Of Steel and Steam

by Pauline Creeden et al.

  Some part of her latched on to the suggestion. She wanted it to be so, that their trouble was external, some villain hiding in the shadows. “It is possible,” she agreed. Possible, but not probable.

  “It is the only explanation.” He set down the cup and picked up a slice of buttered bread, instead, heaping it with jam. “You know my work. You know I’m not sloppy. My space and tools are clean. I wore gloves and an apron, a mask if there was a danger of unwholesome vapors. And after the fire, I have not even handled my materials, myself.” He lifted his hands in front of his face. “The golem has been my hands for years, now. So how would I come in contact with corrupted ennoea in order to be poisoned by it?”

  “Sometimes things go wrong entirely by accident,” she told him gently, but that was not what he wanted to hear.

  “No, I’d have been aware. I’d have noticed a spill or a leak. A reaction gone wrong. If I did not notice, it is because it was concealed from me.”

  With a sudden sick certainty, Aurelia knew where his suspicions were leading him. Why would he not just drink his coffee?

  “After all, her parents were among the first to die when those monsters appeared. Why would she think me innocent when the rest of the peasantry has already decided upon my guilt?”

  Aurelia resisted the urge to slap him. “Helena? You mean the woman who stayed and cared for you when you drove away all others? Have you seen her fire a pistol, Magnus? If she wished to kill you, she could have put a ball through your heart years ago and not wasted so much time. She could have put rat poison in your supper. She could have smothered you in your sleep. She could simply stop feeding you.”

  Shame clouded his features. “No, of course. You’re quite right. But… But she buys our supplies. If someone sold her contaminated goods…”

  Then she’d have been poisoned, too. But Aurelia only nodded. “It’s possible. I’ll begin testing the food stores, if you like. But you ought to eat something and rest. The damage might yet be reversed, but it will be easier if your body is as strong as you can make it.”

  He gritted his teeth and shook his head. “Certainly not. If there’s work to be done, then let us do it.” He took a large bite of the bread and swallowed it. “There. I’m eating, at least. Happy?” And he washed it down with the entire cup of coffee.

  The daemon matured rapidly. Aurelia might almost have said it was growing up, except that it did not grow. By the next morning, it was able to hold its head up, to reach and grasp. By noon, it could sit up unassisted. By evening, it had taken its first step.

  And, Aurelia found, it understood, even if it could not control its tongue well enough to speak. When she and Helena spoke, it listened attentively, face betraying flashes of recognition when it heard a word it knew.

  “How long was it growing?” she asked Henryk.

  He thought a moment, then held up seven fingers.

  “Seven years? You spoke to it during that time?”

  He nodded, averting his eye-lights in embarrassment. “Sometimes,” he said in his rending voice.

  The daemon did not flinch. It opened its mouth and responded with a tiny cricket-chirp.

  Aurelia smiled. “I think it was listening. Certainly enough to have learned something from you.”

  Magnus did not come seeking the daemon on the first day, even after he must have woken. He did not come seeking Aurelia, either, though he must have discovered that the latch of the secret door in the wine cellar had been jammed. Not permanently. His work was important to him, even without the stab of obsession, and when he had begun to recover, they could resume it. But until then, he would need someone with undamaged hands to let him down into the darkness.

  He did not appear for the evening meal, and Helena merely left a tray outside his room.

  The daemon ate sparsely, but with interest.

  What must it be like, Aurelia wondered, to experience one’s senses fully for the first time? It had lived its life in a bubble, the world muffled and dim, and now there was color, texture, flavor, scent. Had it been aware, before? Did it consciously remember Henryk, or was there only the familiarity of a voice heard in your sleep?

  It certainly knew him. It did not seem to dislike or mistrust Aurelia or Helena, but it never reached out for them. It listened to their voices but responded to his on the rare occasions he spoke, body angled toward him, entire attention riveted. It mimicked his movements and studied his reactions.

  And then night had come.

  “Don’t sleep in a chair, again,” Aurelia whispered to Helena. “Take my bed.”

  “At least I did sleep,” Helena replied. “You take your bed, and I’ll sit up, this time.”

  Henryk looked up from tucking the daemon into the bed and glanced between them.

  “I don’t believe you sleep at all, do you?” Aurelia asked him.

  He shook his head.

  “Then we’ll all get a good night’s sleep, since I’ve no doubt you meant to sit up, anyway.” She leaned closer. “Your master is ill,” said in a low voice. “His emotions are unpredictable, and there’s no knowing what might agitate him. If you hear him coming, it would be better both for you and for him if you remove yourselves from here and do not let him see you. Not unless I am near.”

  Henryk nodded seriously, but his expression was skeptical. But then, he was scarcely older than the daemon, himself. He could not have much experience of diseases of the mind.

  Aurelia had some experience, but not with this. She had told an incomplete truth. Perhaps the damage might still be reversed, but she had never heard of it being undone. Ennoea poisoning could be slowed. It could be treated, but no one had ever cured it. Yet.

  She returned to her room and readied herself for the night, turning her back as Helena did the same. The other woman climbed into the bed and waited.

  “I don’t mind sharing,” Helena assured her. “Not at all.”

  Aurelia shifted uncomfortably and sighed. “In a while.”

  Helena pursed her lips, but she lay down and curled up on her side.

  Aurelia watched the woman for a moment, until the moment had become several, and she realized she was looking through Helena rather than at her. She wrapped herself in a blanket and opened one of her cases, removing pen and ink, paper and wax. She smoothed a blank sheet onto the table, uncorked the pot of ink, and dipped the nib of her pen. Then it hovered above the paper, motionless.

  Who was left for her to write to? Of those left, who would know anything about ennoea poisoning? Of those with knowledge, whom could she trust?

  She could leave. She could ride home to her Archive and consult her books. There would be something there, something she had read once and simply forgot. If she left immediately, she could be back inside of a year.

  By which time Magnus could have destroyed himself. And the daemon, and Henryk, and Helena. The entire valley.

  And what if she searched her entire topical index and found nothing? Or she found only a hint of another book in another collection, one that might have been dispersed or burned? Too much time wasted.

  Still, there were others who might know something. Others who had promised to kill Magnus if he returned to his studies. But after the infection had taken root in his brain, even an Orphic agent could not truly blame Magnus for his infractions. At that point, he was only another innocent, seduced and destroyed. If they knew how to heal him, they would do it.

  Her freedom would be the price, of course. If they answered her letter, they would expect her to be there when they arrived. They would take her and hold her indefinitely. They probably would not kill her, but then who would look after the Archive?

  There had to be someone else. Something else.

  The ink in her nib had dried, and she dipped it again.

  She wrote five letters and sealed them with black wax.

  Aurelia woke stiff and sore beside the dying embers of the fire and added more wood. When she rose, Helena was watching her, sitting up in the bed with her knees
drawn up to her chest, wrapped in the heavy blankets.

  “I suppose there’s no point in me riding for the physician,” she said quietly.

  Aurelia shook her head. “I really don’t think so. It’s not the sort of illness the medical schools teach.”

  “Is there anything you can do?”

  “I can analyze it. I can experiment.” Aurelia’s eyes fell on the stack of sealed letters. “There are others whose knowledge may be more recent than mine. You can post those, and some help might come of it.”

  “You don’t sound hopeful.”

  “No? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to worry you.” Aurelia gave the fire another jab with the poker and came to sit on the edge of the bed. “I know how to stop it getting worse. I’m confident in that. But I don’t know yet how to make it better.” She met Helena’s gaze steadily. “I won’t give any false hope, though. I have always believed that a cure exists for every ailment. I am certain one exists for your master. I am not as certain I can find it in time.”

  “In time,” Helena echoed. She sighed and traced patterns on the blanket with her fingertip. “How long do you think that will be?”

  “There’s no way to know.” Not for Magnus, anyway. He was no longer a young man. If treatment was effective, perhaps age would kill him before the illness did. But for those near him… “I don’t think you should stay here”

  None of them should. But Henryk and the daemon had nowhere else to go in a world that would not understand them, and Aurelia had to do what she could to help. Even if she could have abandoned her student, he would eventually find a way back down to the laboratory, and it would all begin again. Leaving would not help him or the people of the village.

  Helena was frowning, though. “I didn’t run when the others did. I won’t, now.”

  “His brain has been damaged,” Aurelia tried. “His mind is not working as it should.”

  But Helena was rising, throwing off the blankets. Then, before Aurelia could even register what was happening, she had thrown off her nightdress, too.

  And all words died in Aurelia’s throat.

  “You didn’t ask how he hurt his hands,” Helena snapped. “You never did ask. When the men came to burn the place, I took a bucket and tried to douse the doors, but they were burning too fast, and the beams in the hall caught. The heat cracked the stone, and one of the beams fell. Not on me, but it caught my skirt and set my clothes alight, and the rug under me.”

  She stared for a moment, almost belligerent, then dropped her chemise over her head and began to dress, covering the undulating expanses of scarring.

  “I lost everything in the span of a year. My entire family, my home, nearly my life. Tell me again to leave the one who saved me, kept and cared for me.”

  Aurelia struggled to make her mouth work again. “I’m sorry,” she managed. She rose, but approaching seemed like too much. “If he cares for you, though, think what it would do to him if he hurt you in a fit brought on by illness.”

  Helena adjusted her kerchief and looked away. “I will think on it,” she said. “But I will not leave.”

  Chapter 12

  Helena had gone out while the sun would protect her, taking the stack of letters.

  Little enough post came through the village, she cautioned, and fewer visitors. It might be weeks before a coach or courier arrived. But she would see if anyone was traveling into Wrocław.

  And that left Aurelia alone, contemplating her need to apologize. She had only given sincere advice. It would be safer to leave. So why did she feel she shouldn’t have said anything?

  The daemon was awake when she returned to Helena’s room, investigating an unlit candlestick with its fingertips. It dragged a fingernail upward through the wax and watched the white curl form.

  “A quiet night?” she asked Henryk.

  The automaton nodded.

  “Did it sleep well?”

  Another nod.

  “That’s good. I think we ought to meet with Magnus, then.”

  Henryk shot to his feet, slashing a hand through the air in a decisive negative. The daemon jumped and stared at him, dropping the candle.

  “It’s more difficult to kill someone you know. I really think he ought to meet you, as well, but that’s your choice.”

  He shook his head and looked around the room for something he did not seem to find.

  Aurelia pulled out her notebook and offered it to him.

  Not if you don’t think you’re killing, he scribbled.

  “Speak if you like,” Aurelia told him. “You shouldn’t be ashamed of your voice.”

  But he continued. If you take a life and put it somewhere else, is that life gone?

  “The life may not be, but the person certainly is. Ennoea is not a soul.” She paused, watching the blue sparks in the automaton’s eye sockets. He’d read his creator’s journals, he said. “Magnus knows that. He knows that specifically because of you. Do you have any memory of the person whose life he gave you? Are you that person?”

  Henryk hesitated, thinking hard on something he had clearly never considered. He shook his head.

  “There. Then to take it from either of you would be killing. I don’t think he’s so far gone that he could wriggle out of that logic. And he has my help, now. There’s no need to steal what we can procure together fairly easily.” She held out a hand. “And if I’m wrong, be assured I will not let harm come to either of you.”

  Henryk regarded her hand dubiously, but to her surprise, the daemon rose and took it. The little creature gave a cricket-chirp.

  “How much do you understand?” Aurelia asked it.

  It chirped again.

  “Probably enough,” Henryk grated. He straightened, nodded, and followed.

  Magnus had set up in the library. At the far end of the room, a door stood open, leading into the smaller chamber they had used as an alternate laboratory before the Orphics destroyed it. The windows had been smashed, and cold air and sunlight streamed in. Aurelia stayed well back.

  “If I am not to go below,” Magnus said, emerging from the wrecked room, “I thought perhaps I might pursue my other studies here. There are substances other than ennoea that are still worth investigation.” His eyes flicked over the daemon and the automaton. “You’ve brought the fruits of my labor to visit me in my desolation.”

  The statement had the flavor of a joke, but it was not the kind of humor Aurelia was used to hearing from him, and she did not know how to respond.

  “I thought you should make your observations as soon as possible, and since you were not in a suitable frame of mind earlier…”

  “Ah, yes. Observations. Notes. I had already made some, of course.”

  He approached, and Aurelia heard the creak of metal beside her as Henryk shifted.

  But the daemon did not flinch. It let its creator peer into its eyes and flex its joints, press his ear to its back to listen to its heart and lungs, awkwardly seek out its pulse with his stiff fingers.

  “It slept soundly,” Aurelia told him. He hummed his acknowledgment. “It’s had milk, bread and butter, roasted pork and onions.”

  “Mm-hmm.” He opened its mouth and nudged its lips aside to examine its teeth.

  “It likes onions,” she added.

  Magnus missed her point. “A preference for strong flavors might indicate a lack of sensitivity of taste.”

  “Or perhaps it likes onions. You used to like strong flavors, back when you still appreciated food as more than mere fuel.”

  He paused and lifted an eyebrow. “Are you trying to say there’s something of me in the creature?”

  He said it as though it was completely absurd, but Aurelia smiled. “There is something of the parent in the child, of the artist in the art. Of course there would be something of the scientist in the experiment.”

  “Hm. That’s a bit too metaphysical for me.”

  “You always were a bit of an atheist.”

  He smirked. “A bit? Have you really been
paying attention, magistrix?”

  There was the humor Aurelia knew. “You’re lucky God finds you entertaining.” She carefully disengaged the daemon from his attentions and led it to sit beside the fire. “It’ll need a name, of course. Especially once we begin work on another. There’ll have to be an easy way to differentiate between them.”

  “I suppose One and Two is more impersonal than what you had in mind.” He held up his hands in a conciliatory gesture to show that it was another joke, but his humor had gone dark and unfamiliar again. “We’ll call her Miel, for now. Does that suit?”

  Aurelia swallowed a harsh negative, because while Miel had been the name of Marcela’s dog, the daemon was she again to him. A small improvement. “Does that suit?” she asked the daemon.

  It chirped.

  “Very well. Miel.” Aurelia glanced back at the automaton. If names were being passed around, it would be an ideal moment for him to introduce himself, but he stood blank and inert, as though waiting for instruction.

  “She likes the Boy, as well,” Aurelia said, gesturing. Henryk’s eye-lights flickered. “He stayed with her last night, as Helena and I were both short on sleep. She seems to have become very attached.”

  That piqued Magnus’s interest. “Oh? A sense of familiarity, perhaps.” He seated himself in the chair beside the daemon and scrutinized it, his face a mask of intense concentration.

  Aurelia watched quietly and let him think. It had to take effort to alter one’s perceptions so far as to make a failure into a living person.

  After a moment, his expression drooped. “It’s a shame that affection will not be reciprocated. At least there are others here to care for her.”

  Henryk did not take his chance, and Aurelia tamped her frustration down hard so it would not show. If there had been any ideal moment to reveal himself, that was it.

  Magnus rose. “Well, shall we make some further observations? Breakfast, perhaps?”

  The day passed slowly in an alternating barrage of optimism and discomfort, understanding and dark, awkward humor, leaving Aurelia exhausted. Magnus gave his daemon a name. He watched Miel eat and took a little nourishment himself. He watched and measured her gait, tested her strength… She’d been unable to move her own limbs, at first, but she lifted books and iron pots and finally one end of the enormous medieval table in the kitchen. He laughed in delight and nearly clapped his hands, remembering only at the last moment that he’d regret it. Then he tried to get her to say her name, and her little cricket, cicada, spring peeper sounds infuriated him until Aurelia feared objects would fly again. But he watched her cling to Henryk and calmed himself. The two of them seemed to earn a sort of reserved approval.