The Fire Cage

by Scott Hungerford

  The Fire Cage

  by

  Scott C. Hungerford

  Copyright © 2012: Scott Hungerford

  Originally Published: June 12th, 2014

  Kindle Format

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author.

  Fellow readers! As a professional content writer, game designer, producer and world builder, I’ve worked diligently to design great games and to tell great stories over the last twenty years of my career for millions of people world-wide. But on the side, I write novels mixing the mythic and the mundane, from urban fantasy to steampunk, from high fantasy to modern day trickster tales.

  The Fire Cage is the third novel in this collection of odd and interesting stories. If you enjoy this story, feel free to check out Wish, an ‘Arabian Nights in Seattle’ mash-up detailing Shea’s endeavors to overthrow a blood-thirsty sultan. My second e-book, a dark fairy tale novella called Goblin Girl, is about a Goblin damsel named Grim who lives in a fairy tale world that is neither nice nor fair.

  Also, I would also like to call out a special thanks to a number of great people! To the amazing Vic Bonilla for creating the stunning cover art for The Fire Cage, along with the cover models Grant Bulmer, Katie Rae Allen, and Brook Willeford. My gratitude to Tim O’Brien for being such a stellar continuity editor throughout the years, and also to Kat for speed-round make-up and madcap bruising applications. Thanks as well to Vic’s Photography Assistants, William Kinzig and McKey Stanley, who helped with lighting, setup, tear-down and assorted green screen mayhem. Then above and beyond the call, my thanks to Cherie Lovell for putting together the whole package of costuming for the cover, including the stunning Victoriana dress from Lori Edwards’ private collection - and for bringing the amazing red cloak once worn by Hollywood star Bruce Campbell!

  Also, as a special mention, the fire cage device featured on the front cover was created by Rafa Maya of Spain. If you’re a steampunk fan of any kind, you’ve got to check out his Etsy shop at https://www.etsy.com/shop/diarmentcreations. From pistols to books, from art pieces to masks, he creates the most astonishing things that you just have to see!

  If you want to learn more about me or what I’m writing next, come find me and Like my author page on Facebook.com! There’s always room for one more!

  Happy reading!

  –Scott Hungerford

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter One

  Over the front entrance of Florin’s Forgeworks, a seven-armed cog lorded over a pair of rod-iron gates that hadn’t been closed in nearly twenty years. While the seven-armed cog had once been a common symbol of luck and good fortune amongst the more superstitious boiler-workers and screw-makers that labored in the factory, now the cog had undergone a profound change. Worn down and pitted by the acidic soot and foundry-fog belching out of the column of smokestacks behind it for some twenty years, the shining cog that had once marked the entrance of Mr. Florin’s first tiny screw and nail factory had become a grungy, pock-marked caricature of itself, a symbol more commonly associated with the mill that grinds down the human spirit.

  Through these ever-open gates ran a teenage boy, dodging and slipping his way through the thronging crowds of tired men and women leaving the factory after a long night shift. Wearing a long-sleeved black wool coat, grease-stained grey pants and a pair of scarred leather work boots, the tall, gangly youth made his way from one open pocket to the next, even sprinting when he could make up more time. While cutting across the wide, dusty courtyard took almost no time for someone his age, the check-in lines at the gates to the first of the factory buildings looked long and formidable. Chewing his lip, he gauged the length of the wait in front of him, checked the large mechanical cog-clock above him for the time, and then dodged through the doors to the cafeteria building. Sprinting past the long, rusted metal tables and the lines of surly workers waiting to slot coins into banks of wide-nozzled soup-dispensing machines, the young man banged his way out through a pair of greasy doors at the far end of the chamber.

  Now out in a darkened alley between the buildings, he maneuvered past overflowing garbage bins and a pair of wandering wide-eyed, bleating cow calves. Pushing into a hallway that reeked of urine and lye, he made a couple of hard turns through doors and doorways, including one full-out run past a guard station manned by a single snoring fat Bastard dressed in factory black. Finally, he broke out into the wide-open factory floor of Automaton Foundry #3. With four-story high ceilings held up by a confusing maze of wooden and metal girders, the room was filled with stifling heat and the pungent smells of roasted metal and acidic steam.

  All around the noisy Foundry, half-constructed nine-foot tall metal automatons stood with their carapaces lashed to special girder-docks, each one in their own stage of creation or repair. Looking more like collections of soup-pots and furnace chimneys than metal men, each of the brass-fitted monstrosities were surrounded by a busy hive of workers, foremen and specialists who were working to gather and assemble each automaton’s parts from a series of haphazardly-stacked rolling carts. While masked Burners worked to assemble and heat-meld the outer armor and the inner stoke-furnaces with smoking flame torches, nimble-fingered Joiners adjusted the spring-tension coils that gave the constructs the ability to lift their legs, move their hands and grip with crude, grasping fingers. On long ladders up by the creature’s head and heart, most important of all, the Ambulators were hard at work installing foot-long lead-sealed glass filament ether capsules that would allow the metal beast to follow basic commands to lift, walk and carry loads with the strength of a dozen men.

  Over by the center of the room, a young woman stood by one of the clipboard-wielding Foremen as a metal automaton was unlashed, bolt by bolt, from the sturdy metal piling that held it in place. When it was finally free, now standing on its own, the young woman confidently stepped up in front of the automaton. At the foreman’s indication she sang a perfect series of high notes, one trilling into another with the skill of a master opera performer. At the sound of her song, the thing shivered, shuddered and lifted up its rivet-marked head. Opening and focusing its metal eyes with a barely-audible series of shuffling clicks, the automaton had the eerie countenance of a man roused from a long deep sleep. At another series of short musical trills, the thing raised its left hand and held it out horizontally, while technicians excitedly rushed up with bubble levels, tension equipment and other measuring devices to test the capacity of their work.

  Pulling his eyes free of the spectacle, the boy continued to run once again, dodging past a shower of sparks from an ember torch, and cutting around a crowd of workers struggling to pulley-lift one of the heavy metal automaton carapaces atop a pair of newly forged metal legs. Charging up a clanging metal staircase, then down the length of a rickety catwalk suspended some twenty feet above the foundry floor by cables, he sprinted along the outer wall of the factory, past soot-covered, cracked windows old enough for the glass to pool at the base of the wooden frames.

  Just as a steam whistle blew in the
distance marking the beginning of the second shift, the young man clattered down a steep wooden staircase and ran through a room occupied by hundreds of desks and stools, all but one occupied by either a boy or girl already hard at work scraping imperfections off of machined screws, nails and other cast-forged metal parts. While hundreds of similar desks were set up in the center of the vast space, each filled by a young Grinder earning their daily coin without a word or whisper, his assigned station was up against one of the walls at the edge of the room, a coveted place of privacy and privilege.

  Taking his seat on a high stool, even as he looked around to see if he’d been caught, he let out a sigh of relief when he saw the Foreman looking the other way, consulting a clipboard filled with an inch-high stack of parchment roster cards. Taking up a rasping tool, he adjusted the springs on his overhead lantern to ensure the rainbow-edged light from the oil lamp would focus properly through the refracting lens onto his desk. Before anything else could go wrong he got to work, hands busy, head down, just as if he’d been there for hours.

  But when someone nudged his foot, he looked over at the plain-faced girl sitting next to him. She was dressed in a coarse brown leather tunic, an ankle-long fire-resistant gray skirt and short gray boots with broken laces.

  “What you want?” he whispered.

  She gave him a look like he was made entirely of worms. “Shut it,” she hissed. “Foreman’s coming.” Ignoring him, she tucked her head back down to her work once again. He did the same, working for a minute or two until the foreman had walked past him without a word or threat of a beating.

  But when he felt the girl kick him again, a little harder this time, he spun on his stool to confront her full on.

  “Quit the kicking.”

  “You want trouble for us both?” she hissed back through yellowed teeth. “Now leave it. I’m not doing nothing.” Confused, he poked his head beneath his desk, where all he could see was a few discarded filings and one of the heavy black-iron furnace grates set into the wall at ankle height.

  “Rats,” Yori conjectured to himself, then hooked his legs up further onto the rungs.

  “Rats?” she echoed with disgust, tucking her own feet and skirts up higher as well.

  “Is there a problem?” the black-clad Foreman asked from behind the two of them. The girl, in trying to both startle and curtsy at the same time, nearly fell off of her stool. The boy, spinning around in his chair, faced the Foreman with fearful eyes.

  “No, Foreman,” Yori said. “I thought I felt a rat touch my foot.”

  “There aren’t rats in this part of the foundry,” the foreman said, adjusting his spectacles on his haggard face. “Not enough around here to eat.” Kneeling down a few inches, he gazed at the metal grating. “And the grill looks secure, that. Now, no more distractions. I want good work out of you...” he trailed off, even as he consulted his roster cards. “Davin. I want good work out of you today, Davin.”

  “Yes, foreman,” Yori replied, hoping the girl wouldn’t break his ruse. But she kept her mouth shut, much to his relief.

  As the Foreman gruffed and stalked off, the girl kicked the boy hard once, for real, right in the shin.

  “Ow!” he hissed, rubbing at his leg. “What was that for?”

  “You’re an idiot. I know you. You’re not Davin. You’re Yori.”

  “Well, today,” the boy said, “I’m Davin. If you don’t want a busted mouth, you’ll keep your mouth shut.”

  Glaring at him, gritting her teeth against saying anything else that might get her in more trouble with the foreman, she swiveled back on her chair to focus on her work, grating away imperfections on a four-inch nail with vicious swipes of her file. Satisfied with her silence, he slowly turned back to his own task. Picking up his own file, he began working on chipping extra bits out of the threads of a six-inch screw. But when something bumped his foot again, he jerked his head beneath the table to see what was doing it.

  It wasn’t a rat, or a snake, or at least not a snake the likes that he had ever seen. With faceted red eyes and a reticulated metal body, the iron serpent was slithering between a gap in the metal grating with a feathery, ripply sound. Before he could even jump back, the thing lashed out and bit him hard on the ankle, piercing all the way to the bone with its twin metal fangs!

  Screaming, Yori toppled backwards out of his chair, landing hard on his back. Clenching and clawing at his ankle, his whole leg already felt like it was on fire — and with every heartbeat the pain was surging up his leg towards his heart!

  The plain girl beside him screamed, and the entire factory floor dissolved into a chaos of shouting and yelling voices.

  “What’s all this about?” the Foreman demanded as he came up, huffing and puffing from his short run, pushing his way through a gawking throng of teenage workers.

  “Something bit him,” the plain girl exclaimed, keeping herself as far away from the desk and the grating as she could without risking the Foreman’s anger. “Something bit him in the ankle.”

  After taking a wary look at the empty grate, the foreman knelt down in front of the boy, just as he took his last breath and went still. The boy’s face was already contorted into a final expression of agony, his sightless eyes staring at the high ceiling above.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” the foreman said, noting the blood soaking through the boy’s pant leg. With a lead pencil, he lifted up the hem and took a good look at the pair of green-dripping bite marks in his ankle. “This is damned odd.”

  “What is this about?” asked a fat Foreman who had just rushed up to investigate the commotion. After him came a third Foreman, this one skinny, also dressed in factory black.

  “This one is dead,” the lead told both of them as he knelt by the corpse.

  “So, what do we do?” the fat foreman asked, scratching his head.

  Reaching down and picking up the boy’s cooling arm, he checked for the tell-tale blue cog tattoo marking the back of his hand. “He’s an Eighteener. We give him a fire burial in the furnaces and get on with the shift.”

  The skinny Foreman clicked his mouth mournfully, then reached down and grabbed the boy’s feet, with the fat Foreman following suit with his arms. While the two lifted the corpse and headed for the furnace room, to stoke the fires with the wretch’s mortal remains, the lead turned to the crowd of the gawking onlookers, well aware of the dent in productivity this outburst was going to cause.

  “Back to work!” he yelled, sending the hundreds of gawking onlookers scampering back to their posts. There was no sign of the girl who had sat next to the victim, which suited him fine. One less headache to deal with on a day already going frightfully wrong.

  When the room settled again and the Grinders were hard at their labors, the lead skimmed through his parchment cards until he found the one he wanted.

  “Davin Washer,” he said to no one in particular. “Poor bastard. He only had two days to go until he was eighteen and forever free of this place. Bad luck, that.” Initialing his mark on one side of the card with his grease pencil, he then wrote Furnaced across the card in large letters, the only eulogy the lad would sadly ever receive.

  .oOo.

  The sound of clicking chips and shuffling cards dominated the Fates Gambling Club, punctuated by the occasional cough, announcement of raise, or the vibrant ring of the foot of a crystal goblet touching off against a silver coffee spoon or a flint-lighter. Amongst the twenty velvet-draped tables, more than a hundred players had started playing in the tournament some twenty hours beforehand — and now the lists were reduced to a fraction of that number. Fine coats worth twenty nobles apiece were draped haphazardly over velvet and felt-backed chairs. Emerald and ruby cufflinks were undone, and money-clips, monocles and unwound watches were tucked away forgotten in vest-pockets. While the scents of quick-strike infernals, pipe tobacco and gin dominated the room, the smell of sweat, fetid breath, and even fear could be tasted lingering in the air.

  The game was Thrush, a card game
involving eighty double-sided cards, each patterned with a variety of vibrant colors and patterns after the five suits of the Empire — nobility, mercantile, military, industrialization and wealth. While some cards featured the same suit on either side, but with different values and denominations, most had suits on two sides, of differing types. As a result, Thrush possessed a dizzying array of statistical possibilities, where one with a keen mind, good card playing skills and a great sense of mathematics could hold their own against a less civilized opponent.

  At the fourth table, a teenager with light brown hair and green eyes was doing exactly that. Having survived two tables and now devouring his way through a third, he had a stake of five hundred chips, far greater than the twenty chips he’d started with. Drinking ice water drenched with the bitter juice of a squeezed lime, he watched as the dealer dealt a new hand of cards to the three opponents, waiting to see what he could learn from the other men’s luck.

  With his dark blue velvet coat draped carefully over the back of his chair, the teenager wore an old white gentleman’s shirt with a high starched collar and a pair of iron cufflinks. He warily made eye contact with the weasel-eyed gray-clad Banker on his left, trying to get any sense of what the man might have on the other side of his cards. To his right sat a teenage noble-son his own age, maybe sixteen or seventeen at best, with tied-back black hair, a high collared shirt, and a tightly-buttoned light blue velvet vest that nearly matched his eyes.

  Upon finishing dealing the cards, the Banker picked up an aged ivory die and handed it to the boy across the table from him. “It is your roll, sir.”

  Davin took the die, nodding, and then rolled it over towards the dealer’s side. “Bets will be made,” the dealer announced as the die finished its tumbling roll, “in increments of four nobles.”

  The Banker haruffed, then stirred his hand through his tangled pile of chips, trying to conceal just how few he had left.