The Fire Cage

by Scott Hungerford

  “Not true,” Rajon said. Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out a single screw, the screw that they had taken from the mechanical serpent just yesterday afternoon, and handed it over to the accountant for observation. Puzzled, the old man took the screw and held it up to the light emanating from a crystal lamp on his desk. When he noted the reverse groove, he blinked twice, then looked up at Rajon with a suspicious gaze.

  “Where you get this?”

  “It’s from a crate,” Rajon said, raising his voice even higher. “It’s from a crate sitting on my loading dock, surrounded by a crates of screws exactly like it. It’s worthless to me, and worthless to anyone else in the Empire that knows that machined screws spin clockwise, not counter-clockwise. It’s incompetence of the highest order.”

  The old man headed over to one of the filing cabinets, about to open a drawer. “What’s your name again? And the name of your factory?”

  “The address you shipped them to was 313 Drury, on the Dob. If I don’t get satisfaction this very hour, this very minute, I’ll make a personal tour to every one of your customers and tell them that they had better damn well check the screws they receive for shoddy workmanship. At the very least, you’ll lose my fifty-thousand noble account, and Florin’s good name besides.”

  Now more than a little flustered, the Ledger opened a drawer by his knees and sorted through the yellowed pages, until he found the set of pages he wanted. Reading a few lines, he shook his head, more than a little confused. “That’s impossible, good sir. I have it right here that — ”

  With one hand, Rajon placed the sharp edge of his unsheathed cane-sword right beneath the old man’s throat, and with the other hand, gently lifted the papers from the accountant’s hands. “I’ll take those.”

  “You’re a thief,” he accused.

  “Not exactly,” Rajon replied, even as he quickly folded and pocketed the pages. “Now, do you have anything more like these you’d like to show me from your secret files, or should I just kill you now?”

  .oOo.

  Verona had quickly gained an audience for herself. As she ran herself through the middle portion of her song, the irritated looks on the singers’ faces below her indicated that she was doing a good job with her audition.

  But now, as she passed the two minute mark, she turned it up. Launching into a series of climbing then cascading notes, she began rising and falling up and down the musical scale at speed, using the same method of patterning that she used when she was breaking a music lock. Predictably, as she struck a high note here, and a low note there, automatons down below would shake an arm, twist their heads, or inadvertently kick over a wheelbarrow of tools and rivets onto the floor. But when she started knitting it all together, using the echoes of the high-ceilinged room to her advantage, Verona began setting off chain after chain of polynotes with all the chaos and destruction she expected.

  As Verona hammered through the upper scale, clustering eighth notes together like an operatic diva, she was pleased to watch as the entire factory floor went haywire beneath her. In some places, automatons were physically ripping themselves free of their supports, taking two steps, and then crashing headlong into tables. In other places, automatons were spinning this way and that, struggling against the support beams hard enough to tear their arms out of their sockets.

  The shrieks and screams of the workers below was like a rising ovation as she climbed up to the height of her song, a chain of notes that knitted brilliantly into one another, guaranteeing that one combination or another would set off some random function in the automatons below. Even as workers desperately ducked beneath swinging mechanical arms and tried to avoid being sprayed with gouts of hydraulic fluid, Verona finished her dark aria with a peppering of trill, shrill notes, causing one of the automatons at the very front to reach up and slap off its own head, sending it rolling down the central avenue.

  When she stopped, trying to catch her breath, trying to keep from breaking into hysterical, gleeful laughter at the wreckage she’d caused, Davin appeared next to her like a ghost.

  “Come on,” he told her, grabbing her by the arm. “We’ve got to go.” Below them, the Foremen was shouting for the Bastards, even as the workmen tried to arrest the surviving automatons and lash them back into place.

  But the mean Bastard from the hall was already coming for them with a look of pure anger on his face, and Davin barely got beneath the swing of his heavy truncheon. As Davin swung a hard fist into the man’s belly, an alarm whistle began double-shrieking somewhere above them. Ineffectually, the Bastard hit at Davin’s knees with his stick, striking the young man along the side of his shins, even as they grappled like wrestlers.

  “Run!” Davin yelled at Verona, as he felt the stronger man start to get the upper hand.

  “Get off of him!” Verona yelled at the Bastard, then lashed out with a vicious boot-kick to the forehead that forced the man to break his hold.

  Davin managed to break free, spin around, and stand back up to his full height. Still staggering from the girl’s accurate kick, the Bastard was too stunned to see Davin’s attacks coming, one-two, three-four, as he popped the man in the face with repeated blows with his fists. Teetering at the top of the short flight of stairs, the Bastard wind-milled for a moment, before he toppled over backwards, ass over teakettle down the full flight, his nightstick flying off somewhere behind him.

  Taking Verona by the hand, Davin ran down the stairs past the stunned guard who was laying flat on his back like a flipped crab. Banging their way through the doors and past the empty guard station, the alarm-whistle double-shriek was even more terrible within the enclosed space. After dodging through darkened hallways and cutting across the bloody alley, they joined up with the throngs of workers milling in the cafeteria, with everyone asking what each other knew.

  “That was close,” she said.

  “We’re not out of the woods yet,” Davin replied. Cutting through a mob of screw-makers, he led Verona to the front door of the cafeteria, where he expected to see a line of Bastards heading to line across the front gates. But none was there, yet at least. “We’re ahead. But this could be risky.”

  “I get that,” Verona replied.

  “You were brilliant in there,” Davin said.

  “I know,” she said back, and then kissed him, right on the mouth, her lips all full of pouty, giggly softness. “Let’s go.”

  Doing their best to look unobtrusive, with Davin still a little dizzy from the vigor of her kiss, the two of them headed out into the courtyard, making their way for the gates as quickly as they could. But as they got closer and closer to escape, they couldn’t see any Bastards waiting for them. Finally, they reached the freedom of the street, and Davin had to use all of his willpower not to just break into a run. Instead, they walked along at a brisk pace hand-in-hand, leaving the chaos behind them, with Verona giggling like a mad thing all along the way.

  .oOo.

  Stepping out of the office where he had left the Ledger bound and gagged beneath his own desk, Rajon was relieved to see that the two Bastards were gone from their post, probably off to try and fix the trouble Verona had stirred up in the Foundry. Breathing out a sigh of relief, he let the flow of fleeing office workers carry him along, abandoning his give-away top hat on a bench along the way. The double-gong sound above him was very loud, and it drowned out most of the confused conversations that the bean-counters were trying to have around him.

  After a few minutes of shuffling with the crowd, Rajon was out in the open air and heading for the main gate. Cutting through the throngs of confused workers, he knew he didn’t have much time before the Bastards got wind of what happened. But the comforting weight of the papers in his vest pocket put hope in his heart that he was on the right track, and that they were one step closer to the identity of the assassins.

  “Excuse me,” a male voice said behind him, nearly scaring him out of his shoes. Moving along, Rajon did his best to ignore the voice, now that he wa
s only a few steps from the street.

  “Excuse me!” the person said again, this time more forcefully. Gritting his teeth for the confrontation to come, he stopped and turned. Looking down, he was shocked to see a young man, dressed in worker’s clothes, holding Rajon’s top hat in both hands. “You dropped this.”

  “Ah,” Rajon said. “Thank you.” Pulling a pair of pennies from his pocket, he traded the young man the coins for the hat. “Please, take this as a reward. You have my thanks.”

  “No problem, sir,” the young man said with a smile, before bolting off into the crowd. Relieved, Rajon tucked the hat under his arm and headed for the gate, but not before he caught a glimpse of a red-haired woman across the courtyard, standing by an iron trellis alongside three men in suits. He recognized the two of the men as being board members from Florin’s, and the third, being Jacob Florin himself, the recent commoner heir to the factory and the millions of nobles of yearly profits that the business garnered.

  But the noblewoman was the one that took his eye. Wearing a long red velvet dress, with skirts long enough to trail in the dust at her feet, her outfit seemed more appropriate for the ballroom rather than the boardroom. With her long curly red hair tied up loosely in a bun and a closed parasol in hand, she seemed the epitome of feminine grace.

  But when she looked over at Rajon, gazing at him through her round spectacles like she was measuring the weight of his soul, he suddenly recognized her, and knew that things were even more complicated than he had realized.

  “Charette…” he whispered under his breath. The woman as none other than Charette zan D’Alabastria, the inventor Vermeni’s sadistic daughter, the who hadn’t been seen in Agora in all the years since her father’s death. Now she had returned, and she wasn’t afraid to be seen talking with Jacob Florin out in the open, a fact which greatly concerned Rajon on a number of levels. They’d had their dealings in the past, and he’d come out ahead at her expense, something that he was sure Charette wasn’t about to forgive and forget.

  Striding on, Rajon headed for the factory exit, looking over his shoulder now and then to make sure he wasn’t being followed, and that Charette hadn’t already sent one of her pretty-boys to follow him home with a knife to slice his life away...

  Chapter Nine

  Davin and Verona returned to the empty house on Applegate, walking through the streets of Marble hand in hand, measuring the length of each other’s stride step for step. Neither of them had talked much during the escape from Florin’s, and especially little as they made their way around the northern end of the Market to the Porter’s Bridge, to keep as few people as possible from discovering that Davin was still alive.

  Verona was still beaming with mischief, complete with long-lashed glances at Davin that made him wonder every time whether his heart would stop. He occasionally tried to say something smart in response to her playfulness, to somehow acknowledge their first kiss. But every time he would clear his throat in the hopes of sounding witty, she would just give him another one of those perfect looks and all of his thoughts would vanish into the air.

  When they turned the corner onto Applegate, both of them stopped, as there was a nobleman’s carriage parked right in front of the house. Atop the buck seat, a driver in carriage blacks sat with a wide-bowled pipe in hand, puffing madly away, even as the steam-horse in front of the carriage stood silent as a statue, with only the occasional wisp of steam pluming from its nostrils indicating its inner stoke-fires. The steam coach, as one of the most extravagant forms of transportation found in the Empire, was typically only used by those who had urgent business in one of the districts surrounding the city where extra speed was required.

  “Are we caught?” Verona said as she and Davin slowly pulled back around the corner, shadowing themselves in the trailing branches of a white-flowered maidenspray tree.

  “Not yet,” Davin said, squeezing her hand, not wanting to let go of her, not even with the danger. “I wonder what it’s about.”

  “Sometimes Rajon pays for steam-carriages out of the city,” Verona offered. “It might be his. But I’ve never gotten to go with him out of the city gates.”

  “Me neither,” Davin confessed. “I’ve never been past the city walls. Never more than swimming in the Lower Dob when I was a boy.”

  “Well, let’s go see who’s in there,” Verona said. “With any luck, it might be Rajon.”

  “I just hope they don’t find the stash,” Davin said, more than a little concerned about where he had hid the funerary package in the cubby.

  “It’s a good hiding place,” Verona reassured him. “Come on. Let’s see what this is about.”

  Following Verona’s bold lead, he walked with her up the street towards where the door to the house stood wide open. But when Verona saw Rajon come out the front door, with a worried look on his face and timepiece in hand, she let out a tiny shriek of joy and went running up to him. Smiling, he warmly embraced her in a large hug, and then gave her a fatherly kiss on the forehead for good measure.

  “I was getting worried,” Rajon said.

  “It went fine,” Verona said. “I got tapped by a Bastard, but I’ll live.”

  “Did you get the papers?” Davin asked quietly. “Did you get the proof?”

  “Yes, I did,” Rajon said. “That, and much more. Come on, get in.”

  Davin nearly took a step back in his shock. “Get in?” He looked up to the driver, who was gazing off towards the splendid view of the six districts while puffing his pipe, but it didn’t seem that he was going to object. The carriage, complete with lace curtains and gas riding lights, was a contraption Davin had only dared dream of seeing the inside of one day from the sidewalk, through an accidentally open door, regardless riding it in and heading to a far-off destination.

  Hitched to the front of the coach, dressed in bridle and gold-tasseled livery, the steam horse was one of the most beautiful Automatons Davin had ever seen. With smooth hair-like metal work running down from its forehead to its steam-moist nostrils, and sets of interlapping silver plates running down over its furnace belly like some kind of armor-bug, Davin was astonished to see such a thing up close without needing to risk a blow from the driver’s whip. Walking around the pretty thing, Davin guessed that there were only a few score working steam horses in existence, and that this one was amongst the newest of the lot. He’d seen more than a few of the primitive steam oxen down by the Dob, clunky and primitive at best, barely usable for anything other than turning left, right, and pulling heavy loads forward. But the steam horse, with its stoking vents and a run of silver pressure dials — this was elegance at its best, and all he wanted to do was just to touch it, to open it up and see how it worked.

  “Come, Davin,” Rajon said. “We have to get up north, to Abbeyshire. This driver has agreed to take us. We can trust him.”

  “What’s his name?” Verona asked.

  “That’s not important,” barked the man from atop the seat. “Tis business, girl, and I’ll just get you to where you want to go. No questions for you, and no questions for me, and then we’re even and through.”

  “Yes, sir,” Verona said, as Rajon opened the carriage door for her, and helped her step up and inside, and then Davin quickly behind.

  “So, what you found. It’s bad, isn’t it? “ Davin conjectured.

  “It’s worse,” Rajon replied. “Now get in, and I’ll fill you in on the way.”

  A few moments later, once Rajon had locked the front door of the house up tight, and just after Davin had confirmed that the package sitting on the blue velvet seat contained the totality of his father’s funerary possessions, Rajon climbed in, closed the door with a practiced twist of the handle, then rapped twice on the ceiling with the tip of his cane. Immediately, a series of playful notes emanated from outside as the driver started singing his travelling song, and the steam-horse began clopping forward, metallic hooves ringing on the cobblestones with every step.

  “What’s in Abbeyshire?” Ver
ona asked, looking a little put out that Davin had ended up sitting on a bench next to Rajon, rather than on her side of the coach. Davin smiled at her a bit, a nervous little smile, still not sure what Rajon was going to do when he discovered that Davin had and his protégé had shared a kiss.

  “According to the invoices I took from the Ledger,” Rajon replied, “there is a warehouse on Butcher’s Road that took delivery of nearly eighty carriage shipments over the last few months of nothing but metal screws.”

  “Eighty loads?” Davin gasped. “That’s a ridiculous amount of screws. What could anyone need with millions of tiny screws?”

  “There were actually far fewer screws than you think, Davin. Quite of a few of them were much bigger than the one you found secreted inside the mechanical snake. Some of the really big ones were as long as four feet in length, and weighed as much as six bars, give or take.”

  “Six bars!” Davin gasped. “I can hardly lift six bars.”

  “The way I figure it,” Rajon continues, “a carriage load pulled by a dray Automaton could only bear a hundred and eighty screws that size,” Rajon continued. “From what the records tell, there were at least six loads of those monsters just in the last six weeks, and the rest of the screw sizes measured from a bar’s weight down to the smallest diameter that could be produced, just like the one in the serpent.”

  “And all of them were backwards,” Verona conjectured.

  “Exactly,” Rajon answered. “All of them were backwards at an incredible cost to produce. Not to mention the inclusion of back-alley payments to Florin’s and all relevant parties for secrecy and ultimate discretion.”

  “But why?” Verona asked. “To what end?”

  “By my best guess,” Rajon answered, “is that the people behind this plot discovered a stockpile of old unassembled machines of some kind, something older than the advent of factory standardization. Whatever they found, they need a vast resource of screws to assemble the lot of it together.”