by Jack Conner
When the grand doors of the labyrinth neared, Lynch’s belly growled again, and he patted it affectionately.
“Hang in there, old -- ”
The doors opened. Lynch froze.
The red light of dawn shone in -- dawn! -- and in through the high jade doors strode a tall, powerful figure, retainers at his back.
Prince Jeselri, bold as life, hair flowing, muscles gleaming, fastened his eyes upon Lynch.
“You!” Jeselri said.
Chapter 27
Still yawning, Eliza joined the other Society members for a breakfast of fruits and cereals in the dining hall.
“All the prisoners have escaped,” Lars Gunnerson said as he bit into a grapefruit. “It was that damned James, I know it.” He bore a bruise on the side of his throat that had not been there yesterday. “I swear, I’ll rip off his head with my bare hands.”
“You had your shot last night,” Lord Wilhelm said. His voice took on a new tone, dangerously idle, as he added, “When my men entered the tent, they said they found strange experiments going on.”
“Oh?” Lars said.
“You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
Lars held his gaze. “I just entered the tent because I saw him go in there.”
“I’m sure,” Lord Wilhelm said, and suddenly laughed. He seemed in very good spirits this morning. “Today the world shall change, my friends. It will be laid at our feet. Germany will reign supreme! And tomorrow . . . tomorrow the Queen and Prince shall teach us how to become supermen, true supermen, not dependent on serums or stolen fluids, but gods.” He shook his head, clearly unable to believe that the time he had long dreamed of was finally here.
“The Prince is already at work on the doomsday devices,” Lars Gunnerson said. “We should hear word from him at any moment.”
Actually, it took most of the day. Eliza was conferring with a team of archeologists, looking for interesting dig sites on a map, when Lars Gunnerson came in, side by side with Queen Iasolla herself. She looked positively radiant, and jewels twinkled at her throat and in her hair. Her dress, found and restored from the ruins, was slightly diaphanous and flowed like quicksilver, just as Eliza had imagined it would.
“My son has sent word,” Iasolla announced. “The device is almost ready.” Her emerald eyes ran Eliza up and down, and not for the first time Eliza cursed her short, tight hiking pants. “Would you like to join us in being present for the Ascendance?”
Eliza swallowed. “I wouldn’t miss it, my Queen.”
She fell into step with them as they made their way toward the main doors of the Palace. Lord Wilhelm met them with a detachment of troops, and he looked nearly as radiant as the Queen. Eliza expected him to whistle. Instead he tipped his head, offered the Queen a small smile, and said, “Shall we?”
“We shall.”
Together the group set off toward the underworld and the ending of it all.
***
“You!” Prince Jeselri said.
Lynch raised his eyebrows, hoping his false eye did not pop out. “Yes, my lord?”
“You said the assassin James had been caught, but I found out this morning that he is still at large and that he murdered no less than two people in the Palace last night.”
“Ah.” Lynch thought quickly. Jeselri remembered him from his mother’s bedchamber last night. “Yes, we all made that mistake at first. See, one of the prisoners James released was caught, and he looked so much like James that we assumed it to be the man himself. We’d just begun torturing him and my superior wanted to claim credit for the capture. That’s when he sent me to tell you.” He grimaced. “The Oberfuhrer is having him flogged even now.”
The Prince strolled on, a team of scientists and technicians scurrying to keep pace with him. “Yes, that was clever of him, releasing the prisoners. Doubtless to cover his own escape.”
“My very thought, Your Excellency.” Actually, that had occurred to Lynch as he was doing it. Call it a bonus.
“Make yourself useful,” Jeselri said. “We shall need a spare hand.”
Lynch resisted the obvious reply but fell into step. “Useful?”
“Yes. The project you lot have been working at -- my project; you better not have spoiled my machines -- is said to be nearly finished. Let us see what we can do.”
Jeselri toured the jade clockwork labyrinth, inspecting its long tunnels and clanking, grinding machinery, and seemed surprised, even impressed.
“Mother has done well,” he said. “And I tease her for not being an engineer!” Lynch noticed that when it came time to heap praise, he did not bestow it on the Germans. Later, when he was finishing his tour, Jeselri nodded to himself and said, “She was making excellent progress. She could probably have finished it herself in a tenday or less. Now that I’m here, however, I can have this finished in hours.”
A chill ran down Lynch’s spine. “Hours, my lord?”
“Before the day is out, the world shall be ours.”
That doesn’t give me much time, does it? Come on, Lynch, be clever.
The hall emptied into a vast chamber, what must be the heart of the complex. Circular, the chamber’s diameter had to be over a hundred meters. Green walls curved up, giving the room an almost onion-like shape and cathedral-like feel. The great ribs of the walls bowed inward, at last reaching what would have been the center of the ceiling far, far above, but instead of joining the ribs made a sharp upward angle to create a hole directly over the center of the room. Below this hole a complicated dais stood at the focal point of the chamber, and a strange pentagonal mound rose from it. The five corners were rounded, as was the whole of the mound; it was a great, green hillock of jade that reminded Lynch somewhat of the bud of a flower just before it opened. It was obviously a control center of some sort, a console. A team of technicians buzzed around it, fiddling with pieces of equipment.
Jeselri eyed the ribs as if verifying they were intact and functioning. Lynch noted that behind the ribs that formed the walls loomed more clockwork, massive gears grinding and clanking.
Jeselri nodded to himself, satisfied, and leapt up to the dais the console sprouted from, huge and strangely beautiful. A jade warrior woman stood guard at every rounded corner, and there were five of these. Everything was of green jade.
“This will do,” Jeselri said, after analyzing the console. “Yes, this will do just fine.”
Quickly he gave instructions to the various groups of scientists and technicians, and they scattered through the jade halls. Lynch found himself attached to a team responsible for making a certain bank of gears operable. They worked down a hall not too far from the Control Room, as Lynch heard some of them refer to the cathedral-like chamber, and sounds of intense activity issued from it constantly.
“This must all be very complicated,” Lynch said, as he applied oil to a certain gear. The strong rose scent nearly made him gag. He sat astride a wide brass-like pipe, warm against his thighs. Great pipes snarled all over, threading through the jade clockwork, and steam hissed from release valves at regular intervals.
“Oh, it is,” said Mikel, the technician leader. “We’re only just barely beginning to understand it. If it weren’t for the Atlantans’ inscriptions, we would never have gotten this far. We never could have invented this sort of machine on our own. The Atlantans’ avenues of research were so far removed from our own it’s almost like a new science altogether.”
“Not even science,” said another man. “Alchemy.”
“It must be quite fragile,” Lynch said. He pointed to a certain nexus, where several pipes snaked together and joined at a transformer-like device. “Why, what would happen if that didn’t work, for example?”
“Oh, nothing could happen to it. Not here. We’re quite safe. Everything will proceed as planned.”
From that Lynch deduced the transformer-like device must be important somehow. It looked important.
Hours passed, and he grew sweaty and tired, climbing amongst
the gears and pegs. Below him gaped vast distances, and he could not even see what it was the clockwork was poised over. He could see no floor. At times he saw green fire, flaring in black pits. Lynch asked about it.
“We know little about it,” Mikel admitted. “Almost nothing, save that it’s the source of the Atlantans’ power. Their energy source. Vris. All we have are their legends, which say it is the fire they stole from the gods -- hence the Queen’s coat of arms, a fist clenching the sun, the symbol of what we would call Prometheus. Though of course the Atlantans had -- have, I suppose -- their own gods, even if the myth is similar.”
Lynch tried subtly to ask about various ways the machinery could go wrong, but the technicians largely ignored the questions and focused on the inevitability of the machine’s completion. And activation.
As time wore on, Lynch grew desperate. I must do something.
The technicians had brought foodstuffs to munch on, and Lynch’s rumbling belly compelled him to snatch a piece of bread and a sausage on his next break. The sausage amazed him. That was one thing Germans got right, anyway. He was just taking a smoke afterward when Mikel ordered him to inform Prince Jeselri that they were done restoring this bank of gears and were ready for new instructions.
Swearing viciously under his breath, Lynch returned to the Control Room. Jeselri was just completing the restoration of the blooming console and looked most pleased with himself. After Lynch gave his report, Jeselri said, “Excellent! Tell your team to assemble here. We’re almost ready to activate the device. I’ll send a runner to inform my mother. As soon as she arrives, she’ll initiate the final sequence, and the Ascendance will begin.”
“I can’t wait,” Lynch said. I hope you choke and die.
The technicians rejoiced at the news and flowed back up the halls toward the Control Room. They were hardly paying attention to Lynch in their excitement and he doubled back down a side-hall to the bank of clockwork they had just worked on. He found one of the jade warrior women that stood silent guard over the clockwork labyrinth. Like the others, she carried an upraised jade spear planted on the ground.
“You’ll do,” he told it.
He wrestled with the spear, finding to his relief that the weapon was not of a piece with the rest of the sculpture and could, with some effort, be removed. Two hands would have made the process easier, but at last he wrested the weapon loose. Wiping sweat from his brow, he turned back to the bank of gears.
“Now for you, my pretty,” he told the transformer-like nexus he had been eyeing, and rammed the jade spear into it as hard as he could.
The explosion flung him across the hall to slam against the bank of gears opposite. He almost tumbled off into the abyssal vris below. At the last moment he caught himself on a gear and pushed himself free.
Before him, the nexus crackled with green and blue energy, and the air shimmered around it. Black scorch marks marred the surrounding clockwork. Lynch stared, amazed. He had not had any idea the blow would prove so devastating.
Foot-steps pattered up the hall.
Lynch collected himself. Here goes nothing.
He had set his assault rifle down to impale the nexus. He retrieved it and made sure his stolen pistol was tucked away in its holster.
As the steps drew close, he shrank into the shadows.
Breathless, Prince Jeselri arrived and gaped at the flames and unleashed energy. He said something that didn’t translate, though Lynch was sure it was a curse. Wide-eyed technicians ran up just behind him.
“I can’t believe it,” one said. “What happened?” “Mikel’s team fucked up,” said another. “Fuck you,” said Mikel.
Prince Jeselri growled at them, and they fell silent.
“Sabotage,” he spoke, and hate danced in his eyes.
Flames licked. No one spoke.
At last Jeselri said, “Do not fear. I can restore it. We will merely circumvent this bank, replace it with another. I know just how it shall be -- ”
Lynch raised his pistol. Stepping forward to adjust for his poor depth perception, he fired point-blank at Prince Jeselri’s head. Once. Twice. Again. The shots rang loud in the jade halls.
The air merely shimmered around Jeselri. He spun at the first shot and glared at Lynch even as the bullets burned up in some energy shield around him.
“You did this,” Jeselri said.
Angrily, he stalked forward. Technicians scattered.
Shocked to find his target still living, Lynch hurled the gun down and backed up. He raised the assault rifle and unleashed it. Rat-rat-rat. Again the air shimmered around Jeselri but no bullets reached him.
Jeselri lashed out and struck Lynch, and Lynch flew backward. This time he struck a gear with such force that he rebounded, tumbling hard to the floor, his back flaring. The revolution of the gear shot him several feet from where’d been standing. The breath exploded from his lungs when he hit, and the world titled and spun.
The vague form of Jeselri approached. Blinking, Lynch tried to scramble away.
Jeselri waved a hand. A blast of superheated air surrounded Lynch. The flooring melted and burst into flame, and Lynch screamed and rolled away. At least the prototype had prevented him from being burned to a crisp.
Jeselri bellowed in rage. He pulled out his jade sword and lunged. Lynch just barely rolled out of the way as Jeselri slashed the blade down. Sparks flew as sword met floor. Jeselri struck again -- again. Lynch rolled, desperate. Technicians fled everywhere.
At last Lynch rolled far enough away that he had time to climb to his feet.
Jeselri rushed him, sword poised to swing.
Lynch had come up before the crackling nexus. He grabbed the blackened spear sticking out of it, yanked it free, whirled -- and impaled the Prince even as Jeselri ran toward him. The jade spear passed through whatever field protected him and punched through his chest. Blood burst from his lips. Lynch could only hold the spear with one hand, and the impact of Jeselri’s impalement ripped the weapon from his grasp.
Prince Jeselri fell to the floor, spear sticking out of him. Blood, normal red blood, seeped from the wound. His eyes bugled, and his face contorted in pain. His giant fists wrapped around the spear’s handle and started to tug it free.
Remembering Prince Michael’s miraculous recovery, Lynch snatched up Jeselri’s jade sword and hacked off the Prince’s leonine head.
It took several blows, and it was a messy, bloody affair. Again, Lynch realized how fortunate he was to live in an age of pistols, because swords were meant for the two-handed. At last Jeselri lay dead, head severed, blood spreading from the point of separation. Lynch hunched over him, breathing hard. Sweat ran down his arms and stuck his tunic to the narrow of his back.
The technicians stared.
“You . . . you killed him . . .”
Another had the bravery to, very slowly, bend over, pick up Lynch’s pistol and, trembling, raise it. Lynch walked calmly over to him, took back the pistol and hit him with it. The man collapsed, whimpering.
“Anyone else?” Lynch said.
They fled, screaming. The one he’d hit picked himself up and ran faster than the others.
Lynch turned back to Jeselri. The Prince had not magically returned to life or re-grown a head. Good. Lynch stole his sword belt and shoved the sword through it. The weapon was awkward for him to wield, but it worked. Jade weapons worked. He looked down at Jeselri again, amazed that he had actually killed the god-man. His fingers shook.
Shortly he heard people approaching and ran off to find somewhere to hide.
Chapter 28
Dread filled Eliza as she descended into the underworld. The laughing demons and their hellish clockwork glistened sickly on the façade of the underworld’s entrance, and those great doors yawned like the mouth of the devil himself. Eliza was not a religious person, but in that moment she was tempted to cross herself as her mother had often done.
Head held high, Queen Iasolla led the way, and Eliza shivered as the coldness of t
he clockwork halls fell over her. How can I stop them? Where is Lynch?
Iasolla nearly vibrated with pleasure. “At last,” she said, “we shall achieve the dream of all those that survived the Fall, and our enemies shall die.”
Lord Wilhelm cleared his throat. “Please, Your Grace, leave matters of life and death to us.”
She did not answer.
They began to see technicians scurrying about. Looks of terror crossed their faces when they saw the Queen, and they fled as swiftly as they could.
“Why do they run?” she demanded. “Are they rats or men?”
Lord Wilhelm forcibly detained the next technician. “What goes on here? Where is the Prince?”
Trembling, white with horror, the technician pointed down the hallway. Eliza could see some activity there. “Th-that way, s-sir.”
Lord Wilhelm released him, and the man fled away as fast as he could, nearly gibbering in terror. Eliza found herself clenching her hands.
“Putting on the finishing touches, no doubt,” Lord Wilhelm said with forced bravado. “I’m sure that’s why he is not here to greet us.”
Eliza saw the Queen’s face, and it was as she’d first seen it at the Palace of Casveigh -- carved from stone. Her eyes stared, flat and cold.
Without a word, she marched down the halls, and Eliza, Lord Wilhelm, Lars Gunnerson and the troopers hurried after her. As they reached the intersection of two corridors, they came on a crowd of technicians gathered around something on the floor. The bank of gears before them lay dormant, and some sort of nexus crackled with smoke and unruly energy, as if it had been damaged. Queen Iasolla stormed toward the technicians, and most ran. Only a few remained to hover in the shadows.
