The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller

by Samuel Simons

  “Hurry,” Pyke told Vino and Eiten. “We have to deactivate the manse, by whatever means necessary.”

  “The oval object at the centre seems essential, no matter what way you look at it,” Vino replied, staring down at the complicated system below. “But I don’t see any way of disrupting it unless we can find a built-in set of controls, like the one in my vision.”

  “There’s also the issue of climbing with an unconscious Seer!” Eiten shouted over several more thunderclaps from Raine’s fight against Merana.

  “I can rig up something to allow us to rappel down with Aqua, but it’ll take a moment.” Vino shrugged off his pack and began pulling pitons, rope, and other rock-climbing gear from a side pouch. “In the meantime, get going, Antiquarian! We’ll follow as soon as we can.”

  Pyke stepped to the edge of the cliff and turned, feeling for the first rung of the ladder with one foot. Finding it, he began to climb as swiftly as he could, hanging on tightly as the rock face shuddered with the largest tremor yet.

  Eiten knew Vino was working as quickly as he could by the limited light of the lantern, but he feared there wouldn’t be time. The thunderclaps from the dark room behind the two were growing closer, and less frequent. He hoped that didn’t mean the Gigant was losing the fight. And yet, he also feared that if Raine should win, Merana would be killed. Surely there was some way of getting her back without harming her?

  “There,” Vino said, startling Eiten from his concerned stare into the darkness. “The Seer is harnessed up, and the pitons are set.”

  “Lower the Seer first,” Eiten said, “Then follow. I’ll stay here until you’re safely on the way down.”

  “Don’t be a hero,” Vino muttered, rolling the unconscious and thoroughly rope-harnessed Aquamarine over the edge of the cliff and grabbing the rope before the Seer’s limp form could pick up speed.

  “Vino?”

  “Yeah?” The Risker didn’t look up from where he was running the rope through gloved hands at the swiftest rate he was able.

  “Do people recover from being… possessed by Fae?”

  “If the stories are true, not often,” Vino replied absently. “Sometimes, the Fae-possessed in the tales are freed by their allies winning a battle of wits, or a test of purity of heart. More often, though, they don’t make it.”

  Then realization crossed the Risker’s face, and he stammered, “B… but that’s in stories. It’s always the character who’s got something coming to him who gets possessed. We can’t put too much stock in the tales: real life doesn’t work that way.”

  Eiten took a deep breath, trying and failing to suppress a surge of raw grief. “I have a terrible feeling that where the Fae are concerned, real life does work that way.”

  “Seer’s at the bottom,” Vino said by way of reply. “I’ll go next, and—”

  He stopped, staring past Eiten at the person who had just walked into the pool of lantern-light. Eiten stiffened and turned.

  Merana’s face was still stretched into that frightening, joyous smile. In one hand, her sword continued to gleam in the colours of the rainbow. In the other, she dragged a gargantuan wrist.

  “I assume I’ve the pleasure of addressing the Queen of the Fae,” Eiten said, his tone as polite as he could make it. Behind him, Vino crept to the edge of the cliff and crawled over it, clipping a metal loop on his belt onto the rope.

  Merana paused, and her smile widened. “You assume correctly.” She gave a heave, and the massive bulk of Raine flew from the darkness and sailed over the edge of the cliff. Eiten couldn’t tell whether the Gigant had been dead or unconscious, but he supposed it didn’t matter, given the height of the fall.

  “I would like to challenge you to a battle of wits,” he suggested.

  “I decline,” Merana responded simply, an edge of harshness to her amused tone of voice. “You’re no hero of legend, to tempt me with a challenge. You are nothing.”

  “Then what can I offer you in exchange for a promise to spare her life and her mind?” Eiten asked, his voice breaking. “If you’ll give her back, I’ll offer myself willingly to be your new vessel.”

  “Unfortunately for you, I prefer a feminine form,” the one-eyed woman said. Then her expression soured. “You could once have offered to take on the impossible task of telling my story a thousand times before your dying breath… yet I have none for you to tell.”

  She stepped forward and seized Eiten by the throat, lifting him into the air. Try as he might to break her grip, Merana’s unnatural strength was such that he failed to pry even one finger loose from his windpipe.

  “No, I have no story…” Her voice rose from a hiss to an unearthly screech. “My book remains unread, and even I do not remember who I am!”

  Terror flowed through Eiten. His every instinct was screaming for him to draw the dagger in his sleeve, to strike out desperately and perhaps catch this monster by surprise, to rob it of its stolen body and save them all. But one thing was stopping him: Merana’s scarred, weathered face an arm’s length away, her features more familiar than his own. Something told him she was still in there somewhere. He couldn’t save himself, not if it meant killing her.

  With an effort of will, Eiten allowed his arms to relax. With a shaking hand, he reached out and stroked Merana’s rough cheek.

  He hoped she was unconscious, and would never know what the Fae Queen had used her body for. He wished so many things had been different, but most of all, he wished he had been able to tell her the truth before it was too late. I have loved you all this time, and I forgive you, he wanted to say... but he had not the breath.

  A single tear traced his scarred features and dripped onto Merana’s hand.

  The mercenary’s grip faltered. The glow in Merana’s eye dimmed, and the rainbow light of her sword died as it tumbled from her hand. She dropped Eiten, tears running down the left side of her face as she struggled desperately against the Queen’s continuing influence.

  Kneeling, Eiten stared back up at her, unable to look away. In that crystallized moment there was such a deep beauty in Merana’s scarred face, he thought his heart might burst with love.

  Moving with care, as though to act too swiftly might shatter the fragile peace of these dearly bought seconds, Merana caressed Eiten’s cheek. I’m so sorry, her expression seemed to say.

  Then, in one decisive movement, she hurled herself from the precipice.

  Vino reached the bottom of the cliff in total darkness.

  His terror of whatever was happening behind him warred with his ecstasy at descending into the depths of an honest-to-Flame system of untouched Ancient machinery.

  Earlier, as he’d been climbing, he’d heard a muffled crash far off amid the nest of devices. Now, another impact much nearer at hand reminded him he had no idea of his surroundings.

  It was past time he used his vision Relic. Digging in his pack, he withdrew a metal hoop and placed it on his brow.

  The jewelled crown settled atop his head with a sensation completely unlike that of the circlet. Vino realized with horror that during the mirror-visions, there had been a long few minutes his pack had been unattended. Long enough for something to change: long enough for a trickster Queen to switch one Relic for another.

  Then his will was swept away, and he belonged to Melianne.

  Pyke had made his decision: with or without a physical body to control, if left undisrupted the Fae Queen would destroy them all before they reached the Manse-Heart or its power source, the Serra-Engine spoken of in the book. He would simply have to hope the tome’s contents would make his group’s situation better and not worse.

  For the past several minutes, Pyke had left the movements of his feet to his Voice, instructing it to make haste toward the reflective black spheroid. He had started by reading the first five pages of the book. The scenes of Dead Lords building their hidden empires and Fae tearing them down served to set the stage, and they had already told him more of the
War Eternal than all his studies combined. Unfortunately, this section of the book did not yet feature the Queen except as a distant authority figure to whom all other Fae deferred.

  Worse, the reading of the book was having deleterious effects on Pyke. He’d experienced lapses of awareness, each one filled with ever-longer bursts of sensation and sound. They seemed similar to the visions he’d had earlier, and they often featured the dark laboratory or one of many blood-soaked crossroads. If he waited to read the story in order, he feared his mind might not be intact by the time he reached the useful parts of the book.

  So Pyke had flipped to the next section, which featured a warlord named B’kosk. Pyke read of life under the rule of the Ancients in their Spellbound World, and of the cost to the mortals whose societies rose and fell at the whims of their overlords.

 

  Snooping, Voice? I just thought it was an interesting linguistic counterpoint to what the Ancients used to call it: Spellbound.

 

  Fancy yourself a poet?

 

  Pyke tried to return his attention to the book, but a piercing shriek of shearing metal not far to his left startled him into alertness.

  What was that?

 

  Pyke looked up and found himself walking amid a complex tangle of cables and metal tubes, effectively a maze. The black object at the centre loomed surprisingly close, now: the Serra-Engine was perhaps the size of the Wayhouse in Void’s Rim, barn included. This made it larger than the Auxiliary Control Hub under the library, but much smaller than any of the other machines in this vast underground space.

  A broad, smoking hole in the side of one of the steel gear casings, no more than ten metres to the left of him, had been the source of the sound. Pyke had only a brief second to take it in before the Voice took hold and launched him awkwardly sideways.

  A bolt of coruscating white light slammed into the stone floor where he’d been standing, creating a scorched, fist-sized crater and scattering bits of granite everywhere. Pyke got to his feet, his body his own again: the Voice had relinquished control.

  Pyke looked up, searching for the source of the projectile, and saw a fading glow atop one of the more distant building-sized machines, roughly three hundred metres away and sixty metres above the floor. There was a weapon emplacement of some sort there, and a vaguely humanoid figure with two white-glowing eyes stood next to it.

  Pyke’s vision improved abruptly, and he could see that the figure was Vino, wearing a familiar crown-shaped Relic and tapping away at a control terminal. The weapon next to the possessed Risker resembled a ballista, but it had a cylindrical barrel attached to it, like nothing Pyke had ever seen.

 

  I can now, Voice.

 

  What do I do?

 

  Pyke turned to run, shaken. It wasn’t the mortal danger which so disturbed him, for he had experienced such far too many times in his career. No… he was shaken because, for the first time ever, he had heard something resembling an emotion in the Voice.

  And that emotion had been not fear but anticipation.

  Another crash sounded, accompanied by a flash of light which illuminated the huge figure who limped through the maze of machinery.

  Raine growled, smashing aside yet another of the chest-high metal tubes which dared obstruct her. She was gravely injured, but that mattered little: her people could fight for hours with wounds so grievous their corpses would fall to pieces the moment the battle ended. She couldn’t rest now: the foolish human Pyke, to whom she yet owed a blood-debt, was in danger. There he was, cowering behind one of the machines.

  “Pyke! Come out from there, and let us—”

  Her danger-sense spiked, a prickle in the nape of her neck. Raine whirled and smashed the incoming bolt of energy with her club, sending it careening into the ceiling where it struck loose a spray of granite. She inspected her weapon: the bolt had carved a shallow furrow into the wood of it.

  “What manner of coward’s weapon is this, which striketh from so far away?” she demanded to know.

  “It appears to be an ancient mechanism designed to defend the Manse-Heart,” Pyke replied, meeting Raine’s amber gaze with an ice-grey one. “The Fae Queen has taken control of the Risker Vino. The crown she is using will consume him in ten to twenty minutes; however, if we wait for that to occur, the people of the Last Spellbound House will perish before we can reach the Serra-Engine.”

  “Then mayhap we shall accelerate his death!” Raine roared, raising her club in front of her and slamming her cupped hand into it with all her considerable might. There was a thunderclap, and a narrow edge of directed shockwave ripped through the air toward the distant device.

  It struck a shield which surrounded the weapon, and the Gigant growled her frustration. “Might I go to it, and tear it down with my hands?”

  “The protective magic likely won’t allow you through,” Pyke said, and Raine noted his eyes were brown again. “There’s power being fed into it from the Engine— attend!”

  Raine had already dodged aside, taking shelter behind a machine hub as another three energy bolts struck the stone close by. She gasped and fell to one knee as the pain of her battered body surged to an unbearable intensity.

  “What is… happening to me?”

  “The bolts disrupt Workings, as well as machinery powered by Res,” Pyke said, his eyes flashing grey again. “Do you rely on such a device?”

  The Gigant growled. “My kin gifted me with their collected strength. It is bestowed by an ancient machine which has been with the Gigant Tribes for as long as we have existed.”

  “Then if you are fatally struck, your people’s strength dies with you.” There was no emotion in Pyke’s voice. “The weapon’s accuracy grows with nearness: if we approach, its targeting systems will surely exceed our ability to seek shelter.”

  A bolt struck the side of the machine behind which Pyke sheltered, and the device began emitting a metallic whine which grew swiftly higher in pitch. The Antiquarian dashed for safety, diving behind one of the metal tubes in the nick of time as the machine glowed white-hot and exploded in a shower of shrapnel.

  Two more projectiles hit Raine’s cover, beginning a similar overload. A half-second later, yet another pierced the metal tube behind which Pyke hid, striking the ground a hair’s breadth from his hand.

  Raine rushed forth and snatched the Antiquarian up by the back of his clothing, leaping for the nearest shelter. Her danger-sense spiked again, and she knew her fleetness of foot would not be enough: the weapon had their range and was aimed directly at her.

  The sense of danger vanished, and Raine wondered if she had been slain. Then she looked up at the weapon, and saw the glow of its cylindrical barrel fading. Vino had left off his assault, turning to face a slender blue-skinned figure who stood across from him on the giant machine’s roof.

  The Seer made a strenuous horizontal motion with both hands, as though pushing water before their webbed fingers. The air warped, and the jewelled crown Relic flew free from Vino’s head. The Risker collapsed, but Aquamarine paused not at all in raising both their hands, now emulating the motion of a rising tide.

  A sphere of distorted light surrounded the flying Relic, suspending it in midair. The crown began to glow a ghostly grey-white, and a thrashing mass of radiant thorns grew from it, lashing against the enc
losing sphere. The barrier bulged and enlarged until another gesture from Aquamarine pulled the binding tight again.

  A shriek of rage emanated from the Relic and its tendrils of light: the ghostly Fae Queen had been hiding within the crown. The spectre was trapped, for now.

  “Ugr’tagg, Aquamarine!” Raine cheered, throwing one fist in the air.

  “I thought Aqua was unable to escape the visions,” Pyke said, still dangling from the fistful of his clothing bunched in the Gigant’s other hand. “Not that I’m complaining.”

  “Aqua’s still stuck,” said Jenna’s voice from thin air. A quiet melody ran underneath her words. “Facing and overcoming your deepest fear is the condition for release, but they’ve already done that in reality. Aqua has no way out of the vision, at least for now.”

  “Speaketh the human Jenna!” Raine’s tone was one of disbelief. “First in the halls, then in my vision, and now here: art thou in all places?”

  “I think I understand.” Pyke went to run a hand through his hair and paused before ruefully prodding at his balding scalp instead. “Aqua reached into Jenna’s mind to share their knowledge. Just from that, Jenna learned how to reach into Aqua’s mind as well. She’s borrowing the Seer’s body.”

  “Right you are.” Raine could hear the music of Jenna’s smile. Then the joyous melody was replaced by a tremolo of worry. “Now, hurry, you two, and I hope you’ve got a plan! My real body is just about ready to give out. I don’t think we have much time.”

  Pyke took a swift, deep breath. “My Voice is out of commission. That last shot knocked it silly; it’s spewing nonsense phrases into my head. The only plan I can think of requires me to be right up next to the Serra-Engine.”

  “I wish I could tell you I had a better solution,” Jenna replied. “I won’t be able to hold out forever. Aqua was willing to lend me the use of their illusioncraft in an emergency like this, but I’m not the master world-sculptor they are.The Queen will break free soon if I can’t adapt quickly enough to contain her.”