The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller

by Samuel Simons

  “Thou art testing my patience,” Raine muttered, but she put her oversized club down behind her and sat cross-legged next to it. “Go swiftly, human, lest I change my mind.”

  Chapter 11

  A new page fell open under the restless stirring of the near-spent breeze. The wind hovered exhaustedly over the book, so enthralled by the tale that it could not help but continue to push over page after page even as its strength failed.

  The book, for its part, knew the little wind would not survive much longer. Still, it held on to the desperate hope that whosoever had arrived alongside the breeze was on their way.

  These are the pages the dying wind read:

  The four thousand, one hundred and eightieth cycle of the Fae Queen’s rule. On the outskirts of Wind’s Tambour

  An old man, dressed in rags and carrying no goods save a large satchel, approached a crossroads under the oppressive heat of this region’s summer sun.

  At the intersection of the roads stood a woman, who was wearing a long cloak despite the weather. She was pretending to read the notices posted by passing heralds.

  Approaching the woman, Tamelios quietly doubted her sincerity in staring for so long at the contents of the squat wooden structure which sheltered the notices from the elements. Here in Swifter-Than-Wind’s protectorates, the scrolls were mostly announcements advertising the theatres and taverns premiering new tales of that Fae hero’s exploits. There were barely any jobs anymore, for Swifter-Than-Wind’s mighty champions, the Lelaosh, did the bulk of the mercenary and hauling work for his subjects. It would be meaningless to post work at a crossroads, for the wingèd Singers did not use the Queen’s highways.

  “You are waiting for me,” Tamelios observed, stopping a few metres from the woman. “Why?”

  She turned to face him, and Tamelios noted the hilt of a sword at her side where it pushed through the folds of her cloak.

  “Perceptive fella. Unfortunate-like for you, it’s far too late to be askin’ yourself that,” she said, and from behind two large rocky outcroppings in the distance emerged thirty men and women wielding cudgels and pikes. They hurried to surround the traveller.

  “You are not from Wind’s Tambour,” Tamelios surmised.

  “Livin’ under the heel of a Fae, endin’ every evenin’ with a bedtime story what takes a day off our lives? Thanks, but no. We ain’t from Windy, not anymore,” replied the woman, one hand on her sword now.

  “So you represent a resistance group, aiming to free your people?” Though he doubted it, that, at least, would be something Tamelios hadn’t encountered before.

  One of the men surrounding him snickered. “Hells, no. We’re already free. Who’d risk gettin’ captured tryin’ to fight for somebody else?”

  “You done misunderstood your situation, traveller.” The leader’s hard voice was edged with cold amusement. “You’re bein’ robbed. Deliver your goods to us, or die.”

  Tamelios sighed. He had hoped for these mortals to be something a little more novel than a band of highwaymen. “If you draw that blade, it will not be me who dies this day, but you and yours.”

  The woman hesitated for half a second.

  “I seen desperate marks put on bravado plenty o’ times. You’re bluffin’,” she asserted, and pulled her sword from its sheath to point at Tamelios. “That was unwise. You coulda just given us your pack and moved on. Ah, well. The hard way it is.”

  Tamelios shrugged. “I accept your unwitting offering, I suppose.”

  A few minutes later, the old man stood holding a damaged, twisted metal cudgel taken from one of the brigands. Tamelios was covered in blood, and the road around him was strewn with entrails and torn limbs. He inhaled deeply but unnecessarily as he drank in the tiny quantities of Res released by the bandits’ deaths.

  An involuntary hitch in that drawn breath reminded Tamelios of the grievous wounds his vessel had sustained in the fighting. One lung was full of blood, and more ran down both legs to further stain the crimson-soaked earth.

  “I had hoped to preserve this vessel for a little longer,” Tamelios whispered, looking down at the aged body he inhabited. He had grown attached to this form, which had served him for the past twenty cycles since he had acquired it from a would-be serial killer in the Fae city of Steamhaven. In that time, the constant flow of Res required to keep his consciousness bound to the body, and to maintain its many biological systems at peak efficiency, had aged it prematurely. The Res he was absorbing now could have healed this vessel, but could never restore its youth: it was time to move on.

  Tamelios turned and strode over to the lone survivor of his retaliation. The bandit leader wept tears of terror as Tamelios approached. Her wrists and ankles were broken and her longsword lay abandoned to one side… but she remained alive, for Tamelios had chosen another use for her.

  “P-please, traveller, spare me. I was desperate, I never meant…”

  “Enough! Your begging irks me,” Tamelios said, placing a deliberate note of disdain into the bloody rattle of his voice to hide his revulsion at what he must do. Without hesitation, he reached up to his own throat and tore it out with one hand.

  The bandit stared in horrified incomprehension as, still unflinching, the person-shaped monster used both hands to casually shred the lump of flesh which had once been his throat, separating out an oversized metal key from the blood-soaked mass. Only worn-down nubs remained of the key’s teeth and handle, and the rest of it consisted of a slender black cylindrical rod etched with runes which gleamed faintly blue through its coat of gore.

  Then, apparently uncaring of the fact that he was suffocating on his own blood, the creature calmly leaned forward and jammed the bloodstained object into the side of the bandit leader’s neck. She opened her mouth to scream in shock and pain… but the noise which emerged was not her voice but an unearthly, perfectly pure note like a singing crystal glass.

  Then she knew no more.

  Two hours later, at a table in one corner of a crowded tavern, a woman collapsed into a seat. She had the look of a wayfarer, or perhaps a mercenary. Certainly the longsword at her hip indicated a readiness for trouble. Under the sword-belt, she wore an oversized, hooded cloak which hid the bloodstains on her clothing and the rapidly healing wound in the side of her neck.

  From under the cloak, Tamelios produced a pack. She reached into it for the journal… but the book wasn’t where it should be, as though it had vanished in the chaos at the crossroads. She was beginning to get to her feet, intending to go back and search for it, when a commotion at the tavern doors alerted her to something unusual afoot. A series of lewd catcalls and impressed whistles followed in the wake of a most exceptional woman who strode through the doorway.

  This woman carried herself like a dancer, all lithe grace and coiled energy, and projected the impression of just barely suppressing the urge to skip instead of walk. Her dress was a work of art in white lace and gold wire which brushed the grimy floor of the tavern, and a strange chill in her aura was enough to freeze in place even the most confident of the men and women who watched her covetously.

  She sauntered across the room at a leisurely pace, but by the time she arrived at Tamelios’s table, all present wished they could have watched her cross the room longer. Every eye was drinking in the icy beauty of her as she seated herself across from the sword-bearing traveller.

  Then, as though a spell had been cast— and it had— everyone present seemed to forget the enchanting woman completely. Stunned silence gave way without warning to conversation, to the scrape of chairs, and to the clink of glass tankards against one another.

  Tamelios drew on her vessel’s knowledge to colour her speech with the local dialect. “Who’s lookin’ for me?” she asked in the common tongue.

  “You’re the one they call Traveller?” the other woman asked in the Language of Magic. Her voice was honey and silk: sweet and smooth and calming.

  “Some call me that. But none here k
now that name, for I have visited Wind’s Tambour only once, many cycles ago,” Tamelios replied in the same tongue, not lowering her guard for a moment. Under the table, she placed a hand on the hilt of her weapon. “Who are you, and why have you come to find me?”

  “How could I not seek to know such an interesting being?” the newcomer replied with a coy smile, her pearl-white irises taking on a tinge of gold like the shimmer of morning sunlight on snow. “Be at peace. I do not come to fight, but to speak.”

  And Tamelios found that, though she tried mightily, she could not draw her weapon. Letting go of the blade’s hilt, she straightened in her seat. “Then speak, and be direct with what you intend. You clearly possess power far beyond mine, and I would as soon not have to guess what you plan to do with me.”

  “Very well. I will play no game with you. They say the Driven have no feelings, nothing motivating them save obsession. I have come to see if it is true. I wish to understand you.”

  Tamelios simply waited, stone-faced. She knew her fate was already decided, regardless of what she did next.

  “You don’t operate like your brethren, Traveller,” the woman said, and now her voice’s tone held no honey nor silk, but instead frost and crystal: chill and resonant and beautiful. “For hundreds of cycles, you have wandered these lands. You do not harvest Essence from mortals, but walk among them, learning their ways. You sustain yourself only by taking the lives of those who force your hand. You study their books, inspect their societies… yet although you could reach out with your will and control the events of their simple politics, transform those societies into whatever you wish… you seem content simply to watch.”

  “Not content: resigned,” Tamelios replied simply. There was nothing more to say: she agreed with all else.

  “Why?” the beautiful stranger asked. “You’ll never learn the deepest secrets of this world by merely watching, yet that’s all you do. You travel, and you watch, and you survive. When will you set aside your melancholy misery and begin to live?”

  “Why do you ask these things? You are Fae, yet you claim you wish to understand me. Will this understanding make me a better plaything?”

  “For argument’s sake, let’s say it will. Humour me?”

  “Is that a request or a command?”

  The Fae simply smiled and drew a familiar, oversized journal of grimy tan-coloured leather from behind her back. “Consider it a request from one who enjoys your poetry and seeks to know the author.”

  Tamelios’s face betrayed no hint of emotion. “You hold in your hands the very reason why I do not establish myself as Lord, nor harvest my tribute from the masses as do others of the Dead.”

  “The diary of a mortal? Some poetry about your regret for a small civilization’s death and your hatred for your master?” The Fae shook her head. “You waste your talents. You’re eternal. It would be a journey of centuries, but you could take your revenge on this Enviselas. You could research the sciences needed to fashion your people anew. I can’t see why you’re so unwilling to begin the task. You don’t behave as you should, Tamelios, and that intrigues me.”

  “When you do comprehend, you will be disappointed.” Tamelios’s voice was calm and even. “There is no great difference between myself and others of my kind. I simply know a truth they do not.”

  “What is that truth?”

  Tamelios gestured, and the journal tore itself from the stranger’s grip and flew to her hand, its pages turning of their own volition. She placed the book down on the table and read:

  “O Traveller, thou craven and worthless being / What gives thee the right to exist?

  Who createth no new and no wholesome thing / In the end, thou wilt never be missed.

  Take thou the Res and the lives which thou needst / From the ones whom you think deserve death,

  Who made thee the jury and judge of misdeeds / Executioner, stealer of breath?

  Thy crimes, they are terrible, many, and vast / Thou hast sent all thy brothers to die

  The cost to atone is to echo thy past / And thy tormentor’s place occupy.”

  “You are a strange one, Tamelios.” There was wonder and intrigue in the Fae’s smile. “You’ve transcended mortality, yet you value your eternal self so little. You could harvest every last soul in this city, and use their Essence to research the arts you need. You could repopulate Wind’s Tambour with your lost people, granting them the memories and culture you desire. You could be a kind and benevolent master with many millions of adoring followers: your worshipful priests would willingly, gratefully offer themselves up as sacrifices. You could use that power to find and throw down Enviselas.”

  The Fae’s pale eyes shone with rapture at the tableau she painted with her words, her excitement glowing like sunlight through her captivating smile. “Why not take what is rightfully yours? Why not cast aside your self-inflicted chains and begin it now?”

  “Because, Fae,” Tamelios said, her face and her voice still utterly emotionless, “The cost would be to become the monster I so detest. If, to gain my revenge on Enviselas, I must consume others in the same way Enviselas consumed my brothers... then I refuse. If, to resurrect my kind, I must destroy another people the way mine were destroyed... then I refuse.”

  The Fae sat back in her seat, still smiling that brilliant, wonder-filled smile. “You are an impossible contradiction. A Golem whose obsession isn’t control, nor understanding, but remorse. You have nothing left except regret at what you’ve become, so your guilt is the one thing you refuse to discard.”

  “Yes,” Tamelios said simply, reclining in her chair as well. “If you have come to bind me, then do so and be done with it. I have not the force of Essence to resist, even were you the least of the Fae. And I know the stories: you are no minor messenger seeking a new tale, but frost-eyed Melianne, Queen of Bright Snow, Emasulasiidanis in this tongue. Ruler of the Fae and their Spellbound World.”

  Melianne smiled, excitement still glowing golden in the sunlit snow-field of her eyes. “I have come to bind you, you miserable, flawed, beautiful creature... but not in the way you expect. Oh, Traveller: I will grant you, instead, a gift of wondrous chains I have bestowed upon no other.”

  In Tamelios’s chest, a sudden warmth blossomed. The first true emotion she had felt in centuries aside from remorse and hatred, it was too new and too unfamiliar for her to name.

  “What have… you done?” she asked, her voice breaking as the foreign sensation reverberated in her chest and spawned ten new emotions, then a hundred. She stood in a rush, her voice rising. “What have you done to me?”

  But there was no one in the seat across from her. The tavern’s other patrons looked askance at Tamelios and shifted their seats farther away from her. Trembling, she subsided back into her chair.

  “What have you done to me?” she whispered, looking down at her bloodstained, shaking hands through eyes which were filling with tears. There she sat for many minutes, weeping helplessly in the thrall of the painful sensations which continued to overflow from the cracks in her cold, atrophied soul. “What have you…?”

  Had the book been able to weep at the beauty of this moment held crystallized within its pages, it would have… yet even that ability did not remain to it, not after so long. So it settled for the dull ache of yearning: yearning for a reader to reawaken the tale; yearning for the glorious past to be revived; yearning for its love, its Tamelios, to return.

  All must be ready when the Traveller arrived, though. The book knew the little wind would not exist for much longer, for it was in the nature of winds to be mortal: to wax, to wane, and eventually to die.

  Varist, nen lafash rei risist, the book urged the breeze in the Language of Magic: Arise, and turn my pages.

  The wind obeyed, exhausted though it was. It had no choice… and in truth, what more could such a small wind desire but a purpose for its final moments?

  This final gasp of moving air ran along the edge of each page
and flipped through the rest of the book, more and more slowly until, with the last of its strength, it reached a place near the end, not long before the scene of the Gala of Excellence where it had begun its reading.

  As the leaves of the tome settled open, the tiny wind sighed its last and disappeared, leaving the book completely alone once more. The return of this past century’s solitude was too much to bear after even such a brief taste of companionship. The book would have wept bitterly, but again it was reminded that it had not the power to do so.

  O maerisrei, the book hoped desperately, Rei lin vakhtefes rates ranteite ful vekh akhest...

  Oh my love, do not ask me to wait in solitude too much longer...

  Pyke returned to the underground chamber at the head of the three Relic-seekers. He had managed to cajole them into coming down here, but convincing them to act friendly with ‘fiends’ was another matter. Eiten was carrying his lantern with an air of bravado which Pyke might have mistaken for genuine confidence had he not known better. Vino and Merana each wore their own individual masks of terror: the Risker looked smaller and more rodent-like than ever as he hunched his shoulders and wrung his hands close to his chest; Merana was puffed up like a threatened owl, clutching the hilt of the sheathed sword she’d taken from Eiten in a white-knuckled grip.

  In the light of the lantern, Pyke could see more of this cavern. Like the one in the real world, the cave’s walls were bedrock and its shape that of an egg, but there the similarities ended. There was no massive machine filling the centre of the room, but instead a series of stone bookshelves hewn from the walls themselves and filled with intact tomes.

  At the far end of the cavern, a human skeleton sat leaning against one of the shelves next to a messy stack of volumes pulled from the bookcase. A discoloration in the stone an arm’s length in every direction from the skeleton showed where the flesh had gone to dust. Both dust and skeleton lay untouched where they had fallen, with neither wind nor scavenging creatures to disturb them.