was in a loose-fitting plain black dress with no makeup or jewelry, but that wasn’t what stood out. She looked tired, and sad.

  Batt thought she herself probably looked a lot worse from the toll of the past four weeks as well. Then she realized she still had her hood up, so she lowered it, the better for Porra to see her clearly.

  Look me in the eyes, Batt thought, and tell me you still think I killed Kenson.

  “Orean told you,” Battine said.

  “That she did,” Porra said.

  “Yeah, sorry,” Orean said. Her voice came from behind Alva, and caused the High Hat to jump. “Seemed like the right play. And I needed her help to get those fancy robes you wanted.”

  Batt turned back to her sister. “I didn’t do it,” she said. “Nor did Damid. We can prove it.”

  “I’m not interested in your proof,” Porra said.

  “It was Fergo. He had the King’s Justice, Porra. It’s in my pocket.”

  “The brooch that lives in the cabinet in the chamber on the second floor?” The queen laughed. “That King’s Justice?”

  “It’s not in the cabinet is what I’m telling you. We found it in Fergo’s bags.”

  “That could be. Or it could be that you removed it from the display sometime in the past week. Which do you suppose I’ll find more likely?”

  “We also have the scroll,” Damid said. “In case that helps.”

  “Enough,” Alva said. She looked over her shoulder at Orean. “Girl, a monk waits outside the door to my chamber. Tell him who we have down here. We’ve no formal prison on the island, but I’m sure we can make do until King Tannik takes them off our hands.”

  “Can’t do that,” Orean said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah, I got a peculiar problem here, your holiness. Everyone thinks I answer to them: her queenness and the princess both, probably the mister over there does too, and you ‘cos this is your place. I’m looking out for myself most days, and the kindest way to get about with that is to know whose skirts to fluff in a roomful of skirts.”

  “Porra, what is this creature saying?” Alva asked, resorting to the lowest insult in her lexicon.

  (“Don’t run around like that, Battine Alconnot, lest you be taken as some low creature. Walk to your lessons.” Batt could still hear Alva shouting that in her dreams.)

  “She’s saying she doesn’t take orders from you,” Porra said. “She takes them from me. And I don’t want her to leave.”

  “This is absurd,” Alva said. “I’ll get them myself.”

  She turned around, to face Orean and her dagger.

  “Sorry, your hatness,” Orean said. “I’m not s’posed to let you do that.”

  “Porra…!” Alva said.

  “I don’t want you to leave either,” Porra said. “Not after I’ve gone through all this trouble to get you down here. What you’re going to do is open the door behind Professor Magly, and then you’re going to give us a tour of every level underneath this temple.”

  Alva laughed.

  “You’ve forgotten who taught you combat,” she said. “Both of you. If you think I can’t defend myself against an untrained chambermaid, you’re powerfully mistaken. And you, Battine. I may be older and frailer than when you trained, but I can still take that sword from you, so have a care.”

  “What about this?” Damid asked. He stepped into the lantern light, to make it clear that the this he was referring to was his hand blaster. “Do you think you can take it from me before I get off a shot?”

  Alva tilted her head appraisingly. “A metallic confection,” she said. “You could have cobbled that together from spare pipe.”

  “I could have, but I didn’t,” he said. “Do you really want me to prove it’s real? There are a lot of valuable things I could blow a hole through down here, and you’re only one of them.”

  Alva looked at Porra. “None of you are allowed past that door. If there’s anyone here who understands that, it’s the blessed among us. You cannot make me do this.”

  “I don’t truly care about your rules, Vilto,” Porra said. “Not any longer. I came asking first. I’m not asking any longer.”

  “I will not do it.”

  “Not to be obnoxious about this,” Damid said, “but I’m pretty sure we just need her hand print to open the door. She doesn’t even need to be attached to the hand.”

  Alva stared at him, and then at Battine and Porra. She saw nothing that would help her in any of their faces.

  She sighed. “Porra Alcon, I once warned you of the corruptibility of an unblessed in your household. But before now I never believed you would allow yourself to be swayed.”

  “Oh shut up and open the door,” Porra said. “You can consign me to the Depths later.”

  All it took to get the door to open was the High Hat putting her right hand on the sensor. Then there was a whirring sound as the door receded six centimaders and slid to the left.

  A stairwell was on the other side. Lights—electrical lights, with bulbs—kicked in to brighten the way down.

  Alva led the way with Damid behind her, followed by Porra, Battine and Orean. Considering Battine still had her sword out, it appeared her sister no longer considered her a threat to life and limb.

  “Hey, how do we close your magic door?” Orean shouted down the stairwell. Three seconds later, it closed on its own. “Aw, never mind.”

  She continued on down, catching up to Battine on the staircase. Batt wond
ered if she should worry about having the girl at her back, with her dagger and variable sense of loyalty. She decided it wasn’t worth worrying about given all the other things there were to worry about in this situation.

  Like her sister and her simmering hatred.

  “We do have the scroll,” Battine muttered over Porra’s shoulder as they headed down the staircase. “We can show it to you. It wasn’t us.”

  Porra sighed and shook her head.

  “And I told you, I no longer care,” Porra said. “Orean already told me what you found and where you found it, and for whatever reason I believe the things she tells me. More readily, I would say, than I believe your words. I came here for answers as to what caused my husband to deliberately place his life in jeopardy, as surely this killed him as much as the guided hand of Fergo Horace.”

  “Ken was executed on the orders of the other eight kings,” Battine said.

  Porra stopped and turned. With her on a lower step they faced eye-to-eye, which was oddly disquieting. “Yes,” she said. “I suspected as much well before Orean told me.”

  “How?”

  “They were all too eager to move on, especially once it became clear that you and Professor Magly had fled the country. It was well within their might to turn the both of you into international fugitives, but they didn’t do that. No entreaties to the League of Countries or separate missives fired to Mursk or Wivvol, Punkoah or Lladn. The minute you were out of mind they turned to a new chapter. Fergo died of his injuries two weeks ago, incidentally. I hope that gives you some satisfaction.”

  “So what now?” Batt asked. “What makes you think the answers you’re looking for are here?”

  “What makes you think that, sister?” Porra asked.

  “Your royal ladies, could you bicker and walk at once?” Orean asked. “With respect. I don’t wanna be stuck in here when the magic lights go out.”

  Porra grinned at Battine—it was her aren’t we up to no good expression—and continued down.

  The stairwell was more than twice as long as it would have been if they were simply going down to the next sublevel. This either meant they were skipping a couple of floors (and they’d passed no doors along the way) or the next secret underground level they were going to was well into the bedrock.

  By the time they reached the bottom, it felt as if they were as deep beneath the surface as the Great Temple was tall.

  An inverted temple, Battine thought.

  The entrance was a set of tall wooden double doors not dissimilar to the doors leading to the Totus throne room. Alva waited until they’d all reached the bottom landing, looked as if she was about to say something like “this is your last chance”, thought better of it, and just pushed open the doors.

  “Gods,” Damid muttered. He lowered his gun and just stood slack-jawed at the scene on the other side.

  He had good reason to.

  They were at one end of a vast chamber that appeared to have been carved out of rock using technology that nobody in the nine kingdoms had access to. Huge balls of light hung from the ceiling, each as bright as a shard of sunlight. Small chambers broke off on the left and right of the main room, no doubt leading to some other improbable marvel.

  And then there was the machine in the center of the room.

  It was perhaps more precise to describe it as a suite of machines all tied together in one large, metallic rectangle. There were parts that were moving—spinning, shifting, rising up and falling down—and other parts that looked like they’d not moved in decades. Long metal pipes ran through and around the machine like forest vines, connecting it all together.

  Two particularly large pipes ran straight up from the middle, took ninety degree turns—one north and one south, if Battine’s sense of compass hadn’t been too badly damaged by all the turns on the stairs—and headed into the walls at each end.

  She thought back to the ghostly evidence of passages Damid claimed to see in the satellite image captured on his voicer, and wondered if these were what he saw.

  “By the Five, that’s a sight isn’t it?” Orean said. “How’d it even get down here?”

  Porra, who ordinarily liked to pretend that nothing was a surprise, was too stunned to speak.

  “What is this?” Battine asked. “Vilto, what are we looking at?”

  “It’s the Engine of the World, Alconnot,” the High Hat said. “And each of you will have to swear its existence to secrecy. Otherwise, you’ll surely doom us all.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Oh come on,” Damid said. “It is not.”

  “You have eyes,” Alva said. “Would you really allow your lack of faith to rewrite what they see?”

  “They see a collection of networked machines that appear to leverage technology that’s either too new or too old. That doesn’t mean I’m looking at the Engine of the World.”

  “That’s my answer,” Alva said. “There is no better one.”

  According to what Battine was taught—when very young—after creating Dibble, the five gods of the Pentatheon built the Engine of the World to keep it running. Without the engine, Dyhine and Hadrine would part, the stars would blink out, the planet would stop spinning and all its creatures would be unmade. Plus a few other terrible and frankly ridiculous things would also come to pass. For instance, it was taught that time itself would end. This always seemed to her to be a tacit nod at the other name for the engine—the Watch Spring of the Universe—rather than a realistic thing that could happen.

  As she got older she was taught a decidedly more believable version of the universe’s vagaries. Laws of motion kept the planet spinning and gravity kept it in orbit around the tandem suns, who were also kept in their perpetual dance by gravitational pull. Whether or not Dibble, the solar system it was contained within, and the universe surrounding it was created by the gods, it was kept going by forces that could be measured and whose existence could be independently verified by anyone in the world, at any time. Much of that independent verification had originally been performed by House Septals.

  It was therefore obviously not the case that it was literally all happening because of a device hidden in Vilto Alva’s basement.

  However, it was undeniable that the machine was currently doing something.

  “If we could verify what it’s doing,” Battine said, “that might help.”

  “Yes, but if the High Hat here isn’t going to help, we’re not going to have a lot of luck with that,” Damid said. He no longer appeared to care that he was supposed to be holding Alva hostage. She, in turn, appeared to have given up on convincing them to not proceed, as it was now much too late. “Why are some of the parts moving and some aren’t? Where is the power coming from; is it generated from within the machine itself, or elsewhere? Where do those pipes go?”

  Alva just shook her head.

  “Is this what Kenson saw?” Porra asked.

  “Did he see it?” Alva asked. “He did, yes. If your question is, is this what caused him grief, then no it isn’t.”

  “You told me he had no issues on his visit. That he received the same tour as Phenton.”

  “It was the same tour, but he did have objections. I saw no reason to revisit them with you when you first asked and I see no reason now.”

  “I don’t care to have you decide that for me, Vilto. But fine. Please take us to the area with the vials and the glass chambers. I believe that is where Kenson found issue.”

  “How do you…? You’re describing the world catalog. How do you know of it?”

  “It doesn’t matter how I know,” Porra said. “I just do; take me there.”

  Alva looked conflicted. Interestingly, she appeared to be directing her confliction at Battine.

  “Do you need me to point the blaster at you again?” Damid asked.

  “No, outsider,” the High Hat said with a sigh. “I will show you the room, but don’t expect much.”

  Alva led them around the side of the engine, with Porra fal
ling behind her and Orean trailing. Damid sidled up next to Battine.

  “This is extraordinary,” he said.

  “I take it your dead monk didn’t tell you to expect this.”

  “He mentioned machinery, but not the extent of it. Do you think it’s possible there’s a room like this in Velon?”

  “I don’t know what to believe. Those tubes could be links to a worldwide network that’s acting in unison to keep the firmament from crashing down upon us, but it’s unlikely. What about your vault? Have you seen it, or have you stopped looking?”

  “I think we’re on the other side of any vault door I could imagine looking for. There aren’t any super-secret books here, but I’d say we’ve found the mother of all pre-Collapse artifacts.”

  “All I want to know is whether this is Kenson’s proof.”

  “It’s not,” Damid said. “Whatever that is, it’s what your sister is trying to find. I think she took my advice and opened his voicer.”

  Alva stopped at another door. Battine noted that several tubes were leading into this room from the engine, just above their heads. Whatever happened on the other side of the door was an aspect of the machinery.

  “You recall that on the day of your pre-conception counseling, you received one kind of counsel and Kenson another,” Alva said. “Much of what he heard related to what’s on the other side of this door. I will let you in, but do not ask me to explain to you what I told him, because that I will not do. The outsider can point his weapon at me all he wants.”

  “Why is that?” Battine asked.

  “Some information is meant for kings alone.”

  She opened the door—another metal one, but less imposing than the one upstairs—and stood aside.

  It led to a narrow room with a long counter down the middle, lined on both sides with small glass chambers. Ladders were on the walls on both sides with wheels on the bottom, to allow someone to access some of the higher-up chambers.

  There was some kind of liquid on the other side of the glass, and symbols on plaques affixed to the wall beneath each chamber. The symbols were composed of a series of vertical, horizontal and diagonal slashes. It wasn’t Eglinat (archaic or modern) or any other kind of language Battine had seen before.