Brasswitch and Bot

by Gareth Ward

  Wrench stopped struggling, shocked by Plum’s confession. Her body felt cold and the nausea returned. She swallowed down acidic bile. “You killed them?”

  “Just Pippa. I wanted them to help; I thought they’d be sympathetic.” Plum gestured to the man with the burn scar. “Leech had been clearing aberrations for years and saw the merits of my plan. However, Pippa baulked at the idea. I had no choice; I couldn’t let her go free.”

  “Don’t delude yourself to brush off the guilt. There’s always a choice.”

  “And Pippa chose death. That’s on her, not me.” Plum’s gaunt features contorted into a deranged grin. “You too have a choice. Perform magic to try and stop me and risk summoning the old gods or stay in the casket and wither to dust as your power is sucked from you.”

  Wrench knew her magic wasn’t strong enough to defeat Plum and if she tried she’d be giving him exactly what he wanted. Unappealing as the casket was, it might buy her some time to think of a way out of this or for Bot and the QRF to investigate. And if all else failed, there was always Trent.

  Octo-Man lifted Wrench off the ground and, unresisting, she let herself be lowered into the hazel wood-lined interior of the casket. She flinched, settling into the grey dust covering the bottom of the coffin.

  “Any last words?” said Plum. “And do try and make them interesting. I find it hard to describe how sickening I found your whingeing. Boohoo, magic’s too difficult. Boohoo, why can’t you teach me what you do? Boohoo, my parents are dead. For a supposed Brasswitch you really are quite pathetic.”

  Anger seethed inside of Wrench. “This isn’t going to end well for you,” she threatened.

  “Perhaps that was on the cards the moment I was born; however, I think not. Isn’t that right, Leech?”

  For the first time the man with the burned face spoke, his voice a sycophantic whine. “Yes, Master. The Epochryphal Brotherhood showed me a glorious future of aberrations ruling the world.”

  Wrench pointed at Plum. “You’re not part of that future. That’s not what I saw.”

  “Didn’t anyone ever teach you, it’s rude to point?”

  The air around Wrench thickened, pushing her back into the casket. Her fingers splayed outwards, an invisible force pressing her hands flat against the hazel wood lining. Two of the spikes topping the railings surrounding the casket bent and broke free. They drifted above Wrench, turning slowly on their axis.

  Plum leant over the coffin. “I know your feeble attempts at magic never got beyond water, but I wouldn’t want you to rain on my parade.” The spikes shot forward, impaling Wrench’s hands, nailing them to the casket’s wooden interior.

  Wrench clamped her jaw shut, refusing to scream at the searing pain.

  A look of disappointment on his face, Plum said, “If it’s any consolation, you only have to endure the torture for a little under an hour, not like the two weeks Flemington had me in the tower. Bot may have rescued me, eventually, but the damage was already done.”

  The casket lid closed and darkness shrouded Wrench.

  Wrench lay immobile, the wounds in her hands angered by the slightest movement. She panted in short shallow breaths. How much air did she have? It probably didn’t matter; whatever Plum was planning it was going to happen soon.

  She used the agony to force away the claustrophobia that gnawed at her mind; she had greater concerns. Bot had intimated that the energy was drained from the occupant over hundreds of years; however, Plum needed her magic released in a pulse of power. He must have either altered the casket, or he intended to perform a dark magic ritual. He’d talked before about sacrifices being required to summon the old gods and perhaps that was what she was. Under Plum’s direction, her odic potential would be drained in an instant, a beacon of magic drawing the old gods like moths to a flame.

  Ignoring the warm trickle of blood that leaked from her hands, she probed the workings of the casket’s locks with her mind. They appeared no different to when she’d opened them before. She could probably even unlock them again, but with her hands skewered in place, she wasn’t going anywhere.

  The locks were the same, but was the casket altered in any other way? She pushed her mind further, fearful she might arouse Plum’s suspicions. Beneath the stone plinth on which the casket lay, something had been added, some form of magical circuit. The layout of the components had a certain familiarity. The transformers at the Epochryphal Brotherhood were of a similar design. Perhaps Leech’s visit to the monks had not only been to gain hints of the future but also to acquire the technology. When activated, the transformer would suck the magic from Wrench and pump it skywards. She let her mind follow a lead-shrouded copper cable from the transformer, out of the under-crypt, up the Minster wall and – that was strange; the cable branched. The old section continued upwards to an antenna that would dissipate the power, much as she’d expected, but a second, newer section of cable passed through a diode, ensuring the magic could only travel away from the casket. Had Plum added this too? No. Although not part of the original design it was too weathered to be a recent addition. She let her consciousness travel along the cable, which ran across the roof all the way to the ruined tower, to the odic capacitor.

  When she’d opened the casket with Bot they’d expected to find a monster; instead they’d found only dust. The additional cable had accelerated the draining of the NIA’s energy.

  Wrench held her mind at bay, scared of what had happened the last time she’d looked into the odic capacitor. Scared of seeing her father, or at least something pretending to be her father.

  Again, she felt a memory lurking. There was something familiar about the device, yet how could that be? Until Bot had taken her to the tower that day she’d not even known it existed.

  Tentatively she eased her mind into the machine. Being so distant, insulated from the Rupture, she hoped to be able to explore its workings without the threat of other worldly hallucinations. Yet immediately the smell of pipe smoke filled the casket, a blend made especially for her father by Pip Finnegan’s Tobacconist on Stonegate. The elusive memory became clearer. A blazing fire, her father sat at his desk, pipe in mouth, annotating an engineering plan. She lay on a soft rug playing with her favourite toy, a golden puzzle sphere made of concentric discs that would contract and expand with the movement of their ingeniously hinged segments. Except now she saw that it wasn’t a toy; it was a scale model, a prototype of the odic capacitor.

  Tears welled in her eyes. Her father had built the capacitor, using his genius to keep them all safe and now Plum was intent on spoiling his legacy. She’d be damned if she’d let that happen. She pushed further into the device, determined to understand its workings. The toy she’d played with as a child had expanding rings – why had her father done that? He’d been fastidious about the robustness of design so he’d made the rings expandable for a reason. She probed deeper, gaining insight into the brilliance of her father’s creation. In a feedback system, perfect as any she’d ever seen, the rings’ distance from the core automatically adjusted to balance the capacitor’s efficiency, dealing with surges from the Rupture.

  What would happen if she pushed all the rings to their maximum? Could she drain enough power from the Rupture to thwart Plum’s plans? She reached out with her mind and expanded the rings to their limits. Nothing changed, their effect on the Rupture unmeasurable. She waited, holding the rings taut but it made no odds; the Rupture was just too powerful. Defeated, she let go and the rings snapped back into place.

  The inside of the casket flashed violet for a millisecond and her skin tingled. What the heck? She repeated her actions, pushing the rings to their maximum and then letting go. They contracted in an instant and again the casket blinked purple.

  It wasn’t a perfect analogy but in many ways thaumaturgy was comparable to electricity: the power dissipated by the capacitor was like direct current. However, when the rings suddenly contracted it created an alternating wave, half of which could travel through the protective
diode, into the casket, into her. Instead of sucking out her magic, the casket could amplify it.

  Wrench reached out to the capacitor and began expanding and contracting the discs in quick succession. Thaumaturgy magnified by the comet flowed from the Rupture, through the capacitor and down the shrouded cable.

  A tingle ran through her body and the air in the casket stirred. The pitch black was forced aside by a violet glow that seemed to emanate from a million tiny specks. The tingling of her skin escalated to a shocking pain, which made the gashes in her hands seem like a minor irritation. Teeth clenched, her muscles held taut in torment, she kept the discs expanding and contracting, fast as her mind would allow. Her body absorbed the magic, a capacitor of its own, and through the anguish, she felt her power growing, like when the Wimshurst discs charged her with electricity.

  The odic forces were many magnitudes more intense than mere electrical potential and every single cell fizzed with energy. There was no need to think of lemons, or use silly hand signals; the magic was hers to direct. She was the magic. The metal spikes tremored, then pulled free of the wood, free of her hands. Violet light shot from her eyes and the casket lid exploded, shattering into pieces.

  Wrench levitated from the coffin, her body rotating upright. Plum stood transfixed, frozen like a rabbit in the beam of a hunter’s lamp.

  She floated to the ground, dust spilling from her clothes and Plum’s trance broke. “Kill her,” he shouted.

  From behind, tentacles wrapped around Wrench’s arms and throat. She remembered the feeling of helplessness when Octo-Man had dumped her in the casket and her anger flared. She sent a pulse of power through her skin. With an anguished scream and the smell of sizzled suckers, the tentacles withdrew.

  Plum’s fingers formed the sigil for fire and a jet of flame shot from his hands.

  Wrench held out her wounded palms and the fire splashed harmlessly against an invisible barrier.

  His shoulders sagging, Plum’s arms dropped. He looked beaten, but his eyes were still the deepest purple. Wrench wasn’t taking any chances. She focused, directing her magic at his hands and a chill mist swirled around them, like breath on a frosty day. She drew more moisture from the air, freezing it solid, so ice enveloped Plum’s fingers, securing them in place.

  “Give up. I don’t want to hurt you, Plum. I’ve won.”

  “Not so.” A lunatic’s smile contorted the thaumagician’s face. “You’ve started what I couldn’t.”

  A tentacle curled around Wrench’s waist. “I’ve had enough of you and your groping suckers,” she said and sent a shock of magic to her skin. The grip on her waist tightened and Wrench gasped. It wasn’t Octo-Man securing her but a translucent metallic cable. Her magic pulsed and the cable-like tentacle became darker, more solid, its grip on her more painful.

  A demented chittering filled the under-crypt and a voice like a million echoes chanting in a language she didn’t understand droned behind her.

  Wrench twisted to look at the source of the noise and wished she hadn’t. The thing that clasped her was colossal, with writhing segmented tentacles and a giant yellow eye made from a thousand smaller eyes. It was clearly too big to fit in the under-crypt and yet it did. Or perhaps not in the under-crypt, beyond the under-crypt, as if an extra dimension had been created especially for the purpose. The arm that seized her was all too corporeal, but the remainder of the beast appeared ethereal, almost transparent in places.

  “Plum, help me, please,” she shouted, hoping the sight of the writhing horror would shock him to his senses.

  The thaumagician dashed his hands against the floor, smashing the ice surrounding them. His fingers trembled from the cold, but he managed to form them into a sigil and a beam of violet light shot at the giant eye.

  The beast roared, the sound a thunderous gargle of pain, and its grip momentarily loosened. Her muscles straining, Wrench pushed the coiled tentacle from her waist. “Run!” she shouted and staggered towards the under-crypt stairs. Plum remained static, his gaunt body quivering. His brow furrowed, and a look of determination contorted his face. The beam from his fingers brightened and the beast grew more solid. Wrench faltered. He wasn’t helping her to escape; she no longer mattered to him. He was intent on adding his magical power to the beast, dragging it into their world.

  She had to stop him. Only, she couldn’t use more magic; that would draw the creature nearer. Snuffing out a candle, she grasped the heavy iron candelabrum, the pain in her damaged flesh excruciating. She didn’t want to kill Plum. Despite what he’d done to Pippa it didn’t make it right. All she had to do was to stop him, stop the magic. She raced towards Plum and swung the candelabrum.

  The sound of the metal striking bone churned Wrench’s stomach and she let the candelabrum clatter to the floor. The thaumagician crumpled, blood seeping from a gash on his skull. The magic died, and the beast keened an angry scream.

  Wrench backed away. The monster lashed out. Its tentacles wrapped around the sturdy under-crypt pillars and it pulled itself towards her, its translucent body becoming more solid as it heaved itself into their dimension. Wrench fled up the steps and ran straight into Bot. Gunfire and screams filled the chapel. The QRF battled Plum’s army of aberrations, their BBGs laying down a barrage of bedlam.

  “Looks like we arrived in the nick of time,” said Bot and loosed a volley of shots into the fray with his hand cannon.

  “You’re too late. They’ve broken through.”

  Bot ceased his firing. “Who has?”

  Wrench’s answer was lost beneath the sickening squelch of the beast squeezing up the under-crypt steps. It emerged in a seemingly never-ending blob of eyes and tentacles, slurping into the chapel.

  Wrench clasped her damaged hands over her ears as best she could, trying to block out the boom of the QRF’s weaponry. The remarkables had fled when the creature appeared from the under-crypt and so now the QRF emptied their magazines at the beast. Despite the calibre of their weapons and the ferocity of their fire the net result was disappointingly insignificant. Even the massive shells from Bot’s hand cannon were absorbed into the monster’s silver skin, melting like lead dropped into a crucible.

  The weapon’s impact was so negligible that the beast was either unaware or uninterested in Bot and the QRF. It squelched through the Minster, resolute in purpose, although the nature of that purpose remained unclear.

  Bot’s pistol clicked empty. He signalled to the QRF and made a cutting motion across his throat.

  The firing ceased, and Wrench pulled her hands from her head.

  Bot returned his weapon to the holster in his leg. “We can’t use magic, and shooting it seems ineffectual. Any thoughts before we hand over to Trent?”

  “What makes you think Trent’s solution will work?” said Wrench.

  “Nothing’s indestructible. It’s like when you get a cut; it’ll scab and heal. However, if we do enough damage all at once its ticket will be punched for sure.”

  “I do have an idea,” said Wrench. “You’re not going to like it.”

  “It can’t be worse than using Trent.”

  “We go to the broken tower. I channel magic from the odic capacitor and then blast the beast to smithereens.”

  “You’re right, I don’t like it. It’s got no chance of working and will probably kill us all,” said Bot. “But under the circumstances, worth a try. How do we get the monster to the roof?”

  Wrench shrugged. “That’s where it’s going, anyway. It’s heading for the biggest source of magic around.”

  Blithely smashing pews and anything else in its path, the beast dragged itself towards the tower door.

  Bot signalled to the QRF sergeant. “Get your men out of here. Either we end this, or Trent does. Either way it’s not going to be pretty.” He sank to one knee and the saddle emerged from his back. “Jump on. We better beat it to the door.”

  Wrench clambered onto Bot’s back, grateful that she didn’t have to climb the steps up the tower again.
If she was going to die, she didn’t want to die tired.

  The Rupture pulsed brightly, casting a mauve hue across the top of the tower, reminding Wrench of Plum’s eyes. Her mouth turned down, a moment’s sorrow piercing her. He’d done wrong, but he’d been driven to it by hatred and prejudice.

  “So, how’s this going to work?” asked Bot.

  “I’ll draw as much power as I can from the odic capacitor and when I’m fully charged I’ll blast the beast,” said Wrench with more confidence than she felt, trying to be the blue train. She’d absorbed the magic in the casket and was gambling their lives on the hope that she could repeat the process here.

  The crash of a door being smashed rose from below.

  “Better jump to it. Doesn’t sound like you’ve got long.”

  Wrench approached the globe and the heavy cables trailing from the capacitor snaked to life. In an imitation of the vision she’d had the first time she’d visited the tower, they slithered up her body, coiling around her legs and arms. Immediately she felt the jolt of magic.

  Another crash from the tower, this time much nearer.

  “That was the last door,” said Bot. “How’re you doing?”

  “It’s working. I need more time.”

  Bot clenched his fists and long blades shot from his knuckles. “I’ll hold it for as long as I can.”

  Argent tentacles squirmed through the archway, probing the air, sniffing the magic. Bot slashed left and right. The severed tentacles dropped to the floor, pooling into mercurial liquid blobs before evaporating in shadowy swirls of mist.

  Wrench’s body spasmed and her parents stood before her. Her mother smiled softly, a smile that Wrench missed terribly. It was the smile that said everything would be fine, the smile that said she’d done well, the smile that said she was loved more than anything in the world. Her father reached out a hand and stroked Wrench’s face, his eyes full of pride.