Of Steel and Steam

by Pauline Creeden et al.

  He told Helena to find some proper clothing for the creature and gave her money for cloth, but that would require her to go into the village again. In the meantime, the pieces and panels of an appropriately warm outfit were laid out on top of a trunk in Helena’s room, cut from spare linens and blankets.

  Had it been a good day though?

  Aurelia sat in front of the fire, alone, tonight. Magnus seemed better. He had gotten sleep, if only because she forced him, had eaten some, had moderated his suspicions and anger as well as he could. It would certainly be easier to fight the symptoms now that he knew he was ill. He was still off, badly off, but that was expected.

  Anything she could do for Magnus would take time, but that did not mean there was nothing to do now. The village was still under threat. Those things in the tunnels were getting out, somehow, and then getting back in to shelter from the daylight. And Aurelia was certain she had already killed one of them more than once.

  There were answers down there to the questions she still did not want to ask.

  Had Magnus created those things in the first place? He must have. The speculation about malicious unseen agents seemed ludicrous. It added too many variables when there was a clear culprit right in front of her. But why, and when? Could the damage to his brain have caused him to build monsters without being aware of it?

  And then, once they were built, did he restore them when they were destroyed? Helena had said they were hard to kill, and there always seemed to be another. Unless it wasn’t new ones appearing, just the same ones returning again and again, killed and restored, killed and restored for years. Could Magnus have done that over and over without knowledge or intent?

  She considered bringing Helena and her pistols, but the young woman’s furious revelation still rang in her ears. Helena would come without hesitation, but she would see in the invitation an attempt to change her mind, to incriminate the man who had become her replacement family. It was too soon to broach the subject again.

  So Aurelia took her shotel and a lamp down into the darkness, once more.

  She should have brought a string, she thought, or a piece of chalk to mark her turns. She had seen the laboratory already, and the crypts, and if she actually had to go exploring, the endless, twisting rabbit-warren might swallow her whole.

  The darkness pressed in, and she felt eyes on her back, but nothing came at her. It was silent in the tunnels, only her footsteps echoing.

  She made a detour into the crypts to close Marcela’s coffin. The weird, opal corpse shimmered and undulated in the light of the lantern, but the light winked out as the shadow of the coffin lid slid across it.

  Aurelia said a wordless prayer for the three women and turned to go.

  Then she stopped and looked back.

  If a morbid-minded man had dark secrets to conceal, where better than inside his own deepest scar?

  A shudder squirmed up her spine and she pushed it away. She’d seen worse than anything that could possibly reside in a coffin. She set the lamp down and shoved the lid of Alicja’s coffin aside.

  He had said his second wife almost seemed as though the serum had been successful. She woke and spoke with him for an hour. The serum had begun to alter her tissues, reacting with and transforming the ennoea inside her. And then it went bad.

  Marcela had woken only briefly. Not long enough to wonder what was happening, to judge by her relaxed body and expression of surprise.

  Alicja received no such mercy.

  The crystallized body was contorted in horror, frozen halfway through the act of sitting up, hands raised, twisting to beg help from someone at her bedside. No wonder Magnus didn’t want the others opened. Other widowers had the consolation of a final viewing, the comforting fact that death resembles sleep. Magnus got only that final moment of terror immortalized.

  But there was nothing worse in the coffin than that. No cache of texts, no secret apparatus.

  Aurelia closed it and moved on to the last.

  Julia. He’d said she had not woken at all.

  The stone lid grated back, and Aurelia frowned. The other two had been interred as they had died, in night-dresses that would have had to be cut away from their rigid bodies. This one was draped with a clean, white sheet. She lifted it back from the face. There was no horror, here. Julia’s cheeks and eyes were sunken, but her expression was peaceful. She simply lay as she had at the very last.

  Aurelia lifted the sheet further.

  “Ah,” she breathed, and let it drop.

  Julia had been pregnant. And Magnus had tried to save the child. Not a pretty operation, even in a body that was not in the process of turning to stone.

  Her stomach lurched. Many men lost children without losing their minds, but few had ever had to chisel a fetus out of its mother’s corpse. That would damage anyone.

  She closed the coffin and let Julia lie in peace.

  No dark secrets there, then, only more questions.

  How could a man who went to such lengths to save his loved ones so casually contemplate murdering another thinking, feeling being?

  Things shuffled and skittered on the edges of her circle of light as she moved back toward the laboratory.

  She had seen it already, and it did not seem equipped to deal with the repeated mass-resurrection of monstrous chimeras, but she had not had a chance to search the other chambers nearby, or to review the journals, which was why she had gone down there, the first time. They might tell her where to look for things Magnus would rather remained hidden.

  Nothing came at her in the darkness, but she shut and bolted the laboratory’s doors before beginning to light the lamps. Now, which of those volumes had he been looking at?

  That one, she thought. A slim book with a brown cover. She took it down and laid it on the workbench beneath the light.

  Magnus was still able to write, but his hands shook, and his clumsy fingers formed letters like a child writing in the midst of an earthquake. Aurelia had to squint hard, but she had enough experience deciphering all manner of obscure writing, and the words came together slowly.

  Unexpected abortion through mishap. I have been prevented from assessing the product thoroughly. Initial impressions: severe malformation, severe lack of muscular strength and motor control, merely animal intelligence. It is likely to be in immense pain, but it may be some time before I am able to euthanize it. The ennoea can still be salvaged.

  Well, he’d had a chance to assess the product, now. Had he decided to let it live?

  She swallowed a sound of revulsion and leafed through earlier pages, but his observations were not particularly revealing. Most of entries read simply Condition unchanged from yesterday. There would be about seven years of those, two and a half thousand days. There would be more journals, many more. And perhaps a different set of journals for each project. The daemon’s history might be recorded separately from whatever had brought about the monsters.

  She picked another book from the shelf at random and opened it.

  And there was a sound.

  That same rising moan came again, echoing through the passages outside. She had almost forgotten about it, or perhaps unconsciously decided it had been the daemon screaming to be released. But the daemon was free and safe above in the castle.

  A gust of air rattled the door on its hinges.

  This was something else, something immediate. Books could wait. This was calling now.

  She set down the journal and picked up the lamp, moving to the bolted door. The latch was cold. She drew it back and stepped out into the corridor, drawing her shotel immediately.

  The sound sank and died, then rose again. Part wind, part voice, part animal howl. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, but she moved until it seemed louder, following it slowly down a side branch of the passage that seemed to curve back around behind the laboratory. She’d have sworn no such passage had existed before.

  Something moved behind her, and she whirled, blade poised to strike, but the gli
tter of eyes only watched her without approaching. She edged onward sideways, unwilling to turn her back on it.

  The maze in the stone was confusing, but she was sure she must have been only a dozen feet or so from the laboratory, from the corner where the glass womb had stood.

  And there was a smell, now, something dank and fetid, living and rotting at the same time, like barnyard and pond scum, tannery and sickbed. There was something wrong about that smell.

  Aurelia blew a sharp breath out through her nose and resisted the urge to cover her face with her sleeve. She needed her arms ready to move.

  The reek led her to another dark opening in the rock, but she could see the hint of a back wall. A chamber, rather than another passage. The horrible moan reverberated in the stone and in her chest.

  She stepped inside.

  Her heart stuttered.

  What was that?

  Overgrown throughout half the chamber was a massive fleshy structure that might once have been a tree. A tree? It pulsed over the floor and up the wall, throbbing across the ceiling with enormous, cancerous burls and twisted limbs… It defied the eye and mind. There in the heart of it, Aurelia thought she saw a face, but the shadows of her lantern shifted, and it was gone again. Then another, high in the corner. Then it was gone. And another, between two growths like orchids or ears, gone when she lifted the light to look more closely.

  She stepped back, appalled and nauseated. And afraid. A glass spout had been shoved into a pulsing vein, attached to a pipe that disappeared through a hole bored in the wall. The glass had cracked, and luminous fluid dribbled down the skin-bark to pool on the floor, spitting and popping with blue-green sparks. Raw ennoea, as vital and as deadly as a lightning strike.

  And in spite of herself, Aurelia was impressed. It was an engine. A great, organic machine generating the substance of Life. No slaughtering of pigs, no days of painstaking extraction and processing, only an endless supply for endless experiments.

  What a shame it had to be destroyed.

  She held her breath and moved closer again, skirting carefully around the puddling ennoea. A touch, a vibration too intense, a static spark, and the volatile substance could react violently.

  The engine was alive, in some sense, to be generating ennoea. And in order for that pierced vein to pulse, there had to be a heart or some other pump structure somewhere in that chaotic mass of mismatched tissues. Most living things had one good spot you could stab in order to kill it. But when you stab a heart, it tends to leak. Blood would be disgusting, but a sudden gush of raw ennoea might simply kill her.

  No, she needed more information before she could act. A way to shut it down without breaching it, some way to collect the ennoea and seal it away safely or neutralize it.

  A bulge near her feet twitched and contracted, and she stepped away hurriedly, watching it in case it should spit poison or extrude a proboscis to catch her. But it split down the center and opened on an eye the size of her entire skull. It swiveled to follow her blindly, and her courage failed.

  She backed from the chamber and ran.

  It was Magnus’s eye.

  Chapter 13

  How?

  How had that thing come to be? What the hell had Magnus made it from? And how did it have his eyes… or at least one of them, grotesquely enlarged beyond any socket?

  She had not imagined that part. Aurelia did not consider herself gifted with a vivid imagination. She might be susceptible to a bit of fear in the dark, an apprehension at strange noises that she fully acknowledged and understood was irrational. She did not see things that weren’t there, and she did not think her mind distorted what she saw.

  That was Magnus’s eye. The left one, which she was more accustomed to see framed by drooping lids, the lower turned slightly outward. Imagination was not among her greater strengths, but she was an excellent observer. She knew that dark brown, a lighter ring just around the pupil, two greenish flecks almost opposite one another.

  That was Magnus’s eye.

  And what did that mean, exactly? Was the engine another daemon, grown from some piece of him and then…

  Then what?

  Distorted beyond recognition, somehow, grown alongside seeds taken from other living things, animal, vegetable, possibly fungal.

  And the end result was an enormous, unfathomable tumor, leaking raw ennoea everywhere. That would be how he was exposed. But that meant he must have built or grown the repulsive thing long before his mind began to go.

  She let herself sink to the floor in front of the fire and ran her hands over her scalp, fingers coming away wet. She would rather have climbed into the bed and hidden beneath the blankets, dignity be damned. But she was cold through and through.

  She’d seen worse, she tried to tell herself, but she could not think when.

  That explained the monsters, though. Not where they had come from, not yet, but nobody was bringing them back when they died. The tunnels were simply so flooded with ennoea, the creatures themselves so saturated, that death could only possibly be a temporary state…

  There was a knock, two soft taps.

  She doubted Magnus would knock if he was in a fury.

  She breathed deep to compose herself and rose to answer.

  It was Helena.

  “I heard you up and moving,” she said, then took in Aurelia’s rumpled and flushed state. “What happened?”

  Aurelia stood aside to allow her in. “I went down to see what I could find out about the monsters.”

  Helena’s lips compressed, but she sat on the edge of the bed and laced her fingers in her lap. “And you found something.”

  “Yes. I know how they keep coming back.” She told Helena what she had seen—told, but did not describe. Helena didn’t need that image in her mind, and she did not need to think Aurelia was being dramatic for her benefit. “It is immensely dangerous and I was disturbed to find it, but I think the only immediate threat it presents is the creatures it keeps resurrecting. And the threat of exposure, but no one is going down there again except me, when I go to destroy it.”

  Helena pinched the end of her braid between her fingers pensively. “Have I been exposed? Is there a way to know?”

  “Almost certainly, but unless you worked with it, breathed it in, you’re not likely to see any harm. It’ll be in the air, in the stone… Perhaps if you lived down there for some weeks, you might worry.”

  “And the daemon? What about Miel? And Henryk?”

  “If it touched them. But they’re not like you and I. Simply being near it shouldn’t do them any harm.”

  “And you? You’ve been down there more than once.”

  Aurelia smiled, but her face felt tense. “Only a few times. But I went closer to the engine than I ought. We’ll see.”

  Helena pulled her legs up and inched away from the edge of the bed, tapping the spot she had vacated. And when Aurelia sat, she took her hand. “And when this thing is destroyed, the monsters won’t be able to come back?”

  Aurelia glanced at their linked hands. “It’ll take some time for the ennoea down there to disperse. Possibly years. But eventually, they’ll stop.”

  “Years,” Helena echoed. “You said they don’t like sun. What do they think of fire?”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “That once this thing is destroyed, we take torches and pistols below and drive them all out of the tunnels into the daylight, then block up the way they were getting in and out. There’s the exposure, but we’d only stay until the job was done.”

  Aurelia nodded slowly. “The tunnels are extensive, and there are several ways in and out, and certainly more that I don’t know of. It might have to be a process over the course of several days, but that’s infinitely better than waiting.”

  “The village might help. They’re terrified of the place, but some I’m sure would brave it if they were promised these things would be gone for good.”

  “There’s certainly strength in numbers. We’ll plan i
t carefully. It’s been a long time since this valley was without fear, hasn’t it?”

  “But there’s a plan now. There never was, before. It’s easier when you know it’s coming to an end.” Helena took Aurelia’s hand between both of hers. “You’re freezing. And you still look horribly shaken. Try to sleep.”

  Aurelia doubted the attempt would be worth much, but she promised she’d make it. She washed and changed, then turned to find Helena had climbed beneath the blankets. She shifted. “It’s my habit to sleep alone.”

  Helena sat up. “Habit or preference?”

  “I’m not sure this is the time for breaking habits.”

  “I’m sorry.” Helena flushed darkly. “I’m so sorry. I thought that… No, I’m very sorry.” She began to untangle herself and climb out of the bed.

  Aurelia stopped her. “I think there’s space enough for two.”

  Helena understood and shifted toward the far side, leaving space enough for two.

  In the early hours before dawn, another knock came. The weather was rising to another autumn storm outside, and the timid sound was almost inaudible, easily confused for rain on the window.

  It came again, and Aurelia opened her eyes, not sure whether she had slept. She tried. She thought she might have dozed, but the image of that eye woke her every time she began to dream. She slid from the bed and wrapped one of the blankets around herself.