The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller

by Samuel Simons

  This must belong to the last person to try to deactivate the Lens. Pyke suppressed a shiver at the reminder of his own recklessness. Only his possession of the Lock and Key had prevented him from sharing a similar fate, he knew. The accusing gaze of the skeleton’s empty eye sockets seemed to say, Finish what you started, or you’ll end up like me.

  “Will you stare forever at the dead, or may I interest you in attending to the demands of the living, Gedreos?” asked a voice of flutes and violins from near Pyke’s elbow.

  For a moment, Pyke failed to react as his psyche glossed over the unfamiliar name. When he turned to look at Aquamarine, a searing headache forced him to his knees.

  Pyke gritted his teeth. “I… can’t answer to that anymore. I’ve been… forbidden.”

  “Then we must beseech the tides of fortune that your master’s aims align with ours, for if not, you are utterly lost,” the Seer said, a melody of lament in their voice. “Come, the others are waiting.”

  To Pyke’s relief, none of the rest gave any sign of overhearing his quiet conversation with Aquamarine. The Relic-seekers had moved deeper into the room to stand in a tense cluster across from where Raine remained seated. The Gigant, by her relaxed sprawl, seemed to find the three not at all imposing… but Pyke noted how the knuckles of her right hand brushed the handle of her giant club. He knew from experience that Raine could strike with deceptive speed at any moment, should she perceive a threat.

  “So, the Antiquarian’s brought us here,” Merana spat by way of introduction, as Pyke and Aquamarine approached the ongoing standoff. “Now what?”

  “What indeed?” asked Raine, a sardonic bent to her tone of voice and her unwelcoming smile. “It seems to me that you humans have come to me for protection from the dangers above... but what offer you in recompense for my might?”

  “Knowledge, secrets, expertise,” Vino put in, speaking at a frenetic pace in his nervousness. “And a theory or three about where the heart of this place really is!”

  Pyke caught a glimpse of Aquamarine’s large watery eyes scanning Raine’s and Merana’s body language as though the Seer were calculating the seconds left until a fight broke out.

  “Not just that,” Pyke added, keeping his voice deliberately slow in the hopes of maintaining a less frantic pace of conversation. “I want to offer trust… and the truth. Without both, we’ll destroy one another just the way the architect of this place intended.”

  “What truths do you propose we share?” asked Aquamarine, their musical voice just the right mixture of interested and soothing.

  “First of all, our real goals: and I’ll go first,” Pyke replied, grateful for the Seer’s tacit support in keeping the gathering’s attention. “If we’re going to work together, I think it’s time I came clean and told you how I really got to this Place Aside.”

  “I think that would be best,” Eiten said. “I could tell you were hiding something. We can’t fight you, but it would go a long way if I could believe you trustworthy.”

  Merana relaxed her grip on her sword a little at Eiten’s tactful reminder of Pyke’s mysterious powers. It was unclear whether this was a measure of her fear of Pyke or her intention of appearing the lesser threat should Raine decide that all humans were her enemies after all.

  “After the group of you vanished, the truth is that I did want to retrieve you… but only if it didn’t cost me anything. I was here at the behest of the Antiquities Guild, looking for just what Vino’s described: a Res-battery or other power source capable of maintaining a Working for a hundred cycles.”

  “I knew it,” whispered Vino in a triumphant tone which carried and echoed from the walls of the cavern. He cringed and ducked his head as everyone’s attention turned to him.

  “You were right that I didn’t come for you out of the goodness of my heart,” Pyke agreed, finding a certain morose relief in admitting his own failings. “I viewed you as competitors, and figured it was best to let you test the waters. When you vanished, I planned to leave you out of the way until I had a handle on how this place worked.”

  The rest of Pyke’s story followed: the loss of his name; the tour and the secret passageway; his arrival here in the Place Aside. He summarized his meeting with Raine and Aquamarine, and described his second encounter with the Fae sisters in the mindscape of the veil. He shared his realization that the manse was now drawing power from those in the real world version of it, but left out the source of that information: he had never told anyone about his Voice, and saw no reason to start now, lest it break this uneasy band of allies’ tenuous belief in his expertise.

  “So I have a vested interest in deactivating the Manse-Heart, the Lens for all this place’s Workings… or else somehow removing its power source. I think we all agree we may need to destroy the Heart or the source of Res: even to a Relic-seeker, there’s no profit in owning an object devised to kill every human being for many leagues, perhaps in all the known lands. We all want it stopped.”

  “And why’re we expected to risk our lives?” Merana’s voice dripped with vitriol. “Your meddlin’s killed one o’ mine, soured what was supposed to be the best-payin’ delve we ever done, and now got us consortin’ with fiends and worse.”

  “Peace, Merana,” Eiten murmured. “What’s done is done, and without the Antiquarian’s ‘meddling’ it seems likely we’d be leagues from here, struggling through the snowdrifts of the Void in search of nothing. That, or we would lie dead in the library, locked out of the reading room where we took shelter from the light-soldiers.”

  “I believe we are your allies in this,” sang Aquamarine’s musical voice. “We may not be willing to sacrifice in the name of your Kingdom of humans… yet our goals align. You seek to drag down the heart of this manse… we may be able to help you safely pick its flesh from its bones.”

  Raine glared at everyone present. “I have come to these sun-bleached lands with the tools to take what is mine, even from amid the traps and tricks of the Ancients. No pitiful human can know the steel of my resolve, nor the might of my artifice.”

  “Our peoples are suffering.” The stringed instruments under Aquamarine’s voice had taken on the mournful tone of a dirge. “Raine and I are their last hope: we each desperately seek, among the world’s last great artifacts of the Ancients, something capable of healing our ills. The Seers of the Deep and the Gigant Tribes have, by our combined arts, divined a clue: to save our futures, we must seek the last sunlit lands, and find the object of magic whose name we believe is pronounced Sehrah. The divinations suggest that it holds the power to grant the wishes of those who control it.”

  The hairs at the nape of Pyke’s neck prickled as a memory of the Primary Auxiliary Control Hub flashed through his mind: SER’RAUMIRAS. Not Gratitude, seres, plus Working, Ras, plus Source, miras... but a proper noun: Sehrah-Engine. Whatever this device was, it represented the power source of the Last Spellbound House.

  To Pyke’s relief, even perpetually-alert Raine was too deeply involved in the conversation to notice his sudden stiffness. “If the mystery at the heart of this place can guard my Tribe, I demand to carry it away from here,” she growled. “Do not oppose me at the last, whether you be human or Seer: should any of you damage the magic we seek, I will break your bones and crush your limbs to paste while you scream your last.”

  Vino opened his mouth, hesitated for a long second when everyone present turned to look at him, then half-whispered, “When we find this mechanism… can I at least look it over for a while? If it’s really a marvel from beyond the bounds of the possible, then just knowing how it works would be… incredible.”

  “Perhaps,” Raine replied, her tone curt.

  “Show Vino some respect. He’s drawn up a map, and has explored this place in depth,” Pyke said. “If I’m not mistaken, uncovering the mysteries of the Last Spellbound House has been a personal project of Vino’s in between forays into the Void.”

  “To the detriment of his duties, a
t times,” Eiten agreed, a tinge of exasperation to his voice as he watched Vino pull his maps from his rucksack and begin to spread them out on the smooth stone floor. The Risker was all but swelling with exuberance.

  “There are two locations the Essence-patterns emanate from,” Vino said, either ignoring Eiten or simply not hearing him. “One is here in this very room, likely the Lens in the real world which Py— uhh, the Antiquarian says sent him here.”

  “And the other?” Raine asked, leaning forward to peruse the map and inadvertently crowding everyone else out of their vantages with her broad shoulders.

  “Just north of the centre, not far from here… but I’ve been over every wall and floor in the adjoining corridors of the real world— on all four storeys!— with no luck. It’s either behind a secret passage as well-hidden as the one in the library, or else it’s here in the Place Aside.”

  “Or both. We should check one storey at a time,” Eiten murmured, moving Vino gently aside so he could look at the map. “It appears we could approach that point from one of three directions here on the ground level, though one is on the other side from us and probably impractical with the automata here.”

  “They’re all ‘impractical’ with the Ash-curst light-solders patrollin’ the corridors,” Merana grumbled.

  “If we get there, I should be able to open the way even if it’s locked,” Pyke put in, pretending not to have heard her.

  “And if there is a hidden path, I will find it,” Aquamarine said, their voice taking on the pizzicato tone of plucked strings. Pyke surmised this might be her way of expressing excitement. “If friend Raine can get us there safely and the Antiquarian can open the way, we shall not be far from finding this place’s secret.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Raine rumbled, rising to her feet in a rush and nearly toppling Eiten over. “I go. Follow, all… if you have the courage.”

  She turned and strode from the room, and Vino let out an annoyed exclamation as the rest hurried to avoid being left behind. Pyke looked back long enough to see Eiten pause and hold the lantern up so the Risker had enough light to gather up his maps without damaging them.

  Pyke shook his head. This group wasn’t likely to stay together long if someone didn’t figure out a way to solve its problems more permanently than with a distraction or one of Raine’s impatient outbursts. He wasn’t the best person for the job, but he supposed there wasn’t anybody else. Not for the first time, he wished Jenna had come across the veil with him: she would certainly have been better than he was at managing people.

  The thought of Jenna sent a pang of something painful through his lower chest. He had to admit he’d been growing more and more deeply worried about the young woman since the moment he’d learned the manse was draining Res from the real world. Did Jenna know the danger she was in? Was she even still alive?

  The fact that there was no way of knowing frightened Pyke more than did his own predicament, which surprised him. When had he grown so fond of that feisty, perceptive young lady?

  Chapter 12

  Standing before Jenna was a door of dark wood: a familiar one, though she was certain she had never seen it in her life. Her heart pounded in her chest. This was the place, she just knew it.

  For a while, she had searched for the hazily remembered room which surfaced in her mind when she thought of Rosie’s name and face… but despite Jenna’s sourceless certainty that the ground floor was the right place to look, the den had been nowhere to be found.

  Then she’d let her feet take her where they would while she tried to think of a better plan. Almost immediately, her wandering footsteps had brought her here.

  Now that she’d come to the door, Jenna wasn’t so sure she was ready. Her anger was there, but it seemed just out of reach, no matter how she tried to remind herself that this Rosie person had done Pyke some kind of harm.

  Well then, I’ll just have to be too stubborn to trick. Before Jenna could lose her nerve, she reached out and turned the door’s handle, stepping through onto a landing. A set of stairs led down into the den she remembered, where a fire burned low in the hearth, its flames weak and fading to embers.

  Standing behind a bar counter was a young woman with blonde hair who wore a red dress. Jenna didn’t recognize her, but something told her this was who she’d come to see. She… needed something from this woman, but she couldn’t quite recall what.

  The girl waved up at Jenna. “A visitor? Come in, come in. Please, sit down and stay awhile!”

  Jenna descended the shallow steps, staring at them as she tried to remember what she’d come here for. There was someone she needed to free from captivity: perhaps even a hostage.

  She looked up as she reached the bottom of the stairs, and the thought was gone. All that was left was the welcoming smile of the young lady behind the counter.

  “I’m… here because I need something.” Jenna was only half-certain the words were true. “Something important.”

  “What is it? I’d love to help, if I can,” Rosie said. Jenna wasn’t sure when she’d learned the girl’s name, but she looked like a Rosie, and that was her name in Jenna’s head. She must have introduced herself at some point.

  “I…” Jenna paused, trying to recall what she’d been thinking about. Rosie’s name? No, before that… “I don’t seem to remember.”

  Rosie’s expression became sympathetic. “I hate it when that happens. Don’t worry, if it’s important, it’ll come back to you. Can I interest you in a glass of wine on the house while you think?”

  “It… It is important.” Jenna sat down slowly on the bar stool, her thoughts fuzzy. Hadn’t she come here on some kind of business? But a glass of wine did sound nice, and maybe it would help her memory…

  “Here, my finest draught.” Rosie’s smile as she poured a glass of wine was an invitation, and Jenna’s heart fluttered in response.

  “I…” Jenna picked up the glass in her left hand, then after a moment’s hesitation she set it aside, trying to clear her thoughts. “I’m not here to drink. I needed to come back… for someone.”

  Rosie gasped, and tears welled up in her eyes. “You came back for me? Oh, Jenna… I didn’t know I meant so much to you. I’ve been so lonely since you left, my sweet.”

  Pity and love swelled to fill Jenna’s chest, and she smiled at Rosie, wanting nothing more than to reassure the vulnerable young woman. She would remain here for as long as she could. Rosie would never be alone again…

  “You can stay forever, if you like: we don’t have to be apart.” Rosie clasped Jenna’s hand in both of her own. “It would give me such joy to hold you each night, and not have to let go.”

  Jenna wanted to cup Rosie’s cheek… but her left hand was already holding Rosie’s, and for some reason her right had wrapped itself tightly into a fist around a fold of Pyke’s coat, knuckles white with the strength of her grip. Her fingers seized and shot pain through her as she released the bunch of fabric. As she did, her wrist brushed against a brass handle which poked from the coat’s pocket.

  A burst of clarity struck Jenna like a bucket of cold water across her face. She took a firm hold of the Relic in her pocket, and the fog in her mind began to clear.

  The wine, and Rosie, sat in front of her, sweet and alluring. Even now, she was tempted— so tempted— by the warmth swimming in her chest and fluttering across her cheeks. Something deep inside of Jenna was crying out for her to give in, to drink deeply and feel the pleasure of Rosie’s company forever. Jenna couldn’t deny there was still a heart-wrenching beauty to that idea: where else, in all the world, was there such complete, lasting happiness?

  But Jenna had a task to complete: something she needed even more desperately than eternal happiness. That task coalesced in her mind as she recalled the face of a man with oily black hair and strange blue-grey eyes.

  “Give him back!” Jenna yelled, her voice breaking with the effort it took to make so ugly a sound in Rosie�
�s soft, intoxicating presence. She yanked the dowsing rods from her pocket and slammed them through Rosie’s left hand, pinning it to the bar.

  The wound didn’t bleed. Instead, a jet of scintillating multicoloured mist jetted from the jagged hole in Rosie’s skin. It resembled an ever-shifting ribbon, shot through with mesmerizing vortices and spangled with gleaming pinpricks of starlight.

  Rosie screamed: a wrenching keen of agony and despair which threatened to tear Jenna’s mind asunder with empathy. So terrible was Rosie’s pain to behold, Jenna was certain she would have died of heartbreak had she not been holding tight to the Relic in her fist.

  Then the awful sound gave way to silence, and Rosie slumped insensate over the counter. A creeping guilt clung to Jenna’s spirit, but gone was the sensation of something vital trying to tear itself free from her chest and rush to Rosie’s defense.

  Standing from her bar stool, Jenna pushed the wine glass gingerly away from her. She needn’t have been so careful: neither the glass nor its contents held the same fascination as before, for the Glamour was gone. Wine leaked from a deep crack in the glass, collecting like a pool of blood under the unconscious girl’s head.

  Jenna averted her eyes from the morbid tableau. Her gaze landed on the other side of the bar, where a brown-clad woman lay face-down on the floor.

  “...Thorne?” Jenna asked. Her memory was returning all at once, now. Her heart raced and she broke out in a cold sweat as she recalled the events of last night. These sisters, these Fae, had taken Pyke’s name, just as the old myths said… and they’d done something with him. The secret room under the library took on a new meaning: Jenna now remembered Rosie’s tour, and what Pyke had been doing before he’d vanished.

  “Come to finish us off?” asked Lifa from a short distance behind Jenna.