Pyke swam partway into consciousness. It was dark, and his hands were clenched around fistfuls of his cloak. His head ached abominably, and a sensation of pressure against his eardrums came alongside a rushing sound. The pressure increased, and the noise grew louder and louder, as though someone or something with a voice like the tide were screaming a warning at him… but he was too overwhelmed to open his eyes, or to do anything other than clap his hands over his ears and gasp with pain.
Then, all at once, the noise fell away, and he drifted into the blessed, peaceful quiet of a now-dreamless slumber.
Chapter 6
Jenna was beginning to fear that Pyke was in danger.
At first she’d been surprised, then hurt, when she’d awoken to find the strange-eyed man had left without even saying goodbye. Perhaps quiet, awkward Pyke had been overwhelmed by the implications of their sleeping together and had fled from some inner turmoil. But that didn’t seem right, either: nothing had happened between them.
What worried Jenna the most was that she could barely remember anything from the prior evening. She recalled the disappearance of the Relic-seekers. She also remembered walking the corridors of the House for hours with Pyke and… had there been someone else? She remembered the feeling of a glass in her hand, and the taste of the most delicious wine she’d ever encountered. But where had she gotten that wine? And what had happened to the moments before and after that one clear memory?
She couldn’t deny something strange had happened last night, and now Pyke was missing. If he had fled of his own accord, he’d done so without so much as breaking his fast: none of the other dining hall staff had seen him this morning. Jenna had asked some of her favourite regulars, too, but the scholars in question hadn’t noticed anyone like Pyke entering or leaving any of the rooms they used for study.
As difficult a task as finding him was turning out to be, Jenna wasn’t giving up. One of the first things she’d done this morning, after asking around, had been to head out to the spot where the Relic-seekers had vanished. After a brief minute’s search amid a thin drift of snow, she’d found two L-shaped metal rods joined by a wire which ran from one bend to another: the bright brass Relic one of the adventurers had been using to find… well, whatever had vanished them.
Now, with those rods securely hidden away in a pocket behind a fold of her riding skirts, Jenna was back in the Last Spellbound House. She struggled to keep from breaking into a run: along with her urgency to find Pyke, there was a certain excitement in carrying such a mysterious and valuable object, and a feeling of adventure in having a mystery to solve.
First things first: she needed a place to start. Jenna thought back to her conversation with Pyke: he had been most interested in the places where it was rumoured people had gone missing. Perhaps they were related to those ‘thin places’ she’d heard about…
Jenna frowned. When had she learned of thin places? Her mind strained to recall, but the memory simply wasn’t there. Frustrated, she pulled the Relic out of her skirt pocket and held it up, hoping it would give her a clue.
The handles gave a tug, pointing her in the direction of the nearest stairwell: the Relic was behaving like the dowsing sticks her grandma had taught her to use as a young girl. With mounting excitement, Jenna trotted down the hallway, heading for the stairs and fully intending to follow this Relic wherever it led her: this could be her first clue to unravelling the secrets of this ‘manse!’
In another version of the same manse, a man with no name opened his eyes to three sensations: to darkness; to a hard, flat surface against his back; and to the awareness of something large and warm looming close above him.
He shifted his arm slightly, reassured by the feeling of the sheathed knife in his sleeve. After a moment’s tense stillness, he rolled sideways away from the unknown presence. As he did, he shook the blade loose of its restraints with a jerking motion of his forearm, launching the weapon’s handle into his grip.
“Who’s there?” he asked, holding the knife up between himself and whoever had been leaning over him. He could still guess at the presence of one or perhaps two beings near the spot he had left… but he couldn’t hear movement, and his surroundings were still completely dark.
Three long seconds passed, then someone with a melodic voice said in strangely accented Common, “I do not believe it can see us.”
There was a rustle of fabric and a tangible wave of heat from a coat venting air as someone stood from a kneeling position. The man adjusted the direction his weapon was pointing, and opened his mouth to tell them to stay back.
He never got the chance. The words were replaced by a yelp of surprise as something heavy knocked the handle of the knife from his grasp with a solid tock of wood on metal. The rough tip of a blunt weapon brushed his fingers just hard enough to smart, but not forcefully enough to do any lasting damage.
“Are all thy people so swift to draw a blade at a disadvantage? Among my kinfolk, thou wouldst have been slaughtered in an instant, baring steel without the resolve to fight,” said a deep, forceful voice from several feet higher up than the man would have expected. “Test not the patience I show thee, human, lest thou find out what my weapons can do.”
“I thank you for your restraint, friend Raine,” said the other person, the one whose hollow accent was counterpointed by flutes and humming strings in their musical voice. “See, the human is no threat to us: it is only afraid. Young one, do you require light to see by?”
The human in question held stiller than the dead air of the entry hall. He was certain of little, save that beings who would refer to him as “the human” would have had most citizens of the Phoenix Kingdom screaming for the Fiend Hunters.
“I believe thou speak’st true,” the owner of the deep voice responded in her archaic dialect of Common. “It reeketh of fear. Dost thou suppose it understandeth us, or is our speech of this land’s corrupted tongue wrongful?”
“Shh. I think it is preparing to say something.”
The man made a concerted effort to school his breathing, so as not to sound winded. “Some light would be nice, thank you.”
“Ah!” The melodic voice piped: a short, delighted noise akin to a sharp note being played on a reed instrument. “I am so glad you are not blind, nor mute, young human. ‘Twould have been an awkward first encounter indeed!”
A gentle white glow filled the room, emanating from a spherical object held in someone’s hand. As the man’s vision adjusted, he made out the shape of the chamber: it appeared he had made it to the entry hall, after all. Then, his recovering sight resolved the two silhouettes into humanoid figures.
One, the owner of the low, gravelly voice, wore thick, fur-lined brown leather garments from head to toe, including boots which still bore traces of snow. She was ten feet tall and extremely broad, almost five feet from shoulder to shoulder. She was leaning casually on a metal-studded wooden club taller and broader than his entire body. On her back, a leather sack hung from a strap across her torso. Something inside clinked with the distinctive sound of metal against metal as she adjusted her posture. Her eyes, glaring down at him, gleamed a luminous amber colour.
The other was slender and less than five feet tall, had skin the deep blue of lapis lazuli, and was completely naked. The man began to avert his eyes, but the human concept of modesty seemed not to apply: this person didn’t possess any of the sex characteristics he’d have expected. The blue-skinned humanoid’s chest was flat and devoid even of nipples, and there was a smooth nothing at their loins… though he avoided staring nonetheless. They had no eyebrows or other hair. Their eyes were large, expressive, and moist, with wide blue irises which darkened to black near the centre and shaded imperceptibly into their pupils. At the sides of their head, in place of ears, were two holes partially covered by sleek fin-like protuberances which were currently spread open like a lizard’s crest.
“I greet you, human,” the blue-skinned fiend said. “My name is—” a
nd here, for a little more than a second, they emitted an otherworldly sound like an orchestra’s worth of stringed instruments being plucked underwater. “But in these lands I choose to take the name of Aquamarine.”
“And I am Raine, of the High Tundra Tribe,” grunted the giant woman.
Voice, what are these fiends? What must they want? And do they have weaknesses? the nameless man asked silently… yet the question met only with a further silence, and his distant sensation of something being wrong grew from a nervous nagging at the back of his mind into an awful certainty. Where was his Voice? It was sometimes silent for hours at a time, but never when asked a direct question.
“Well? Willst thou introduce thyself,” Raine growled, leaning forward as she tightened her grip on her club. “Or do common manners fare thus poorly in all the human lands? Pah. I scarce believe that its kind have names at all, after the beastly din of hooting and hollering which its kinfolk did raise upon seeing us. Methinks it be not far from an animal of the snows, mimicking our speech without comprehending.”
The man took a steadying breath. “I’m a he, not an it. And my name is…” His eyebrows drew together. “I… I don’t seem to know my name.”
The two non-humans glanced at one another. “Hath it… hath he encountered some trap of lost memory? Quick, man-thing: tell me the name of the place thou call’st home.”
“Independence City.”
“Then speak the name of thy closest friend.”
“I don’t have any fr— wait. Van Wright, my mentor in the early days of my Antiquarian training. Oh, and I suppose Jenna counts, if she considers me a friend.”
Raine crossed her arms, suspicion written plainly across her blunt features. “He doth remember all else, yet no name. What mak’st thou of this, Aqua?”
“He is… Fae-touched,” the other whispered. “‘Twas my belief that none of the old magics yet afflicted those who did not live before the Cataclysm. Tell me, human—”
The blue-skinned androgyne paused. “My apologies. Is it ‘he-man’ in the masculine? The tendency of your language to assign gender to words is... troublesome.”
“It’s— no, the word is still human,” the man said, staring.
“Thank you. Tell me, human, how old are you?”
“Thirty cycles is my best guess. Not old enough to have lived in the time of the Ancients, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“It is odd that whosoever took your name chose not to return to you the memory of it. It may yet be possible to preserve your will,” Aquamarine murmured. “Then I name you Gedreos, ‘unfortunate one’ in the old tongue. You must think of yourself as Gedreos without fail, lest you lose all that remains to you.”
Gedreos blinked at the sudden lessening of a pressure at the back of his mind: a pressure he hadn’t been fully aware of until it had vanished. Immediately, if distantly, he could hear a Voice calling out to him.
Yes. What—?
What error?
The Voice had only ever exclaimed like this once before, and as before, the message came alongside a powerful impulse to move. Gedreos ducked into a backwards roll across his shoulders without thinking about it, and a split second later Raine’s vast metal-studded club swept through the air where he had been standing. Had the Voice not warned him in time, he would have been a shattered wreck halfway across the room.
“Friend, why do you aim to drag him down to the silent depths?” asked Aquamarine calmly, turning to regard Raine.
Holding the club casually over one shoulder, as though the devastating swing had been nothing more than a swat at a fly, Raine raised her free hand palm-up as if to say, why not? “If he be Fae-touched, then wherefore should we suffer him to live? The presence of one with Fae power over him can only impede us.”
Aquamarine shook their head, ear-fins drooping soberly. “The doings of the Fae are subtle, and rarely do their actions carry so little weight as a single moment of aid or harm. In more than a day of wandering this place, you and I have been unable to find anything but empty rooms, and ancient traps, and a lone band of similarly captured humans. We are trapped here, and we cannot know whether his presence be help or hindrance until we learn the nature of his Fasheuleisios— his Name-Keeper.”
“I suppose thou dost know the Fae best. They are thy progenitors, not mine.”
Aquamarine’s ear-fins flattened against their head in a display of an emotion on which Gedreos couldn’t begin to speculate. The way the skin around their eyes tensed made Aquamarine seem troubled, though. “I have only the forbidden stories of my people by which to know the Fae’s powers, but friend, trust that it is so. They have sent Gedreos here, and they surely possess power over him still; but so long as he goes by this new name, he is only influenced by their will, not controlled.”
“And thou dost consider this an acceptable risk? I remain unconvinced. The will of the Ancients has seldom been to the benefit of any save themselves.”
Gedreos had backed up all the way to the main doors, taking advantage of the opportunity presented by the conversation to move while the fiends were distracted.
Having been about to turn the handle and push, Gedreos paused, then pulled the door open instead and dashed through it. He was not about to stick around while these two debated the merits of letting him live… in case they decided he was more trouble than he was worth.
Emerging into the darkness under the manse’s front balcony, he paused. Something was wrong. There were no horses by the door, no fog in the air, and no snow on the ground. In fact, it wasn’t particularly cold outside.
Sure enough, as Gedreos hurried away from the manse, he took in a vista with some striking differences from the real grounds. Hundreds of white lights, shaped like giant candle-flames, hovered slowly from place to place. The pathways and the main road were intact. There was not a single living plant anywhere, but the rock gardens were well designed to make up for the lack of natural decoration, with their gentle curved trails and artfully arranged statuary of granite.
The only damage visible anywhere on the grounds was to a ten-metre-tall marble statue of a man in a voluminous, hooded robe. The statue had been decapitated by some great force, cracks running down through the neck and into the torso. Its severed head lay like a misshapen boulder at one side of the main road which led away from the front door.
Settling into a steady jog following the road and approximating his direction based on where the Relic-seekers had vanished from the real world, Gedreos thought back on what had happened since he’d lost touch with his Voice.
You said I committed an error. What was that error?
Who…?
It took him a few seconds to search his memories and confirm that he hadn’t spoken his real name to the Relic-seekers, then to understand the Voice likely didn’t mean Jenna. The sisters? Now that you mention it, I did write my name on their papers… but I didn’t see any sign of a Relic on them.
I thought the Fae and the Dead disappeared a hundred cycles ago.
What else do I need to know about the Fae?
Best to put them out of my mind, then.
Gedreos found that as soon as he tried to avoid thinking about Lifa, Thorne, and Rosie, his focus was irresistibly drawn to considering the mystery of them. Did one of them secretly hold a Relic? Or were they really Fae? Between their too-accurate themed names, their mysterious attitudes and airs, and Rosie’s surprising knowledge of the times of the Ancients… was it possible?
Gedreos shook his head briskly, trying to banish his conjectures, but to no avail. Instead, he settled on trying to distract himself with other, hopefully safer questions.
Do you remember my name?
Well, why not tell me it?
I’ll… I’ll pass. A cold sweat broke out on Gedreos’s forehead. I’ve made one too many mistakes like that already today.
A sinking feeling gathered in the pit of Gedreos’s stomach. What does this ‘reversal’ mean, practically speaking?
The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller Page 11
