Stupefying Stories: August 2014

by Alison Pentecost

  Cormann had private conversations with members when he wished to discuss something unpleasant, so it was with very little surprise that the younger Meister’s greeting was cool and abrupt. “Please, sit, Danos.”

  “Meister Van Hocht, or ‘Brother VanHocht’, if you please.” VanHocht sat himself in the heavy oaken chair across from Cormann and did his best not to glower.

  Cormann was a man with impeccably waxed moustaches and permanently sweaty palms. Van Hocht suspected a connection, but never spoke it. Cormann was several decades younger than Van Hocht and very popular; he made spirit clocks and spring-watches, and wore his finest works upon his person, tucked into the various pockets of his brightly-colored doublet. He had clocks that measured time, but also those that measured weather and windspeed and even the moods of those around him. This one he fished out of his pocket and checked, thin fingers plucking at the end of one moustache. “I really cannot see why you would be angry with me, brother. Surely I and, by extension, the rest of your brothers are the ones injured.”

  VanHocht snorted. “What injury have I done you? I pay my dues and I stay clear of the guild’s business. You and the council made it clear that those were your wishes, and I have obeyed them. Have you made an old man hobble down here just to tell me again how much you dislike me?”

  Cormann smiled weakly. “It isn’t that the guild dislikes you, brother—far from it. You are our most senior member, by Hann! You should be sitting on the council; gods, man, half the council of Meisters were your Lehrlings!”

  “Their respect for their elders is overwhelming, as always.” VanHocht tapped his cane against the floor and looked at Alphod’s Table. He could see a storm brewing off the coast of Veris. Tiny fleets of merchant ships, their sails like grains of sugar spread across the blue expanse of ocean, altered their courses to make for safe harbors.

  Cormann sighed. “That’s just it, Danos—you treat us like arrogant children, no matter how old we get. We’re supposed to be your peers; those on the council aren’t journeymen anymore. We’re Meisters, just like you.”

  “And yet you spend all your time making pointless toys or pedestrian tools. You’re just a pack of money-grubbing merchants trying to sell whatever shoddy nonsense you have on your shelves to whatever fool walks through your door.”

  Cormann held up his hands. “I’m not having this argument with you again, Danos. It isn’t why I called you here, anyway. It’s a matter of your dues.”

  “Increased them again, have you? The cost of wax gone up, or have you some fool watch that tells you when to do it?”

  Cormann frowned. “Did you really expect that we wouldn’t notice?”

  VanHocht blinked. “Eh?”

  “Your second shop, Danos. The one you so cleverly hid across town—the one on Satcher Street. How long has it been open?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Cormann fished a piece of parchment from one of his many pockets and spread it out on the table, obscuring most of Akral and part of Eretheria. It was a copy of the guild bylaws or, more accurately, a copy of a part of them. Cormann pointed to a statute and read. “Any guild member opening an additional shop must increase their dues by not less than 25% and not more than 50%, this increase going into effect three months from the opening of said shop.”

  “I have no other shop. This is ridiculous.”

  “Look, Danos, you may think we’re all children and worthless hacks and whatever, but we aren’t stupid. The council has had enough of you spitting on them for all these years, and this is the last straw.”

  VanHocht slammed his cane into the ground. “I have no other shop! What nonsense is this?”

  Cormann leveled a moist finger at the old golemsmith. “I’ve seen you there with my own eyes. My Lehrling bought a golem from you there—it’s your work, VanHocht. I’d know your work anywhere.”

  VanHocht stood up, his knees screaming with the effort. “I’ve had enough of this.”

  “You’ll pay another fifty percent, Danos, or you’ll be thrown out of the guild.”

  “What!” VanHocht’s mouth popped open. “You can’t do that! I’ve been a member since…since…since before you fools were born!”

  “We can and we will.” Cormann stood as well, his fleshy cheeks quivering. “I didn’t want things to go like this, Danos, but I remember now why we asked you to stay away. You’re nothing but a selfish, angry old relic who still thinks what we do is some kind of calling. It’s not, Danos! We’re a business; we’re here to make a living for our families. If you can’t respect that…”

  “No!” VanHocht brandished his cane at Cormann. “I cannot!”

  He was standing outside Alphod’s Nook, now, and other members of the guild—Gesellen, Lehrlings, and even one or two other Meisters—stared at him with open-mouthed shock. No one yelled at Meister Cormann; everyone loved the watchmaker. VanHocht glowered at them all and then stomped out, his cane tapping sharply against the floor.

  ¤

  Satcher Street was a long walk—too long a walk for VanHocht, really. He felt as though everything beneath his knees was about to twist off the bottom of his legs like pieces of over-worn metal, but he had to see what Cormann was talking about, anyway. With a heavy scowl, he dug in his pockets for a bit of silver and hired himself a coach.

  There was some doubt in VanHocht’s mind that the rattling, bumping coach with its threadbare, flattened cushions and un-upholstered birchwood interior was any more comfortable than the walk might have been, but at the very least it allowed him some time alone to think on his myriad miseries.

  How could the guild do this to him? It was bad enough they undercut his prices with their cheaply made gadgets, pushing an old man to the brink of bankruptcy. Now they were going to cook up some nonsensical story and toss him out? Why? Without his guild membership, he couldn’t even legally practice his art. He would be turned out onto the street, thrown in debtor’s prison, or worse things his mind could scarcely contemplate, and at his age, too!

  It all came down to jealousy, of course. VanHocht was something puerile laborers like Cormann could never understand; he was an artist. The ‘Artful’ part of the Guild of Artful Builders used to mean something. When he was a Lehrling, VanHocht remembered being taught that golemsmithing and artificing was more than simply making arcano-mechanical objects. It was about expression, about…about Truth. “Yes,” he muttered to himself, “we, the artificers, hold a mirror to the world, so that mankind may see his works, and judge them good or ill according to the merits.”

  It was a calling, a gift. VanHocht bunched his arthritic knuckles together and growled his arguments to an imaginary Cormann seated across from him. “Consider Alphod’s Nook! Think on the significance of that wonderful table, you dolts! What is that, if not art? Its meaning is greater than any value you could place upon it; it shows us our own world and how small we are! It tells us the Truth about ourselves!”

  VanHocht felt his heart pounding in his chest; he was altogether too upset. An artist too poor to make his art, an old man too old to wait for a better time. He thought on his workshop, filled with great works that would never be finished. He would spend his last years tinkering away at menial golem to sell for cut-rate prices just to feed himself, with nary a moment for anything more. Whatever greatness he once possessed had now passed. Meister VanHocht, once the greatest of his generation, would be buried by lesser golemsmiths and dull watchmakers and forgotten before the dust had settled atop his grave.

  The coach let him out in front of a small storefront with a narrow display window and a bright green door. The sign read “Artifactory and Golemsmithy; Meister DanosVanHocht, proprietor”. VanHocht froze as soon as he stepped out. He looked back at the coachman. “How did you know?”

  The coachman shrugged beneath his greatcoat. “It’s yours, isn’t it? Seen you through the window, Miester. Did you want to go somewhere else?”

  VanHocht shook his head, his mouth hanging open. The
coachman rode away, leaving him before the store, too stunned to move. How was this…?

  An impostor, then. Someone trying to defame him. Perhaps it was a simulacrum in this shop—an illusion stitched together by sorcery—installed by some Akrallian invoker in the pay of the guild. VanHocht wouldn’t put it past them, the sharp-eyed weasels.

  In the window was a series of basic golem, as well constructed and lovingly engraved as VanHocht’s own. He looked them over quickly, noting that whoever had perpetrated this fraud knew a thing or two about the discipline. The centerpiece of the display, though, was enough to make the old man curse: a mechanical dragon, elegant and lithe, its wire-thin skeleton covered over with dyed hydra scales, its garnet eyes blazing in the light of the streetlamps.

  Had VanHocht been a younger man, he would have kicked in the door. As it was, he slammed it open and struck it with his cane once, just to make his fury clear. The shop was well lit and set up in much the same way his own was—catalogs and sketchbooks on the counter, an array of frames and faces for golem of various size lining the walls. The similarity only made VanHocht more angry then he had been before. “Thief!” He shouted, and rapped the lion’s head of his cane against the counter. “Show yourself! The true Meister VanHocht demands to see you!”

  A man emerged from the back, ducking through the curtain that separated the store from the workshop. He was old and precise, with bony fingers and a sharp nose. A pair of magnifiers was perched atop his brow and his apron showed signs of grease and charcoal. The man looked exactly like VanHocht himself. Exactly.

  The two VanHochts blinked at one another for a few moments. The one behind the counter at last spoke. “Ah, hello.”

  “Are you a simulacrum?” VanHocht—the real VanHocht, or so he told himself—asked of the apron-wearing doppelganger.

  “No, I am not.”

  “That is not proof.” VanHocht countered, and, reaching out with his cane, prodded the man with the tip. He was as solid as a man should be, if not more.

  The fake VanHocht held up his hands. “Please, Meister, I can explain.”

  VanHocht pointed at the dragon in the window. “That is my design! You stole it!”

  “Impossible.”

  VanHocht threw open the gate and came behind the counter. “What else have you robbed me of? Eh? My dragon, my store, my face…”

  The fake VanHocht put a hand on VanHocht’s arm. “Please, calm yourself.”

  “UNHAND ME!” VanHocht’s cane struck his double across the face. It was a reflexive action—the knee-jerk blow of a man seething with rage. The false VanHocht cried out and, clutching his eye, fell backwards.

  His cries were those of a man.

  Van Hocht looked down at the lion’s head of his cane and saw its face smeared with blood. His whole body trembled. “Gods…what have I done?”

  The mirror image of himself—also an old man, also with weak knees, also with swollen, arthritic knuckles, clung weakly to the shelves behind the counter, trying to pull himself upright. He moaned as VanHocht moaned on those cursed winter mornings where the evening’s chill nestled into his bones and would not be dislodged.

  He had assaulted an old man with a weapon—he, Meister VanHocht, eldest master of the Guild of Artful Builders. If Cormann did not see him expelled for the extra shop, he would certainly be expelled for this. VanHocht stumbled away from the scene of his crime, the groans of his doppelganger echoing in his head like the tolling of the Headsman’s Bell. His heart jerked and throbbed in his chest; his whole body seemed to tighten, as a piece of wire being wound around a peg.

  His vision clouded at the edges until all VanHocht could see were the panels of the boardwalk. His breath came in short, sporadic bursts. “Carriage…” he gasped, “I…I need to go home.”

  He tried to look up, to wave for one of those cursed coachmen to hop down to help. In the act of lifting his head, however, the world spun. He felt himself falling to the ground, his head cracking off a tether-rail. He heard shouts and the worried snort of a horse. He tried to rise, but there was no strength left in him. He was limp as a golem on his workbench. In a half-dream, he saw his own face looming over him, and heard his own voice chasing him down wide, endless corridors until, at last, he lost it in the shadows.

  ¤

  VanHocht awoke lying upon a table lit by a half-dozen feylamps. Leaning over him, the false VanHocht, his face now marred with a purple bruise swelling above his temple, flicked his magnifiers back upon his brow and smiled. “Do you know what year it is?”

  VanHocht blinked. “The tenth year of Polimeux II. What kind of question is that?”

  “How old are you?” The doppelganger’s smile did not fade. It was like gazing at a mirror that inverted one’s expression to its opposite.

  “I am seventy-six. What is the meaning of this absurdity?”

  The false VanHocht stepped back. “I am eighty-eight. I hadn’t expected you to last this long. Please, sit up.”

  VanHocht scowled as he anticipated the pain involved in sitting up after lying on a hard wooden table for gods-knew how long. He grit his teeth and tensed his muscles, planning to roll to one side first. There was no pain. He slid to his feet effortlessly, his knees and ankles flexing and bearing his weight like those of a young man. “How in the…”

  VanHocht’s words caught in his throat as the sight of his surroundings hit him. He was standing in a workshop the mirror image of his own but, again, it was a reflection distorted. Where his workshop was dust and discarded hopes, this one was bright and active. On every shelf and lined up along every bench were the wonders that VanHocht had spent his life dreaming of: the wooden otter frolicking with a handful of the silver secret-spiders; the mechanical head in a corner, eyeing a ledger and announcing complex sums to itself. The dragon in the window, it seemed, was only the first of three—another two swept from rafter to rafter, screeching to one another in tinny voices. All around VanHocht was the workshop of his dreams, and all about him the stuff of his imagination made real.

  At the center of it sat the fake VanHocht, perched upon a stool, that silly smile still fixed to his bruised face. He was older; VanHocht could see that now. The lines around his eyes were deeper, the sun had left more spots on his parchment-thin skin, and his hair was wispier and whiter than it was even now. “I am pleased to see you again.” The fake VanHocht said.

  “Who are you? Why have you done this?”

  The fake VanHocht sighed. “Difficult to explain; this is why I’ve been avoiding you. I suppose the Guild told you about me, eh? Who is running it these days? Fetchmeer?”

  “Cormann.”

  The doppelganger made a face. “The watchmaker? Ugh, he has the creativity of a stablehand. I might have known—knew the guild was going to wind up that way. That’s why I left.”

  VanHocht took a step towards the old man on his newly-painless legs and brandished a clenched fist at him. “Curse you, old man, tell me your name!”

  The doppelganger sighed. “I am Meister DanosVanHocht, student of the great Alphod, and the greatest golemsmith to ever live. As for you, well…” The doppelganger trailed off and pointed to VanHocht’s chest.

  VanHocht followed his gesture. It pointed to his unbuttoned shirt which, fearing a chill, he hastened to button up again, but as his fingers brushed his bare flesh, he felt something. Something hard, like lacquered wood or ivory. In that instant, VanHocht knew what it was. He knew the answer to the riddle of his double. His hands withdrew from his chest without pulling open the shirt. He trembled. “Is that…” He began to ask, but trailed off.

  VanHocht’s double nodded slowly. “I did my best to conceal the door; it seems I did very well for it to remain concealed this long. Yours was the largest stormheart I ever purchased. The alchemist that sold it to me thought I was mad, but, well, this was twelve years ago and it was easier to bribe a man’s silence in such matters.”

  “I have a stormheart. I am a golem.” VanHocht took a deep breath…or did he? Was h
e breathing at all?

  VanHocht’s double...no…the real VanHocht frowned and gave him a curt nod. “It took me a decade to build you. I did it in secret, a bit here and a bit there. I knew the guild would never approve; even then it was full of cowards and misers. I looked at my life, at my career, and I saw it stretching out before me like a prison sentence. We were no longer artists, we were salesmen. I was no salesman and I would never make enough money to pursue my art. After old Alphod died, there were none of the old masters left; I was alone. No one wanted to listen to me.”

  VanHocht—the fake VanHocht, though he could scarcely think of himself this way—nodded. “I know, I know. They don’t want me around, but they can’t let me leave. Once I tried to book passage on a ship to Illin. I was going to accompany a caravan to Tasis, on the edge of the Kalsaari Empire…”

  The true VanHocht laughed. “I did the same thing, except over twenty years ago! Let me guess: they told you if you left, your membership was void, yes?”

  VanHocht nodded, smiling despite himself. “They didn’t want me spreading guild secrets. I realized then I was a prisoner.”

  The true VanHocht pointed at the fake VanHocht. “That’s why I built you! I gave you my memories, my skills, everything I could, and they never noticed did they?”

  The golem VanHocht smiled. “No, they never did.”

  “I traveled to Kalsaar, to Tasis, to Saldor, to Eretheria. I studied and collected and learned things they would never have let me learn here.” The true VanHocht motioned to the collected fruits of his labors. “Look, Danos! Look at what I made for us! I did it—everything I and everything you ever dreamed, I’ve done it! I beat them!”