“We don’t have much time before Altius comes back to spy on us some more.” She took the bottle from Davin and twisted the octangular cap, breaking the cork seal that would allow her to lift the stopper up and out of the neck. Pouring the wine into the pan as well, she burbled out about half the contents until she was satisfied with the color and viscosity of her bubbly mess. Sliding the pan back under the bed, she took a huge, guzzling drink of the expensive red, then passed the half-full bottle back to Davin.
“That’s all I need,” she said.
“Good. Then, we eat?” Davin asked, more than a little famished. “Assuming it’s not poisoned.”
“They want their resident alchemist alive,” Verona whispered. “So, yes. We eat, almost all of this, then we fight. Then we put the plan into action.”
“What plan?” Davin asked.
But Verona wouldn’t tell him. Instead, she just held up the crude wooden spoon, gave him a perfectly murderous look, and then broke the utensil in half between her fists with a menacing crunch.
.oOo.
While the wine helped, Davin soon had a headache from Verona’s endless parade of accusations, declarations, and screaming fits. He yelled back as much as he could, mostly empty accusations that seemed to fall short compared to Verona’s seemingly endless supply of nautical profanity and emasculating put-downs. But as he was strong enough to smash furniture and throw fixtures in-between her screeching, melodramatic crying fits, he knew he was lending to the performance. Finally, on Verona’s cue, they fell silent for nearly an hour, until they could finally hear Altius letting himself through the outer door, a new tray clanking in hand.
As Altius closed the outer door, Davin took the last swig of wine from the bottle at his side, right on cue. As the food grate slid open with a bang, he heard Altius make a surprised noise at finding his lunch tray covered with pieces of broken crockery. Chuckling, the old man carefully drew the old tray out, then slid the next one in, a tray of sliced venison, pumpkin soup, and a small plate of truffle-spiced crèmes. But after closing the lower grate and opening the upper, his intake of surprise at seeing the destroyed suite was worth the entire afternoon of Verona’s screeching torment.
Verona lay sprawled across the foot of the bed, her head grotesquely dangling, a wide, meaty swatch of flesh dangling from her bloody throat. Beneath her head, a bloody pool spread out beneath her where she had clearly bled out, the ends of her hair trailing in the muck. Davin, the right hand side of his shirt soaked with gore, lay on the bed, blooded in red, even as he held the broken-off end of the spoon at just the right angle so it would look like it was thrust through his ribs.
“Saints be damned!” Altius said from behind the door. “Son. Are you all right? Are you all right in there?”
In response, Davin did his best to move his head and cough out the wine a little at a time, hoping the reddish spittle would be convincing enough in the firelight. Following Verona’s coaching, he didn’t make a sound, letting the effect of the gore-spattered room tell the story, right down to the grotesque nature of the half-chewed veal cutlet draped perfectly over Verona’s throat.
Altius cranked the door open, unlatching the two heavy bolts that secured the portal. Cautiously, he made his way inside, crunching bits of smashed crockery underfoot, goggling at the destruction of the elegant room. Taking a quick glance at Verona’s savaged neck, he gagged in the back of his throat, even as he made efforts to carefully keep his fine leather shoes away from the spreading blood pool. Circling past her, he went over to Davin to take in the full extent of his horrific injuries.
“Charette’s going to kill me,” Altius muttered. “She’s going to bloody gut me if the boy dies. Murderous little bitch killed him for sure, she did.”
Davin gasped, as if he was trying to speak, luring Altius just a little bit closer. As the old man bent down, trying to hear what the boy was saying, he got a whiff not of bowel and blood, but of wine and peppers — and his eyes lit up with alarm. But in that instant Verona was already up and on him like a screeching demon, stabbing him over and over again in the back and backside with her piece of the splintery, broken off spoon. Yelping, Altius tried to push her off, but she kept on him like a sharp-clawed kitten intent on the attack.
Davin, springing off the bed with bottle in hand, drove the end of the container into the old man’s belly, blowing the wind out of him with a single hit. “That was for Guiseppe,” he said righteously, even as Altius collapsed to the floor with a gasping groan.
“Come on!” Verona yelled, even as she started to pull Davin towards the door. Once safely outside, they clanged the inner door shut and latched it. After letting themselves out into the candyglass lit corridor beyond, both still dripping with fake gore, he clanged the outer door shut too and latched it good and tight for safekeeping.
“We did it!” he whispered, only to have Verona, resplendent in her soup-soaked outfit, grab him with both arms and kiss him with lips that tasted deliciously of wine.
“You smell a bit like lamb,” he said, when she finally let him come up for air.
“I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“No,” he said with a smile, putting his hands around her waist. “Just you.”
They held each other for a few moments in the odd-colored light, chins over each other’s shoulders, shivering and shaking together with shared nerves. Inside, they could faintly hear Altius starting to shout for Charette, beating on the inner door with his fists, far too softly to ever be heard down the tunnel.
“Your turn,” Verona said.
“To do what?”
“It’s your turn to figure out what to do next.”
“We rescue your father from Charette,” Davin said, “and mine as well. Then we save the Empire.”
“What an excellent plan!” Verona exclaimed, and sealed her approval with a kiss.
Chapter Sixteen
Following the candyglass lights overhead, a red-spattered Davin and Verona made their way along the low-ceilinged corridor, which reminded Davin more of a well-kept wine cellar than a mad scientist’s underground lair. After stepping down a couple of low, flat stone steps, soon they were walking beneath a pair of thick black metal pipes, each at least four feet across, with one dripping condensation, and the other radiating visible ripples of heat. Keeping their conjecture to themselves, Davin and Verona kept going along the path, not sure what they were going to find next in the underground maze.
After the corridor hooked to the right, the hallway opened up into a circular room similar to the one that connected Mercuri’s and Vermeni’s estates, right down to the spiral staircase leading upwards through the domed brick ceiling. A small sign labeled KITCHENS was attached to the rail with a small length of chain, while the other corridors were marked with such things as BOILER A, PIPEROOM, and UTILITY B. Dismayed by the lack of signs saying things like SPIRIT PRESERVATORY, or RAJON’S WORLDLY REMAINS, Davin chose Utility B to see how the maze of corridors would play out.
Another length of low arching hallway led to another circular room, where another staircase led up through the ceiling, this time with the mysterious SOLARIUM WORKSHOP placard attached to the rail. Other interesting choices included WORKSHOP D, CAUSTICS, and ZOOLOGICALS. Lacking a better choice, Davin led Verona down the short Workshop corridor to where it ended at metal-riveted door. Ratcheting the handle open, noting how the candyglass overhead flickered a little when he grated the slightly stuck door open, he and Verona quickly made it inside and closed the portal shut behind them, hoping they hadn’t been seen or heard.
As most of the other rooms in Vermeni’s dungeons, the workroom was lit by candyglass strands strung up by the ceiling. Beyond that, the contrasts to Mercuri’s workspace were startling. While the laboratory was a smaller space with fewer tables, there were devices and objects crammed into every available nook and cranny, a lifetime of half-finished experiments and gadgets beyond count. To Davin, Mercuri’s lab had seemed more like a toymaker’s work
shop, relatively tidy with everything in its own cluttered little place. But Vermeni’s lab seemed like a tool shed inhabited by the criminally insane.
As far as Davin could see in the gently flickering light, haphazard piles of blades, vices, wires, cogs and clamps littered every table, with acid vials, burners, thick branching rubber tubes and drills lay scattered across benches, work stools and rolling carts. Along the left hand wall, a row of six brass-colored automatons stood bolted to the ceiling’s support beams, with metal retracting struts holding them in place by the shoulder, belly and hip. Featuring squat metal heads like old Teutonic helmets, right down to having spikes on top, some of their limply-hanging arms ended in fists, some in spikes, and some with multi-nozzled barrels that Davin now recognized as flechette guns. But Davin noted with some interest that every last one of the war machines had a scarab-like indentation for a fire cage tucked up right beneath the chin-armor, in the hollows of their mechanical throats.
Astonished at the raw brutality of the weapons and painful looking devices scattered across the room, Davin left Verona behind to investigate a set of slightly glowing glass tubes. Making his way over to the automatons, he carefully approaching one, making sure it was inert and that there was no felonious spirit waiting inside. Taking a close look at the overlapping rusted brass plates, he noted with some satisfaction at the sight of a set of shining metal screws holding the decades-old device together. Taking up a scarred longdriver from the table behind him, he turned and torqued one of the inch-long screws out of the massive metal chest. Exactly as he had suspected, the screw’s lines ran backwards, and was surely one of the ones secretly made at Florin’s.
“Look at this...” Verona said from behind him. As Davin turned, something that she was holding in her hands let out a burst of blue-green colored fire that plumed up to the ceiling in a chaotic ball of heat and light. Shrieking, she dropped the tubular object back onto the table, then wrinkled her nose at the terrible smell of something that reminded Davin of scalded turpentine.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I thought it was a lighter, for lighting your pipe. I guess not...”
“Well, be careful,” Davin warned. “There are a lot of dangerous things down here.”
“I will be now,” Verona replied, even as she reached down and picked up a new object, a thick leather glove covered with metal plates.
“What does that do?” Davin asked, trying to puzzle it out.
“I’m not sure,” she said, even as she snugged the thing over her hand. Before she could even react, a current of bright green lightning rippled across the glove’s fingerplates — and a metal wrench flipped up from the table, right into her waiting fingers!
“Wow!” she said, even as the crackling lightning vanished, leaving her holding the wrench by her own power.
Davin, now more than interested in what else might be lying about, began scouring the tables himself for weapons that they could use, ignoring anything that looked like it might do him more harm to them than Charette. While he passed up a crude prototype steam-pistol of some kind, with its barrel blown out badly enough to make it look like a split tulip, he did pick up a small, interesting gadget that fit neatly into his hand. Made of oily black metal, with a rubber grip attached to a slightly wiggly protrusion sticking out the bottom, the spring powered device looked as if it were meant to spring- fire the four square, sharpened metal pieces set in extruding grooves carved along the top of the weapon. Lifting it up, he aimed it towards the far wall, away from Verona, and squeezed his fist. Much to his initial delight, one of the metal squares whipped out of the gun — but then spun down in a big circle and ricocheted off of the stone floor just a few inches from his right foot’s big toe.
“Not much of an invention,” Davin muttered as he set the dangerous toy back down on the table.
After setting down the wrench, but still wearing the glove, Verona reached down and picked up a sizable hacking blade from one of the desks, something that looked like a military sword combined with a jagged-edge butcher’s cleaver. As she raised it over her head, the glove arced green lightning again, and a hail of screws, nails, cogs, and metal bits flew off the tables around her, clanging and sticking to the blade with all the subtlety of a marching band being crushed by a runaway scrap metal wagon. Her hands trembling with nerves, she dropped the weapon back on the table, then hastily stripped off the glove before anything else interesting could happen.
“Let’s get out of here,” Davin said. “This place isn’t going to help us at all.”
“I’ll second that,” Verona said, even as a door at the far end of the room opened up, making the candyglass lights overhead flicker a bit once again. Without a word, Davin and Verona both ducked down beneath tables across the room from one another, scrambling on their knees for all the cover that the wires, parts, sheaths, metal plates and toolboxes could provide them.
“Mice in the grain bin?” came a slightly falsetto voice from the far end of the room, followed by an unsettling laugh. “I think it’s about time you showed yourself, so I can add you to the rest of my lady’s collection.”
Davin didn’t make a sound in response and began looking around him for anything that could be used as a weapon. Hopefully any weapon that could be used that wouldn’t get him killed, maimed, gutted, mauled or decapitated in the process.
The sound of a knife blade drawing from a sheath caught his ear. He’d heard the same sound when Charette’s pretty-boys drew out their long hooked blades for a fight back under the broken trellis.
“So, are you a man or a mouse?” the man said, as he began walking along one of the crowded aisles separating the tables, his boot heels clicking loudly on the stone floor. “You made your way all the way in here, all the way down from the surface, to learn about the buried mysteries of the past. Reveal yourself, and you’ll soon learn everything you want to know.”
From over in Verona’s direction came a quiet clink of metal on metal, followed by a muffled burst of nautical swearing.
“Ah, yes,” the man said, now homing in on the sound she had made. “You’re surrounded by the mastery of Vermeni’s creations, the collection of his life work. Please be careful. A lot of things in here may be very dangerous if touched or mishandled. I’m sure you understand that genius has its price.”
Davin could hear the man’s footsteps moving away from him towards where Verona had clanked. Desperately, he began looking around for the right weapon to grab. While there were any number of wrenches, longdrivers, and predictable metal shafts that would have the goodly heft of a brawlclub, he wasn’t a fighter, and the pretty-boy walking towards Verona was likely a weapon’s master on par with the Knives that guarded the Fates. Rajon had taken two of them out on the lawn outside of the manse, but he had the advantage of longer weapon reach and years of fighting skill. Davin had neither, and he had to get some advantage fast if he wanted to save Verona from being recaptured by Charette’s twisted henchman.
Finally choosing his poison, he reached up and tried to pull a device down from one of the tables, something that looked like a smaller version of the flechette gun but with a wide, circular drum bolted firmly around the middle. But in lifting it down from the surface, Davin unwittingly dropped a shower of rusting metal discs onto the floor around him, their ringing pinging rolling noise attracting the attention of the man hunting them down.
“Two mice,” the man said, then stopped in his tracks. “Very suspicious, that. Two mice wandering free, without a priest to be seen...”
Then silence descended as the man stopped making any noise whatsoever… no breath, no word, no footstep. To Davin’s ears, he just vanished. Gripping the makeshift weapon, Davin stood up, ready to attack, ready to blast the man across the room into as many little pieces as he dared. But he was surprised to see Charette’s butler, in all his black finery, only a few tables away and coming fast. Levering up the cannon, Davin took quick aim at the stalking predator and pulled the bulky, ratcheting sw
itch.
To his shock, the back of the gun exploded outward in a shower of gears and metal shards, while the front of the gun fired an arrow-like projectile with a twisting, winding metal cord spooling out after it like some kind of giant fishing line. Rolling to one side, Davin watched as the harpoon end of the device zipped past the butler and tore one of Vermeni’s tables in half, sending shower of glass acid tubes flying and shattering in every possible direction.
Dropping the suddenly ember-hot device, Davin scrambled backwards, even as the assassin rounded the edge of the nearest table and neatly leapt over the trailing wire rope as effortlessly as a strolling gentleman might step up over a street curb. Thinking that the evilly grinning man was going to have a fair shot at gutting him, Davin wasn’t prepared for the blistering rain of hot rivet projectiles that blasted the hunter from one side. Chancing a glance, Davin was more than pleased to see Verona holding up some kind of Machinist’s nightmare weapon, firing smoking rivets at the hunter, one after the other, all the while cackling like a playhouse villainess.
Ducking just in time to avoid having one of the fist-sized metal bolts punch him straight through the chest, Verona’s ill-aimed distraction gave Davin the time he needed to make a hard right and go sprinting across to the other side of the room. When her gun finally ran out of rivets, leaving the wall and automatons behind the cowering assassin embedded with nearly two-dozen smoking bolts, Verona let out a sad little sigh of discontentment that the fun was over.
But now the assassin stood up out of where he had been hiding behind one of the tables, holding what looked like a double-handled rotary longdriver. With a cackling laugh, he threw it at Verona and the sharpened end of the thing whickered and whistled just past her ear, sticking its bladed edge deep into the wooden shelves bolted to the wall behind her.
“Weapon, weapon, weapon,” Davin muttered to himself, even as he scanned the tables for something he could just pick up and use. His choice ended up being a lopsided cutting saw mounted on a pair of rough-nubbed handles, with a dual pair of cutting blades mounted at the ends. But even as he turned to where the assassin lurked, Davin barely deflected a flung pry-bar out of the air with the front of his invention. Much to his dismay, the well-thrown projectile wrecked the integrity of the weapon’s utility by folding one blade across the other.
The Fire Cage Page 18
