The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller

by Samuel Simons

  “Sorry!” Vino stage-whispered, closing the door in a hurry.

  “It seems we all want to leave here,” Eiten said from the shadows. “I propose a truce.”

  “Sounds acceptable to me,” Pyke said. “But I don’t know if Merana agrees.”

  “Ah, shut yer face, Un-Guildsman!” Merana spat on the floor as though to make her opinion clearer than it was already. “I ain’t arguin’ if it gets us outta here.”

  Eiten emerged from the darkness and moved to open the door leading out of the small office room. His hood still hid his features too perfectly to be a mere trick of the light. Merana snatched up the lantern and followed, leaving Pyke to pick himself up.

  As Pyke emerged through the doorway, he saw Vino staring at him from a short way down the corridor. The man’s cloak was even more stained than before. He smelled of blood, and his eyes were sunken deeply into his head, with broad, bruise-like dark circles completely surrounding them. Pyke had seen Riskers on the verge of giving themselves a heart attack with too much Relic use, and Vino showed all the signs.

  Eiten took the lead, moving ahead into the maze of hallways. Pyke’s sense of direction wasn’t serving him, given the lack of reference: he had yet to see a window, so he could only guess the group was somewhere close to the manse’s centre. Every ten metres, a candelabrum filled with lit candles cast a comfortable glow. These illuminated a narrow carpet which ran the length of the corridor: unlike the ones in the real-world manse, this long rug was soft, not even a little threadbare, and completely free of dust.

  “I take it you aren’t responsible for the candles,” Pyke murmured to Vino, who was walking not far away.

  “They were like that when we got here, and they don’t seem to burn down,” Vino replied just as quietly. “Did you really come to a dangerous place like this to find us?”

  “It’s the duty of an Antiquarian to protect humankind from dangerous Relics,” Pyke said, deliberately skirting the truth. Vino didn’t need to know that the Antiquities Guild was given wide latitude to permit, or even cause, ‘acceptable casualties’ in the name of preventing threatening magics from falling into the wrong hands. “I’d say the Last Spellbound House qualifies as a dangerous Relic.”

  “I said it before,” Vino muttered, “If you’re anything to go by, Antiquarians aren’t so bad. You just have a reputation, like us ‘Riskers.’ People are frightened of what they don’t understand, that’s all. I’m sorry for Merana.”

  “I’m used to it,” Pyke said, a pang of regret pinching at his side as he tried not to feel guilty at letting credulous Vino believe he was a kindred soul. “Average folk mistrust Antiquarians for our work with Relics, and the rest mistrust us for our duty to the Kingdom. Be glad you never signed up: at least someone is willing to work with you.”

  “I wish I saw it that way,” Vino griped. “It must be nice to have a whole library of secrets at your disposal. Out here, you have to learn everything the hard way. Sometimes I feel like a pretender, you know? Everyone expects me to understand every new Relic we find right away, but really I’m just guessing. It’s the lot of every Risker, of course, but... I worry that I’m not doing it right. That someday I’ll fail, and we’ll all die horrible deaths.”

  I agree completely, Pyke thought, But I’m not about to say so to your face… at least not as long as you’re the only one here who doesn’t consider me a useful tool.

  “Vino! Get up here and use that vision Relic o’ yours afore we run into somethin’ nasty ‘n’ hidden,” Merana shouted irritably. “Were you jawin’ with the damn Un-Guildsman?”

  “Uh, no, not at all,” Vino called, pulling the circlet-shaped Relic from its hard leather case, settling it on his head and hurrying to catch up with Merana and Eiten.

  Pyke sighed with relief at finally having a moment away from the Relic-seekers’ prying eyes, and took the opportunity to check the secret pockets of his cloak. The Lock and Key was gone, of course, taken by Eiten. The Serpent’s Tongue, though, was still in its fabric envelope sewn into the lining of his cloak. His third Relic, his secret insurance policy in case he encountered a device he couldn’t control, was safely affixed to a metal clip on the inside of his belt. The Relic-seekers hadn’t found these two when they’d searched him.

  As the group rounded a bend, the candles lining the next hallway reflected from a dark window. Here, their hallway met with a corridor which ran along the front wall of the manse. Eiten stopped at the window and looked out for a long moment.

  Merana joined him. “Creepy, ain’t it? Never seen the sky so black. Really hits home that we’re in a damned fiend’s world.”

  “Look down,” Eiten replied. “There are fewer flame-soldiers patrolling the grounds. Perhaps the sounds of destruction we heard earlier were from a fight. If we’re fortunate, the soldiers and the two monsters we saw earlier have destroyed each other.”

  Pyke recalled Raine’s earlier reference to ‘others of his kind.’ “You encountered the Hoard-Watcher and the Seer,” he guessed, walking up to stand a safe distance behind the two Relic-seekers. From here, he could see that this was a third-storey window, and that Eiten was right: the light-automata had thinned out considerably.

  “Hoard-Watchers and Seers, huh? So that’s what you Antiquarians call ‘em,” sniffed Merana. “I don’ give a damn. A fiend is a fiend.”

  Pyke opened his mouth to reply, but his voice caught in his chest as though an invisible force were squeezing his lungs. To his concern and astonishment, a completely different set of words from what he intended came out of his mouth. “I’m guessing you screamed the loudest when those fiends popped up, Merana.”

  Merana turned to stare at him, her eyes bulging with rage. “Ya can’t be talkin’ to me, ya crazy bastard!”

  Unbidden, a crafty, mocking smile spread across Pyke’s face. “Was it out on the grounds that you met these ‘fiends’? I do hope you at least had the sense not to do any of your screaming right out in the open. It would’ve drawn the light-automata... like flies to rotting meat.”

  Merana blanched.

  Pyke’s nasty grin grew wider, though internally he was trying desperately to wrest back control of his words and expressions. “Poor Wolder’s death might have been avoided if you’d kept your trap shut.” The voice was his own, but its tone of casually brutal self-assurance was Thorne’s. “You could’ve forestalled any trouble… after all, the Seer and its pet might’ve listened to reason. In my experience, ‘fiends’ have a lot more to lose than mere humans. The automata? Not so much.”

  Merana’s hand went to the dagger at her side. “He’s been talkin’ to ‘em. Connivin’ with the damn fiends! Maybe they’re what left him for dead in the room where we found ‘im—”

  “No,” Eiten said sharply, “I believe he’s fabricating names and guessing, to appear as though he knows something we don’t.”

  “Maybe,” Pyke’s body said, its tone effortlessly casual. “But if I’m only guessing, it’d be odd that I know one of them is ten feet tall and wields a huge club, while the other is blue-skinned and naked.”

  From the way Eiten’s head moved under the obscuring hood, and Merana’s look of open hostility, Pyke could tell he had the Relic-seekers’ attention. Or rather, if he were honest, his new and unwelcome mistresses did.

  “I’ll tell you this for free: I don’t know where those… ‘monsters’... are now,” Pyke continued, still with Thorne’s signature mocking smile. “You don’t have the activation phrases for my Relic, but I can use it to lock doors behind us if they show up. You’d be well advised to give me back the Lock and Key, and hope I feel like helping you when we encounter those two.”

  Merana glowered, her fist white-knuckled around the handle of her dagger, though she had yet to draw it. “My turn to say I ain’t puttin’ much stock in yer benevolence, Un-Guildsman.”

  “M-maybe we ought to listen to him,” Vino stammered. “He knows what these fiends are called, so maybe he kn
ows their weaknesses?”

  “I’ll eat my damn boots afore I let an Un-Guildsman take back his ill-got Relic—”

  The crisp, clear sound of hands clapping emanated from under Eiten’s cloak. “Well played, Antiquarian,” the smooth-voiced man said, his amusement clear in his tone. “But I don’t accept your offer. You’re bluffing: it’s all there in your expression. You’re practically dead-faced most of the time, but now that you’ve a lie to defend, you’ve started to emote much more—”

  “Enough,” Pyke’s mouth said, and the air shivered. “I won’t be tutored on the simplistic science of psychology by a pretender.”

  As he spoke the last word, Pyke’s hand snapped out unbidden and made a harsh grasping motion in Eiten’s direction.

  Eiten doubled over and fell to his knees with a wheeze of air rushing out of his lungs, gasping for breath. In the same instant, his cloak exploded outward in a rush of fabric scraps and tiny, elongated shadows which screamed as they fled into the darkness. Before Merana or Vino had a chance to react, a ring of bronze metal flew from one of Eiten’s pockets, sailing across the hallway and into Pyke’s outstretched hand.

  “Fiend!” Merana drew her dagger swiftly, holding it between herself and Pyke with a hand which, to her credit, trembled only slightly.

  As though he were unconcerned, Pyke’s right hand began to put the Lock and Key back into his pocket. His left, though, made a flicking motion in midair, like a swat at an annoying insect. Merana’s weapon tore itself from her hand and smashed through the window, sailing out into the stone gardens.

  “Now, we leave when I say we leave. Agree to follow my lead, and I’ll swear a binding oath on my name— Pyke— to take the survivors back with me to the mundane world… when I choose to go.”

  Vino broke down in tears and threw himself to the ground, begging incoherently for mercy. Merana had frozen, save for her hand which was grasping at the empty sheath for her knife, as though by groping desperately enough she might still find its handle there.

  “You’re welcome...” whispered Thorne’s cruelly amused voice in Pyke’s ear. With that, Pyke’s body was his own again.

  Eiten rose from his knees, revealing the massive scarring which covered his face: this man had been badly burned at some point in the distant past. He had no hair or eyebrows. His nose was a misshapen gap, and a single intact eye peered out from under the shredded remnants of his hood. His clothing consisted of a serviceable brown tunic and leggings, stained with sweat but otherwise clean.

  “As—” Eiten took a ragged, strained breath, trying to recover from being so brutally winded. His voice was the same deep tone as before, but with none of the smoothness and assurance it had held when it had issued from beneath the hood of the cloak. “As a sign of good faith, I’ve... returned your Relic to you.”

  Pyke suppressed his urge to explain himself or try to make amends: he’d be a fool to throw away the advantage he’d been given.

  “Of course,” he said, trying to appear confident and just a little mocking, “How gracious of you.”

  Eiten’s forehead wrinkled as though he were confused by some shift in Pyke’s demeanour. Then his gaze lowered to the ground in a clear admission of defeat.

  Vino stopped grovelling for long enough to look up at Eiten, and he recoiled as he took in the ruin of the man’s face. In contrast, Merana’s expression as she stared at the patchwork of scarring which passed for Eiten’s features seemed almost tender. She knelt next to him and placed one hand on his scarred cheek.

  Eiten flinched. “I’m sorry you had to see this, Merana,” he muttered. “The Relic-cloak… it was meant to keep the truth of me from you, to hide my weakness… to let me be the one with secrets, the feared one, the one who could protect you. The cloak helped me see beneath the surface— see when people were lying to you. It helped me to work out their insecurities and tell you their secrets.”

  “I’d no idea,” Merana replied, her voice soft. “Always thought ya jus’ liked bein’ mysterious.”

  Eiten looked up at her, meeting her eye with his. “You aren’t disgusted by me?”

  A slight smile twitched at the corner of Merana’s mouth, and she pointedly adjusted her eyepatch. “Be a damn phony if I thought a scar and a missin’ eye was ugly on somebody else.”

  Then she stood and fixed Pyke with a harsh stare. “Yer a cruel one, fiend, an’ make no mistake. I’ll work with ya to leave here, if Eiten gives the word... but next time ya aim to harm one o’ mine, ya better come for me first. Don’t, and I’ll strike ya down, even with my bare hands if that’s all I got.”

  A sick, sinking feeling had settled itself low in Pyke’s stomach. Although Eiten and Merana had been willing to threaten anything to maintain control of the situation, and although Merana was surely dangerous when she felt cornered, his intuition told him they weren’t cold-blooded killers. They wouldn’t have followed through on their threats, because until now they hadn’t considered him a danger. As the truth sank in, Pyke couldn’t help but feel this confrontation had been taken a hundred steps too far.

  Thorne, you monster. It would have been enough to return the Lock and Key to me, let them wonder what other powers I held. Eiten’s Relic-cloak was all the man had left to help him lead a normal life, and you destroyed it to make a point.

  Unlike his Voice, Thorne gave no sign of acknowledging the thought, much less any reply. Pyke took a deep breath and tried to push his meddling emotions aside.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he told Merana, injecting a confidence he didn’t feel into his tone of voice. “Hopefully we can keep our relationship civil until we’re out of here, and avoid finding out.”

  “I agree to your terms,” Eiten said firmly, with a valiant attempt at his earlier self-assurance. “There are fewer soldiers now. When we’re… done with your errand here, there’s still some hope of sneaking past them.”

  “There are some guarding the gateway to the real world,” Pyke said, choosing to leave it to the Relic-seekers to imagine how he knew. “It won’t be easy.”

  Merana spat on the floor. “I’d ask why ya saw fit to throw my knife out there if ya wanted me to fight for ya, but the damn things can’t be hit with a weapon anyway.”

  Pyke could think of no reason not to enlighten the Relic-seekers as to the weakness of the automata. “They can, but only in the instant they strike. Their spears are a part of them, so they have to become tangible to cause harm.”

  Vino, still sitting against the wall below the window, gasped. “I was right! They do fully materialize when—”

  “Shut up!” Merana shot Vino a vicious look and drew her hand back as though to strike him. “If you’d told us earlier, Wolder might still be alive, you little rat!”

  Vino flinched and resumed his cowering against the wall, shielding his face with his arms. “It was only a theory!”

  “We have nothing but theories to go on in this strange place, Vino.” Eiten rose from his knees on legs which shook. “Please share anything you think of. Our lives may depend on your expertise. That goes for our educated… friend, here, too.”

  Vino peeked out from between his arms. “Does that mean I can tell the Antiquarian my theory about this place?”

  “By all means, compare notes,” Eiten replied, perhaps a little too patiently. “Anything that gives us an edge against the force which brought us here.”

  Vino stood up in a nervous rush, his eyes darting to look anywhere but directly at Pyke. “I think there’s a power source hidden somewhere in this place, feeding all the magics. What’s more, I think it breaks the rules of magic as we know them.”

  Pyke chose to allow his eyebrows to rise. “I agree there must be power stored somewhere in the manse: those light-automata aren’t self-sustaining. But I’ll admit to not following how you reached your conclusion.”

  Vino began pacing, somewhat frenetically, back and forth past the window. “I had the first pieces of the puzzle when I
was looking into the Working enchanting the real-world manse: the one making it impossible for anyone to fight there. Why was it spending power to introduce a mental block, rather than, say, absorbing the vitality from an aggressor’s arm to deaden the limb? The latter would’ve cost nothing, and generated power for the manse in tiny quantities. That would have been the expected approach: the Dead, especially, were known for inventing Relics which used magical energy efficiently.”

  Pyke frowned. “Perhaps the Dead Lord in question didn’t have the right skills to adjust the Working?”

  Vino shook his head. “So I thought at first. I wasn’t sure until we were drawn here, but I’d already guessed the anti-violence Working wasn’t all there was to this place. The manse is a masterwork, Antiquarian, and it’s defended: not just by those... light-automata, you called them… but also by a magic designed to strike out at anyone who can see the truth, trapping them here.”

  “The Veil Tide,” Pyke murmured.

  “Yep. That trap alone was a work of genius. I can barely imagine the complexity of the Lens sustaining it. Mark my words, the Dead Lord was perfectly capable of making the House violence-free in a more efficient and subtler way. He chose not to.”

  Pyke was still forming a speculative reply when a loud noise from below and not far away startled him out of his thoughts. Eiten and Merana turned swiftly to stare down the hallway in the direction from which the sound had come, and Eiten drew a short chopping sword.

  “What do you suppose that was?” Eiten asked, his voice carefully, consciously calm.

  “It sounded like the main doors bein’ thrown open downstairs.” Merana’s tone was grim. “Gimme that. I know how to use it better’n you.”

  Eiten handed over the blade without argument, still staring down the hallway as though expecting something to leap up through the floor and rush at him.

  “Let’s get movin’,” Merana said sharply. “Unless you got a goal for us, fiend, I’ll want to get my knife back if I can… An’ I’d rather get it done well afore whatever-that-was has enough time to come searchin’ the House fer us.”