Less than a minute later, a high, thin shriek filled the air, and there was a thunder of footfalls. Tilde bolted past the doorway without stopping and Seraphim went stiff.
“Don’t–” she whispered to Cookie. She was going to finish with move, and then whoever was chasing Tilde, God rest her soul, would run right past the drawing room and follow the woman outside, leaving them behind to slip out another way.
But Cookie was damn fast, the idiot, and without even checking the coast, she snatched up a tea kettle – not even silver, but some cheap, highly polished pewter, the idiot – and dashed after Tilde.
A girl with long blond hair, in a bloodstained white nightgown, flew down the hall, glancing only briefly into the drawing room.
But one moment was all it took, and Seraphim saw that the girl had an eerie face of glossy, white bone.
“KILL HER!” she commanded, pointing directly at the figure silhouetted against the glowing faceplate of the clock.
The wall of automata shuddered to life.
Seraphim bolted for the door, abandoning her sack of stolen goods, but a tall male automaton coasted into her path. She kicked hard into the air and his face shattered almost clean away, revealing the plates of brass and twisting gears beneath. A marble tumbled from its socket and rolled. She edged backward, hyperventilating, and wrenched the steel hour hand from the clock behind her. She arced it through the air madly at the approaching automata, their glassy eyes glowing with a faint red, their smooth faces like those of aliens, and the male whose skin she had kicked off snatched her weapon with a dramatic swoop, jerking back to a full stand and driving it efficiently into her sternum.
Advancing down into the grand hall, Kaizen’s attention was first drawn to the door at its very end, which hung open onto the castle grounds themselves, and the rug, which had been rolled halfway up the corridor, exposing wooden board beneath. He frowned and stepped closer, wary of this scenario, but found nothing. Nothing in the hall, nothing out the door. He glanced into the dining hall, and then into the throne room, but found both utterly still and quiet.
In the drawing room, however, he vomited just inside the door.
A dark-skinned woman with no hair was pinned by her abdomen to the faceplate of his father’s favorite clock, the one which doubled as a screen for the keep cameras installed into the eye of every sentry. The hands had been torn from the clock and one used to impale her; a trail of bright blood crept down toward the numeral VI.
“How may I serve you, sir?” an almond-eyed, coal-haired automaton asked, coasting to him and bowing deeply.
Kaizen flinched and looked back again. Several of the automata in the room were spattered in blood, and still stood at odd positions throughout the room rather than lining the wall as they normally did, as if they awaited further command. One of them had no glass on his face anymore, and was missing an eye.
“Y-you can tell me who t-told you to do this,” he stammered. It had to have been a member of the royal family or staff.
“Imprint 03, sir.” This was the system to prioritize commands in the ‘small group’ imprint setting, so automata could not become confused by conflicting orders. Kaizen was imprint 01, followed by his mother, Olympia. Followed by his sister, Sophie.
He might throw up again.
“And where did she go?” he asked, using the cup of his palm as a mask to defend from that queer scent filling the room. The smell of raw meat. Fresh blood.
“I do not know, sir,” the automaton replied, and Kaizen, gone blank with horror, remembered the still-open door at the end of the hallway. He fell from the room and bolted out into the deceptively peaceful night, pounding along the path which would lead around the castle if one turned, or into the garden at a straight shot. He didn’t need to go far before he saw her, though.
“Newton, no! Sophie! Baldergas dash! Baldergash dass!” Kaizen cried, sprinting toward the scene of horror playing out in the garden. But it was too late. He was so far away from the carnage that it reminded him of a shadow play. There was the silhouette of Sophie, her back and shoulders narrow, arm pointing, the familiar hem of that chemise falling to her ankles. And there, on the stone path between the trimming of lilies and poppies, stood Newton-3 in profile, the curls a pale fringe in the diffuse lamplight of the castle, struggling with his hands bound around the throat of another profile, this evidently slender and female, driven to her knees. “Balderdash gas! Balderdash gas!” Kaizen called again, but even now, if Newton-3 registered the cease code, it would only prolong the poor girl’s suffering, whoever she was . . . whatever she was doing here.
Kaizen broke past the hedge border of the garden and saw the murder in grim detail. The girl collapsed onto her side, no longer fighting for breath. The automaton footman had either completed his task or registered the cease code; it was impossible to tell which. From his left hand dangled the thin white rag with which he had been washing the dome. The girl had long hair, a sunny shade of yellow, and wore a short skirt and boots. Into her garter was thrust, of all things, a slingshot. It was tragically cute.
Sophie turned and beheld Kaizen. That porcelain mask remained on her face, and her white chemise bore its greatest stain of all. A thick swath of blood from the very first button to its lace fringe.
“Is there anything I can do for you, sir?” she asked, tilting her head. Kaizen’s stomach rolled. “I would most love to be of assistance.”
There was a long pause in which the duke considered how to best handle the shattered psyche of his little sister. “Yes,” he finally answered, careful to keep his tone and mannerism neutral. It wasn’t only for the mask that he was afraid of her. “Yes. Can you tell me, who are these intruders?”
“Enemies of the castle, sir,” she replied with a pipe of pride to her voice. Kaizen’s eyebrows settled, a line forming on his forehead. She sounded so disturbingly happy. The happiest he’d heard her voice since she was a child, before playing pretend had become a discouraged activity for such a pretty young lady. “They have been thoroughly dismissed, you’ll be happy to know.”
“Yes,” Kaizen agreed. “Very happy. Did you sustain any . . . damages to your system?”
“No, sir!”
But Kaizen persisted. The sole benefit of this rift in her sanity was that she believed she was a member of the staff. “I would like you to accompany me to the castle dungeon until a doctor can be reached to review your condition.”
“Automata are not serviced in the castle dungeon, sir!” she responded. A hint of annoyance filtered into her practiced, mechanical tone.
“Oh, yes. Yes. My mistake. Please report to the castle keep immediately and await Master Addler for diagnostic maintenance. He will be with you shortly.”
“And Newton?” she persisted.
“Newton . . . must finish his task of polishing the dome. Please report to the castle keep immediately and await Master Addler, Sophie. Thank you.”
Sophie trundled past with a jolting, dramatically robotic gait, disappearing into the shadows along the side of the castle. He could only pray that she was truly as mad as she seemed and would obey his request at the cost even of her own limbs, as any automaton would. He knew he ran the risk that she was only playing with him, and would slip away and hide, a genuine psychopathic serial killer.
But he didn’t think she was that kind of psychopath.
He feared he should have seen this coming long before it arrived.
“Newton-3?”
The automaton swiveled at his request, red pinpricks glowing. “Yes, sir. How may I be of service?”
Kaizen took a deep breath. “Bury this woman you have killed,” he instructed the bot. “Bury her, and bury the woman who lies in the drawing room. Clean the faceplate of the clock for its blood.”
“Yes, sir.” The automaton grasped a shovel from the small gardening shed behind the castle and returned. “Where shall I dig, sir?”
Kaizen could hardly summon the urge to care. He simply couldn’t think of what else to possibly do.
They couldn’t just dock in Celestine with dead bodies everywhere. “I don’t care,” he muttered. “Right there is fine.” We’ll plant some nice roses or something. Maybe the girls liked roses. “I will return to check your progress in thirty minutes. I expect for the task to be completed in that time. You will stand ready for further instruction.”
“Yes, sir.”
Kaizen turned and trod toward the castle keep, the rhythmic shuffle of digging behind his back. When he reached the machinist chamber, he found Sophie on the workbench, still wearing the blood-soaked chemise and porcelain mask, her eyes closed. He thought, at first, that she was roleplaying an automaton that had been powered down, but when he stepped closer – around the body and gore which still remained – he saw the steady rise and fall of her chest, the slackness of her shoulders.
He wondered if she would awaken sane, but then again, wasn’t sure just how long ago that stopped being a given. He wondered if she would remember what she had done, and if she’d feel any remorse at all.
At least that’s one person Trimpot won’t be able to manipulate so easily anymore, cropped unbidden into Kaizen’s mind. He hurriedly shunted the thought back into his subconscious and went to find Master Addler in his bedchambers. As he walked, the possibilities whirled, a colorful, noisy carousel in his head. They would need to find her help. Someone versed in trauma, in fantasy, in multiple personalities. But then, how to find help for her without the legal identity? In all likelihood, she wouldn’t be allowed to retain the services of a psychiatrist. She would be removed to the nearest N.E.E.R. station and assigned a calling, then dosed with her first syringe of the Kill Curiosity and Calm the Nerves cocktail.
Maybe he could pretend that he was the mad one, and swear the psychiatrist to secrecy. It was always a gamble, who could be trusted with confidential knowledge and who could not. He would need to shop around . . .
Kaizen was heading toward the servants’ wing of the castle when he saw a pink-tipped shadow slinking from the rotunda.
“Hey, Trimpot!” he belted, marching forward. That was one thing about Neon Trimpot’s peacock-like hair. It was no good for sneaking around. “What are you doing wandering about at this hour?”
“Uh,” Trimpot replied. He scrubbed at his face and neck.
Kaizen grimaced. He couldn’t say he was surprised. He’d seen men exiting the royal rotunda doing the exact same thing before: handsome young sentries, for the most part. It was his mother’s lipstick. He’d never said anything, because what could you say to such things? No one in their family had ever labored under the misconception that Malthus and Olympia had been soulmates.
“Well, I was – It’s the funniest thing! I was going to find you so we could talk all about Exa. I’ve decided, you know, that this small feud between us is just silly. At heart, we both want what’s best for the girl, don’t we? She and I were friends, and maybe I’ve lost sight of what drew us together in the first place, but I want to make amen–”
Kaizen massaged the pressure point at the bridge of his nose. “Augh, for God’s sake, shut up. Look, I don’t care, all right? I don’t care if you bang my mother. Believe me, that was something with which I came to terms long ago, back when I had less important things to worry–” It hit him in the gut and he dropped his hand, eyes bulging open. The helm. He’d abandoned it at the sound from within the keep, and now, twenty minutes or more had gone by. They wouldn’t run aground, of course, but they could easily drift off course. “Actually,” he added, pointing to Trimpot, “you can actually be of some real assistance . . . for once. The helm is unmanned. There’s been an emergency and I need someone to take the wheel immediately for the next hour or so, until I can return. Your only responsibility is to keep us on course. Am I heard?”
“Like the bell that stirs a flock of–”
Augh. “Great.” Kaizen strode past him and continued on his route to Master Addler’s chambers. What a damn night. How many fires could spring up at the same time? How did the old saying go? When it rains, we drown, or something like that.
His fist thundered on the doorframe of the machinist’s suite, and a few minutes passed. Finally, Kaizen heard first a crash, then the tinkle of broken glass, and thirdly a muttered curse, before the knob finally turned and Master Addler poked his head out, one bleary eye open. “Mm?” he croaked.
Kaizen launched, perhaps too quickly, into his recap of the events from the night. The screams in the keep. The strange woman with her eyes gouged out, among other things. The woman who had been stabbed through the chest with the minute hand of the clock in the drawing room. It seemed that automata had been involved. Finally, the trio in the garden, the young girl strangled with a rag, the footman digging a grave as they spoke, and then . . . Sophie. Her chemise. The mask. The way she was talking. The way she was walking. The way she had obediently gone to his workbench and laid down for maintenance.
Master Addler blinked with increasing severity as the story went on.
“And I don’t know what to do,” Kaizen finished in a spill of vulnerability.
Master Addler nodded gravely and scratched at the loose skin of his cheek. “I will update her processes,” he announced.
Kaizen glared. “This isn’t fucking funny,” he snapped.
“Of course this isn’t funny! I will tell her that I am updating her processes. When she wakes up, I will inform her that she has been given the charge of assisting the machinist full-time as a reward for her exemplary performance tonight. I’ll watch her. I can take care of her, son. I mean, Duke Taliko, sir.” He smiled wanly. “She’s a good girl. I know she is. She only needs someone who can play her game. Sometimes I, too, forget that they are only machines. And I was afforded the opportunity to attend a real school, and marry, and have a beautiful daughter, and work at this fine castle. Still, I forget.”
Kaizen grimaced. Master Addler was right. Even those given everything for which they could have asked sometimes fumbled. However, he also doubted that Sophie would ever be sane again. That would require intense intervention, and not to simply be kept and played with, like a large living doll.
“But when we reach Celestine,” Kaizen went on. “Something has to be done.”
Master Addler nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. “When we reach Celestine, something will be done for the poor girl.”
“Thank you, Master Addler.”
Sagging with exhaustion, Kaizen doubled back toward the garden. He never realized how huge the castle was until he needed to run his own errands inside it. When he arrived at the path between the poppies and the lilies, he found Newton-3 standing, dirtied, holding a shovel at his side, next to two rectangles of freshly turned earth. The girl was gone from the path, and Kaizen gulped back some nausea.
“Newton-3. You are dismissed from all tasks. Please stand ready for further instruction.”
“Yes, sir.”
He reached forward and took the thin rag from his former footman’s hand of jointed porcelain, gazing at the boundary of the dome’s glass just beyond. He saw one patch that had been polished so heavily, it was a circle of milky fog. He took from its other hand the shovel. Kaizen stepped behind the thing and yanked the twisting key from its back. The footman’s head sagged forward on his neck, the rest of his body going completely rigid.
Not wanting to possibly awaken Sophie by the usage of clinking, graceless automata, Kaizen removed the third body, that in the machinist’s chamber itself, by himself. It would likely give Master Addler a heart attack or stroke to see it, and he might be less amiable to the stopgap of playing pretend with Sophie until Celestine was reached.
He mopped the gore from the floor himself, wondering at how Sophie could have fallen asleep beside it, much less committed it, and carried her dead weight to the garden, where it was dumped beside the other two graves, a sheet draped over. A row of three hedges might look nice there. Newton-3 hung nearby, slumbering, eavesdropping on Kaizen’s human shame, for while the automaton could quickly and heartlessly dig t
wo graves, and it would be the same for him as washing two frock coats, Kaizen was a man. He had to sweat real salt as he plunged the shovel repeatedly into the earth of the garden; he had to form real blisters between his thumb and forefinger. Most of all, he had to keep casting glances at the body beneath the sheet, as if it might lunge forth. He had to wonder who it was, why they were here, what had led them to such a grisly demise, and he had to battle the knowledge that his own little sister had done it. He had to fight back real vomit and consider that he was literally covering up a murder – but what could be done now?
And, deep down, he had to wonder if it was for Sophie, or for himself, that he did it.
The monarch had reminded him to not underestimate the tenuousness of his grip, hadn’t he. Three dead women wouldn’t help anything.
Finally, bloodied and dirty and sweating and aching, the job was done. The corpse was dumped, and covered. The grave tamped and the shovel hefted to the side.
Kaizen trudged back up the royal rotunda, intending only to take a bath and change his clothes before returning to the keep and relieving Trimpot of his shift at the helm. His calves ached and his eyelids were unbearably heavy, but he had this driving twinge in his chest which told him that this was his mantle. The castle, and Sophie, the staff and the automata and even his indulgent, philandering mother. Not to mention all the bodies that needed to be buried, now and in the future. All the skeletons in the closet and ghosts in the attic, as the old sayings went.
The bath was very successful, but returning to the keep was not. Duke Kaizen’s muscles groaned and even his bones sang, all a closing chorus of the night’s unfolded agony which tided him off to sleep, half-dressed and slumped at his window.
Chapter Eight
At dawn on Thursday, the passengers of airship Albatropus congregated in their most drab and formal attire, lining up portside as if awaiting some agreed upon moment. They would be reaching Celestine later that very day – so close, and yet so far, from one of those little intersections where everything could have, but did not, pivot. The young statistician would have no formal burial. A man of his standing, with no family or offspring of which to speak, could never hope to even take up some slot in a well-tended plot of Old Earth, much less a cemetery in New Earth.
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