The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller
Page 26
An unexpected and threatening sound caused Pyke to straighten, and Raine’s head whipped about to stare at the hallway leading into the collection room. The noise which had caught Pyke’s attention was a slow, rough scraping, like claws dragging furrows through wood.
“I sense danger,” Raine growled, and raised her club between herself and the hallway.
As though the statement were its cue, the creature on the other side of the illusory wall burst through it. A cloud of debris flew down the corridor, obliterating the traps and peppering everything in the collection room with tiny pieces of wood and metal. As the humans covered their faces and stumbled away from the archway, Aquamarine vanished completely. Raine stepped forward, bared her teeth, and barked a challenge in a guttural language Pyke didn’t recognize.
A deep shadow rushed along the hallway toward the group, swallowing the light of Eiten’s lantern and leaving velvety darkness behind it. Pyke heard again a sound like hundreds of hands skimming lightly across wood and metal as the darkness flowed into the collection chamber.
The black stain of supernatural shadow spread in seconds to cover the far side of the room, stopping only when it was level with Raine. From out of the inky depths rushed a pair of pallid white hands on unnaturally long arms: they darted to wrap themselves around the end of the Gigant’s club.
Raine barely twitched. At the slight motion of one wrist, her club jerked back and then smashed head-on into the hands, scattering them into irregular, roughly triangular shards of blackness which showered the room. Those which landed in the pool of light cast by Eiten’s lantern began to shrivel, steam darkly, and evaporate. The remainder were absorbed back into the deep shadow which still covered the walls and floor of the room’s far half.
“Is that all thou art capable of?” bellowed Raine. “I challenge thee!”
As though in response, a hundred hands reached from the darkness. Their pale, papery skin rustled as the arms brushed together, a sound reminiscent of moths taking wing.
Raine swiped a handful of the arms out of the air, but the rest latched on to her club, her arms, and her shoulders, beginning to drag her inexorably into the darkened half of the room. The blackness pooled like water around Raine’s feet, climbing the Gigant’s boots as though she were sinking into a dark ocean.
“Belg’geth!!” Raine shouted, and slammed her club into the blanket of darkness on the floor with a high-pitched percussive crack!
Pyke gasped and cried out, his vision blanking as his sensitive ears sent a wave of agony through him. Underlying the piercing noise of wood against wood was a basso booming which shook his bones, as of a mighty and deafening thunderclap far too close at hand.
As he regained his senses, Pyke looked up from where he had fallen to his knees, and saw the aftermath of Raine’s action. At her feet, the wood of the floor was not just cracked but cratered, compressed by a vast force. Thousands of tiny shards of darkness littered the floorboards… but aside from these, the pool of black velvety emptiness was gone.
“The creature was not the threat I believed it,” Raine said, still raising her club as though ready for trouble. “It could not withstand the thunder of my people.”
“Good riddance,” muttered Vino.
“Hear, hear,” Eiten agreed.
An impulse from the Voice and a shuffling noise from somewhere above Raine were the only warnings Pyke received. “Raine! Attend!”
Raine leapt out of the way as an immense arm rocketed from the shadowy ceiling above her. Its fist, broader than Raine’s torso, slammed into the spot where she had been standing. Unhesitating despite its lack of success in crushing its target, the disembodied limb lashed out with a backhand the Gigant barely managed to block with her club. Raine was forced a step back, where anyone else would have been knocked from their feet.
Pyke hadn’t wasted his time just watching. In the seconds since the creature had arrived, he had pulled the Serpent’s Tongue from his pocket. Humming quietly to it, he adjusted his tone bit by bit until the Relic began to vibrate, indicating he’d found its resonant frequency. His eyes closed, and the serpent’s second-sight replaced them as it rose like mist from between the floorboards.
Before he could take full control of his proxy, five papery-fingered hands lashed from the ceiling and seized the snake, rending its misty form asunder. Pyke was sent careening back into his own body, with a jolt of searing pain shooting through his head and neck. He gasped, and nearly fell face-first to the ground.
Raine duelled with the giant hand, dancing from one wall of the room to the other as the monstrosity snatched and grabbed at her. Although she was holding it at bay, it always retreated in advance of her return strikes, and the darkness which served as its shoulder was still spreading from the ceiling to cloak the rest of the room. Many smaller hands reached out from the walls to grab at Vino, Merana, Eiten, and Pyke.
Rolling onto his feet and backpedalling out of the hands’ way as the long arms snaked along the floor in pursuit, Pyke brought himself to the wall closest to Eiten’s lantern. There he found the other three humans standing in a cluster, Merana hacking at any arms which strayed too near.
Voice. The Serpent’s Tongue isn’t appropriate, and the Lock and Key is no good in a fight. What are my options?
Then what do I do?
I’d hoped to try a few more avenues. Is there time for—
A hand snatched at Merana’s elbow, and another seized the blade of her chopping sword. Only Eiten’s swift slice, severing the latter at the wrist with a knife he’d drawn from his boot, prevented the two pallid arms from yanking the blade out of Merana’s grip.
Vino stomped on another of the arms as its hand grabbed Merana’s ankle. “If you’ve got something to deal with these, now’s the time!”
Merana slashed two more reaching arms into shards of darkness, but several more took their place, and the mercenary stepped backward onto Pyke’s feet to avoid being grappled again.
Pyke went for his pack, but a cold white hand shot out from the creeping darkness on the nearest wall and seized his right wrist. As he reached for the knife in his right sleeve, another three hands grabbed his other arm and his ankles and began to drag him into the darkness. He opened his mouth to shout for help, and a papery palm wrapped itself around his mouth and nose, muffling his voice and cutting off his breath. He glimpsed Merana and Vino in the same dangerous predicament, though Eiten had somehow avoided his own share of grabbing hands and was stabbing ineffectually at the nearest pallid arms.
Then Aquamarine stepped out of thin air near the beleaguered humans. The Seer spread their webbed fingers wide and raised their hands from waist height to above their head, slender arms straining and trembling as though they were lifting a heavy object.
A noise of rushing water filled Pyke’s ears, evoking the crash of a mighty river careening over the edge of a waterfall. The hands holding him distorted as though they were mirages, then washed away in midair like dust in an invisible tide. The Relic-seekers scrambled to their feet, freed just as suddenly as Pyke had been.
“I cannot muster so deep a current again for some time.” The flutes and violins of Aquamarine’s voice wavered a tremolo of fear. “If you have a solution in that pack, pray make haste with it, Antiquarian!”
“Here’s hoping I’m not just worsening our situation.” Pyke pulled the book free of his pack. Another surge of hands raced toward him, but Merana leapt into the way, hacking desperately at them with her blade.
Pyke wrenched the book open, and the hands recoiled from where they had been wrapping themselves around Merana’s hip, wrist, and neck. They continued to reach for the mercenary’s outstretched blade, but appeared t
o be giving the enchanted tome a wide berth.
Does this creature feel fear?
Then we have to hope the creature’s right about the threat… and that this book is more dangerous to it than to us. Still no idea how to use it?
Lovely. Will you at least translate?
Then let’s get started. Pyke sat cross-legged on the floor with the book in his lap, and it fell open to the pages it had been displaying when he’d closed it a few minutes earlier.
Desperately, he read:
The four thousand, three hundredth cycle of the Fae Queen’s rule. A mansion outside the small town of River’s End
It was the dead of night. In a blacksmith’s workshop which leaned against the outer wall of a mansion, a woman who went by Tamelios toiled at an anvil.
Her hammer rose and fell in a steady rhythm, striking an ornate hoop of white-hot metal the size of her head. She remained alert for the sound of intruders, but she need not have worried: the nearby town had grown used to the occasional comings and goings of strangers at the mansion.
Tamelios had now suffered the Fae Queen’s ensorcelment for one hundred and twenty cycles. At first, the Dead traveller had spent a great deal of time considering her odds of breaking the enchantment. It was theoretically possible: she could have designed an Invention capable of shattering the Glamour. But powering it was another matter: the human body she inhabited could not hold even a fraction of the might required to break such a powerful binding.
There was her Phylactery, of course. It could hold vastly more Res than a mortal body, and its capacity only grew with the passing of the cycles as Tamelios devised new ways of altering it. Still, she would have needed an additional source, for the device alone was not enough to contain the quantity of power needed to shatter the Queen’s spell. Even were she to design such an auxiliary Res-battery and gather the components for it, she did not believe her freedom was worth sacrificing one life, much less the thousands needed to power such an Invention.
So, a hundred cycles ago, Tamelios had given up on breaking the Glamour. But as much as, in those earlier days, she had lied to herself about the reason for her surrender, she had not given up because the task was impossible, nor even because the cost was too great. No: she had surrendered because there was sorrow, and meaning, and sometimes even a melancholy joy to be found in the Fae Queen’s curse.
Thanks to the Glamour, Tamelios finally had a goal beyond mere survival: a purpose other than to fail endlessly to atone for her crimes. Each day, from the moment Tamelios’s mortal vessel awoke until the moment it slept at night, she felt the enchantment at work: it whispered of love and longing; it filled her with a desperate yearning to be at Melianne’s side.
As far as Tamelios could tell, the Glamour had been fashioned simply to ensnare her heart in the undefinable emotion called ‘love,’ to harness and twist the all-consuming obsessions which defined every one of the Dead into a new form. But more had followed from that love: a wealth of deeper emotion which she could only guess the Fae Queen had never expected or intended.
In those first cycles, Tamelios had suffered miserably from the constant conflict between her desperate love for the Fae who had captivated her cold Dead heart and the knowledge that Melianne was far better off if such an unworthy creature as Tamelios kept her distance. For the first time since the death of B’kosk, Tamelios had experienced not just regret but true self-loathing: for what was she but a deathly and shrinking wanderer who possessed neither the callousness to embrace her monstrous existence nor the courage to end it? And yet, in equal measure she had felt an astonishing degree of warmth for herself: for she was a being who loved and desired another to the point of obsession, yet would not seize that love if the cost were to become a ruthless harvester of lives like accursed Enviselas.
Tamelios had learned to value these feelings, for even those which pained her were better by far than the numbness which had held her heart in its listless grip before she had met Melianne. There was beauty in feeling again: she could never have appreciated that beauty had she not first experienced emptiness.
The hammer rang its last as Tamelios finished the Invention she had spent the past two decades designing and building. It was the frame of a mirror, fashioned of iron and precisely the size of an average human face. Its internal Res-conduits were correctly aligned. The decorations on its exterior were pleasing to the eye, but more importantly were designed to smooth the natural chaos which would arise when Res was channelled through this Invention, venting the wasted energy harmlessly in a glow of soft white light.
Tamelios reached out and lifted a locket which stood open on the workbench. In it was a lovingly painted portrait of a woman with long white hair, an expression full of playfulness and wonder, and eyes which captured the radiance of sunlight upon snow: Tamelios’s muse, her beloved Melianne.
After a hundred and twenty cycles of withstanding her pain, the Dead wanderer had come to a new place in her journey. No more did she shrink from her monstrousness… yet neither did she embrace it. Her nature was her constant companion: it forced her to kill to survive, but it granted her the accumulated knowledge of eight hundred and twenty-three cycles of existence. She held within her the potential to seize what she desired.
And she desired nothing less than the deep, ardent requitation of her love from none other than Melianne, Queen of the Fae.
Tamelios allowed herself a gentle smile as she closed the locket. She would not be wasting thousands of mortal lives to shatter the Glamour which had brought her life meaning: no, her solution was much more elegant. Over the past century, she had learned what she needed to design an Invention which could use a pittance of Essence, less than a single life’s force, to reflect the Glamour upon its creator.
Tamelios’s vessel was growing stiff, its joints aching with age and wear due to the Res she had drawn through it in the crafting of the mirror. But no matter: she had already chosen the body she would use for the Gala.
Her quarry was by all accounts a dashing and charismatic man, and well-loved by those around him… for his crimes were committed behind closed doors and out of the public eye. Those crimes, and the lasting misery they inflicted upon the women who were his victims, were more monstrous than any Tamelios had come across in the five centuries she had wandered since B’kosk’s death. To her, those crimes cried out to be answered.
“It is an odd thing that I should feel compassion,” Tamelios murmured. Empathy had been one of the many side-effects of the Fae Queen’s enchantment: it was the one which had surprised Tamelios the most. She could not deny she felt for her target’s victims, though she knew that she, abuser of her entire species for three centuries, had no right to sympathize with them.
Very well, then. The time had come. Tonight, one monster would destroy another as Tamelios committed one final act of atonement and necessity. Tonight, occupying a new vessel, Tamelios would go to the Gala, and would welcome her destruction if that was to be her fate.
Tonight, the Dead traveller’s heart was oddly light as she left the workshop, iron mirror-frame in hand.
Chapter 14
Pyke looked up from the book. The pallid hands from the darkness were giving the humans a wider berth: they clustered at the edge of an invisible sphere, darting back and forth and waggling their fingers agitatedly, but the darkness-automaton seemed unwilling to enter whatever field of power the gilded volume was projecting.
All was not well. The inky blackness which enwrapped m
ost of the collection room had swallowed Raine. Another crack of wood and crash of thunder sounded, but it was muffled and feeble compared to the overpowering might of the earlier concussion. Pyke’s ears picked out the slithering, moth-wing sound of hundreds of arms enwrapping a large, struggling figure somewhere in the darkness.
From elsewhere in the room there came a truncated musical cry, like a fiddle being broken over someone’s knee. A pang of guilt struck Pyke: now that the Seer had showed themself to defend him, gentle Aquamarine must be in grave danger as well.
“Whatever yer doin’, don’t stop!” shouted Merana. The arms were beginning to crowd closer again.
What if I don’t figure out how to use the book before Raine and Aquamarine are smothered? Pyke asked.
No, Pyke decided. I’ve chosen to unlock this book’s secrets, and I’m done with half-measures. There won’t be any saving them later: I have to go and help now.
I’ll take that chance. I will find the part of this story that holds the real power. The time for caution is past, and I was always going to live or die by my trust in my skills.