The Fire Cage

by Scott Hungerford

  As the King Serpent began to make a new turn, Davin gripped the oil-slick rail, all while catching a glimpse of the giant engine heel over a little bit as well on its chains — but never enough that its inner workings were interfered with. Even with the shift in momentum, the giant pistons arrayed on either side of the room pumped and ground amidst a forest of branching colored pipes of every size and description.

  Getting moving, and now making far better time in the light cast by the near-constant streaks of lightning emanating from the coils, Davin led Verona forward at good speed along the incline, until the snake’s path leveled out once again. Then, when the catwalk held straight again, they broke into a run, their feet banging off of the catwalk together in nearly perfect time.

  When they reached the end of the path, unlike the other doors behind them, there was no slot for a fire cage to be used to crack the lock. The handle of this door slid opened easily under Davin’s hand, revealing a steep ladder leading up through a hatch in the ceiling. Wasting no time, Davin climbed the first few steps of the ladder, slid the castor-wheeled hatch door open above him, then climbed up into the snake’s attic to check for enemies, more than a little wary of what horrors he might find.

  Above the engine room the sense of vibration and motion was significantly repressed. Davin already felt better on his feet, as if he were standing on somewhat more solid ground, with the terrible sounds of the machines and the music damped out to a significant degree. But even as Verona came up behind him, he got a better look at where they were — and knew he didn’t dare move until he got a better idea of what kind of mad gadgetry was surrounding him.

  Racks of silver balls, each one big enough to barely fit in one of his mother’s washtubs, extended down the length of the chamber for as far as the eye could see. Overhead, more of the candyglass wires were strung along the ceiling alongside additional racks of the glistening globes, casting eerie vibrating reflections on every wall and surface. Looking at the silver sphere closest to him, he could see his and Verona’s reflections standing weirdly upside-down in the mirrored surface.

  “What are they?” Verona asked, as she touched one a little bit, running her fingers over its smooth, oily surface with no small fascination. Davin, looking down the length of the room, noted the larger empty rack in the middle, and imagined without too much trouble how the balls might be easily rolled to the front of Vermeni’s war machine with such an apparatus.

  “I don’t know what they are,” he said. As the snake bumped over something, perhaps a downed tree or a boulder that got in the way, all of the balls jiggled and clacked in their racks, rocking back and forth like a giant set of children’s glass marbles. “But I get the sense that they are a weapon of some kind.”

  “There’s liquid inside them,” Verona stated, even as she knocked on one with her knuckles.

  “You probably shouldn’t be doing that,” Davin said. “Come on. Let’s keep moving.”

  She nodded, then followed Davin through the kaleidoscope constellation of dancing silvery reflections, trying to put aside her fascination for the spheres as he led her towards their goal.

  At the end of the ball room, another hatch led downward. Reaching down and sliding this castor-wheeled hatch back as well, he was suddenly drowned with a new wave of machine noise combined with peals of the screaming, discordant music. But the greater shock was the automaton waiting for them at the bottom of the ladder!

  Startled, Davin reached out his hand, trying to shatter the fire cage before the felon realized he was there. But the mechanical creation, to his surprise, had no fire cage within its heart, and thus no spirit inside. The automaton was empty, just a silent husk standing guard in the serpent’s darkness.

  “There’s nobody home?” Verona yelled after a second, when it didn’t attack, move, or fall down.

  “Nobody is in there at all,” Davin yelled back, relieved. Scurrying down the steep stairs as fast as his feet would take him, then helping Verona down afterwards by holding her firmly around the waist, he saw that the tube corridor before them led to yet another door. But this door had a pair of strange blue lights bracketed to either side of it, much like the ones that had been mounted on the back stoop. Beyond this portal, the music was at its loudest, like a church’s pipe organ being tortured within an inch of its life. Creeping forward, Davin and Verona watched them for any sign that they had been discovered within the King Serpent’s belly, for any waiting death machines or lethal traps that Vermeni might have left behind. But it seemed they were alone, and the moment of destiny lay at hand.

  “Come on,” Davin yelled to her, even as he took his father’s fire cage out of his pocket one last time, placed it within the waiting aperture and opened the door that led to the heart of the beast.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  As the door slid open, blasting the two of them with a cacophony of pipe organ sounds, Davin goggled at what he was seeing. While he had expected to find some kind of control center built into the head of the beast, he was amazed at the majesty of the place, complete with dangling, jingling crystal chandeliers and painted, faded portraits of Vermeni hung on every wall. As their doorway opened onto a landing built high above the command floor, Davin and Verona had to take a couple of steps across the wine-red plush carpet in order to reach the vantage of the carved mahogany hand rails. With the terrible music being played at such a high volume, Davin had to resist the urge to cover his ears rather than grip the banister. But when he saw what lay below, he was glad that he’d steadied his balance on the rail, for nothing more than his grip kept his knees from giving away at the tremendous sight beneath him.

  Vermeni, an automaton tyrant resplendent in his spider-legged machine, was sitting squat in the middle of what looked like a dozen pipe organs all lashed together with hoses and wires, with tiny gouts of steam spraying out of every available crack and crevice. Beyond Vermeni’s mechanical nest, Davin and Verona could see down and out of the wide, open mouth of the serpent, where the lamp-lit landscape passed speedily by. Just ahead, he could see that the snake had just come within sight of the high walls of Agora, and he wondered if they were already too late.

  Below, oblivious to their presence, Vermeni laughed loud enough that Davin could hear him over all of the musical tumult, even as his ten legs and four hands continued to perform an amazing feat of dexterity and precision as he played all of the pipe organs simultaneously. With sounding tubes beyond count running all across the spongy flooring to ducts and hatches ringing the edge of the room like so many mouse holes, it became obvious to Davin how the Serpent’s slithering motions were so skillfully mastered. With Vermeni’s organs driving the music that controlled dozens, if not hundreds of ether-tubes placed all throughout his serpentine juggernaut, he could control the speed and rotation of each of the rotating cylinders, adjust the fuel, and make as much speed as he dared with a single stroke on the keys. Within his nest, Vermeni was the orchestra, the actors, the conductor and the stage all in one, in a grand opera of diabolical evil that posed the greatest threat the Empire had ever seen.

  And from here, on the balcony, Davin knew the fiend was too far away for him to crush his heart. He would have to get closer — then closer still!

  Also seeing that his death machine was approaching the walls of Agora, Vermeni reached across with two of his metal legs and tapped a careful series of notes on one of the smaller organs, his needle-sharp legs dancing across the keys with a delicate touch. With a growling lurch, and the sound of straining girders in the Serpent’s frame taking on a rising load, the head of the snake suddenly skyrocketed upwards, and Davin’s viewpoint of the rushing ground suddenly became a dizzying vista high enough to see all the way over the walls of Agora, and down upon the chimneys and rooftops of the slumbering city beyond.

  As the head turned this way and that, scanning the city walls and the groups of Guards running for their lives, Vermeni turned the head down towards the Lion’s Gate, to where Davin could see the automaton
army just starting to arrive, weapons held at the ready. A pair of horsemen from the city walls charged, swords in hand, ready to cut down the machines — only to be cut down themselves at thirty yards by a blistering wave of flechette fire, rendering the soldiers and their horses to tumbling ruin.

  Cackling, Vermeni swung the head back around again, he could directly see the Emperor’s castle standing proudly by the shores of the Dob. Pulling up a sound hose, a wide-mouthed funnel attached to a sulpher-yellow tube, Vermeni raised the amplifier to his lips with one thick-fingered fist and cleared his metal throat loudly enough to wake every citizen of Agora from their beds.

  “Good citizens of the Empire,” he began, even as the King Serpent grew steadier on its neck, poised majestically above the city’s rooftops with its glowing demon-eyes. “My name is Vermeni zan D’Alabastria, and I would like to introduce myself as your new ruler, as the new Emperor of your rising Empire.” With a triple-tap of one of Vermeni’s free fingers, Davin could hear something unlatch in the ceiling above him, followed by the sound of a set of heavy balls rolling along the racks towards some unknown destination.

  “My soldiers are just arriving to ensure my victory,” he continued. “An entire army of metal warriors created with the capacity to maim and kill on my command. My marvelous serpent also contains powers beyond imagination, as I will shortly display to you in a feat of my unstoppable genius.”

  Davin didn’t wait anymore, but began moving down the carpeted balcony, heading for an elegant staircase that wound down to the organ floor. Keeping his eye out for more metal soldiers laying in wait, he hurried as fast as he could, hoping he could get to Vermeni before he could unleash his madness.

  “For my first presentation, I give you...” Vermeni said, as he tapped another set of keys behind him with one of his rear legs, causing a boiler-trembling pair of dual tones to reverberate within the room, “death, by Mercurial Cannonade...”

  From above him, Davin could hear the sound of a loud ka-chunk, followed by an impossibly loud ratcheting noise, as if a winding clock was gearing up for a monumentally large suicide attempt. Then, with a great whoosh of air it released, and a stream of ten silvery balls flew out into the night, one right after the other, plummeting straight on in a line towards the Emperor’s palace nearly a half-mile away.

  When the wave of shining spheres struck the Eastern Tower, the first explosion’s flash, brilliant in the darkness, nearly blinded Davin, sending him tumbling head over heels down the last few remaining stairs to the room’s sponge-covered floor. As he landed hard on the three-inch thick layer of sponge, the booming pop-kettle reports from each of the ten exploding spheres reached the Serpent’s body. By the time Davin regained his woozy footing, he could see by the King Serpent’s eye-lights that the East Tower of the Emperor’s castle was not just merely damaged by the attack, but was entirely gone, blown to pieces by the mad scientist’s weapon.

  From his vantage by the foot of the stairs, some hundred feet from the villain, Davin raised his hand towards Vermeni’s automaton, questing for the heart — but the monster was still too far away from him to attack. He must get closer still!

  But Vermeni felt the attempt... and the madman’s metal head whipped around on its castors, searching around him with his single remaining eye for any sign of the biting mouse. Davin, cowering behind the banister like an errant child, desperately hoped that the madman wouldn’t see him. After a second, then two seconds, then three seconds of intense scrutiny, Davin was sure that Vermeni had discovered him — when Verona, high atop the balcony, began to sing.

  Shocked, Vermeni’s head whipped around, his good eye glaring with hatred at the pretty voice. Dropping his amplifier tube, Vermeni spun around in his seat and raised his right fist towards the meddling girl, meaning to stop her before she could trigger any of the singing tubes scattered throughout the delicate machinery. Davin watched with horror as the monster’s hand dropped down off of its hinge and the barrels of the lethal repeating flechette gun slid into view. Even as Verona dodged aside, Vermeni opened fire, chewing up the banister, walls, and his own treasured portraits in an effort to quell the singer’s deadly voice.

  Davin made his move, dodging across the cables, trying to avoid twisting an ankle on the springy stuff laid in-between. Going down on his knees, he slid into place behind one of the side pipe organs, now no more than a dozen feet from the beast, hopefully out of sight of Vermeni’s one good remaining eye. Above him, Vermeni stopped firing, as if he was getting his bearings on his target, or maybe seeing whether the girl was still alive or not.

  “Show yourself!” Vermeni demanded. “Show yourself, or I’ll demolish every building in the city, and the deaths of the Emperor and all his good citizens will be on your head!”

  As Davin prepared himself, and he started to feel once again for Vermeni’s beating heart, he heard the sound of a piece of glass cracking on the landing. Chancing a look up above, he saw Verona bravely starting to stand up behind a section of splintered railing, beautiful and proud in her wine and oil spattered dress.

  “Where is the boy?” Vermeni demanded. “Where is Mercuri’s get?”

  “Go to hell,” she said, nodding subtly to Davin, gambling everything that it was either her time, or Vermeni’s.

  “I’m right here!” Davin said, standing and stepping out from behind the console, his will and his might already latching onto the giant fire cage nestled in the Vermeni’s heart. “Die, fiend, die!”

  As the gigantic gun began to swing down toward Davin, even as Davin’s own arcane power wrenched down on Vermeni’s heart, a chain of flechettes began spitting out of the barrel of the descending weapon, chewing up the wood paneling on the walls. But Davin was faster still, and he yanked down hard on the old man’s fire cage just as the gun was twisting to bear down on his own body, with hundreds of its errant rounds severing tubes and pipe organs in his desperation to destroy his rival’s last heir.

  But Vermeni lost the race, his precious fire cage cracking and sundering under the strength of Davin’s conviction. With an anguished stream of shrieking steam, the metal machine collapsed amidst the keys, hoses and pedals, unmoving, lifeless, without the slightest trace of animation.

  “Are you all right?” Davin yelled.

  “For the moment,” Verona yelled back. “But I think all that is about the change…” Much to Davin’s horror, without Vermeni’s skill to balance the huge machines below, the great serpent began to fall forward with speed, straight towards the walls of Agora. Without the constant upkeep of the madman’s song, the King Serpent’s head began to descend, pulled down by its own weight towards the city below.

  “Hang on!” Davin yelled, even as he made to put both arms around the pipes of one of the massive steam organs. He caught a glimpse of Verona, terrified, dashing a couple of footsteps to a remaining banister post and clinging to it with her arms and legs with all her might.

  To his horror, the ground rushed up upon them with a great roar — and the impact as the Serpent’s neck struck the great wall of Agora shook every bone in Davin’s body. Plunging downward, all Davin could see out the opening of the snake’s mouth was shaking, vibrating tumult. He closed his eyes and prayed for the first time in his life to the Fourteen Saints, prayed that he and Verona would somehow survive the coming ordeal.

  The crushing hit collapsed the inner shell of the Serpent, and decapitated its head from the rest of its body. Helpless as a doll in a windstorm, Davin felt himself flying up through the air for a time, then came down hard on something metal and heavy with far too many sharp corners for his liking. When his body finally stopped rolling, coming to a stop amidst a field of pipes and debris knocked loose by the terrible impact, Davin was already knocked to black by the terrible concussion from the Serpent’s fall.

  .oOo.

  Shadows amidst daylight; the peaceful quiet of morning, with birds singing in the distance. The smell of fresh dew and machine oil with not a little smoke and steam thrown in for
good measure. Hungry, sore, and still quite tired, Davin opened his eyes to see a remarkable sight.

  It was the statue of gentle Rosella, the Saint of mercy and small favors, untouched by the serpentine carnage that otherwise crushed through the Marble garden. He was laying on the grass at her feet, upon a cloth stretcher that felt as marvelous to him as the softest bed in the world, with a pair of Abbey physicians attending to his many injuries.

  “Verona?” he managed to whisper, before he realized that two of his back teeth were missing. His mouth tasted like blood, which didn’t really concern him. His mouth tasted like he was alive, and he liked that quite a bit.

  “She’s here,” Rajon said from beside him. “But she’s not much better than you.”

  “Good,” Davin said. “Wait. You’re alive too?”

  “And McCarthy at that,” Rajon added. “Though I can’t say the same for his horse. Old Bessie might need some fixing once we find all the pieces.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Davin said sleepily. “I’ll fix it.”

  “You just rest,” Rajon said with a touch of amusement in his voice. “But the Emperor is going to want words with you when all this is over.”

  But Davin zan DeLorenzo was already asleep, slumbering on the grass at Rosella’s feet as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Nox nox?”

  “Lumina,” Davin answered, but the candyglass lights in Mercuri’s main laboratory didn’t light this time.

  While the caverns below Mercuri’s estate house had survived the flood with minimal damage, the machines that powered the candyglass lights down in Vermeni’s quarter were beyond reach. Apart from finding the metal doors leading up to the laboratories closed by some automatic process, the gentle uphill slope from Vermeni’s underground lair up to Mercuri’s preserved home had foiled the water’s rise. But the method by which the lights had been lit, by whatever machine or engine Vermeni and Mercuri had devised together so many years ago to light the candyglass strands, was buried and drowned under tons of rubble.