The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller

by Samuel Simons

  Raine seized him by the front of his cloak and raised him into the air. “Name my people thus again and I shall make thee regret having been born!”

  Raine’s voice was thunder echoing between mountains, and to experience her grip was to be wedged between two stones on the precipice of an impending landslide.

  “I didn’t know it was a slur!” Sweat stained Pyke’s armpits and ran down his face. “I sincerely apologize—”

  Raine jerked Pyke closer to her face as though searching his eyes for sincerity, then threw him to the ground. He landed heavily, the wind rushing out of him.

  “Thou’rt fortunate I find thee useful, and that thine ignorance protects thee. Those of the Situmasai, which you call Gigants, who lived during the time of the Ancients as I did… we do not appreciate reference to our people’s long enslavement. We protect no one’s hoard of riches.”

  “Enough. The danger comes this way, slowly but surely,” Aquamarine murmured. “I can See its aura: mere wood and mortar are not equal to the task of hiding its power. The creature is similar to the light-soldiers, yet its ripples in the water of reality speak of darkness and not light… and it is vastly more powerful than they. Let us make haste.”

  Nobody had anything to say to that. Pyke struggled to his feet and stumbled along behind the rest. Vino led the way through the corridors for another minute and a half amid a cowed silence until he stopped at yet another T-shaped intersection. This one struck Pyke’s instincts as different. Its wall was not empty, but instead bore a decorative archway which, though its centre was identical to the rest of the wall, was the right size for a double door capable of fitting even Raine through it. At the top of the archway was an inscription, too high and too filled with shadow for him to read without his Voice’s darkness-vision.

  “This is something unique to this place. It may be what we seek,” Aquamarine said.

  “The archway definitely isn’t there in the real world,” Vino said, practically vibrating with a mixture of fear and excitement. “This is new! It must hide something unique.”

  “Give me some light.” Pyke stepped forward, trying not to make it too obvious how winded he still was after Raine’s outburst. “There’s an inscription here which might be helpful.”

  “Just use yer Relic and open the damn door,” Merana muttered.

  Pyke shot her what he hoped was a withering glare. “The last time I leapt before I looked, so to speak, I ended up here and endangered everyone in the House. Would you have me repeat that mistake?”

  “We take your meaning, Antiquarian,” murmured Eiten, raising his lantern to shed light on the archway.

  The inscription read, Lin khesist, huvu eluvash val reutalas kheset vash neskhit. Navaosh luvas shesiut; lesaosh sur vakhshadis sheseut.

  Pyke took the deepest breath he could. This was a sentence more like poetry than instruction, full of plural and compound nouns, unusual vocabulary, and future-tense verbs. Not his area of expertise.

 

  Pyke narrowly avoided giving a start at the Voice’s sudden return. Damnit, you know how to make an entrance, Voice.

 

  “Seek within, you who dare the secrets of this manse,” Pyke said out loud, conscious of five pairs of eyes watching him intently as he stared at the inscription.

  You said erstwhile. My ‘erstwhile’ Mistresses.

 

  How is this possible?

 

  What’s the second part of the Old Ancient writing? ‘Navaosh luvas shesiut; lesaosh sur vakhshadis sheseut.’

  “Friends will discover enlightenment; foes will find only damnation,” Pyke said out loud, relaying the Voice’s response.

  There was a long silence.

  “So, which are we?” Pyke asked sardonically. “And are we supposed to take heart that this could have been meant as a warning and an invitation as well as a promise of certain doom?”

  “Be silent. I sense something,” said Raine.

  Pyke listened, and heard what he could only describe as a hundred hands slapping quietly against wood. The noise was far behind the group… but it was growing closer. He drew the Lock and Key from its pocket, but Aquamarine held up a hand to stop him.

  “Save your strength. This will be swifter and easier.” The Seer gestured, and the wood of the wall faded away as though it had never existed, revealing a wide hallway. “Let us hasten: the beast is near, and moves swifter than the sharks of the deep.”

  As Pyke stepped into the corridor, a trapdoor opened five metres ahead of him, its mechanism collapsing to reveal a wide, sloped chute which ended in a pit of sharpened stakes. A few steps beyond it, a series of heavy metal spikes exploded from the wall, and three spears dropped side-by-side from the ceiling near the end of the hallway.

  Pyke froze, his heart racing. He had nearly died thrice over: only luck and the passage of time, it seemed, had caused the traps to malfunction and trip early.

  “Go, Antiquarian,” Merana urged Pyke, then growled and pushed past him as he stood stock-still at the hallway’s entrance. She ran and leapt over the trapdoor, which was about two metres wide, then sidled swiftly along the wall opposite the spikes. Straightening, she used her sword to hack the brittle wooden hafts of the spears out of the way. Eiten followed with similar aplomb.

  Vino sighed. “Show-offs. It’s always been up to me and Wolder to figure out our own way past things like this.” He began to pull a length of rope out of his pack.

  “There is no time.” If Pyke hadn’t known better, he’d have said there was fear in Raine’s voice. The Gigant picked Vino and Pyke up by the waists, one in each massive hand, and barrelled straight down the hallway, traversing the trapdoor in a single step and striking the sides of the metal spikes hard enough to bend them into uselessness.

  said the Voice as Pyke tensed in the Gigant’s ungentle grip.

  You’re saying the traps were designed to disarm under certain circumstances?

 

  I’m up to my neck in mysteries, Voice. Let’s deal with this later.

  Raine burst into the room at the other end of the hallway and stopped to look back, dropping Pyke and Vino as an afterthought. Following the Gigant’s gaze as he picked himself up, Pyke saw that the illusory wall had reappeared, and that the unknown threat wasn’t following. He looked around for Aquamarine, and was startled to see them stepping out from behind Raine, though he hadn’t witnessed the Seer crossing the intervening space.

  Then he turned his attention to the room they’d entered, and his heart began to race again, this time with excitement. The chamber wasn’t large like the dining hall, nor elegant like the Place Aside’s library… but to Pyke it was more beautiful than either. Illuminated by Eiten’s lantern were walls covered in bookshelves, but unlike the orderly rows of tomes in the library, these books were all shapes and sizes and organized by no system Pyke could determine. The titles on their backs were not written in dialects of Common from the time of the Ancients like the ones in the library, but instead all were spelled out in Old Ancient or other, less familiar alphabets. To Pyke, the shelves had the look of a personal collection, and he wished dearly that he had t
he time to study them.

  The rest of the room was no less intriguing. It was full of objects on plinths, almost but not quite to the point of feeling cluttered. Atop the short pillars were giant books under glass cases with hand-cranked clockwork mechanisms for turning the pages; sets of coins in wooden display boxes lined with silk; stands propping up mechanical devices; a bespoke vise holding the base of a rainbow-coloured feather; a bust wearing a necklace whose ruby gemstone gleamed the colour of blood; a red velvet cushion on which lay a rose with silver petals. If Pyke hadn’t already suspected many of these things were Relics, Aquamarine’s musical gasp would have confirmed it.

 

  You figured this out how?

 

  Pyke shook his head, disliking all these unanswered questions. The last time I indulged my curiosity, it only made matters worse. You’re certain it’s safe?

 

  Cautiously, Pyke crossed to the book and began to flip through it using the page-turning mechanism. The Voice assimilated the information and transferred it straight to Pyke’s mind, allowing him to take in the contents in seconds.

 

  Pyke nodded, his heart pounding. About nearly everything. This was written by someone who had experimented for centuries with the practicalities of storing large quantities of power.

 

  You mean genocides.

 

  So it could theoretically exist? Pyke tried to hold on to his skepticism, but he knew the Voice wouldn’t speak with such certainty if the theory weren’t sound, for it had no ego at all as far as he could determine. The implications are staggering… if there really is an infinite source of Res here.

 

  That’s not all. The final chapter of the book theorizes that if something or someone could be found which exists independently of our reality, it could be used as a catalyst to break that law.

 

  Sehrah.

 

  What would a Dead Lord wish for, if not infinite Res?

 

  “Antiquarian, can you help me identify this Relic? I think it’s special,” called Vino, and Pyke looked up from the last page of the Res-theory text.

  With interest, Pyke headed over to look at the object in front of which Vino stood. It was a crown which rested upon a stand atop its plinth. The rubies and sapphires set into its uppermost points gleamed alluringly blue and red in the lantern-light.

 

  Pyke shuddered. “You don’t want to know.”

  Ignoring the Risker’s groan of exasperation, Pyke moved on to the next object forward, the silver rose he had glimpsed earlier. To Pyke’s keen hearing, the flower gave off a faint, beautiful tune, a quiet music a person could lose himself in listening ever closer to, trying to identify the instrument, the melody, the subtle chords…

 

  I know. Pyke tore his attention away, keenly aware of the dangers of giving an unknown Relic too firm a grip on his mind. Perhaps I can explore these collected wonders further once we’ve deactivated the manse’s heart. Help me find something useful.

  As Pyke scanned the room again, the Voice spoke.

  Sure enough, in the far left corner of the room was another doorway. This one wasn’t as large or ornate as the arch leading in from the hall of traps: Raine wouldn’t have been able to fit. Passing through, he observed that the chamber’s plain wooden walls held no bookshelves. There was only one object displayed here, in the precise centre of the room: on an ornate stone lectern, a dome of crystal covered an open book.

  This was not just any book, that much Pyke could see. The fine leather of its cover was still smooth and supple even after so many cycles, and the edges were lovingly trimmed with the narrowest filigree of gold leaf. Large, broad-brushed Old Ancient letters covered its snow-white pages. An inkwell, long dried, sat to one side under the crystal casing with a fragile quill and a copper-handled calligraphy brush balanced across it.

  Overhead of the plinth hung a piece of dark brown hardwood on two slender black chains. It was carved with decorative whorls around its edges, but the front was flat and unadorned except for a messy, burned-looking series of Old Ancient characters haphazardly scorched into the wood, as though an uneven brand in the shape of the letters had been held against it.

  Eluvas val Reutalaukheras rei hevet.

  <‘I hold the secret of the Manse-Heart.’>

  Pyke’s instincts had already been telling him this was what he’d come here to find: this book was the answer to his desperate search for a way to stop the manse from completing its function of ‘Restore Life.’ But as well as his intuition usually served him, he was loath to put his faith in it alone where the objects of the Ancients were concerned… and he trusted the inscription not at all.

  What is the book?

 

  I’m unwilling to do that. I’ve been uncautious about this place’s secrets for the last time.

 

  You’re not usually one to anticipate my wishes. That alone is suspicious… and besides, a general statement like ‘this could be helpful’ would be true of any of the Relics out there.

 

  And there’s no trap of magic or other means on the plinth or the crystal dome?

 

  Pyke still wasn’t about to read the book without a good reason, but he’d learned not to second-guess too much when the Voice’s logic aligned with his own ins
tincts. Lifting the dome from its shallow wooden slots, he placed it on the ground to one side of the plinth. Then, trying not to glance at the book’s contents, he closed it and slid it gently into a reinforced compartment of his travel pack specifically designed for fragile or volatile Relics.

  Pulling the pack’s drawstring shut, he turned and headed for the main room where all five of the others were still perusing the assembled Relics.

  “Antiquarian, I demand that thou shouldst tell me all there is to know about this!” Raine held up an intricate metal machine whose outermost layer was covered in interlocking gears. Three large metal blades sprouted from its top.

  “It is an Invention designed for remote vision,” Pyke replied, letting the Voice speak through him. “The mechanism itself flies, and the magic binding it to its user allows that one to see what it sees.”

  “And this?” Aquamarine asked. The Seer was holding up a grey ceramic cylinder scarcely larger than their petite web-fingered hands. The top of the device had an indentation all the way around, an indication that it could be opened.

  “It is for enhancing herbal remedies placed into the upper chamber. It uses the wielder’s Res to infuse a topical solution with a temporary Working of hastened healing. This is a particularly Res-efficient specimen, likely a masterwork.”

  “It will serve me well, then,” Aquamarine said, inserting the object into a pouch over their abdomen, roughly where a human being’s navel would be. As they let go of the cylinder, it vanished completely into the pouch.

  Then the Seer smiled, and Pyke barely managed to avoid taking an unnerved step back. Aquamarine’s teeth were razor-sharp, and there were four layers of them. Until now, the Seer hadn’t opened their mouth more than a little, even when speaking.

  “Did I do it wrong?” Aquamarine asked, picking up on Pyke’s discomfiture. “That is a pity. I had been practicing since I learned this is how humans express pleasure.”

  “No. I just wasn’t expecting…” Pyke pointed to his own teeth. “Ours are designed a little differently.”

  “Ah, I see,” Aquamarine said, and smiled again. This time their teeth were broad and flat, and there was only one row. While the display was not quite as startlingly predatory, there was still something off about it which sent a shiver down Pyke’s spine, though he couldn’t place the issue. Perhaps it was that there were too few teeth, or the lack of canines, or that the Seer’s mouth was just a little too narrow…