The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller

by Samuel Simons

  Every day, B’kosk appeared before his people on the castle balcony which jutted out high above the town square, and gave the decrees he was expected to give. His subjects paid him respect to his face… but he knew their hearts, and every day he bore the indignity of their scorn with outward equanimity to hide his cold fury.

  By night, B’kosk’s ghost strode the streets of the city of Enviselas’s Hold. On this night, as on all other nights, he went out among his subjects, invisible to their eyes and intangible to their senses. His astral form glowed red with his ever-present rage.

  The Grand Chief passed through the wall of a dwelling in the poorest part of the city, and emerged into one of the two rooms which composed the wattle-and-daub structure. A family was seated around a makeshift table by the light of a candle, eating with their hands from trenchers full of plants seasoned with dried insects.

  His subjects were making animated conversation about the day. B’kosk sized up the two menfolk, ignoring the dull words they were bandying about the harvest and their plans for expanding their dwelling. A fairly ordinary arrangement: two mate-bonded menfolk and their three shared female spouses… although, based on the complete lack of children or pregnancy in the household, it seemed both men were being unforgivably sluggish in their all-important task of expanding their Clans. B’kosk shifted his attention reluctantly to their conversation, his eyes boring balefully into the back of the one who was speaking at that moment.

  Like all his people, the young fellow was huge and green-skinned, with wide ears shaped like triangles which came to two points near his temple and his chin. His simple garb marked him a menial labourer, and his teeth were broad and flat, indicating his lack of interest in sharpening them to someday qualify for the role of a warrior. B’kosk despised such cowardice as a matter of principle, and he had ensured that many of his people did so as well. This family, however, accepted the youth’s lack of ambition as though it were normal. B’kosk fumed silently at their complacency.

  “The roof over the table needs fixing,” the labourer was saying in the language of his people. “I’d like to give it a go in the morning.”

  “Take care about the wobble in the roof supports, P’ram,” cautioned his husband. This one was bigger, older, and had one row of sharpened teeth: likely filed by good parents in his youth. The larger row of adult teeth, though, were flat, more appropriate for grazing than for meat and battle. “I’d hate to see you take a tumble.”

  B’kosk considered the possibility that this had been a veiled threat… but the tone of voice had been too sincere for that. There was no animosity here, no aggression. He scowled, though none present could see him: he considered this domestic pottering a personal affront. Had he not dedicated lifetimes to ensuring his species outgrew such weaknesses as compassion and domesticity?

  “V’nagh, I… may I say something?” asked the smallest of those at the table, one of the girls, averting her eyes but turning to face the older of the two men.

  B’kosk’s scowl grew deeper. Did this female not know her place? Had he not decreed for the past century and a half that the women of his great nation should speak only when spoken to?

  The older of the two, V’nagh, shifted uncomfortably, but to the Grand Chief’s growing disgust, neither of the men present took umbrage.

  “Of course you can speak, G’trela,” P’ram replied.

  The girl smiled, a timid expression which wavered as though she were still learning how to make it. “I have a friend at the spinning house. Her name’s D’pera. She’s about to be of age for the Claiming, and she’s afraid. She doesn’t want to be a mother. Could we… could we bring her here?”

  P’ram opened his mouth to speak, but V’nagh interjected. “Are any of the Claimants of the warrior-Clans?”

  The girl’s face fell. “Two. K’dreg and P’krit.”

  “Let her go.” V’nagh’s voice was gruff, but B’kosk could see he was using the tone to cover the pitiful weakness of his emotions. “There’s nothing I can do.”

  “B… but—” Tears gathered in G’trela’s eyes.

  “But nothing,” V’nagh snapped. “I help no one if I die challenging a Claim which goes to the Duel-Grounds. And I promise you, no man of a warrior-Clan is backing down from a challenge by an old field-worker with half a mouth of warrior’s teeth.”

  “I’m sorry, G’trela. But V’nagh’s word is final,” P’ram told her gently. “We have to be grateful for what he’s already given us: a place to stay, and safety. His family name can only protect so many.”

  So it was deliberate sabotage of the rightful order of things, then. B’kosk reined in his fury, sublimated his urge to return to his body and to order his forces to tear the tiny hut apart, slay the two menfolk, and bring him their three spouses for his pleasure. No… B’kosk had not risen to his current station by acting selfishly on his passions. Time and time again he had risen above the petty urges of his anger and lust, turned his attention to empire-building. And for his pains he had been rewarded by the Dead Lord Enviselas with enhanced intellect, long life, and great power. If he continued to be useful and watched his mentor’s actions carefully, someday he too might learn the secrets needed to become one of the glorious and immortal Dead.

  Yes, worth it to be subtle this time, too. Smothering the fires of his rage against those who perverted the structures of his society, the Grand Chief turned the cooling charcoal of his fury into fuel for the ever-present intrigue of statecraft. He could use this. After all, the threat of retribution for crimes against the rightful order could turn even the most subversive coward into a useful spy…

  A change in the atmosphere of the room brought B’kosk back to focusing on the family at their dinner table. All five of his wayward subjects had turned to stare at the doorway, which was at that moment filled with a muscled silhouette who carried a spear.

  V’nagh cleared his throat. “What can we do for you, honoured warrior?”

  “Ghhhhh…” rattled the figure in the doorway, and fell forward to land face-down on the earthen floor of the hut.

  The two men rushed forward and knelt to tend to the warrior’s wounds. But it was far too late: the new arrival was no longer breathing, and neither of his hearts still beat. He was covered in his own blue blood, and as the two gently turned him over, they revealed a splash of bright pink fluid on the man’s forearm, a sight which sent a chill of foreboding down B’kosk’s incorporeal spine.

  “What… what does this mean, V’nagh?” asked P’ram.

  V’nagh’s green-skinned face had flushed purple with a fear response, his ears fanning out around his head in an instinctive show of bravado. “It means nothing.”

  P’ram grew still. “Don’t lie to me, please. By the love you have for me, tell me what you’re so afraid of.”

  V’nagh took a deep and shaky breath. “This means the Many-Arms are upon us, or will be soon. The pink stuff is the blood of a feared Fae creation, a race of creatures born for nothing but to slaughter such as we. Our monster of a leader has brought the rage of the world’s rulers upon us. Gather the girls— we must flee the city, before it is too late.”

  It had been a century and more since the heart of Grand Chief B’kosk had been anything but a cold stone in his chest… yet the chill which passed through his astral form was the closest thing to terror that still moved him. At the speed of a blink but with an effort of intense will, he tore his existence from the wattle-and-daub hut and placed himself in the sky above his city. Eyes which were not truly there, and which cared nothing for the impediment of the night’s darkness, scanned the four horizons. B’kosk looked out on the surrounding hills only for the few seconds it took to see the figures pouring over them to the east and the south, chasing a routing force of his soldiers through the darkness of the night. In the first of those seconds, he marked the four arms on each of the pursuers’ torsos. In the second, he estimated the enemy’s numbers at between two and five thousand. In th
e third, he knew without a doubt that his other cities and their armies were gone, and that his garrisoned troops in Enviselas’s Hold were neither numerous nor mighty enough to defeat this foe.

  With a second exertion of his willpower, B’kosk hurled his consciousness back into his body, the distance between them tearing painfully at his mind. Bloodshot eyes opened in a pale, withered face, and B’kosk groaned as the stiffness of his aging body returned in a rush. With as much haste as he could muster, the Grand Chief levered himself out of the hammock he used to cradle away the nighttime ache in his bones, and staggered through the doorway leading out of his sparsely appointed sleeping chamber.

  Aides rushed to serve him from the moment he set foot outside his suite of rooms, and he sent them away with orders to sound the alarms, to rouse the garrison, to command his lieutenants to prepare a battle of attrition amid the streets of Enviselas’s Hold. But he did not go to the castle walls to oversee the fighting. Instead, he waved the last of his servitors away and followed a narrow staircase leading down from the ground level of one the corner towers, arriving at a locked door.

  A black key hanging around his neck opened the door, which locked with a well-oiled click when he shut it behind him. His hurried footsteps brought him into the network of secret chambers few of his subjects knew existed below the castle. He passed through dozens of hallways and down yet more steps, through storehouses full of esoteric minerals and ores, and then deeper, into the workshops where the Dead Lord Enviselas endlessly honed its craft.

  A light ahead told B’kosk that his mentor was in the Chamber of the Core. Here lay the mechanism which powered the whole complex of laboratories and strange machines. It did so by means B’kosk understood poorly.

  As B’kosk drew closer, the power infusing his eyes to grant them vision in darkness faded away to adjust for the change in light, and the details of the room resolved into a towering figure with a gleaming red ruby in its right eye socket, standing silhouetted against a lurid blue glow emanating from a hatch in the central mechanism. That mechanism was a monolithic cylinder of metal with strange pipes and gauges connecting along its length. B’kosk had never before seen it with a hatch open, and the sensation of raw power from within it stirred a strange melancholy in him.

  “My Lord,” he said, “It is the Fae. As I speak, a horde of Many-Arms comes over the hills. I…”

  B’kosk’s mouth was dry. When had his tongue grown so slow? “I come to beg that you use your power to save us.”

  “Is what I have already given you not sufficient?” spoke the Dead Lord, its voice filling the room and humming in B’kosk’s bones.

  “I… I have served you well, my Lord. Three hundred cycles ago I slew the Drake of the Emerald Valley to found this city, and slaughtered the first Grand Chief in ritual combat to become his successor. I completed his work of uniting the Sixteen Clans, and I shaped my people into the warriors you needed them to be to protect Enviselas’s Hold. I have fought many battles, and it was I who, at the Battle of the Guarding Peak, killed a hundred Many-Arm warriors serving the Fae Swifter-Than-Wind, securing the mountain pass for our forces. But, my Lord… I am not equal to this. Even I cannot destroy a legion of five thousand.”

  “Speak your request,” Enviselas intoned.

  “Blast them from the face of the world. Cause them to rue the day they challenged the Dead Lord Enviselas and its servant B’kosk.”

  “Very well. And after I have destroyed them… what then?”

  B’kosk’s mouth worked as, taken aback, he tried to encompass the question. He had expected there to be more begging required for the Dead Lord to deign to intercede. “After? I… Of course, I will gather more troops. I will begin a campaign of forced conscription, to stand ready if the Many-Arms gather another horde—”

  “They will come again, B’kosk,” the Dead Lord said, and the power suffusing Enviselas’s voice brooked no argument. “And again, until every one of your warriors has breathed his last.”

  The realization which seized B’kosk was an icy fist, and its harsh grip threatened to break even the Grand Chief’s heart of stone. The Dead Lord had no intention of becoming B’kosk’s weapon: no intention of defending a people which could not defend itself.

  “Speak your truest now: how long until you could gather an army capable of defeating the Many-Arms? Envision a horde the size of your current foes’ forces, then another of twice that strength following behind it. How long would this task require?”

  An untruth rose to B’kosk’s lips, but an alien intelligence invaded his mind and tore it away. His ability to dissemble, nurtured for three long centuries, was cast beyond his reach in an instant. B’kosk struggled in vain to form the lie, like a condemned man dying of thirst straining at the bars of his cage to reach a cruelly placed flask of water.

  But his will had withered, and he could not even draw forth his people’s birthright of bravado and false confidence. What emerged from his mouth instead were the defeated words of a coward: “Even in three hundred more season-cycles, I could not gather a force capable of slaying fifteen thousand Many-Arms. It is… impossible.”

  “You have seen the truth. My arts could buy you time, at great cost… but they would avail you nothing in the end. A single eager Fae noble would joyfully lay waste to a force three times what you require to overcome their Many-Arm toys.”

  B’kosk bared his teeth in an empty show of aggression. “Then why all of this? Why the tributes, and the shows of obedience, if you never intended to lend us your power?”

  “What is the first lesson I taught you?” intoned the Dead Lord, the intense vibrations of its voice shaking B’kosk’s bones. “Speak the verse all Dead and all Fae know, Grand Chief.”

  B’kosk felt neither grand nor chiefly. “Turas val Res rashei situmasaiti reshes reshai atii eshet. The smallest meaningful unit of magical power is one mortal life.”

  He had tried for centuries not to think too hard about the annual ‘tithe’ he provided in exchange for the Dead Lord’s continued patronage: every cycle, twoscore of his people’s strongest warriors vanished into this underground laboratory. He paid the clans well, and told them their men had been selected for dangerous and crucial missions. The families had always been too pleased and honoured to question him.

  “If you understand, then you know that to spend the strength of your people on a futile task is wasteful. Go to your city’s aid if you must, Grand Chief B’kosk… but know this: all who remain here are doomed, for the servants of the Fae will hunt them to the last to punish their service to me. You, however, may yet survive this if you have learned well my sciences.”

  And then the Dead Lord Enviselas was gone, along with the glow from within its great machine. The Chamber of the Core was utterly dark and frigid with the absence of the Core’s power.

  B’kosk fell to his knees, no longer able to pretend his suspicions had been incorrect.

  The smallest meaningful unit of power is one mortal life.

  He had condemned his finest warriors to die senseless deaths. They had been nothing but fuel for the Dead Lord’s experiments: the least of the components for the mighty Workings B’kosk’s master had shared so sparingly with him.

  And the Many-Arms would be here in minutes. Harsh despair crowded close to the Grand Chief, enwrapping him like a cloak of thorns. He had no living kin: none who would clasp his arm and recite the Chant of Good Death together with him before going into a hopeless battle at his side. That ancient tradition, once known to every man, woman and child in the time of B’kosk’s youth, was now gone. None else lived who remembered it, for he had prized and encouraged only his people’s traditions of brutality and glory, forbidding those of comfort and solidarity. His soldiers, brutes all, availed him nothing this day, and he had thrown away everything else.

  Thrown it all away, and for what? For rulership. For fleeting power. For the table-scrap morsels of secrets dropped sparingly by an unknowable, uncaring bein
g. He had sacrificed his people, his brothers, for nothing but the privilege of being the greatest and most wretched servant to a heartless master. He had eradicated the best of his people’s legacy for no purpose but to be, in truth, Thrall B’kosk...

  Running footsteps on the ceiling above B’kosk told him the castle’s defenses had fallen and the small door leading down to this place had been found. They would be upon him soon.

  B’kosk drew himself to his feet. Alone, he grated out the Chant of Good Death, invoking his people’s mythical ancestor-spirits in the old tongue. The Grand Chief grimaced bitterly. He had forsaken those ancestors so easily. He had abandoned the old ways the moment the Dead Lord had appeared to him three hundred cycles ago, promising freedom: freedom from mortality; from tradition; and from the superstitions which bound him to powerless ancestors. It would be only fitting for the spirits of his forebears to turn their backs on him now: B’kosk knew they would not bind his soul up in the spirit of the Warrior when he fell.

  He drew from the pocket of his nightrobe a gift he had been given on the first day of his service to Enviselas: a telescoping staff with spearblades which sprang from either end when it was extended, made of enchanted metal which could not break. He considered it for a second, then tossed it aside. He would not use this gift. Enviselas had never been worthy of his faith: B’kosk would trust in his ancestors to supply what was needed, and he would accept their judgment if they saw fit to leave him to die.

  The first Many-Arm rushed through the doorway into the darkened Chamber, and B’kosk turned to face his fate. The Many-Arm stood only six feet tall, head and shoulders shorter than B’kosk himself. Its grey skin, pebbled like the stones of a beach or a road, flexed around powerful muscles. Despite the Many-Arm’s diminutive size, each of its four hands held a battle-axe so heavy most of B’kosk’s people would have had to wield it two-handed.

  B’kosk leaned forward and let his instincts come forth. His arms were strong, still, but they creaked when he moved. When had he become so old, so distant from the young warrior the Dead Lord had first bribed with gifts of strength and speed? It had not been so on the day he had declared his hundredth annual survival acknowledgment ceremony: though his people considered seventy a venerable age, he had been as hale and hearty that bright morning as when he had, at the age of twenty-five, slain the Drake of the Emerald Valley.