The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller

by Samuel Simons

  “In that case, I should be accoladed for trying to warn them and you. I don’t see the problem!” Anabel replied glibly.

  Jenna considered demanding an apology for the scare, but Anabel was already walking briskly under the archway which led into the library. Jenna scowled and jogged to catch up with the older woman.

  Anabel crossed to the far wall and reached in between two bookshelves. With a creaking noise, the shelf to her left rotated clockwise and revealed a secret passage.

  Jenna’s head pounded. She tasted blood… or was it wine? …and put a hand up to her temple, but the pain passed as quickly as it had arrived.

  Anabel didn’t notice: she was already hurrying into the stone-walled passageway. “Don’t fall too far behind with that lantern, little lady!”

  Jenna hurried to catch up again, and her annoyance with the old Founder was forgotten when she found Anabel investigating a circular stone doorway which stood open. It had a series of magical-looking runes carved along the top in a language Jenna recognized from the oldest books she’d seen the House’s patrons reading. Her mouth moved as she tried to liken the symbols to letters she knew.

  “What was that, Jenna?” asked Anabel, glancing up.

  “The path closes,” Jenna murmured, barely aware of her own words. “The path closes with my death, and opens only to herald my return.”

  Anabel moved to stand beside Jenna and stare up at the Old Ancient lettering. “Did you tell me you could read Old Ancient?” she asked sharply.

  “I can’t.” A strange emptiness passed through Jenna’s mind, and again she tasted wine on her tongue.

  “This door shouldn’t have been open. I have the only key.” Anabel held up her cane: the end of it was an unusual rectangular shape, exactly the right size to fit in…

  To fit in what? Jenna didn’t remember where she’d seen a lock to fit this key: the doorway was empty. A chill ran down the young woman’s spine as she realized she must have been here before.

  “I think you’ve figured it out, too, then,” Anabel mused. “You were with Pyke when he discovered this place. How he got the damn door open without the key, we might never know, but he did it. Let’s hurry; until I see the changes he made to that Lens, I can’t guess what’s happened to lock us all inside this place.”

  Anabel strode forward into the large, egg-shaped chamber under the library, and Jenna followed with her lantern held high, trying to call on the memories which hid somewhere in her mind… but she didn’t seem able to recall anything, and the strange, sweet taste in her mouth was fading.

  “Damn,” said Anabel from where she was now standing on a raised dais next to a huge metal cylinder, perusing a glowing panel. “He’s accessed a part of the menu I’ve never seen before. I’d only managed to partially translate the ones I knew about.”

  “You mean you don’t know how this thing works?” Jenna asked, stepping gingerly up to join the older woman on the platform.

  “Not really, no,” Anabel grumbled, pulling a palm-sized notebook from her pocket. It was bound in tan leather and had a stick of graphite dangling from a string tied to a hole in its cover. The cover was marked with black stains from where the graphite had ground against it in her pocket. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to operate this thing without speaking Old Ancient? I got some of it translated, but I had to move slowly and only ask for a word here and there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because some of these tricks it’s capable of have the most dangerous names I’ve ever seen. If I asked someone to translate even half this text, they’d lose their nerve. Mention it to the wrong person— say, an undercover Antiquarian—” she spat off the side of the platform in disgust, “And I’d have the Fiend Hunters at my doorstep the next day, ready and willing to burn my sorry ass at the stake.”

  “I take your point,” Jenna murmured, now extremely glad she hadn’t mentioned Pyke’s profession. Guilt burned its way up from her stomach like bile. She might not remember much, but she knew she’d told Pyke the truth about the Last Spellbound House. She hadn’t considered the consequences for the people who lived and worked here should Pyke report any of this to his superiors. Anabel and Flarrow had been kind to them all, albeit from a distance. They paid well, provided a place to stay, and occasionally a generous bonus would arrive for an employee who was struggling, though no one knew who was informing the Founders.

  “There’s nothing for it,” Anabel said matter-of-factly, having flipped through the notebook and stopped at a specific page. “I’ll have to experiment a little. Step off this platform, if you please… and if I go missing, tell Flarrow he’s a good-for-nothing pretender and I love him dearly.”

  Jenna obliged hurriedly as Anabel turned one of the dials next to the faintly glowing screens and pressed a button.

  “If I’m not mistaken, I can adjust these functions up and down one at a time, and see what changes,” Anabel said. “I never wanted to do this if I didn’t have to, but it seems we might be trapped in the House until we figure this thing out. There.”

  Anabel stepped off the platform. She did so somewhat gingerly, as though she expected to vanish if she jostled the metal dais too hard. After a tense moment, the old Founder relaxed.

  “Now. To the Viewing Chamber.” The way Anabel said the phrase implied a title.

  “What’s that?” Jenna tried and failed to hide her excitement.

  “You’ll see.” Anabel set off for the stairway leading back up to the rest of the house. “You’re in for a treat, little lady!”

  Chapter 9

  The wind had grown weary of waiting, as was the wont of even such a tired breeze. Still enthralled by the story, it pushed at the book’s leaves. The lonesome tome was only too happy to let its page turn, inviting its mercurial reader to savour its story.

  The next pages told of the events after the death of B’kosk the Beholden.

  The three thousand, eight-hundred and second cycle of the Fae Queen’s rule. The ruined city of Enviselas’s Hold

  A grey-skinned Many-Arm warrior staggered through the ruins. The straight blade and bent teeth of a black iron key jutted from his forehead where it had been shoved handle-first into the front of his skull, and pink blood ran down his face from the wound. He gingerly reached up to touch the key with one of his four hands, but he was dissuaded by the intense pain which surged through him the moment his fingers made contact with it.

  Bodies littered the streets of the city. The vast majority of them were green-skinned creatures larger than a Many-Arm: only a few corpses belonged to his own people. A sense of satisfaction at the decisive victory still ran through the Many-Arm, but it was rendered distant by the strange fog which clouded his thoughts. An uncharacteristic melancholy came over the warrior every time he looked up at the broken shutters and shattered ornamentation on the façades of the larger buildings of stone. Even more strangely, something akin to remorse invaded his heart whenever he gazed upon the wreckage of the more common complexes of wattle-and-daub huts in which the city’s people had dwelled.

  He thought of the great battle in the basements of the keep. It had taken a hundred warriors to defeat the elderly green-skin: the first groups of Many-Arms had survived only long enough to buy time for more to arrive. It was not until there had been nearly fifty of them in the room, all coordinating their assault, that the tide had turned against the green-skins’ Grand Chief. As the sole survivor of the underground battle, it was this Many-Arm’s duty to ensure songs were sung of that green-skin: a great fighter, and tenacious. The Grand Chief had continued to strike out, tearing out hearts and crushing windpipes, even as the convulsing, suffocating Many-Arms had piled atop him, hacking at him with axes and pulverizing his bones with their weakening fists.

  The surviving Many-Arm warrior would be Named, he knew, for his valour in combat, though he had not landed a single strike. He had been rushing to join his brethren when the dying green-skin’s broken-fingered hand had la
shed out and jammed this key backwards into his forehead.

  The joy of the battle to storm the keep had faded, and the Many-Arm failed to feel the proper invigoration at the knowledge that he had slain thirty foes, was heir to a great victory, and would receive the ultimate honour of a Naming from his Fae masters.

  He stopped in one destroyed hovel amid the ruins of a razed housing complex. Without understanding why, he stooped and lifted from amid the rubble a crude, oversized book: parchment sewn messily into a grimy cover of hardened, tan-coloured leather. Glancing at its contents, he sneered: this was nothing but a girl-child’s journal, documenting the gloryless day-to-day life of a peaceful family. To a Many-Arm warrior, it was not even worth the stick of brittle graphite it had been written with.

  Through the haze of his thoughts, he failed to notice how one of his hands clung desperately to the book as he stumbled on through the wreckage. He only knew that for a moment, something about the book had briefly checked the overflowing, sourceless despair which was overtaking him… and that the temporary dam was now breaking. The flood of misery it released washed away the elation of combat and drowned his pride in his people’s victory.

  What was wrong with him? He did not know, yet his restless feet led him onward, to the west. They led him away from his people, from his masters, and from the life of war he had so revelled in. They led him to a future he could never have envisioned, had it not been for the key resting lodged in his forehead.

  The three thousand, eight-hundred and second cycle of the Fae Queen’s rule. The Protectorate of Winds

  Five days later, a warm spring breeze touched on a unique tableau as it blew through the bright city of Wind’s Tambour, capital of the lands held by the Fae noble Swifter-Than-Wind, Lord of Autumn, Marquis of the Skies and Eminent Fashioner of Queen Melianne’s Most Beloved Singers.

  Wind’s Tambour was a sun-kissed metropolis populated by half a million mortals, most of them human. At the centre of the city stood a vast windmill stretching fifty storeys into the sky, its immense blades reinforced by Fae magic preventing the wooden frames from collapsing under their own weight. At the end of each blade lay a disc of metal: a Glamoured device designed to beckon the winds and turn their passing into music like that of a tambourine. This epically-proportioned structure, the Tambour for which the city was named, powered the clockwork mechanisms which made possible the comfortable lives of the city’s mortal inhabitants, and fed the pumps which brought boiling water from the hot springs below to fuel the steam-powered appliances for which the city was famous.

  The endless turning of the Tambour was not what was so unique about today, though. It was the streets which held the most interesting anomaly: but even the most curious of eyes dared not stare too long at the spectacle of a clothed, weaponless Many-Arm trudging down the main street of the city. The mortals of Wind’s Tambour settled for cautious glances and fascinated whispers to one another behind their hands.

  “Y’all… that is a Many-Arm, right?”

  “I ain’t never seen one without a weapon, or with clothes on.”

  “I done heard they’re ruthless warriors, and serve only the greatest o’ the Fae.”

  “You’re right… Marquis Swifter-’n-Wind called on ‘em last summer to protect us, when the Dead Lord’s armies were at the ford to the east!”

  “Why d’you think he’s carryin’ a book? D’you suppose they can read?”

  The Many-Arm wrapped his lower pair of arms around himself under his cloak and pulled the hood further over his face, but his efforts only hid the nub of black metal which poked through the grey skin of his forehead. Under the revealing rays of the noontide sun, his pebbled grey skin, six-foot frame, and the bulky silhouette of a second pair of shoulder-blades halfway down his back could not help but give away his species.

  Then so be it. If he could not hide, then he would simply proceed without a care for what rumours might spread. Ignoring the whispers of the passersby, he stopped in front of an inn whose brightly painted red sign was emblazoned with a silver air-burst emblem. Ducking under the lintel of its cramped doorway, he emerged into a richly appointed and blessedly uncrowded lobby, where a lone human stood behind a desk at the other end of the room.

  Crossing to face him, the Many-Arm grunted, “A room for one.”

  The concierge smiled and nodded, though the Many-Arm could hear his heart racing. “Of course, welcome to the Wind’s Wake. How will you be makin’ payment today?”

  “Making… payment?” There was quiet menace in the Many-Arm’s tone as he leaned forward to loom over the man.

  Drops of sweat formed on the concierge’s brow. “My mistake, sir. A hero o’ the Battle o’ the East Pass can stay as long as he likes, at no charge.”

  The Many-Arm leaned back and crossed both pairs of arms. “Good. I will take your finest room.”

  “As it happens, our finest room is indeed vacant.” The man smiled welcomingly, though the Many-Arm’s keen sense of smell told him the human was still sweating. “May I have your name, for the guest book?”

  “B’kos—” the Many-Arm began, then paused. “Buko. My name is Buko... and your book may have my name, but your master may not, for another is my Name-Keeper.”

  “Very good, sir,” the human replied, hastily scrawling the name in a book with a quill pen and then much more carefully adding a glyph after it. ‘Buko’ did not miss the way the glyph’s ink turned from black to red as soon as the human finished drawing it. “Your name has been marked as ‘taken.’ Right this way, please.”

  Buko soon found himself ensconced in a palatial room with fine linens on the bed and a plush red carpet stretching almost from one side of the room to the other. A brass-capped outlet in one wall appeared to conduct pressurized steam piped in from the vast windmill.

  When Buko demanded a quill and inkwell, the implements were brought to him without question. Wind’s Tambour was a prosperous city, and its people lived well, he could see. From his studies, he knew the only price for this charmed existence was to tell, again and again, the story of their liege-lord and hero Swifter-Than-Wind, never mind that their worshipful belief in their Fae overlord shortened their lives by as much as a quarter.

  But such considerations were only idle thoughts in Buko’s mind as he sat at the table and opened his book. For the hundredth time in the past five days, he began to read. The journal was not well-written, but it did not need to be: it was sincere, and that was all that mattered. These writings were all that was left of a girl-child who had lived in fear for her entire youth, and whose only ray of hope in life had been a found family led by two beleaguered men struggling to be kind in a system built to reward brutality.

  Regret and self-loathing welled up in the one who had once been called B’kosk. He saw in these pages the tyrant he had allowed himself to become. He saw what he had done to his people in his mad scramble for power. And for what, in the end? To be the last of his kind, with Dead magics he scarcely understood trapping him in the body of a creature he loathed.

  He almost hurled the book aside… but his desperation to protect this last remnant of his past, however painful, overcame that impulse. Instead, he ceased his pacing and seated himself at the writing desk which took pride of place along the room’s eastern wall. He would leave here, soon. From now on it would be best to travel only by night, so that word would not spread of a Many-Arm alone and going where he should not be. Buko reopened the book to its first empty page, and began writing the words which felt as though they were etched upon his wretched soul.

  ‘B’kosk the Chieftaincy has won!’

  A million warriors chant your name.

  Your legend you thought just begun,

  But tyrants’ fates are all the same.

  Begone, compassion, faith, and trust:

  You thought your people’s rage sufficed.

  But strength of arm has gone to dust,

  And strength of heart you sacrificed.
<
br />   Now set out on the path of fools

  As all behind you burns to ash.

  You made yourself the mighty’s tool;

  The fire you set becomes your lash.

  The road alone remains to one

  Whose hubris tore his home apart.

  So walk on, Chief; your will be done

  Now only by your weary heart.

  The journal in that story had been lost centuries ago. In a way, though, the spirit of it still existed, for it had inspired the book under the crystal dome. The Fae nobles and the Dead Lords, with their flawless memories and advanced arts, had never seen the merit of such pitiable human crafts as writing. The written word was crude and limited in the eyes of the Fae, who saw value only in the performance and connection granted by verbal storytelling… and printing was unnecessary for the Dead, who did not share their jealously hoarded wealths of knowledge. That was, until B’kosk, who would later be known as Tamelios, Traveller, saw the power which lay hidden in the written word, and developed from that power the weapon which would one day seal away all the Ancients.

  The book allowed the breeze to rest and save its flagging strength. It would need to ration what was left of the little wind, for it might be a century before another visitor came to this place. But the tome was sorely tempted, for it was such a joy to be read again. Perhaps its next reader would come someday soon. Perhaps tonight.

  Please, let it be tonight.

  Anabel had brought Jenna all the way to the fourth storey, directly under the attic.

  Jenna had only explored this place once, back when her love for adventure had guided her instead of her caution. For six of the seven cycles she’d worked here, she’d wandered the halls, searching out the most intriguing rooms and learning where the stairs connected to one another. Now Jenna regretted having stopped her explorations after the warning about disappearances.