The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller

by Samuel Simons

  Through a subtle impulse, the Voice directed Gedreos to will a tiny portion of his strength into the Lock and Key. As he did so, he could sense the Relic drawing an equally small portion of Raine’s and Aquamarine’s strength into itself.

  He opened his eyes, unsure when he had closed them, and could feel the difference: where before, the Relic had been connected to nothing, it was now linked to all three of them.

 

  For as long as we’re working together to get back to the real world, I’ll welcome any secret depths to them, Gedreos responded. But I take your meaning. I’ll watch my back.

  “Art thou prepared, little human?” asked Raine.

  “As I’ll ever be.” Gedreos peered around the edge of the sculpture to adjust his eyes to seeing distances again. To his relief, his vision had mostly returned to normal.

  “Then lead on, friend Raine,” said Aquamarine.

  Gedreos glanced at Aquamarine as the Seer spoke, then experienced a moment of disorientation when he returned his gaze to Raine and found her missing. With no sound save for a rush of displaced air and one last clink of the metal objects in her pack, Raine had launched herself out from behind the stone hemisphere. In barely three seconds, her impossibly swift pace brought her the fifty metres to the nearest of the light-automata patrolling the area.

  Gedreos and Aquamarine hurried out from behind the sculpture’s cover as Raine impacted the squad of light-automata like a spear puncturing a child’s air-filled ball. The soldiers scattered, reacting more swiftly than any living being, but the first swing of Raine’s vast club nonetheless sent three of the ten scattering into fading shards of splintered brightness.

  Dislike the Gigant as he might, Gedreos couldn’t help but marvel at the artistry of Raine’s movements in battle. There was no wasted effort, and no showmanship: the way she redirected her oversized club had a natural grace of its own, making use of the weapon’s momentum to move Raine’s body from one stance to another. The follow-through on her first strike pulled her out of the way of the spears of two more of the light-automata as they converged on her. Pivoting on one foot, she extended the club to slow her spin, then tucked her arms in to speed up again so that she struck out only in the moment when the light-automata’s weapons passed through the spot she had just vacated. No one had to tell her these creatures were vulnerable only in the instants they lashed out with their spears: whether by intuition or simply by her preference to strike at foes whose guards were down, Raine smashed them both into oblivion at exactly the right moment.

  The remaining five silhouettes spread out and attempted to flank the Gigant, but she whirled aside with unnerving speed to prevent them from fully encircling her. One by one, she placed each of the remaining threats between herself and the rest and then dispatched it while the others tried to maneuver around.

  Gedreos and Aquamarine arrived at a jog just as Raine slammed the club down on the last remaining light-automaton, dissipating it along with its spear an instant before the point made contact with her chest.

  “They are threatening foes, but only by virtue of their trickery.” Raine grinned broadly at Aquamarine and Gedreos. “After I determined their weakness, they posed little challenge. I appreciate that I need not clean my weapon afterwards: the designer of these creatures was thoughtful in this respect.”

  “They were not created like this to save mess. Light is significantly less energy-intensive to maintain than flesh,” Gedreos relayed in a monotone, his Voice speaking through him. Then Gedreos himself added, a little sarcastically, “But I’m glad you’re pleased.”

  “More are on the way,” Aquamarine said. Sure enough, a great number of white flames could be seen in the near distance, emerging from among the rock garden’s walls and sculptures and heading straight for the source of the disturbance. “Pray, do not tarry, young Gedreos.”

  Rather than waste another second, Gedreos stepped up to the region of space where the air wavered, and held forth the Lock and Key. Careful to keep his free hand hidden from the other two, he reached into his cloak and clasped his fingers around the envelope containing the Serpent’s Tongue, drawing on the life force stored inside of it instead of on his own Res.

  “Hastas ferest; steris reish renfesest,” the Voice said, accepting control of Gedreos’s tongue. “Hastas ferest; steris reish renfesest.”

  “The activation words swim in the same current as our goal.” Aquamarine stepped to place themself carefully between Raine and Gedreos. “‘Open the path; accept our offering,’ he says. Young Gedreos may well be able to free us.”

  “He had best hurry,” Raine grumbled, taking her club into a two-handed grip as the nearest of the floating white flames resolved into the running silhouettes of soldiers. “Fighting while surrounded is not a choice I would have made, were it avoidable. I can keep myself safe in such a situation, but three? Unlikely.”

  “I shall remove myself, then. Protect Gedreos until he can open the way. Worry not, for I shall be nearby if you need me,” Aquamarine promised, then vanished from sight.

  “Gag’ga dagros,” muttered Raine in her native tongue. If her tone and the way she bared her teeth were any indication, the words were not nice ones.

  In his mind’s eye, Gedreos trudged through a featureless grey expanse, struggling against a headwind. Holding the Lock and Key out in front of him like a shield, he knew instinctively that this wind represented the natural resistance of the veil between the Place Aside and conventional reality. The only thing preventing it from blasting him back into his body was an equal force pushing forward from behind him, which he knew was his own Res twined with the strength of Raine and Aquamarine. The divide between worlds was not just thick here, but reinforced: like a locked and barred gate.

 

  Gedreos squinted against the wind. Voice? It’s unlike you to leave a sentence unfinished. Where did you go?

  Only silence met his query. Gedreos suppressed the urge to shiver at the unpleasant implications, given what had happened the last time his Voice had gone missing.

  Up ahead, barely visible in the grey fog, was a steel gate with a large and impressive brass padlock on it. The gate, standing as part of a wall clad with iron, was dauntingly far away, but Gedreos wasn’t about to turn back and waste the Res he’d already spent. Step by painstaking step, he trudged forward, his legs burning and the force at his back barely sufficient to keep him from being bowled over by the continuing wind.

  Then, as though time and distance meant nothing in the veil, he arrived at the gate. The Relic which had brought him here was warm in his hand despite the cold of the gale, and as he looked down at it, the Lock and Key changed shape, transforming smoothly from a hoop of bronze into a gleaming brass key.

  As Gedreos reached out to put the key into the lock and release the bar across the gate, he felt a tug, as though a string attached to his heart were being pulled gently but insistently.

  Pyke, whispered a voice.

  Gedreos’s free hand had been resting on the gate, but abruptly he was standing several steps away from it. He glanced about, concern rising like acid in his chest… but the grey expanse was empty. He rushed to the lock and tried again to insert the Key.

  Pyke.

  Again he was standing three steps away from the gate. A hand came to rest on his left shoulder. He whirled, his fingers going to the pouch where he kept the Serpent’s Tongue.

  “Looking for this?” asked Thorne, her voice and gaze sharp. In the grey light of t
he veil between realities, there was an ethereal and deadly beauty to the brown-clad woman’s sharp features, as though her presence were a knife which sliced the very air of this abstract place. Her irises gleamed a lurid blood-red whose searing brightness hurt Gedreos’s eyes. In her right fist, she held up a rod of black metal: Gedreos’s prized, private Relic, about which he had never told a soul.

  “Give it back,” he demanded, but the wind snatched the strength and the assertive fire alike out of his words.

  “Or else what, Pyke?” Thorne’s lips curved into a cruel grin as the use of Pyke’s name sent a preternatural pang of loss through him. On the heels of that sensation arose the powerful urge for Pyke to throw himself before her, prostrate in terror and awe. “Or else… what?”

  Pyke— no, Gedreos, he reminded himself— was silent, but only for the moment it took to consider his next words. He was keenly aware of how every second spent in this place was burning away precious hours of his lifespan. “Or else… I’ll destroy myself, along with whatever plans you had for using me.”

  “We’ll find another servant,” said Lifa, who was now standing there instead of Thorne. The green of her dress drew the eye with its brilliance, and her expression was serious but confident. “We always do.”

  “Not for a long time,” Gedreos retorted. “And not one with my set of skills. Do you think I didn’t notice, in retrospect, how carefully tailored your arrangement was to gaining power over someone who knew things about the Ancients? Your bait was the opportunity to learn more, and you sprang the trap when you were impressed by the knowledge I already possessed. Now release me, or I’ll destroy your plans the only way I can.”

  Now it was Rosie standing there with a sympathetic, sad smile on her face. “That’s an awfully tenuous line of reasoning to risk your life on, sweetheart. There’s no shortage of scholars in the Last Spellbound House. Please, love… don’t throw yourself away like that. I so enjoyed our time together, and it would break my heart to see you go, Pyke...”

  Gedreos winced and averted his gaze as the name, this time, evoked in him a deep, lustful longing to hold Rosie close and never let go. Raine was right to fear them. Fae tricks, indeed.

  “I also remember,” he said through teeth gritted against that surge of tenderness, “How you stopped Jenna when she was about to give you her name. As though you didn’t want it. I think you’re playing a careful balancing act against a limit to your powers.”

  “Do you want to test that theory?” Thorne was back, and her red eyes blazed with eagerness. “I do so enjoy it when a mortal underestimates me, Pyke.”

  Spoken by Thorne and with such vindictiveness, Pyke’s name caused his body to light up with fiery pain, as though every one of his nerves were tearing itself apart at the seams. He fell to his knees, twitching uncontrollably with the effort it took not to collapse all the way to the ground.

  I… am… Gedreos. He tried to hold on to that thought, hoping against hope it might protect him.

  The pain didn’t lessen a whit. “Look at me, Pyke,” Thorne commanded, and Pyke couldn’t help but obey. Through a haze of agony, he tried to focus, but all he could see clearly was his Fae mistress’s eyes gleaming crimson.

  A shade of amusement entered Thorne’s unyielding tone. “I will be taking that adorable name your misguided little friend gave you. You will experience this pain every time you answer to ‘Gedreos,’ or to any other name that is not Pyke.”

  “It’s not too late,” whispered Rosie tearfully from somewhere close to Pyke’s right ear. Her lips brushed tantalizingly against his cheek as she spoke. “Our goals are close enough to yours: you don’t need to fight us. We’re here to help, even if you don’t want to believe it.”

  “Enough, Thorne,” Lifa instructed, and despite the calm quiet of her tone, her voice thundered in Pyke’s bones and rendered the howl of the wind a distant memory. She moved to stand over him, and at her touch his pain faded, then vanished from his mind as though Thorne’s torture had happened a long time ago. “Pyke: you stand to gain nothing from defying us, and everything from accepting our help.”

  “Spoilsport,” said Thorne, and the caustic glory of the venom in her voice alone was enough to singe the edges of Pyke’s mind. “Serve us, Pyke... or the agony you just experienced will seem like a love tap.”

  “Please, Pyke,” said Rosie, wrapping her arms gently around his waist and awakening again within him that desperate longing to hold and be held, to be lost forever in the comfort of her embrace. “Go back. We’ll make sure you have a fighting chance, but you have to trust us.”

  Pyke struggled to deny the threefold urge to obey, to concede, to surrender. Try as he might, he couldn’t find a reason to resist: harsh reality dictated that the sisters held the power here and that the only way out was a pointless death; logic held that they were Fae, and might know something about the situation which he didn’t; and on some level, he had to admit that he liked Rosie, that it would feel good to let go, to trust that everything would turn out all right, and allow himself to be comforted by the warmth of her arms around his waist and the softness of her body at his back.

  But Pyke had one thing left to combat all this: the illogical, undeniable instinct in the back of his mind which still screamed that this was wrong. Throwing himself on the mercy of that intuition, he surged to his feet and leapt the distance to the gate, shoving the brass key into the lock.

  An instant before he was able to turn it, Pyke’s hands stopped responding to his will.

  “I’m so sorry, but I can’t let you do that,” whispered Rosie. “The way deeper into the manse will be opened soon enough. Please… be patient, Pyke.”

  When Rosie spoke the name, Pyke felt the willpower holding his connection to the Lock and Key go involuntarily slack. The supporting cushion of his life force was yanked away, and the winds of the veil seized him. He was flung out from the maelstrom and back into his body with a harsh jolt, and before his senses had a chance to recover, a ruthless force gripped him and shifted him in a way which was neither sideways nor any other natural direction. The jarring, mind-bending grasp of the Fae sisters shattered his waking consciousness and sent him careening into a fitful slumber.

  “But after that, there’s this gap in my memory,” Jenna was saying, walking down the latest of what seemed like a hundred corridors alongside Anabel.

  “And the gap starts from just after you chased this young man onto the balcony and saw those Relic-seekers disappear,” Anabel clarified. The older woman didn’t need the cane she carried: she had no trouble setting a pace Jenna could barely keep up with. Jenna didn’t think she’d be half so limber at the age of seventy-something: whatever Anabel had done to stay active well into her twilight cycles, it was effective.

  “That’s right. I can’t seem to recall anything else that happened last night, except that I distinctly remember Pyke joining me in bed.”

  Anabel’s eyebrows rose, and Jenna hastened to add, “Just to sleep. I’m not a... I mean, I don’t make a habit of sleeping with—”

  “Peace, peace, little lady,” Anabel said with a gap-toothed grin. “That wasn’t what I was thinking, and I’ll thank you to not be too embarrassed by the thought. I’ll have you know I was making a damn comfortable living as a sex worker at one point, right up until I met my adventuring group.”

  Jenna’s jaw dropped. “What? You—?”

  “Not a story for today,” Anabel cut her off, still grinning. “Let’s just leave it at this: I wasn’t judging. I was taking a guess at who might have really hopped into bed with you. I assume you didn’t see their face?”

  “I was too tired. It sounded like Pyke.” A sensation like a too-cold drink of water prickled at the centre of Jenna’s body. “Did I invite a stranger into my bed?”

  “You can relax. I can’t say too much, but if I’m right, then that one wouldn’t have taken advantage… at least, not in the conventional ways. And also, I might be able to help you fin
d him. That is…” Anabel trailed off with a grin.

  “That is, you’ll help me find him after we’re done fixing these Lenses of yours, right?”

  “Exactly. You’re sharp. I don’t work free of charge, not even for friends: one of the reasons I’ve made it as far as I have in this life,” Anabel said, adding an amused cackle for good measure. “But trust me, you’re getting the good end of the deal. I don’t expect trouble… just wanted some company, and somebody to hold the lantern. Here we are!”

  The two were arriving at the intersection closest to the library, where the central corridor ended near the middle of the manse’s ground level. The circuitous path they’d taken to avoid disturbing the mob in the entry hall had brought them all the way up to the third storey and then back down, a route Jenna would’ve been hard pressed to reproduce.

  “I haven’t visited the library in almost a cycle.” Jenna reached out and ran a hand along the dusty bookshelf, sadness crossing her expression. “Ever since you and Flarrow made that announcement about the disappearances, I’ve kept my explorations to areas near the dining hall and the entryway.”

  Anabel grinned. “I lied about the vanishings. There hasn’t been a disappearance in fifty cycles.”

  Jenna stopped and stared at the older woman. “You made it up? That’s no joke. You frightened us!”

  “It kept you from sniffing around, didn’t it?” Anabel replied with a nonchalant shrug of her finely attired shoulders. “And more importantly, the rumours drum up all sorts of investigators who come here and pay good money to rent a room while they try and find the source of the mystery.”

  “Well, you’ve attracted five who might be in danger now,” Jenna retorted, stopping and crossing her arms.