The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller
Page 36
Pyke nodded. “Desperate plan it is, then. Raine, I need to get to that black mechanism at the centre—”
This was all Raine needed to hear. Rather than waste time bandying any further words, the Gigant gathered herself to jump. The battered muscles of her legs strained as they bunched, and then tore as they forced themselves straight with a concussive blast, sending cracks spiderwebbing through the granite below her.
Raine’s mighty leap sent herself and Pyke sailing halfway to the ceiling of the vast cave, over the intervening tangle of machines and connectors. She reached the peak of the jump and began to fall, hurtling down toward a metal platform at the right-hand side of the black orb. The structure was the height of a single-storey human dwelling, and was contoured to the side of the spheroid like scaffolding for construction.
As Raine plummeted ever closer to a catastrophic landing, she angled her body so as to fall headfirst. Moments from impact, she tossed Pyke away from her and slightly upward such that he would be rising slightly instead of falling, though she made sure to accelerate him slowly so his fragile human bones would not shatter.
As soon as he was clear, she whirled and slammed her fists together as hard as she could, creating a cushioning shockwave between herself and the metal. The concussion expanded, splitting the skin of her fingers and forearms, and when it struck her chest it brought her to a stop a fraction more slowly than the platform would have. Then its force passed through her head, and her world went dark.
Pyke rolled and came to his feet, still shaken by the swiftness of the travel. Then he nearly lost his balance again as a great force shivered through the metal platform. Getting his bearings, he looked up and saw Raine tumble past him, unconscious or possibly dead. Blue blood ran from the Gigant’s forearms and legs where she had used more force than her body could safely absorb.
Even without the Voice, Pyke could feel the raw power which thrummed within the smooth black surface of the Serra-Engine. Every few seconds, the device emanated a wave of Res which made the hairs on his arms stand on end. This, certainly, was the otherworldly anomaly mentioned in the book, the one Vino and the Voice had described: an impossibility which shattered a central law of the world’s magic. An inexhaustible source of Res.
In the distance, light pulsed irregularly from the crown Relic, illuminating the cavern as Jenna continued to do battle with the Fae Queen. By that light, Pyke stumbled on unsteady legs over to the reflective black wall of the Serra-Engine, where a brass control terminal rose from the platform. The control panel consisted of one dial and two buttons with Old Ancient writing on them. He hoped desperately that this was the right place: that one of these buttons would deactivate the manse.
Kind of you to show up. Can you identify these controls?
The panel was designed for someone a head and a half taller than Pyke, so the buttons were high but not unreachable. Half-arriving, half-falling against the brass supports of the control bank, Pyke slammed his hand down on the button reading VAKHLASIT.
There was a long, expectant moment during which Pyke waited for a sound or sensation to make it clear the manse was powering down. Then he understood the truth: nothing was happening.
How can I fix it?
Then how do I stop the Engine? Should I use the Scarab?
…I know.
Revulsion rose in Pyke. Raine sacrificed everything to get me here, and trusted me completely. You expect me to kill her by way of thanks?
In Common, please?
Pyke didn’t have the luxury of hesitating. Pulling the Tongue from its pocket in his cloak, he hummed the note to activate it.
But instead of shifting to fill the serpent of smoke, Pyke’s consciousness pitched sideways into a most unwelcome vision.
Chapter 20
The four thousand, four-hundred and ninety-ninth cycle of the Fae Queen’s rule. The grounds of the manse-weapon
Pyke stood on the shattered, crater-pocked grounds of his manse. His mechanical body was damaged and malfunctioning, held together only by his will and the remnants of Res leaking from its ruined storage nodes.
He tried to scream his frustration at his surroundings: everything was at stake! Now was no time for a vision, or memory, or whatever this was… but his intentions didn’t seem to matter here: it was nothing but a recollection, and he was unable to escape it.
Only one wrist remained attached, and it twitched rhythmically with the motion of the misaligned cogs in its actuators. In his remaining fist he held the lower two-thirds of the sundered black blade of his sword. Around him were strewn the corpses of the Dead and the Fae: three messes of collapsed machinery in humanoid forms; a sizzling pile of dead insects; and almost fifty finely armoured humanoid bodies dissipating into multicoloured mist. The destruction of their corporeal forms would delay them all significantly: they would not return in time to make a difference in the battle.
Across from him stood a creature composed of woven shadows: the Dead Lord Grandmaster of True Sight.
The streams of visible Res rising from the slain Fae were leaning in the Grandmaster’s direction as the Dead Lord consumed the remnant power. Pyke… or rather, Tamelios… would have done the same, but his body’s Res-storage nodes had been too thoroughly destroyed in the fighting. All he had left was what his Phylactery could hold, and it was a meagre sum next to the Grandmaster’s might.
“You disappoint me,” the Grandmaster intoned, and the weight of its voice slammed down on Tamelios, flattening him to the shattered stones of the main pathway. “I had thought I could someday use you to achieve a lasting peace.”
“And then discard me.” Tamelios’s voice was tinny and warped.
“Yes.”
“I chose another path.”
“You chose poorly.”
“I would not follow a different path, even were these events to repeat themselves… a thousand times.” The pace and pitch of Tamelios’s voice fell as his vocal modulators gave out. “I chose love… and still I… choose… it.”
“Then you are a fool.”
“No…” A deep rumble grew in the earth. Had Tamelios been able to smile, he would have. “I… have… won.”
The howling Cataclysm rushed forth from the manse: a wave of purple light shot through with tendrils of shadow. The black metal rod of Tamelios’s Phylactery was sent spinning out of his mechanical body, carried high into the skies by the force of the Res-laden shockwave.
As the sensations from possessing a physical form disappeared, Tamelios’s consciousness felt a pull in each of two directions: one was his Phylactery, and one was the heart of the manse. If his wife’s plan to make him forget himself were unsuccessful, the Cataclysm would trap him in the Manse-Heart, never to emerge. He would dwindle and vanish into nothing before he could be freed, for his own alterations to his nature made him ineligible for the bargain of mortality.
He regretted nothing. He had already fashioned a Relic-book, a secret failsafe he hoped would protect his beloved Melianne. Now there was nothing for him but emptiness in his metaphysical cell in the Ancient-prison, and the wait for oblivion.
“Pyke,” called an unfamiliar voice out of the infinite darkness. It was feminine, but it didn’t belong to Melianne. “Pyke, come find me.”
In the emptiness which had replaced the dreamscape, Pyke was himself again. “Who are you?”
“I’m Serra. Come find me. It’s not too late.”
On his hands and knees on the metal of the platform, Pyke gasped for breath and shook his head to clear it. He hoped desperately that the speaker in his vision was right, that there was still time: perhaps only seconds had passed in the waking world.
There were no flashes of light illuminating the cavern anymore. It was fortunate his darkness-vision was back, else he’d have been completely blind. He tried not to think about what else was meant by the lack of radiance from atop the far-off machine.
All right. Any other great ideas before I kill myself with the damn Scarab?
There was a long pause.
Are you broken again? Damn it, give me something! I need to deactivate this mechanism.
Pyke glanced around. It was as though the Voice had been speaking from a particular direction. His gaze roamed the metal platform and fixed on a snake made of black smoke, thicker than Pyke’s arm and as long as he was tall. The construct was more than thirty metres distant, and it was rising to regard him with large, eerily humanoid blue-grey eyes. This was the first time he’d ever seen the proxy of the Serpent’s Tongue from the outside.
What did you say?
Again, the Voice’s resonant words in Pyke’s mind were coming from the direction of the snake.
You don’t want to what? Pyke asked, worry beginning to gnaw at his stomach. The Voice had never before refused a direct instruction.
Now isn’t the time to grow a will of your own!
“Ash damnit.” Pyke stood, unfastening the Scarab from his belt. The snake was too far away to strike him, and he intended to do this with or without his Voice’s support!
But before he could work the Relic free of its metal clip, his hands froze. In fact, his entire body had gone rigid: it was all he could do to force himself to continue taking shallow breaths.
Voice? What’s the meaning of this? An awful, nauseous mass of fear rose from Pyke’s gut. I didn’t give you permission to control my body.
Why? You’ve said it yourself: your purpose is to observe!
You mean the visions? They’re from the book. Is it controlling you?
Pyke began to tremble head to toe with the exertion of his struggle to regain control of his body. He tried desperately to push through the mental block and press the Scarab against the surface of the Engine, but his hands wouldn’t respond.
I have the feeling I won’t like the answer, but tell me anyway, he replied, to buy time and hopefully distract the Voice.
To the right of Pyke and the snake, a skeletal figure rose from beneath the lip of the platform, glowing dimly white. The Fae Queen was much diminished by her struggle against Jenna: she had been forced back into a shape possessing only bones and a grinning skull with a circlet at its brow. The glow around her flickered, and she stepped forward unsteadily onto level ground.
After all our time together, you’re turning on me? Pyke asked the snake, desperately trying to appeal to whatever conscience the Voice might have grown along with its volition. Do I mean nothing to you?
Flashes of memory struck Pyke like physical blows. He was looking down at a still pond, humming a tune. In his reflection, an old man dressed in rags grinned back up at him from amid a cloud of wild white hair.
He blinked, and now he stood in a sparsely decorated stone room in a keep whose window looked out onto Independence City. He was staring into a small mirror: in the reflection, an armoured, red-headed woman fixed him with a stern glare.
Pyke returned to reality in time to watch helplessly, unable to move, as the Fae Queen drew closer, her skeletal hands outstretched imperiously to sweep him far away from the Serra-Engine…
Then, for the third time that day, a massive club landed in front of Pyke. The Queen stumbled back, barely avoiding yet another destruction at Raine’s hands.
Raine looked even worse than Pyke felt. Her face was a mass of bruises. Several of her teeth were broken, and others were falling out. The Gigant swayed unsteadily as she moved to place herself between Pyke and the glowing skeleton, raising her club.
Let me go, Pyke pleaded. We can still stop this tragedy, Voice.
the snake replied, its tone in Pyke’s mind growing deeper and more sonorous.
A wind with no natural source twined around the serpent’s smoky form, and the snake grew larger as the harnessed breeze fed it with Res carried from the manse.
Pyke’s struggles against the Voice’s ironclad control of his body began to weaken. Without oxygen, darkness closed in on him, and rational thought grew more difficult to access with every second. Distantly, he heard a muted booming of thunder as Raine clashed with the Fae Queen.
Our power. You mean our lost power.
The smothering pressure on Pyke’s mind eased.
Control of Pyke’s breath returned to him, and he gasped for air. He still wasn’t sure what he’d meant, but the thought felt important. “It’s our power, not yours.”
The Voice was silent. For the first time, Pyke was grateful for its reluctance to act on incomplete information. As Pyke’s consciousness
recovered, pain flared from where his muscles had been locked in place by the Voice’s vicelike grip, and memories began to rise into his mind like bubbles from a deep wellspring.
“You said you recall more of yourself with each passing moment… and that it’s because you’re the consciousness of the Dead Lord in the story.” Pyke was beginning to piece something together by intuition, and as though in response to his realization the flow of remembrances grew from a bubbling brook into a roaring river of recollection.
“Neither of us can explain why we’re both experiencing the memories,” Pyke replied. “Every time I’ve read from the book or passed any Res through the Serpent’s Tongue, we’ve each experienced a vision. But I was surprised by the information you learned, because I never saw it. We’re having different recollections. Here, I’ll hold one out for you to look at.”
Pyke focused on one of the memories, pulling it free from the torrent flowing into his mind. More pain flared from his joints, and he nearly lost his grip on the recollection. This memory was from shortly after Tamelios and Melianne had eloped, from a time before they had conceived the idea of the Cataclysm. The two watched a group of humans from the shadows at the edge of a forest. A dozen children cavorted in a meadow under the watchful eyes of their mothers, who talked and laughed together as their young ones played.
The Dead artisan and the Fae Queen were debating the paradoxical duality of humans: their way of being nurturing and kind one moment, and viciously defensive the next when they perceived a threat to whatever they valued. Melianne wanted to manufacture a harmless, illusory ‘danger’ to the children, and see how the women’s attitudes changed. Tamelios, however, questioned the objectivity of that experiment, and instead suggested watching the village for a week and waiting for a natural threat to present itself, so they could observe the motherly protective instinct in an organic context.