The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller

by Samuel Simons

  “Tell your servant to drop the weapon. He interfereth in our Duel!”

  “I will not,” Raine said through gritted teeth, straining to hold the Revenant immobile.

  “You would dishonour the ancient traditions?”

  “I owe the human twice a blood-debt,” Raine panted. “I must protect him, even at the cost of all other honour!”

  “Thou serv’st not Tamelios, nor my Lady Melianne.” Rage rumbled in the Revenant’s voice for the first time as she dropped the formal ‘you’ of her dialect in favour of a more familiar and pejorative address. “Thou hast lied to me, and dishonoured the ancient traditions of our people!”

  The apparition bunched her shoulders and began to force Raine’s arms apart. Bit by bit, Raine lost her grip on the other Gigant. Finally the Revenant tore free and spun away, raising her sword to point at Raine from halfway across the room, ignoring the rest of the group who were disappearing through the now-open door.

  “I shall slay thee and thy charge, honourless one, then hunt down those who flee,” the Revenant promised.

  “Thou canst try,” Raine spat back.

  Breathing just as heavily as Raine, Pyke arrived next to the Gigant, and raised with aching limbs the handle of the massive club. Nausea passed through him in waves: the natural consequence of so much power being drawn through him.

  “You must strike her heart,” the Voice instructed through Pyke. “Else all may perish.”

  Raine nodded. “Go. I will destroy this Ancient-puppet all the more swiftly without the need to protect thee.”

  Pyke dashed for the door at the best speed he could manage, not allowing himself the distraction of looking to his right as one of Raine’s concussive weapon-blows sounded uncomfortably close by. Passing through the archway, he found himself at a four-way intersection of granite tunnels, their ninety-degree angles too perfect to be a natural cave system.

  Ahead was an open doorway into a small room where the rest of the group stood staring at a broad array of controls and three large viewing-screens. The screens showed, respectively, the desolation of the grounds, the emptiness of the entry hall, and two duelling figures.

  Pyke didn’t try to hide his awe: now that neither was bound to keep the battle from impacting the others present, the two Gigants had become forces of nature. Their feet and their oversized weapons moved at impossible speeds, and the noise of their clashes echoed cacophonously through the underground space. It was clear the Revenant was now defending herself in earnest: she must have sensed the danger the club now posed, and was blocking or deflecting all of Raine’s strikes instead of allowing some to pass through her.

  Pyke surveyed the room again. Frost rimed every surface in this chamber, including the slender metal frames surrounding the viewing-screens.

  “By the look of the ice, our foe was here, and recently,” Eiten observed, glancing back at Pyke.

  Pyke took it all in, trying to think through the pounding of his head.

  Voice? What are all these switches and dials?

 

  Pyke nodded, then stumbled. Aquamarine appeared at his elbow.

  “Are you injured, Pyke?” the Seer asked.

  “No. But... “ Pyke’s eyes drifted to stare at the centre viewing-screen, which displayed the duel between the Gigants. “I’m ensuring Raine has a chance… and there’s a cost to that.”

  As he spoke, Pyke leaned against the side of a control bank, needing its support against the waves of vertigo rushing through him. He put a hand to his temple, and a clump of his hair fell out into his palm. He looked down at it. There was grey at the roots of the hairs.

  “Ashes and Dust, you look terrible, Antiquarian,” exclaimed Vino, turning from the controls and apparently noticing Pyke’s presence for the first time.

  “Like I’ve aged?” Pyke replied with a wan smile.

  Aquamarine looked back and forth between Pyke and the ongoing duel, whose speed was such that it was impossible to tell who had the advantage. “Oh, friend Raine,” Aquamarine murmured, “Achieve victory with haste, I beg.”

  “I hate to interrupt yer misery over there,” Merana cut in, “But I think we got other problems.”

  The Relic-seeker was standing in front of the left-hand viewing-screen. In the entry hall, which had been empty when Pyke had walked in, there stood a woman in a white dress. She was staring straight at them, as though she knew they were watching.

  The woman’s features were withered, but otherwise ageless, severe, and somber, as might befit the funeral of an important figure. Her skin was the pristine, unblemished grey-white of a freshly embalmed corpse. The dress she wore was familiar: a more complete form of the same gown of flowing mists the skeletal Fae Queen had fashioned for herself in the collection room, though judging by its texture it was now cloth and lace.

  She raised one hand to point up at them, its pale skin clinging close to the bone. The viewing-screen went dark.

  “I believe we’ve received a message,” Eiten observed after a few seconds of tense silence. “She’s telling us she can be anywhere, and she sees us. We should go.”

  The mightiest thunderclap yet echoed down the short, wide hallway from the Revenant’s chamber. The remaining two viewing-screens flickered and died all at once, and Pyke felt an enormous weight lift from his shoulders as the Hollow Scarab ceased drawing on his Res.

  the Voice warned.

  Slow, heavy footsteps sounded in the hallway, and all eyes turned to the entrance with apprehension.

  Raine stepped through from the hall, her winter gear largely sliced to ribbons and many shallow gashes covering her forearms, face, and legs. Her blood, which ran down her clothing and face from the injuries, was blue.

  “I won,” she said simply, holding out a beetle-shaped Relic for Pyke to take. “One debt is paid.”

  Chapter 17

  Jenna made her way up yet another flight of the Last Spellbound House’s stairs, leaning on Anabel’s cane in her right hand and clutching the Manipulators in her left. Every step was an excruciating act of exertion: she could scarce imagine making the trip again. Pyke and the others had better be well on their way to stopping whatever this was.

  She tried not to think too hard about the possibility that Aquamarine had never heard her.

  Jenna had passed no fewer than twenty unconscious or delirious men and women on her way through the corridors. The debilitating paranoia, combined with the steady draining of their life’s force, had incapacitated every last one of them.

  Well, at least they aren’t energetic enough to come after me anymore.

  Jenna rounded a corner and nearly tripped over a mess of insensate forms strewn about and piled up in the middle of the hallway. It took a moment for her exhausted mind to process that she had arrived: this was the attic stairway.

  She avoided looking too closely at the pile of bodies. If it turned out they were dead, or that Anabel’s corpse was visible underneath them, she would regret the sight later. Assuming she lived long enough for there to be a ‘later.’

  She descended the straight flight of steps and stopped at the top of the spiral staircase. Tears came to her eyes at the awful concept of descending hundreds and hundreds more stairs. Then, a hopeful idea occurred to her. She leaned Anabel’s cane against the wall and pulled open the large hatch in the side of the staircase’s central pillar. Sure enough, the metal tube was hollow, and inside of it was a platform surrounded by a cage with an open front, just large enough for a person to fit inside if she crouched.

  She picked up the cane, crawled into the space, and shut the hatch behind her. Then, taking a wild guess, she cleared her throat and said, “Take me down, please?”

&nbs
p; There was a pause long enough that Jenna began to feel foolish… then the platform began to descend. Jenna could hear machinery whirring above her, and after her first heart-stopping moment of fearing she was falling, the steadiness of the lift’s descent reassured her.

  After a count of twenty, the device stopped with a charming ‘ding!’

  Jenna groped about until she found the handle on the inside of the hatch, then pushed it open and emerged into the cave-like granite room at the bottom of the staircase. There were ten men and women scattered about on the floor, some groaning quietly with eyes closed and the rest unconscious. Jenna gave them a wide berth as she picked her way across the chamber toward the closed metal door.

  Reaching the other side, she pushed the end of Anabel’s cane into the keyhole. The door nearly tore the cane from her hand as it shot upward and vanished into its frame.

  On the other side, she could see the Viewing Chamber’s central viewing-screen. It showed the same room she had just left, but there were no unconscious men and women. Instead, the room held the shattered remains of a skeleton, and the floor bore a crater surrounded by cracks in the granite bedrock.

  “The Place Aside,” Jenna breathed, arriving at the controls. Adjusting the dial she’d seen Anabel use to change the right-hand viewscreen, she switched from viewpoint to viewpoint throughout the Last Spellbound House until she saw movement.

  She was looking at the selfsame Viewing Chamber she stood in. The screens must still have been showing the Place Aside, because she didn’t see herself: instead, six people were standing in a small circle, talking about something she couldn’t hear. One of them, whom she assumed to be Raine, was huge and covered in gashes and blue blood. Another was aqua-skinned and petite, with ears like fins and huge, adorable ocean-blue eyes.

  “Aquamarine,” Jenna whispered. “You got my message.”

  Except for one, the other humans were familiar: they must be regulars at the House. The unfamiliar man wore the same clothing as Pyke, but he looked to be two decades older, perhaps in his late forties. He was balding, and had deep worry-lines on his soot-smeared face.

  Then Jenna’s tired brain caught up with reality, and she remembered the price Pyke had mentioned for using Relics.

  “Oh, Pyke,” she breathed, “You’ve given so much to get them all here in one piece.”

  On the screen, Pyke finished saying something, and Raine nodded. The Gigant strode from the Viewing Chamber and turned right, and everyone else followed in single file.

  Determination swelled in Jenna’s chest. She couldn’t go back in time and prevent what had already gone wrong… but she could affect what came next. If something was going to happen in the Place Aside, she needed to learn what she could about the real-world version of the same spot. She strode from the room and turned right at the four-way intersection of tunnels.

  The hallway turned right, then emerged into another small chamber. Unlike the others, this one had a smooth floor of worked granite. Above her, the ceiling was covered in metal tubing. There were only two items in the room: one was a mirror about the size of her head, set into a frame of decorative iron which hung on the far wall; the second, directly underneath it at shoulder height, was a metal lever with a large red-painted handle.

  Jenna crossed to the mirror and carefully considered her reflection. Were the lines on her face deeper than they had been this morning? She paused, leaning on Anabel’s cane as she considered the switch. It was connected to the tubes in the ceiling by two thick copper wires which dove behind the mirror and then emerged above it. She couldn’t tell what the tubes held, or what they connected to: each one vanished into the walls and ceiling apparently at random.

  Hmm.

  Her first impulse was to pull the lever, and be damned the consequences. Wasn’t this a desperate enough situation to merit drastic measures?

  But Jenna knew Anabel had spent fifty cycles watching and waiting, and presumably had never thrown this switch. That had to count for something: caution might not be Jenna’s style, but she’d never had a decision this important to make before. Like it or not, she was now the heir to the Last Spellbound House… if only by virtue of being the last one conscious in the whole darn place. She ought to be responsible, practical, like Pyke.

  Jenna came to a decision. She would throw the switch… but only if the hazy feeling in the air and the exhaustion settling into her bones continued to grow worse. She had to give Pyke the benefit of the doubt, because by the look of him he was sparing no expense to do what needed to be done. And for better or for worse, she trusted him to succeed at his goal, no matter the cost.

  After all, that was what she admired most about Pyke.

  With Raine at the front in case of danger, the group of six emerged into a vast chamber filled with full-length mirrors. The mirrors were arranged in orderly rows with at least ten metres of space between each one. All were of different styles and sizes, but none was so small as to be unable to capture a person’s entire image.

  The underground room was wide enough for twenty people to walk abreast, and it stretched longer than the manse’s dining room and entry hall combined. Eiten’s lantern lit a mere fraction of the chamber: only the darkness-sight granted by the Voice allowed Pyke to see the far wall.

  “There is a handle at the far side.” Aquamarine pointed, but Pyke couldn’t make out what the Seer was indicating.

  Raine stepped forward. “Then we go to it.”

  Aquamarine hesitated. “I mislike this place. The mirrors have no Working to them, yet I am filled with a foreboding.”

  “I feel it, too,” Pyke whispered, suppressing a shiver at his own strange, sourceless certainty that trouble lay ahead. “Something’s waiting for us here. I can feel a cold, patient intent to do harm.”

  “I sense nothing. Whatever the threat, it hath no teeth.” Raine hefted her club. “Let us dare it to show itself. When it does, I shall crush it.”

  “You’ll crush me, will you? Again? How rude… we’ve barely met,” purred a voice, sonorous and feminine. “Besides, how does one crush a ghost?”

  A faint wisp of mist appeared in the centre of the expansive room. Shining with a dim inner light, it grew into a wavering, translucent apparition with the same embalmed-looking features as the woman the six had seen in the viewing-screen.

  She spread her skeletal arms wide as though in welcome, and the hundreds of mirrors in the hall ceased to reflect any image, instead shining like golden lanterns.

  At the far end of the room, a spotlight in the ceiling lit itself with a sound like a person clapping gauntleted hands. The pool of white light it cast illuminated a blue-painted handle on the distant wall.

  “Welcome, intruders, to my hall of mirrors,” announced the spectral Queen.

 

  That remnant is still plenty threatening. She doesn’t look solid enough for Raine to hit, so how do we stop her?

 

  The Scarab?

 

  Great.

  “Should all of you reach the far wall, I may grant you a reprieve,” the Queen continued. “Yet it seems likely that you, too, will stay in this place forever. Join me for eternity in my sepulchre.”

  Behind the group, a heavy metal door slammed down from its slot at the top of its frame. Raine wasted no time raising her club and smashing the door experimentally… but though it produced a muted thunderclap, the weapon rebounded from an invisible barrier before
it could strike the metal, making it clear there was no way back.

  The Fae Queen vanished, and the mirrors rose into the air, floating and rotating at random and focusing beams of eerie golden light on the ground. Wherever several of the spotlights converged, they produced a pool of baleful brightness which was painful to look at.

  “Avoid being the focus of too many Faerie-lights,” Aquamarine called, “And head for the other side!”

  The six scattered as several of the lights from the mirrors converged on the spot where the group had stood. They began to cross the chamber in fits and starts, dodging the lights as the Queen’s disembodied laughter rang through the room.

  Allowing the Voice direct access to his reflexes, Pyke dipped sideways out of the way of a convergence of three beams of golden light, then hopped backwards a step to evade two more spotlights which collided in front of him.

  A single Faerie-light passed over Pyke from behind, and his perceptions warped. A nauseous daze came over him, as though he were on the verge of either throwing up or fainting. As soon as the convergence in front of him passed, the Voice guided him forward along a zigzagging path.

 

  I don’t have eyes in the back of my head!

 

  Pyke didn’t hesitate in relinquishing control: he couldn’t react as swiftly as the Voice could calculate.

  Then he nearly retched as his head began to swivel disorientingly back and forth at the fastest pace his muscles could manage, rendering the room a blur. His body took off running at a breakneck pace, then leapt into the air, twisting awkwardly to avoid another convergence of Faerie-lights in a way which strained his still-aching joints and bent his back past its limit, wringing an involuntary cry of agony from Pyke.