Brasswitch and Bot

by Gareth Ward

  The smell of smoke filled the under-crypt, but not from the flickering candles; it had a pungent tang that Wrench couldn’t place. They walked between thick stone columns that supported the arched ceiling and Wrench sensed a change in Bot’s demeanour; he was more alert, his movements controlled and measured. The back of her neck prickled. He was hiding something from her, she was sure of it. Why bother? How could it be worse than a coffin containing a monstrosity from another world?

  Surrounded by twisted railings, a baroque phosphor-bronze casket rested on a marble plinth. Chains and locks inscribed with strange symbols secured the casket closed. The sooty silhouettes of a man and a child tarnished the white plaster wall behind.

  “Time to earn your keep, Brasswitch,” said Bot.

  Wrench placed her hands on the coffin. “Inside there might be a murderous monster from another dimension that wants to rip us to pieces before destroying all humanity.”

  “If we’re lucky.”

  “And if we’re unlucky?”

  Bot’s hands clenched into fists. “It’ll be empty.”

  It didn’t make sense; she wasn’t getting the whole story. “I’m still a bit thin on why you need to open it.”

  “One of my officers, Master Regulator Leech, uncovered reports of an aberration from the original Rupture that hadn’t been destroyed. Historic documents suggested it had been captured and contained for centuries in a casket of phosphor-bronze.”

  “And Leech thinks this is that casket?”

  “Indeed.”

  “So why doesn’t Leech open the coffin?”

  Bot clapped his hands together, the metallic clang echoing around the under-crypt. “Enough stalling with the questions, Brasswitch. Get it done.”

  Wrench examined the phosphor-bronze, a metal known for its strength and resistance to corrosion. Perhaps that was why the craftsmen had chosen it, knowing the casket would be required to maintain its integrity for centuries. She ran her fingers over the locks. The metal felt abnormally cold, and the locks had no keyholes. There was no way to open them, or at least no way unless you were a Brasswitch. She pushed her mind into a lock’s mechanism and aligned the pins. A mental nudge rotated the barrel and the lock sprung open. Wrench shuddered. She’d removed the first defence without problem. Would the others prove so easy? And if so, what unimaginable horror would she release? Her focus shifted from the mechanism to herself. The palms of her hands tingled, and her heart thudded faster, but all things considered, she felt remarkably calm. Perhaps that was the thing with unimaginable horrors: you couldn’t imagine them, unlike the crash of the Drake, which even in her nightmares was so very real. She pushed the thought away, distracting herself with the remaining restraints.

  With six of the locks now sprung open, Wrench’s palms prickled uncomfortably. There was something different about the last lock. She wriggled her fingers, trying to force the unpleasant feeling away.

  Bot moved closer. “The moment you’re done, run to the carriage and bolt yourself in.”

  “And I’ll be safe there?”

  Gears grated inside the mechanoid, making the mechanical equivalent of a laugh. “Don’t be stupid. This is an eldritch being from another dimension. The only way to be safe would be to get across the sea to France. They hate the sea.”

  The final lock had an added safeguard, but it was already deactivated, not needed. The discomfort in her fingers lessened. “No point in hiding in the carriage then.”

  “It would save you from a horrifying sight.”

  “The eldritch being from another dimension?”

  “No. Me whimpering like a girl.”

  Wrench put her hands on her hips and turned to face the mechanoid. “I am a girl, and I never whimper.”

  “You’re a Brasswitch – that’s different.”

  “And you’re a skorpidium-carbide armoured mechanoid, so toughen up.”

  Bot eased closer to Wrench. “That’s an oxymoron.”

  “No. You’re a moron. There’s nothing in the casket.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There’s something odd about the last lock. It’s got a counterbalance that won’t allow it to open if there’s a weight in the casket.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “See for yourself.” Wrench pushed the lid free. The sarcophagus was empty except for a thin layer of what looked like ash covering the hazel wood interior.

  Bot’s shoulders slumped. “Tarnation!”

  Wrench prodded the ash in the coffin with the shackle of a padlock. “Maybe Leech was wrong.”

  “I think not. I was hoping I was mistaken, but Leech beat us here and released it. He knew it would be weakened from centuries of containment and he thought he could handle it.”

  “So, we find Leech and we find the unimaginable horror.”

  Bot motioned to the soot-stained silhouette on the wall. “Leech must have miscalculated. It was still too powerful. A mistake he didn’t live to regret.”

  “That’s not possible.” Wrench raised one of the padlocks. “He couldn’t have opened it without a Brasswitch.”

  “He had one. How does it feel to be the only surviving Brasswitch in the country?”

  Wrench stared at the second silhouette on the wall. It was not that of an evil harridan, some hideous monster to be despised, but a girl not much younger than her.

  “Dangerous,” she said.

  An intricate brass relief covered the door that led to the ruined north-west tower. The detailed frieze, depicting an armour-clad Sir Dereleth forcing a betentacled behemoth back through the Rupture, did little to camouflage the immense strength of the heavy steel door beneath. The things that came through the Rupture were said to have taken many forms, some no bigger than a man, others purportedly the size of a battleship. Wrench had always struggled to believe a creature that size could exist. Even the dinosaur skeletons in the Yorkshire Museum would be judged small by comparison. It seemed impossible that Sir Dereleth could have battled such a beast, as impossible as St George slaying a dragon.

  Bot raised his arm and made a fist like a battering ram.

  “You want me to open that?” offered Wrench, concerned the mechanoid would adopt a similar approach to the one he’d used on the cell door.

  A three-pronged key extended from Bot’s knuckles. “I’ve got this.”

  Bot inserted the key in the lock and twisted his fist. A series of loud clunks echoed from deep within the door. Wrench didn’t need to use her powers to tell that the lock’s mechanism was both complex and robust. Accompanied by the staccato clatter of a ratchet, the door slid aside to reveal a spiral of thick stone steps, leading upwards.

  Somewhere overhead lay the ravaged remains of the tower and above that was the Rupture, not permanently sealed, as Wrench had been taught, but a thinly netted hole to another dimension. A shiver slithered up her spine. She should be terrified but the strange energy seeping down the staircase exhilarated her.

  “We’ve got some climbing to do,” said Bot. “Can you keep up or shall I carry you?”

  Wrench bristled, anger burning away any exhaustion. She was nearly fourteen, and she most certainly wasn’t going to be carried like a child. “I worked ten-hour shifts at the coachworks; I can manage.”

  The stairway spiralled around and around. Wrench trudged relentlessly upwards. The clank of Bot’s feet on the worn stone steps echoed from above and the faint smell of oil and steam hung in the air. Why couldn’t they install an Otis elevator or an Armstrong hydraulic lift? Probably the same reason why every fifty steps there was another of the heavy steel doors. For anyone without a key or a hulking metal mechanoid they would present an almost insurmountable obstacle.

  She passed through the fifth such door, the muscles in her legs burning like the finest Barnsley coal. At the coachworks, she’d had to prove she was a match for the boys, never once complaining, and now she pushed through the pain with the same dogged determination.

  A violet haze filtered into the stai
rwell. It played in dappled patterns on the walls like sunlight reflected from water. Except up here, hundreds of feet above the ground, there was no water. It was the flicker of raw thaumaturgy, the name given to the energy leaking through the Rupture. The public were told it was safely contained at the top of the tower, nothing more than a spectacular light show. Was that another lie?

  The substance of the walls had changed too; no longer sandy-coloured limestone blocks, they were glassy and smooth with candlewax-like drips. It was as if the tower had been melted in a great furnace.

  The clank of Bot’s footsteps stopped. Wrench rounded one more bend and she emerged into daylight, or what would have been daylight if it weren’t for the roiling storm cloud surrounding them. The Rupture swirled and pulsed, casting a surreal hue across the smelted stone.

  A grid of titanium bars arced over the ruined tower top, encaging it in a protective dome. Bot waited at the cage’s centre, alongside a tarnished gold ball the height of two men. A steel pole skewered the ball’s centre, disappearing into the angry clouds far overhead. Seven brass and platinum discs rotated around the ball. Something that wasn’t quite electricity arced between the discs and crackled along thick copper cables that trailed from the base of the machine and over the tower’s edge.

  “This is the odic capacitor,” said Bot. “It absorbs surges of power from the Rupture, stopping it gaining enough energy for anything to break through. Since we added it to the earth coils a decade ago, breaches of the Rupture have more than halved.”

  The capacitor had a feeling of familiarity to it. A distant memory nagged at Wrench. A blazing fire, the smell of pipe smoke and lying on a soft carpet playing with her favourite toy, a puzzle ball. Overhead, the Rupture thrummed and sparks crackled across the capacitor’s discs.

  Wrench extended her mind into the machine. Beneath the globe’s shell Faraday shunts, Edison coils and all manner of other components fizzed with power. Yet they weren’t as she knew them. Subtle differences repurposed the technology to change the way it functioned. No. It wasn’t possible. It didn’t make sense – this wasn’t science. Wrench pushed harder, trying to sense the flow of electrons passing through the wires, but there were no electrons, only–

  Pain lanced her skull. The copper cables that snaked from the base of the machine squirmed towards her and encircled her arms and legs. One grabbed her head, snapping her neck back, forcing her to stare directly into the heart of the turbulent cloud. A face appeared, massive and morose.

  Wrench fought back tears. It was her father. “Help us,” he said. Behind him, a second face emerged from the haze, her mother. “Wrench. Help us, please.”

  “You killed us. Left us here in limbo. Free us now,” said her father.

  Tears rolled down her mother’s cheeks. “You crashed the Drake. You must free us, Brasswitch.”

  “Brasswitch,” said her father, his voice distorted. He reached out to her, a greedy smile on his face. His fingers elongating into metallic tentacles.

  “Brasswitch!” Bot’s hand seized her head and forced her gaze from the cloud. Wrench clawed at her neck, but there was nothing there. No copper cable strangling her. The thick wires lay dormant, unmoved, trailing from the machine. What had happened? It had been so real. Her mother and father talking to her after all these years. She rubbed a hand across her eyes, fighting back tears. She hadn’t killed her parents. It had been a terrible accident, nothing more. It wasn’t her fault.

  “It doesn’t pay to stare into the Rupture,” said Bot. He removed his hand from her head. “Not if you don’t want to end up a gibbering lunatic.”

  “I saw my parents,” said Wrench, ashamed of the tremble in her voice.

  “Whatever you saw, it wasn’t your parents. Reality is thin here; the old gods can sense your power, but they can’t break through, not without help. That’s why I needed to check the thing from the casket hadn’t tried to destroy the odic capacitor.”

  Wrench stepped away from the cables and made a mental calculation of the strength of the titanium cage surrounding them. “I hope it’s well guarded.”

  “It is.” Bot waved in the direction of the adjacent undamaged tower. “Snipers keep it under constant vigil. The stairs are the only way up. And I’ve taken a few secret precautions of my own.”

  “But you still had to check?”

  Bot ran his fingers over a blob of melted stone. “You need to understand the world you’re a part of now. The thing from the casket is an NIA, a Non-Indigenous Aberration from beyond the Rupture. Not as powerful as an Old God, a lesser-servitor maybe, but still stronger than a charging bull, deadlier than a striking snake and with the ability to access powers we barely understand. It will be weakened by its incarceration, but it’s only a matter of time before it recoups the rest of its strength.” Bot twisted his arm and checked the chronograph inset in his wrist. “Time we don’t have. Chattox, my previous Brasswitch, was brilliant, resourceful, and tough beyond her years. She was well trained too, yet the NIA turned her into a sooty smudge. We can’t afford for it to get any more powerful.”

  Wrench removed her glasses and polished them with a grubby handkerchief from her pocket. She had always wanted to be a part of something, to belong. When she’d become an apprentice at the coachworks she’d thought at last she’d fit in. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Now she was being offered another chance to belong; however, she wasn’t sure it was a chance she wanted. So far, the regulators had brought her nothing but pain. Flemington with his accusations that she’d crashed the Drake and then Bot with the visions of her dead parents. If she joined them, what additional suffering would she endure?

  “So, what do you plan to do about the NIA?” she asked.

  “I’m going to find it and then I’m going to ask it politely to return to the casket.”

  “Really?”

  Bot laughed. “Of course not. I’m going to kill it with extreme prejudice.”

  The carriage ran down Queen Street, its steel feet sending sparks flying from the cobbles. Out of the window a fortified stone wall stood atop a steep grass bank, the medieval defences still providing a robust barrier around the old city. Further down the hill the grandiose glass canopy of York railway station glinted in the sunlight. Steam and smoke billowed from dragon-shaped roof vents that kept the platforms free of smog.

  “I thought we were returning to your headquarters?” said Wrench.

  “I’m not part of the Clifford’s Tower Cabal. I head up Cabal Thirteen.”

  Wrench rolled her eyes. “Oh, let me guess. You’re called Cabal Thirteen because all the bad people get sent to you and it’s a really unlucky posting.”

  “Actually, we recruit only the best regulators because our work is so dangerous. Whether that’s unlucky or not depends on your viewpoint.”

  “So why are you called Thirteen?”

  “Because thirteen is the platform number our train’s stationed on.”

  Wrench put a hand on Bot’s arm; he didn’t seem to notice. “You have a train?”

  “York is the centre of the Rupture, but the rest of the country still suffers its effects. Being able to move our cabal using the rail network has proved invaluable.”

  A train of their own. Railways fascinated Wrench. As far back as she could remember she’d felt drawn to the majesty of steam locomotives, and the crash of the Drake had only served to strengthen the allure. If she got to know the engineer, she might get a chance to help on the footplate. “What class of train is it?”

  “Oh, the usual: big wheels, three chimneys, pointy bit at the front,” said Bot, casually waving a hand.

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  “It’s just a train.”

  Wrench removed her hand and sat back. “The railways are the lifeblood of the country.”

  “People are the lifeblood of the country and my job is to keep them alive. I can’t get bogged down in the details.”

  With a hiss and a clatter the carriage drew to a halt at the front
of the station and settled onto its haunches.

  Bot squeezed through the door and dropped onto the road, the crash of his feet on the hard flagstones frightening the horses of a more traditional carriage nearby. He offered his hand to Wrench. She ignored it and jumped down the steps. “Tell me about Cabal Thirteen.”

  Bot strolled into the station. “We deal with the most dangerous aberrations and all NIAs – the things that break through the Rupture from other dimensions.”

  They crossed an iron lattice footbridge spanning the station’s many platforms. Below, locomotives and rolling stock of all colours, shapes and sizes filled the tracks. A Caledonian blue express thundered along the mainline, dirty smoke billowing from its graceful curved chimneys.

  “The twelve fifty-three to Edinburgh,” said Wrench.

  Bot glanced sideways at her.

  Wrench pointed at the locomotive. “It’s a four-six-four Stephenson rotary piston with over-boiler.”

  “You know this because you’re a Brasswitch?”

  “I know this because I’m an apprentice mechanic at the LNER engineering works. Or at least I was until this morning.”

  “You’re still an apprentice.” Bot drummed his fingers on the footbridge’s metal rail. “Just not to the London North-Eastern Railway.”

  “I’m an apprentice Brasswitch?”

  “You were born a Brasswitch. You’re an apprentice regulator.”

  Wrench stopped. The regulators were the enemy, or if not the enemy, the bogeyman. The people mothers would frighten their children with. Eat your turnips or the regulators will come for you. Holding more power than parliament, people feared the regulators like they used to fear the inquisition. The regulators could change your life in an instant, or end it.

  “What do you mean I’m a regulator?”