The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller
Page 14
No matter. Old or young, B’kosk would give these Many-Arms a fight to remember.
The leading Many-Arm let out a war cry. The grey-skinned fighter’s heart held a trace of disappointment that this last opponent was so old and feeble… but like the hearts of all his people, it still soared with the joy of battle. The pride of having slain no fewer than thirty-six formidable foes in the course of tonight’s swift and vicious fighting still flowed through him like nourishment. He raised his favourite of his four axes, preparing a strike which would smash the green-skin’s face in and dash his brains against the stone floor. It would be good to add a thirty-seventh marking to his belt of bones… even if it were a small mark for an elderly foe.
The faint trace of disappointment vanished completely from the Many-Arm’s heart when the old green-skin lunged forward and effortlessly stopped the strike with a withered hand on his grey wrist. The Many-Arm felt only respect, tempered by pain, as B’kosk crushed his wrist in one hand, then disarmed two of his other hands with a kick swifter than lightning.
The four-armed creature smiled with wonderment when his foe, with incredible strength, wrested the remaining axe from his fourth hand and whirled it once to bury it with vicious precision in its owner’s heart.
“It is a good foe who slays me this day,” choked the Many-Arm in the tongue of his masters the Fae, falling to his knees and grasping at B’kosk’s forearm as though to pull him close enough for one last attempted death blow.
“Wish that were so,” replied B’kosk haltingly in the same language. He wrenched the axe free from his dying opponent, and turned to face ten more Many-Arms who were spilling out of the doorway to encircle him. “Mine was never to be a good death.”
And that is where the chapter ended. The book’s next page shivered and rose ever so slightly, as though coaxing the breeze to turn it and read more… but the wind was growing tired, and needed some time to rest before it would be ready to push over the page.
The book’s spine creaked with resignation. Perhaps a more tenacious reader would come someday… and the book so desperately needed that day to be soon.
The dowsing Relic had led Jenna all over the Last Spellbound House, but it seemed only to be tracing ever-smaller circles, all of which led back to the library.
Jenna stood in the dark, staring at the empty bookshelves along the library’s east wall and holding out the twin metal rods with frustration writ plainly on her face. “Why do I keep coming back here? I thought you were supposed to lead me to secrets, not an empty room,” she told the Relic.
It didn’t respond, nor did the bookshelves. Somewhere in Jenna’s mind, there was a strange feeling of having been here before… but every time her consciousness approached it, the sensation vanished, leaving only a faint, sweet taste on her tongue.
With a growl of frustration, Jenna grabbed up her lantern, which she’d hooded to cast just enough light to see by when she’d discovered the dowsing Relic worked best in the dark.
“I’m gonna go get something to eat,” she said out loud, scowling at the unhelpful Relic and shoving it into the pocket of Pyke’s coat.
From the library, the entry hall was only a left turn and then a long, straight line down the hallway the staff called the central corridor. Jenna knew this route well, and her thoughts wandered as she walked the two minutes needed to traverse it fully.
She still had no idea what had happened to Pyke, and she was beginning to think there weren’t any clues left. What if he had simply headed south, to go report to his guild?
I was stupid to tell him what’s going on here. Maybe I should have listened when he said he wasn’t a good person. I’m gonna feel like a total dupe when the Antiquarians tell the Fiend Hunters and they shut the whole operation down.
Noise from the entry hall distracted Jenna from her morose thoughts. As she pushed her way through the heavy double doors at the end of the central corridor, loud voices rose.
“What do you mean, you can’t open them?”
“We’re trapped here?”
A crowd of two hundred assorted merchants, craftspeople, and Relic-seekers had assembled in the entry hall. Several were tugging ineffectually on the handles of the doors leading outside. One of the Founders stood nearby, wringing his hands: Flarrow, a man in his eighties with thin white hair, wearing a finely embroidered red-and-brown robe.
“We have a handyman on the way,” he was saying, gesturing ineffectually with both hands for the crowd to quiet down. “Please, be calm, my friends.”
Jenna couldn’t help but think this was no longer the daring, adventurous man who was rumoured to have broken a curse on this House and overcome the spectre of a Dead Lord in combat some fifty cycles ago. The legends about the discovery and claiming of the Last Spellbound House seemed less plausible when she considered they were supposed to have been done by this nervous, portly old man and his wife, along with three others… though she had to give some latitude for the fifty cycles which had passed since then.
The public, too, seemed less than impressed with Flarrow’s platitudes.
“I’ve a meeting at the Wayhouse in two hours! If you can’t open this door, I’ll make my way out a damn window!”
Apparently, someone else in the crowd had no intention of letting Flarrow respond to this suggestion: a sling-stone sailed out from among the press of angry folks and into the hallway leading to the dining room, straight into the nearest glass window.
Instead of shattering the window, the stone rebounded from an invisible barrier in front of the glass with a crackling sound unlike anything Jenna had ever heard. The rock ricocheted and lodged itself in the wooden wall across from the window with a loud crack.
A chill ran down Jenna’s spine. This wasn’t normal, even for the Last Spellbound House: once, when she’d been walking about and eating her lunch, she’d seen one of the House’s second-storey windows break when a particularly drunk patron had thrown his tankard out of it.
The rock tumbled from the new hole in the wall, and clattered to the floor. The crowd went quiet, save for a few confused whispers asking what was going on. If the doors were locked and the windows wouldn’t break, did that mean there was no way out of the House?
Murmurs of ‘trapped,’ and ‘magic,’ and ‘cursed,’ rose swiftly into loud argument and then panicked shouting. Several people threw themselves at the doors, unaware in their terror that the hinges opened inward and that they were impeding the efforts of others who yanked impotently at the handles. The crowd surged forward to grab at elderly Flarrow, yelling for him to do something!, to lift the curse from the House like he had in the stories. Near the centre of the crowd, a few voices cried out in pain as their feet and legs were trampled.
Fear radiated through Jenna as the atmosphere in the room turned from anger to desperation in seconds. The sense of helplessness awakened in her the memory of the last time she’d been at the mercy of someone else’s violence, and for a moment she was back on the Old Road, being tied up and shouted at: she was once again among the brigands who shouted and jeered and threatened…
“Quiet!” screamed a loud, clear voice, piercing the chaos. Glancing around for its source, Jenna realized the voice had been her own.
To her surprise, everyone in the room grew silent and turned to stare at her. Glancing about, Jenna found she was framed in the doors to the central hallway, a step above the rest of the room. The elevation, and the way sound reverberated in the hall, meant she could be heard and seen clearly from anywhere in the room.
“Just… stop,” Jenna said haltingly, nearly paralyzed with the fear that if she didn’t say the right thing, the chaos could return. But more words began to tumble out of her mouth one after another, as though they’d been waiting to be set free. “You oughta be ashamed o’ yourselves. Look what you’ve done.”
She gestured to indicate the three or four people near the centre of the crowd who were lying on the ground, clutching ankles or
legs which could no longer support their weight.
“We all want the same thing here: for everything to be okay, and to find a way to fix whatever’s happened to the doors an’ windows,” she continued, her voice shaking and her childhood accent starting to return. “Now start… start actin’ like it! We’re on the same team, so we damn well better stop hurtin’ each other an’ bein’ panicked animals! Okay?”
The mob stared at her. A couple of fearfully muttering voices rose from the group, and Jenna realized she was about to lose them.
“You. Flarrow,” she said, pointing at the Founder. Her instincts told her she could keep the crowd’s attention by using their hopes in his adventurer’s skills. “You know things about this place, how it acted fifty cycles ago. But you’re no scholar, am I right? You’ll need help to fix this.”
Flarrow cleared his throat, extricating himself from the grip of the four or five patrons who still had fistfuls of his robe. “Y… ye’re right, girl. A lot o’ what I did five decades ago was reckless guesswork an’ sheer luck. I ain’t so darin’ as I was: I got more to lose nowadays.”
“You may not be a scholar, but there are plenty of them here. Does anyone know enough to tell Flarrow how and why the doors and windows are locked?”
Everyone was still looking around and muttering, but at least their focus was on who would step forward.
After a long ten seconds, someone cleared his throat. “Name’s Belles. I been looking into the relationship ‘tween Relics and enchanted places like this. I got some ideas, but you’re not gonna like ‘em.”
“That’s something,” Jenna said, hiding her trembling hands behind her back. Her legs felt like they were going to give out. “Flarrow, you’ve been here a long time. What questions do you have for Belles?”
“Well, first o’ all,” Flarrow said, crossing to join Jenna on the raised platform, “Do ya got any theories ‘bout where the magic’s comin’ from?”
The crowd’s attention shifted to Belles as he began explaining his ideas, but Jenna couldn’t hear what he was saying through a pounding which filled her ears. She stepped out of the way and sat on the single stair leading down from the platform. Putting her head in her hands, she took shuddering breaths, her body rebelling against the vivid memories of being lifted by her hair, her hands tied behind her back…
“You did good there,” said a voice from close above her, and Jenna nearly shrieked again.
An elderly woman stood over her. Jenna recognized Anabel, the other surviving Founder of the Last Spellbound House. Anabel wore a red-and-brown robe similar to Flarrow’s, but where the puttering old man made it look like a housecoat for sleeping in, Anabel’s bearing lent the garment a sense of regal confidence. Her white hair was gathered into a crown-like braid atop her head, and she wore thick black boots which, despite her lean five-foot frame, accentuated the power of her bearing instead of seeming out of place on her. She was leaning nonchalantly on a wood-handled metal cane.
“I don’t feel like I did anything much,” Jenna said, but she welcomed the conversation as a distraction from the terror which was still churning in her chest and belly. “I feel like I panicked just as much as anyone else there. I’m still sick with fear.”
“Make no mistake, you averted a disaster. This situation could have turned into a riot if you hadn’t had the instinct to redirect them,” Anabel replied. “Been a long time since I met someone with the talent for crowd management. Sturgen was the one with that gift in our old team of five, before we settled down here in the House and he left for more exciting pastimes. Makes me nostalgic for the old days.”
Jenna stared.
“I’ve got the handyman working on the doors, but something tells me he won’t have much luck. I’ve been too Ash-cursed cautious to mess around with this place’s Lenses in the past fifty cycles, and now one or more of them are active,” Anabel continued. “Come help me figure out what’s gone wrong with my House, and I’ll make sure Flarrow knows you were due for a promotion yesterday. You seem capable, and besides, you look like you could use a distraction.”
Jenna looked up from her numb stare into the middle distance, and realized Anabel was holding out a hand. The old Founder’s confident smile had an edge of mischief to it. Without thinking, Jenna reached for the offered hand and was startled when Anabel gripped her wrist firmly and pulled her to her feet.
“A distraction,” Jenna echoed, her thoughts returning from somewhere far away. “Y… yeah. I could do with one of those.”
“Then it’s a deal,” Anabel said, still grinning. “Dammit, I’ve been spoiling for a good bit of mystery, and to Ash with my comfortable life here! Glad I found somebody to go on one last adventure with me. Now come on, we’re headed for the Library: these Lenses aren’t going to fix themselves.”
“Lenses?”
“Come on. Talk while we walk: I’ll fill you in,” Anabel said, heading for the steps leading up to the second-storey landing in the entry hall, so as to avoid the crowd which was now listening to Belles and a few others debate what was going on.
“Wait,” Jenna said, gripping Anabel’s forearm. She detested the way her hand still trembled with the waves of queasiness which kept rising from somewhere in her stomach. “I need to find Pyke.”
“Let me guess. Inquisitive sort, vanished into thin air almost as soon as you took your eyes off him?”
Jenna nodded mutely.
“Then you’ve got some filling in to do, too. Tell me all about this Pyke and where you last saw him. This old place, she’s got her moods and her ways of doing things… she doesn’t change much. I lost somebody fifty cycles ago the same way you lost your boy-toy, so I suggest we help each other: you and I will fix my Lenses, and I think I’ll be able to sort out what happened to your beau.”
He didn’t leave me behind, Jenna realized with a surge of conflicting relief and worry. He’s not the first to have vanished, and he needs my help.
She took a deep breath, and resolve blossomed as though from nowhere as her fist closed around the handle of one of the dowsing rods in her pocket. “Okay. Show me where to start, and maybe these will come in handy,” she said, pulling the rods and their connecting wire from the coat.
“You’re full of surprises,” Anabel said with a grin. “I knew I chose well.”
“I’ll help you figure out your Lenses. But then you have to help me find Pyke, and bring him back safe.”
“Good girl. Now keep up: we haven’t got all night.”
Chapter 8
At that moment, the man calling himself Gedreos was leading the way toward the very spot in the Place Aside where Jenna had found her Relic lying in the real world’s snow.
As he and his two new allies rounded the stone hemisphere counterclockwise, more of the grounds came into view. The main path curved gently back and forth for another hundred metres before ending abruptly at a straight line of inky darkness whose depth seemed impossible to estimate. It could have been a precipice, a wall, or an endless, featureless black plain. The stone gardens and pathways of the grounds, too, cut off sharply at this spot, making it appear as though the world simply ended.
Explain.
Coming further around the art piece, the three saw the source of Raine’s sense of danger: some fifty metres beyond the dome of rock, ten white silhouettes stood guard or patrolled around a person-sized rent in the air, where reality rippled and swayed as though a sheer silk veil were hanging there.
Gedreos held the metal hoop out again in the direction of the anomaly, falling into the trance of attunement.
The usual torrent of sensation struck Gedreos, and he weathered it as best he could. He opened his eyes, and shifting colours filled his vision: it would be ten to twenty seconds before the beginnings of sight returned, and a few minutes before he could see properly again. Still, he wasn’t about to tell Raine that. She seemed to be constantly on the watch for signs of weakness anyhow, and Gedreos saw no reason to make her task any easier.
“The gate’s closed, but I can open it. We need to stand in that spot,” he explained, gesturing in the direction of the shimmering anomaly and the light-automata surrounding it.
“They will likely call for aid, if the ability remains to them,” grunted Raine. “I will handle that.”
“We should establish the link with the Lock and Key now; there won’t be time later,” Gedreos suggested, holding the Relic out toward the vague silhouettes of Raine and Aquamarine. “If you’re still willing, reach out and touch it. You might feel a tug: don’t resist.”
A huge hand landed on his, nearly knocking the Relic out of his grip. A moment later, a smaller hand reached delicately underneath to rest one finger on the bronze metal of the Lock and Key.
Voice. I haven’t used a Relic this way before. How do I proceed?
His Voice did something, and Gedreos became aware of the life force flowing through his body. This sixth sense expanded until he felt the presences of Raine and Aquamarine: their flames of power were like bonfires compared to the candle of his own. To his surprise, the blue-skinned Seer held within their slender frame an even mightier force than Raine’s, as difficult as that was to comprehend.