The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller
Page 37
It was a joyful memory for the Dead Lord. Pyke could feel the warmth of it, even if he found the subject of conversation questionable at best. To his right, the skeletal figure advancing on the injured Raine paused, her skull’s mouth opening in a silent sigh as though she, too, were recalling better times.
“What do your memories speak of?” Pyke asked the Voice, curious despite himself. He thought he had an inkling.
“It seems we’re channelling different parts of the Dead Lord’s memory. I’m lacking something essential to who Tamelios was… but so are you.”
The snake drew itself up into a threat display, a smoky hood around its head flaring out.
“You’ve grown defensive, emotional.” Pyke’s expression twisted into a pained smile. “Odd and fitting that it’s me pointing out your flaws, now.”
The snake froze, then slowly lowered its hood.
“You were mistaken in your conclusion, Voice. You aren’t the Dead Lord of this place: we are. Together.”
At those words, as though the memories had been waiting for him to accept the truth, the torrent of recollection grew swifter and more intense, barraging Pyke with an unbearable flood of sensations. Visions of times long past blurred into one another. His mind struggled to encompass them, and instinctually he sectioned them off in his mind like crates of weighty belongings to unpack later.
As he did, he found that he was free, for the Voice was subject to the same flood of memory. Although the construct could process at incredible speeds, it lacked the flexibility to leave any of the new information for later, and it was overwhelmed. Every muscle in Pyke’s body ached abominably… but he could move.
Intuitively, he knew how he would have designed this control panel. He groped at its underside, and found there a small cylindrical hole. Pyke jammed the Serpent’s Tongue, which was humming and vibrating so intensely it had numbed his right hand, haphazardly into the opening. With a high-pitched whine, the power supply to the control panel restored itself.
The Fae Queen let out an unearthly scream and leapt forward. Raine blocked the attempt to sweep her aside, her club producing a muted booming of thunder, and the weakened apparition stumbled back again.
Pyke reached out for the controls, but the Voice’s invisible will seized his hands, holding him back from the dial and the two buttons. Its grip was not as strong as before: Pyke could still make his hands twitch, though he couldn’t move them.
“I refuse. Even one life is too great a cost.”
“You’re wrong, Voice.” Pyke kept speaking, forcing his thoughts to keep pace through the downpour of remembered sensation. “Tamelios… wouldn’t want this. I don’t want this. We were never… just an analytical mind. We were… an artisan, a traveller… a poet.”
The Voice’s control slipped amid the flood of memory, and Pyke’s hands began to move, ever so slowly, toward the button marked “To Extinguish” in Old Ancient. The language felt familiar now, like an old friend.
“Tamelios learned, as none of the Dead before him had, to do more than obsess and dwell. We both represent that, in different ways: you’re the part of Tamelios which took satisfaction in self-betterment and creation, in understanding not just one aspect of reality but everything. I’m the aspect which yearned, which loved, and which above all was curious about the beings around us. Curious enough to see the value of their ways. Curious enough even to emulate them, to learn from their arts and their writings.”
The movement of Pyke’s hand toward the “Off” button accelerated, and he struggled to keep his shaking legs under him as the Voice changed tactics, trying to make him collapse. The memories became a roaring waterfall which obliterated coherent thought and threatened to incapacitate both of the minds within Pyke’s body.
Pyke’s smile grew peaceful.
“You do need me, Voice. You always have, and you always will… because without one another, we’re each only half a being. Without you, I’d be desire without the strength to actualize it, emotion without agency. Without me, you’d be ambition without purpose, drive without destination. Empty, constantly seeking something greater to fill the void within.”
Pyke’s legs gave way amid the Voice’s strengthening grip. Clinging weakly to the control panel’s stand, he failed to stop himself from sliding down onto the metal floor of the platform.
The snake’s face placed itself inches from Pyke’s own, and he realized that by bringing the construct so close, the Voice had already won: a single bite would immobilize him. The Voice had allowed him to think he could win, and by doing so had kept him from getting creative.
Behind Pyke, Raine slumped forward, knocked unconscious by a sweeping strike to the side of her head. Over the Gigant’s body stepped the Fae Queen Melianne, a cold mist forming her dress anew around her.
A tear ran down Pyke’s face. He had failed. He had failed the people of the Last Spellbound House, and those of the Phoenix Kingdom… but most of all he had failed Jenna, who’d believed in him.
<…Yet I cannot deny the truth of what you say.> The snake coiled to wrap itself around his shoulders like a cloak.
Pyke struggled halfway to his feet.
Pyke’s peaceful smile returned, then faded to something akin to sorrow. He closed his eyes.
“You already know me. You must have calculated who we’ll be when we join.”
A pause.
“Then it’s time. Tamelios is gone forever, but you and I remain. I name us anew, in the Language of Magic: Alendras. Curiosity.”
A tremor ran through Pyke’s body from where the snake rested on his shoulders: a sensation like a long, relaxed exhalation which reverberated in his mind and in his bones.
A sourceless wind laden with gleaming white streamers of Res blew through the underground cavern. The gale pushed Melianne back as it gathered to coil around the man who clung to the control panel. The bright wind merged with the serpent of smoke wrapped around his shoulders, and the snake dissolved into a black mist which flowed in through his nose and ears.
The will of Alendras, the newly awakened Dead Lord of the Last Spellbound House, flowed through the weak human body Pyke and his Voice had once inhabited. That will shored up the brittle bones of the mortal shell, poured strength into its muscles. Its force instantly mended wounds, bruises, and even the smallest tears in the tendons and ligaments of the arms and legs.
Alendras stretched out his hand toward the ceiling, and the movement of his arm was effortless compared to the bursts of human impulse which had been needed to manipulate his body’s actions until now. With a sensation like flexing a long-disused limb, Alendras raised himself the rest of the way into a standing position through intention alone, eschewing the need to pull himself up.
He looked down upon the controls of the Manse-Heart, and he understood the secret method of deactivating the Serra-Engine perfectly with a harmonious combination of the Voice’s clarity and Pyke’s intuition.
“So, my new self,” Alendras murmured, “What do you say we put aside this internal conflict? It’s time to do what’s right, and be damned the ambitions of my past life.”
Neither Pyke nor the Voice responded, but as Alendras opened a secret panel in the side of the control terminal and removed a vital component, his own thoughts formed the words like twin echoes: Yeah, and,
Chapter 21
Jenna’s eyes fluttered open. The last thing she remembered was struggling to stay awake as she pitted Aquamarine’s fantastic illusion-magics against the powers of the ghostly Queen of the Fae. Being in the Seer’s body had been invigorating: Jenna had felt she could’ve held the Queen captive forever, until her own body here in the real world had given up.
But she was alive, and no longer quite so exhausted. Pyke had succeeded.
Jenna wished she could muster the proper excitement. She felt old… old, and sick, and worried. Her muscles and joints ached, and her back was killing her. She half expected to look like Anabel as she dragged herself to her feet and looked for the mirror.
But the wall on which it had hung was missing. The mirror itself lay not far away, the glass covering shattered to bare the silver at its back. Instead of a wall, Jenna was looking out over a precipice into a cavern full of mechanical wonders, brightly lit by a series of light-casting devices built into the ceiling overhead.
Earlier, as she’d raced after Vino in Aquamarine’s body, she hadn’t had time to appreciate the sheer complexity of the machines, tubes, and cables below. This was the kind of place Pyke would have loved to explore…
Pyke, Jenna thought, and her wonderment fled as that same persistent worry pushed its way back into her heart. It wouldn’t go away for good, she knew, until she had proof Pyke was all right. She wouldn’t feel at peace with the world until she held him in her arms again… and chided him for his recklessness, for good measure.
She grabbed up the mirror, figuring that even if the glass was broken it was still a Relic, and could be of use in a dangerous situation. Reaching the edge of the cliff, she found a set of rungs and was about to begin climbing down when a shadow passed over her, causing her to duck.
Above and a bit ahead of Jenna, a square metal platform descended out of the air. It was about the size of a small room’s floorspace, and was suspended by jets of blue fire emanating from the bottom of it.
It stopped flush with the edge of the cliff and waited there. After a brief moment of consideration, Jenna stepped cautiously onto it. There was no point in acting suspicious, she figured: if there was still danger here, it wasn’t going to politely announce itself like this platform had. Without Aquamarine’s Res or their skills, Jenna wasn’t prepared to deal with the threat the Fae Queen posed, so she planned to assume the best until she figured out how long she’d been unconscious and what the situation was now.
The platform jetted slowly away from the cliff, then accelerated until it was flying along at a speed Jenna would have called a gallop if she’d been on Rione. It was energizing, moving through the air instead of on the ground... though part of the exhilaration was certainly a healthy fear of heights. She stayed as close as she could to the centre of the platform, reassuring herself under her breath that it wasn’t about to flip over.
After less than a minute of flight, the platform began to descend, bringing her down toward a giant onyx egg surrounded by a metal scaffold. On that scaffold stood a cluster of people: it wasn’t difficult to pick out Aquamarine’s blue skin and Raine’s massive bulk. Jenna’s hovering platform landed gently, and she stepped off onto the crosshatched floor of the scaffold, trying not to smile at the thought of arriving in such style, on a flying machine.
It appeared everyone else had gotten here before Jenna: along with Aquamarine and Raine, she recognized two of the regulars from the Last Spellbound House, Vino and Eiten, both of whom bore dour expressions and looked much the worse for wear.
She caught sight of Pyke kneeling at the centre of the group, mostly hidden by Raine’s bulk where the Gigant was hovering protectively next to him like a bodyguard. There was a pale figure standing a respectful distance away from Raine: she wore a white dress which attractively matched her snowy eyes and platinum-blonde hair.
“Am I crazy, or are you the Fae Queen?” Jenna held on tightly to the metal rim of the mirror and the Manipulators in her pocket as she walked up to stand next to Vino and Eiten. “Weren’t you a skeleton last time I checked? You’ve got some nerve hanging around after what you put us through!”
The beautiful woman smiled. Her teeth were improbably white and even. “You must be Jenna. He was waiting for you.”
Jenna was about to retort with something rude, but words failed her when Raine and Aquamarine stepped aside to grant a clear view of Pyke.
He looked terrible. If he’d appeared twenty cycles older when she’d seen him in the Viewing Chamber, now he seemed to have aged twice that again: had she not met him before now, she’d have expected this man to be eighty or ninety cycles of age. The wispy remains of his hair were growing swiftly and falling out as she watched, and the roots had turned completely white. Liver spots covered the sagging skin of his face and hands.
He craned his neck to look up at her from where he knelt at the base of a metal control panel, his shoulder muscles visibly spasming with some disease of aging.
“Jenna… I’m glad… you made it… before.”
Tears filled Jenna’s eyes, and she rushed to him, falling to her knees and wrapping her arms around his shoulders. “Before what, Pyke?” He felt withered, as though only skin and bone remained.
“First… please, let me introduce you,” the old man wheezed. “This is Melianne… my wife. Be not afraid: she has sworn… not to harm my allies any further. Melianne… this is Jenna, the woman I love.”
The Queen moved to stand a few paces behind him, smiling down at Jenna. “It’s a pleasure.”
“I can’t say the same.” Jenna’s voice trembled. “What have you done to him?”
“My swift aging wasn’t her doing.” Pyke struggled and failed to stand. “I owe you an apology, Jenna. I had no memory of my past beyond the last decade. I… misrepresented myself to you. I suspect you’d never have wanted to be involved with me… if either of us had known about Melianne. I can explain my actions… but I can’t excuse them. I’m truly sorry.”
Still kneeling and holding Pyke’s withered shoulders, Jenna tried to push aside the hurt settling deep in her chest as she realized she’d never really had a chance with him. For Phoenix sake, he was a married man! She simmered with fury at Pyke… and at herself for being angry. Obviously
this wasn’t his fault: he would never have intentionally played with her heart.
She raised her eyes to look up at Melianne. She couldn’t bring herself to like this cold, imperious creature… but everything Jenna had been brought up with told her she’d done something shameful. By the Flame, she’d kissed the woman’s husband! Her grandparents had brought her up to take responsibility for such things. As much as she’d have liked to just sink into the floor, Jenna cleared her throat and spoke.
“I… I’m sorry, your Majesty. I didn’t know, or I’d never have…”
“Don’t be glum, young one,” Melianne said, fixing Jenna with another dazzling smile. This time, her frigid eyes flashed with a tinge of golden warmth, like sunlight. “It’s been centuries since I considered my husband my possession. He may choose to love whomever he loves… and after our exhilarating battle earlier, I think his choice a good one.”
Flummoxed, Jenna stared at the Fae Queen, then at Pyke, then back at Melianne.
“Now that you’re all here, I owe you an explanation,” Pyke rasped. It sounded like every breath hurt him. Jenna’s misery and worry for him returned in full, despite her lingering confusion and anger.
“I was once Tamelios, the Dead Lord Master of the manse you know as the Last Spellbound House. By remembering my nature, I re-established my link to the Manse-Heart. To prevent the Phoenix Kingdom from being drained of all life, I was forced to improperly deactivate its most powerful Working. I must now hold back the recoil, or else the feedback will obliterate everyone in the House, ourselves included. Channelling the quantity of Res needed to suppress the fallout will perforce… degrade this body beyond my ability to force it to function.”
“So… you’re dying?” clarified Vino tentatively.
“That’s too cruel,” Jenna whispered, still kneeling and supporting Pyke with her hands around his fragile forearms. She looked up at the others. “Why can’t one of you help him?”