“This place is a maze,” Verona complained. “Every time we take a corridor, there are three new ones waiting for us at the end of it.”
Davin nodded; he was also getting frustrated at how long it was taking to thread the maze.. After passing doors labeled with interesting descriptions like ACTIVE ORGANICS and VITAE SALON, Davin kept hoping they’d get luckily enough to just stumble upon the door he was looking for. “The halls don’t make any sense either. Some gently rising, some gently falling; I get the sense we’re moving from level to level with tangles of rooms caught in-between like so many seeds in the rind.”
“So we keep searching,” Verona said. “Charette has to be in here somewhere. I just hope we don’t get too lost.”
A few minutes later, after another dead-end and a loop through a series of dusty, abandoned storerooms, Davin watched with curiosity as all the lights dimmed at the same time, and stayed dim. Stopping Verona for a moment, he listened to the growing machine noises rumbling through the tunnels, and the roaring sound of the turbine engines starting to rush somewhere up ahead.
“The Electric Death?” Verona asked.
“Or something like it,” Davin replied. Moving just a little faster now, the two of them cut down a couple of adjoining hallways following the unmistakable reverberating whine. More than once, he passed another staircase leading up to the surface and safety, to the DAYLIGHT LABORATORY or the ROSE ROOM. But even with escape being so close at hand, Davin knew his course. By the determined look on Verona’s face, it looked like she knew the course as well, and she was prepared to use her piece of pipe to take care of anything that got in her way.
Now the turbine whine was at its highest, and Davin could feel the corridor floor trembling beneath his feet, sending a dull rumble through his bones that made him feel like his teeth were going to start chattering together at any moment. Just up ahead, the corridor opened up, becoming twice as wide and high, with rows of central brick support pillars marching down the middle of the brick-lined space. Keeping an eye out for guards, metallic or otherwise, Davin dodged alongside a row of candyglass coffins sitting parked beneath one wall, each placed beneath a series of numbered brass plaques. While the coffins all seemed empty, Verona still took a risky moment to check every one, to ensure that there were no living occupants or misplaced fathers trapped inside.
Creeping forward along the wall, taking careful cover behind one of the protruding columns, Davin caught his first glimpse of Charette, bent over some monstrous device sitting amidst the generators and turbines of the Electric Death. Still oblivious to their presence, she was working with a longdriver on something that looked more like a giant metallic octopus than anything else he could fit to describe. At first the six-foot high cabled contraption seemed little more like a tangle of shining hydraulic struts bolted to a workbench, like a deranged surgery table with far too many feet. But the single arm, complete with a wrist and fingers, seemed completely out of place.
Squinting against the flashes of the sporadic discharge lightning ripping from coil to coil above, Davin visually followed three thick black wrinkled hoses down from where dangled down from the shadows above, to where they connected with the machine at three seemingly random points, each locked down tight onto chuck-nozzle points. With at least ten legs, the thing seemed less like a spider, and more like an automaton turned inside out and backward with no hope of ever coming together again.
Davin turned to Verona, trying to get a sense if whether she knew what they were looking at. Instead, she was looking across the way to where a brass automaton sat in one of the lightning chairs, sitting motionless amidst the flickering candyglass light.
“Is it Vermeni?” Verona whispered, her voice barely audible over the rising whine of the generators.
“I think so,” Davin said, just loud enough for only Verona to hear.
“Is he dead?”
Davin chanced a look, but couldn’t tell from here whether the Teutonic automaton was dead or alive, working or broken. But after a few moments of sensing outward, he made his best guess that the fire cage within was flickering with power, and that it felt like there was nobody inside.
As Charette stepped around the machine once again, putting her back to them now, Davin saw something that might be a head reclining at the back of the contraption. But more importantly, he caught a glimpse what he hoped was the golden heart he’d created — if not felt it reverberating deep in his chest in that same moment, as if the metal heart were beating in his own flesh-and-blood body.
Not realizing that he’d closed his eyes, Davin opened them again and shook his head a little bit to clear the mental cobwebs. Davin realized he’d almost missed his moment, with Charette’s back still turned to him, and hoped that he still had a chance to sneak up behind her before she knew he was even there. Moving out into the room, hammer in hand, he began to skulk his way over to where the scientist was kneeling in order to give her a swift rap over the head. But, to his chagrin, the scientist stood and spun around before he and Verona could even make it halfway across the chamber.
Ready to charge, ready to fight, Davin was just about ready for anything except Charette’s instinctive reaction. Pivoting in her rubber boots, her white coat flaring out with her motion, she spread her arms wide as if she were protecting the helpless machine from a horrible slavering monster.
“Don’t,” she warned him, in such an odd tone that he actually looked down quizzically at his hammer, wondering if it had any mechanical, explosive, or magnetic properties he didn’t know about.
“Don’t what?” Davin asked, feeling a little befuddled at her uncharacteristic reaction.
“Move away from the machine, Charette,” Verona warned as she stepping up to Davin’s side, pipe in hand, “or you’ll get what’s coming to you sooner than you like.”
Charette relaxed her shoulders a bit, then set her hands down on her hips as if she were about to give them a stern motherly lecture. “It’s not nice to sneak up on people. How did you get out?”
“Altius couldn’t stand the sight of blood,” Verona yelled, taking a moment to curtsy daintily in her bloodstained clothes.
“And your butler got stuck in the lab,” Davin added with a smirk. He made a motion to step forward, but Charette took a step back to the machine, arms spread wide, warning him with a shake of her head not to get any closer.
“I’m proof against the lightning,” she called out, “but you two aren’t. I’m sure none of us wants to watch either of you get cooked by twelve thousand units of hydrostatic charge.”
“Free Rajon,” Davin demanded. “Let him go.”
“And Davin’s father, too,” Verona said, just as fiercely.
“You can have Vincent,” Charette said, throwing them a bone. “But Rajon is mine.” Flashing a quick glance over her shoulder, Davin saw her check one of the dials, barely repressing a giveaway smile that would have cost her a round of bets at the gambling table. Davin cocked his head and looked over at the automaton in the chair, then back over at the giant device in front of them.
“It’s really Vermeni in the machine, isn’t it?”
“Yes...” Charette said hesitantly. “I’m making the final adjustments upon my father’s masterpiece now.” Looking down, Davin looked up at her, and he could feel his father’s soul tucked up against her breast. He could feel the tiny essence shelled inside the prison, colored like the last vestiges of fading light at the end of a cold winter day. Over by Charette, he could feel another tiny fire as well in her pocket, like a tiny ember trapped in a flint-lighter. But the spirit in the giant machine, the soul at the heart of the tangle of hoses and struts and hydraulic legs, that one was dark as pitch. Davin knew it had to be Vermeni; of that he had no doubt.
“This is your last chance,” Davin demanded. “Let Rajon go, put him back in his body, and bring him to me alive and well,” Davin said as pointed his hammer at the machine, putting all his cards on the table. “Or I’ll smash that bloody heart into scra
p.”
Charette drew in her breath and took a half-step towards him, unconsciously keeping herself between Davin and her precious machine. “I won’t let you do that.”
“Let Rajon go, now, or I’ll destroy the heart with my power,” Davin bluffed. “I swear I will.”
Her face went white with shock; she stopped as rigid as any automaton. “Please, Davin. Please don’t.” Reaching slowly into her pocket, her hands trembling, she pulled out the other fire cage and clenched the tiny thing in the gloved fingers of her hand. “This is Rajon. I’ll do it. I’ll free him. I’ll do as you ask.”
“Do it now!” Verona barked.
Charette closed her eyes and raised her trembling hands, concentrating, even as Davin wondered if he could really snuff out the heart with some kind of wishful thought. Charette certainly seemed to think so. But while he was tempted to try, to his best recollection from his time in the Electric Death, she seemed to be performing the same kind of ritual that she did when she stole Rajon’s spirit away in the first place; he could only hope that her intent was true.
After a few more moments, Charette opened her eyes. “It’s done. Rajon should be waking any moment.” Davin blinked, astonished that she’d actually done the deed. The fire cage in her hand was empty.
“Where is he?” Verona asked, a little too desperately.
Charette gestured with a nod of her head. “Down the hallway behind me. In the Cold Room by the stairs.” By then Verona was on the move, heading down the hallway with as much desperate speed as her feet would allow.
“Verona!” Davin yelled, trying to stop her, trying to keep her from leaving him alone with his prisoner. But she didn’t pay any heed. Verona just kept going, down the hall into the shadows. As she vanished, just as Davin was about to put Charette to the final question, the giant automaton stirred on the table — and then stood up to its full fourteen foot height!
“You fool!” Vermeni shouted, even as he rose from his feigned slumber. As Davin stumbled back, badly startled by the machine’s sudden animation, he watched with horror as the thing’s head swiveled around on castors, revealing a human face cast entirely of brass with flaring blue lightning sockets in place of eyes. With strong shoulders, two four-cord muscled automaton arms, and a chest cavity as big as a steamer trunk, the entire upright body suddenly made anatomical sense in Davin’s eyes. It wasn’t an octopus at all, but a human torso attached to nearly a dozen four-foot long foot spikes. In perfect control of his amazing machine, Vermeni spun around like a scrambling spider, prepared to face the last survivor of Mercuri’s family line.
But the worst thing that Davin saw was the heart, the beating metal heart sitting locked in its chest within a cross-hatched grillwork of bolted iron. Davin could hear it banging away as it allowed Vermeni’s control of all the spider-machine’s limbs. As Davin tried to get a better look at the device, as he tried to get a sense of the machine’s core, to see if he could somehow kill the heart in the same way he’d made it, a metal carapace slithered down from one side of the beast’s chest, locking the heart beneath two inches of thick body armor.
“Father!” Charette yelled. “Run!”
“You?” Vermeni bellowed in a metallic, booming voice, his twin lightning eyes staring right down at the young man cowering beneath him, useless hammer still clenched in one hand. “You’re the spitting image of Mercuri, by a hair. I never thought you’d make it this far.”
“Father!” Charette warned. “He has the talent! You have to go!”
Vermeni turned his machine upon his own daughter, the inch-thick fingers at the end of one of its arms clenching in an angry, massive fist just in front of her face. “You will tell me to do nothing, daughter. You freed Rajon? Just like that, after everything I told you to do? You fool!”
“It was to buy us time!”
“Your meddling bought me nothing, you stupid child. For too long Rajon has meddled in my affairs, and you’ve freed him to harass me again!”
Davin, experimentally raising up his hand like some kind of spirit-charlatan, reached for Vermeni’s heart, felt for it, quested for it, tried to get some kind of psychic grip on the one invaluable piece that would cripple the death machine if it broke. But Vermeni spun right back to him with his hand dropping down limply at the end of its wrist, swinging out on a hinge. An eight-nozzled flechette gun ratcheted out of the wrist-port, with the tip of the barrels pointed right in Davin’s face. Davin suddenly lost all his focus to dowse for the heart, and instead had to concentrate solely on not pissing himself.
“Wait!” Charette shrieked, grasping the barrel of the weapon with both hands, like a child pleading with her father not to shoot a favorite pet.
The lightning blue eyes turned towards her, in such a way that the shadows on the automatons forehead seemed to make his forged eyebrows furrow. “Is he something to you, daughter of mine?”
“He has...” Charette stammered, trying to think of an appropriate response. “Possibilities. He made you the Flame Heart. He can make more. For you… and for me.”
“But now I won’t need another fire cage.” Vermeni’s arm clanked loudly as the sound of a fresh load of darts loaded into the waiting tubes. Davin, smelling the heavy scent of freshly machine oil wafting out of the barrel of the weapon, scurried back a little bit more, his heart pounding up in his throat before the giant’s wrath.
“But he is Mercuri’s grandson.”
“I had Mercuri killed,” Vermeni said dispassionately. “I ordered you to kill Vincent. I can kill this one as well, without as much as a thought as killing a fly.”
“Wait a minute,” Davin said, getting his fire back. Standing up back to his full height, no longer cowering, he held his hammer in one hand, bold before the giant. “You killed my grandfather? You killed Mercuri?”
Vermeni nodded. “I grew tired with refusing his requests to build toys and distractions. I needed weapons to undermine the Empire’s fledgling authority so soon after we lost the war. He balked; I applied pain and pressure. Ultimately, he folded mortally under the duress, as a casualty of nothing more than his own foolish, stubborn pride.”
“Father,” Charette begged, giving Davin a warning look that he should really shut up, at this very instant. But Davin didn’t shut up. Instead, he stepped up and clanged the front of the automaton’s flechette tubes with his hammer, getting the old man’s attention.
“You killed Mercuri.” This time, it wasn’t a question. It was a statement.
Vermeni lowered the gun, leveling it at Davin’s chest for a clear shot. “Drop the tool, boy, before I do something you’ll ultimately come to regret.”
“Say it.” Davin challenged him.
“Fine then,” Vermeni said, with a mocking laugh. “I killed Mercuri zan DeLorenzo,” he announced, to all the world and all the Saints. In a reflex, Davin stepped back and raised the hammer, even as Charette pulled down hard on the giant automaton’s arm, trying to prevent her father from blasting the boy’s body into pieces with a killing barrage.
“You dare thwart me, daughter” Vermeni hissed, his head ratcheting down to face Charette. “You dare stand before my will, now, when I am my strongest?”
“You can’t kill him,” Charette begged. “I need him. For the work. To do the things we can’t do. Light and dark together, just like in the times of old.”
“To hell with your work,” Vermeni said. “To hell with the light. Kneel and pay respect to your father, girl, or I’ll find myself another daughter that will.”
As her eyes went wide with shock at his threat, Davin took the opportunity. Throwing the hammer overhand, he watched as it twirled twice end over end — until it smashed right through the broad blue globe of the automaton’s blazing eye!
.oOo.
Verona, tears running down her face, ran down the hallway, down away from where Davin held Charette at bay. Turning into the first doorway, throwing open the recessed door with abandon, she was blasted by a wave of surprisingly chilly air, her br
eath frosting in the ice-cold chamber. Astonished, she looked around the sizable workroom, noting the large ice-covered metal boxes placed every few feet, and the frost-covered black hoses that ran between them all. But even more shocking to her were the lines of candyglass coffins, arranged all in rows, on numbered racks against the back wall going up to the ceiling. There had to be hundreds of them, with a resident in every one, their body preserved in an icy stasis.
“Father!” she yelled, even as she made her way along the floor, trying to guess which of the stasis chambers held Rajon’s body. In all of her years of wondering about the power of science, she had never seen anything as horrible as this. So many people, frozen in place like fish waiting for the winter thaw, all kept alive by some diabolical process beyond the scope of her knowledge of either sorcery or science.
Checking this coffin, then that one, she looked into the scarred faces of thieves, murderers, rapists and blackhearts, all dressed in plain gray cotton prison garb. Men from all walks of life, every last one of them bore the crossed-lock sigil tattooed on their cheek, the Imperial mark indicating them as men beyond redemption. A collection of Stonegate Prison’s finest, all slumbering on the edge of death in the icy cold, Verona had an urge to just start smashing the coffins one by one until she found her father and pulled him back out of Death’s cold embrace.
Finally, by the back of the room, she found a coffin with a shape inside wearing clothes other than prison whites. Opening up the coffin’s lid with a misty hiss, she was shocked to find that it wasn’t Rajon within, but a gentleman in civilized clothes laying in state, as if resting perfectly as peace. His signet ring was marked with a stylized A. She surmised that he must be Mr. Aston, the Warden of Stonegate Prison, already transferred to one of Vermeni’s killing machines.
The Fire Cage Page 20
