Swimming, chaotic colours filled Pyke’s vision, but as his sight cleared he was able to focus on the stone door. Removing his hand from the Relic, he opened it palm-up.
The Lock and Key remained stuck to the door, glinting brightly in the lantern-light, and Jenna gasped as the Relic’s colour changed from the brown of bronze to the brilliant golden hue of brass. In Pyke’s palm, a metre-long brass key materialized. It had no teeth, and was exactly the right size and shape to fit into the slot.
Hefting the weighty object, Pyke inserted it into the keyhole. Without so much as an attempt to turn the key, there came a grinding of stone. The door rotated clockwise, rolling to the right and disappearing into the wall.
The key vanished as soon as the door twisted it out of Pyke’s grip, and the hoop-shaped Relic turned bronze again and fell away from the empty doorway. He caught the Lock and Key before it could strike the floor, then checked it for damage before returning it to its reinforced pouch in his cloak.
“Thank the Ash and the Flame alike for workarounds. I suspect the real key to this place no longer exists.”
“A Relic to open any door,” Rosie gushed, pulling Jenna and Pyke close in an excited group-hug. “What a fascinating thing to carry around! I was right about you two. Thank you for bringing him, Jenna!”
Jenna grinned, and Pyke couldn’t help but smile as well. “You’re a flatterer,” he told Rosie, doing his best to pretend he didn’t find her exuberance refreshing after having dealt with so many self-interested merchants, brigands, and Relic-seekers on the way here. “Let’s see what’s in there, shall we?”
Rosie clapped her hands and squeaked as Pyke and Jenna stepped through the doorway. On the other side was an egg-shaped cavern the size of a small building, which Pyke’s sense of direction told him was directly underneath the library. There were no other exits, but in the centre of the cave rested a monolithic metal cylinder thrice Pyke’s height and oriented similarly to a beer tankard lying on its side. Its surface gleamed silver in the light of Rosie’s and Jenna’s lanterns, and it bore not even a trace of rust.
The cylinder was connected to the floor and ceiling by a series of steel tubes and copper cables, and was emitting a strange, steady hum unlike anything Pyke had ever encountered. Attached to one side of the object was a metal dais, which bore a series of three gleaming silver plinths topped with angled slabs of white marble. They brought to mind lecterns, as the angle seemed perfect to read from.
Crossing the cavern, Pyke made out more detail by the light of Jenna’s upheld lantern. The surfaces of the three lecterns were not smooth, but instead each one held a series of buttons and dials surrounding a flat black plate at its centre. As he stepped up onto the dais, he noted the plates were glass-smooth and glowing faintly, as though they were transparent and lit from behind. Each displayed the same word in Old Ancient: SULSET, meaning ‘Sleep.’
“What is it?” Jenna’s eyes were wide, making it clear she was interested enough to overcome her sleepiness for the moment. “It’s huge.”
“Whatever it is, it’s more advanced than anything I’ve seen,” Pyke replied. “I suspect I can find out more if I translate the contents of these panels. They match the description of things called ‘viewing-screens’ in some of the writings about the Ancients’ machinery, and if I’m not mistaken…”
Pyke mounted the dais and approached the centremost of the three control panels. He tested the buttons and dials until one of them resulted in the viewing-screen next to it changing its contents. The single word, SULSET, was replaced by a list of phrases in rectangular boxes stacked one atop another. The title at the top of the list said ILEUTUSIIUKHERAOS ATII, which by Pyke’s best estimation translated roughly to ‘First Additional Heart Which Controls.’
“A system tapped into the Workings of this manse, with a pre-established menu of options,” Pyke whispered, excitement rising in his chest. Until this moment, he would have sworn his heart was incapable of beating harder and faster than it had during the encounter with the brigands on the Old Road. “Fascinating… it still functions after all these cycles! It must have lain dormant, hence the word ‘sleep’ on the viewing-screens until now…”
Jenna sat down on the edge of the dais, careful not to lean against any of the three plinths in case she disturbed something vital. “Is this gonna take long?”
“Probably,” Pyke murmured, already deeply engrossed in the task of copying the menu options into his journal, translating the Old Ancient glyphs as he went.
“Okay. I can…” Jenna yawned, interrupting her own statement. “I can wait.”
Jenna awoke to a gentle hand squeezing her shoulder.
“Jenna. You need to sleep,” said Pyke’s voice quietly from somewhere above her.
She looked up, barely able to open her eyes. Through a haze of sleep, she saw Pyke’s silhouette against the dimness. In the background was a distant, irregular tapping noise. “How long’s it been?”
“Hours. I should help you up to wherever you take your rest in this place.”
“I’ll sleep here,” Jenna murmured. “Go back to your work...”
“Let’s continue tomorrow,” whispered Pyke. “I need my rest, too.”
Jenna nodded, more than happy for an excuse to sleep somewhere other than this cold metal dais as long as it wasn’t going to disrupt Pyke’s investigation.
“I stay in one of the rooms here between shifts, when I’m not returning home for my day off,” she replied, letting her eyes fall shut again. Ashes, she was tired! “Rione’ll be fine sheltering under the balcony for the night. Should I show you where the staff sleep?”
“Yes,” Pyke said, offering an arm to help Jenna stand.
Pyke half-supported, half-carried Jenna out of the tunnel, through the library and into a section of the House where she could distantly hear the murmur of quiet conversation in the dining hall. With Jenna giving directions, the two made their way to the staff quarters. By the time they arrived, she was too exhausted to do more than nod as Pyke indicated a door, and gesture sleepily for him to take her through it.
The room had once been an office or reading-room, but the Founders had converted it into a sleeping chamber some twenty cycles ago when they’d expanded the offered services to include food and lodgings. Up against one wall was an old bedframe made of a light and splintery wood which didn’t match the surroundings. It bore a pile of reasonably fresh linens which served Jenna as a mattress and bed sheets alike.
Pyke let go of Jenna, who collapsed with a grateful sigh onto the bed without bothering to remove her boots. She lay there in a tired haze, with something at the edge of her awareness telling her this exhaustion was too much for a single missed night of sleep.
As Pyke turned to leave, Jenna impulsively reached out and caught his hand. He paused, wordless, so Jenna tugged gently and murmured, “I know you don’t have a place to rest, Pyke... worry about what people think some other time. Come sleep.”
Pyke sat down on the edge of the bed, and gratefulness swelled in Jenna’s chest as though her heart were about to burst. She tugged on his hand again, interrupting his attempts to unlace his boots, then pulled gently on his shoulder until he laid the rest of the way down. The last thing she knew before drifting away with a smile was that Pyke had wrapped his arms around her.
Pyke’s pulse was racing. He was coming to understand ever more about the machine in front of him, and what he was learning was both wildly exciting and more than a little concerning.
The device appeared to be a conduit for a power source hidden elsewhere in the manse. These panels were technology so advanced and long-lost that he had never heard of anything like them. They activated and controlled the functions of the Last Spellbound House, including Workings Pyke couldn’t properly identify by names alone.
Among the menu options were SALVAS SETKEI, ‘Forced Peace’, and LONSAS VAKHRESHAI, ‘Eternal Shell,’ which he guessed represented the Working enforcing
the ban on violence, and the enchantment shoring up the structure of the Last Spellbound House. Other, less clear titles included: VAKHSALVAOSH LASII, ‘Bright Warriors;’ ELUVIUESMERIS, ‘Veil-Tide;’ RASHODESH LESAOSH, ‘Enemies Everywhere;’ SER’RAUMIRAS, an irregular compound word which seemed to mean ‘Gratitude-Working-Source;’ and finally RESHES FAHALIST, ‘Restore Life.’
Of these, almost all were inaccessible: attempting to choose them yielded only a prompt with an empty, square box labelled SELAURAKHAS, ‘word-key,’ which dismissed itself after a few seconds.
RESHES FAHALIST was the exception. Selecting it resulted in the appearance of a dialogue displaying a variety of statistics surrounding a rectangular box nearly full of blue light which displayed SOLAS: 96%.
“I think I’ve found something promising,” he murmured. “Jenna? Are you still awake?”
Only silence greeted him. Pyke squinted into the darkness. He had no idea how long it had been since he’d last looked up from the controls, but there was no sign of Jenna’s or Rosie’s lanterns: no light at all save for the dim glow from the screens.
Maybe they went to bed. I must have been at this longer than I thought.
Pyke considered calling it a night and returning in the morning. But he knew that between the invigorating Res the Serpent’s Tongue had drawn into him from the brigands, and the myriad theories running through his mind, he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He would toss and turn all night thinking of this device. The draw of the curious Lens and the allure of testing its functions one at a time, of uncovering its mysteries, was too intriguing.
Further, if Pyke correctly understood the old system of measurement known as percentage, which his Voice often used, this meant some element of the House was nearing readiness for… something. No, this was to be a sleepless night regardless of all else, and he would rather spend it experimenting instead of dwelling on a mystery.
Pyke turned the dial on the central control panel, and the statistics grew to fill all three screens. Perusing them, Pyke noted that the language was particularly arcane: it was rife with proper nouns and compound words, few of which he understood. What little of the jargon he could work out, however, caused his consternation to deepen significantly.
RESHES FAHALIST was the second part of a two-phase system. While the text was too dense for Pyke to properly glean its true purpose, he was beginning to see what the first, finished phase must have been. The oblique meanings of Old Ancient sentences such as ‘solar safeguards 2 through 178 offline,’ and ‘cascade phase successful,’ were placed in context by others: ‘emergency sunfall 99.44% complete,’ and ‘Fae/Dead seal integrity 99.99%.’
The chill which ran down Pyke’s spine had nothing to do with the cool air of the underground chamber. Somewhere in this manse was the very mechanism which once tore all but one of the Liberated World’s suns from its skies… and which, it appeared, was responsible for the disappearance of the Ancients themselves.
Pyke turned the dial on the central control panel, causing each section of the statistics screens to light up one by one, starting at the top of the left-hand panel. At the bottom of the middle one, he found three options: RAS LASIT, which could translate as either ‘light spell’ or ‘activate Working;’ RAS VAKHLASIT, its opposite; and SESRISIT, ‘return.’
As soon as SESRISIT lit up brighter than the others, Pyke pressed the small round button which he had learned meant ‘proceed,’ and the centre screen returned to the much smaller dialogue with the rectangular box reading SOLAS, ‘progress.’ Pyke twitched as, unbidden, the number beside it changed abruptly from 96% to 97%.
This place hasn’t completed its final task. A creeping horror rose in Pyke’s chest. The Last Spellbound House brought about our apocalypse, and in the century since then it’s been quietly working away at something else… something that’s almost finished.
Pyke recalled his training. Those rare objects of magic which could neither be controlled nor understood were dangerous, and must be stopped at any cost. This was perhaps the most terrifying example Pyke had ever encountered, and he shuddered to think what the designer of a device powerful and malignant enough to rip the suns from the skies might intend with its mysterious second phase.
Worse, ‘Restore Life’ took on an ominous meaning when Pyke considered just what the machine might be designed to restore life to, and he suspected the Res to power this Working was coming from the people of the Last Spellbound House, or perhaps even from the entire Phoenix Kingdom. Such a range of Res drain was unheard of, but if this device was capable of reaching into the skies to tear down the suns, then…
Resolve gathered like a weighty stone in Pyke’s stomach. I have to prevent this mechanism from finishing its task.
Returning to the page of statistics and options, Pyke turned the dial until he had selected RAS VAKHLASIT, ‘deactivate Working,’ then pressed ‘proceed.’
Two options appeared: IA and VEKH, ‘yes’ and ‘no.’
Pyke turned the dial so IA lit up. After only a moment’s hesitation, he pressed the button for ‘proceed’ one more time.
A mighty force seized Pyke, as though the absent master of the manse had reached down and enwrapped him in a merciless grip. The cylinder before him vanished, as did the control panels, removing every last light source from the room in an instant.
As swiftly as it had arrived, the terrifying force was gone. Pyke reached out with one trembling hand and cast about with his gaze… but there was nothing around him save for empty blackness.
Stumbling as he sought to step off the dais but found his feet planted instead on a flat expanse of bare stone, Pyke groped his way across the large room. He zigzagged in search of the device or anything else, but he encountered nothing save bare walls and smooth stone floor. Finally, he found the archway and a short tunnel which dead-ended at a flat surface: the circular door. It was closed, and to make it move aside, he had to blindly place the Lock and Key against it and mutter the Relic’s activation phrase. As the door opened, the Lock and Key clattered harshly to the ground. Wincing at the possible damage to the brass hoop, Pyke stored it back in his cloak, then felt his way along the wall of the tunnel in the continuing darkness.
At the end he found the staircase and ascended the steps with his hand against the wall, groping until he found the handle which activated the swinging bookcase.
He shielded his eyes against an unexpected glare of light as the bookcase opened. The library was beyond, but something was very different about it: the shelves were chock-full of undamaged books, and not a mote of dust could be seen anywhere. Two massive chandeliers filled with candles hung from the ceiling above the shelves, casting a steady light between the catwalks and onto the library floor… yet despite the hundreds of candles it took to fill them, not a drop of melted wax could be seen anywhere.
As his eyes adjusted, Pyke resisted the urge to rush to the nearest shelf of books and at least take note of their titles. Now was not the time, he reminded himself sternly: something strange was happening here, and it was urgent that he find the truth of it.
The dining hall. If there’s anyone still there, perhaps they’ll know what’s changed.
His sense of direction had suffered only slightly from his long time underground. The ability to retrace his steps from anywhere was a skill Pyke had carefully cultivated, one he was confident belonged to him alone rather than being a facet of his Oddment. The clearest path to the dining hall was via the entry chamber. To find the entryway, he needed only to seek the front wall of the manse and follow it until he came to the front doors.
Exiting the library, he emerged into the hallways. Although dimmer, the corridors were lit by unmelting candles which burned in the candelabra on the walls every ten metres. The front of the manse must be somewhere to his left, so he took the first turn in that direction, arriving at one end of a particularly long and broad hallway.
He hurried forward, his feet sinking into a plush red-and-brown carp
et which ran all the way down the corridor and which showed no signs of wear. After two minutes of swift walking, Pyke came to a pair of closed doors.
It took a bit of pushing, for these doors were heavy. Nonetheless, Pyke managed to get one open, and the dim light from the candles behind him illuminated only a small section of the entry hall’s hardwood floor. It was pitch black otherwise: only the impression of open space ahead of and above him allowed Pyke to be certain he’d emerged into the right place.
As the door began to swing shut behind him, Pyke turned to catch it, thinking he should at least light his torch from one of the candelabra in the hallway.
Sulsest, whispered a voice in Old Ancient. A command: Sleep.
Sulsest, Pyke.
As though an unyielding fist had seized his mind in a stifling grip, Pyke lost consciousness.
Pyke’s dream was a strange one. Normally, on the few occasions he remembered a dream, it featured everyday situations in which he was somebody else. The ‘characters’ recurred, for sometimes when his dream-self walked past mirrors or pools of water, he saw a stern-faced man wearing finery with rings on his hands. Other times, his reflection showed him a woman who carried a sword and sported chain-link armour, or a wild-haired old beggar in sackcloth. But tonight was different: unusually, in tonight’s dream, Pyke was himself.
The rest of the dream was properly surreal. He stood on a hardwood table the size of a building. A giant, upturned wine glass trapped him in a transparent cage which would not break or topple despite how he beat it with his fists and pushed against its sides. Outside, three giants argued in voices warped to near-incomprehensibility by the glass.
“Hath he… expertise? Another opportunity… decade,” were the words Pyke was able to make out from the speech of one.
“...machines, and… of not one but three Relics,” said another. “With the remaining… and the Hoard-Watcher… possible… the binding.”
“Hold,” instructed a third, and the other two fell silent. “He nears wakefulness. Hold thy tongues until…”
The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller Page 10
