The Fire Cage

by Scott Hungerford

  “Damn!” Davin yelled, and ducked just in time to avoid a second pry bar, which went ricocheting and crashing across the tables behind him. When he perked his head up to search for the assassin, he had vanished again. The room was silent, save for the tic-tic of the cooling rivets still buried in the opposite wall.

  “It’s not so easy, being the hunter?” the pretty-boy mocked from somewhere in the far corner of the room. “Running is so much simpler, like a rabbit in the field, all-fearing of the shadows of hawks and clouds with equal dread.”

  “Ah-hah!” Verona said as she picked up a new toy, something with a flanged end and a huge rippling nozzle coated on the inside with a fleet of studded bearings. But as she lifted up the toy, the back end messily farted a quart of greasy oil across her skirts and shoes. “Bollocks.”

  “Surrender now, young Davin,” the butler warned from his hiding place, “or I’ll kill the girl right in front of your eyes.”

  “She’s tougher than she looks,” Davin called back, nodding in synch with Verona, surveying the room for any sign of the fiend. “I think you’re the one that might be in trouble.”

  Verona, after dropping the useless squirting device, gestured questioningly with her thumb towards the far door. But Davin shook his head. He knew that this had to end here. They had the best chance of stopping the butler in the laboratory. Out in the open hallways, he figured they’d be chopped meat in a minute or less. Deciding against a number of other weird looking tools from the table, he settled for a heavy-hafted forearm length hammer in his right hand, and a thick metal rasping tool in the left. Until he or Verona found a device that worked, he’d just have to go barbaric until the situation got better.

  When the assassin came leaping up over Davin’s table, knees bunched up beneath him like an acrobat, with hook-knife in hand, Davin was more than glad he’d made the right decision in his choice of weaponry. Swinging wildly, his blow swept passed the attacker a second too late, even as the butler went right on sailing by, the wicked edged blade of his knife cutting the air right in front of Davin’s eyes. More than shocked, Davin watched as the other man gracefully tumbled himself down between two tables, neatly avoiding Verona’s rain of hurled tools and spare parts.

  “Face me like a man!” Verona yelled, but only earned maniacal laughter in response.

  “Watch out!” Davin yelled at her, even as the butler popped up at the end of the row behind her. Shrieking and stumbling to get away from him, Verona violently overturned a rolling cart of tools and heavy bolts in his path, then scrambled backwards as he came for her, one determined step at a time. Twice, he swung the curved knife towards her, once towards her lights and once towards her face, eliciting a pair of tiny shrieks in response. Davin, grabbing something that looked like a rounded painter’s tray from the table next to him, sent the impromptu discus flying overhand at the butler. Unable to dodge in time, the man was forced to knock it aside with the haft of his blade, only to catch a face-full of metal bits and dust as result.

  Grabbing Verona by the hand, Davin led her back the way he’d come, back towards the automatons, even as the assassin growled challenge behind them, now sounding quite angry. Pushing Verona on by, Davin stopped at a table covered with fat round vials and began chucking them one at a time at the hunter with the best accuracy he could muster. While the pretty-boy dodged the first couple of missiles, coughing a bit when an acid vial detonated on the handle of a trunk-sized anchor vice behind him, the assassin finally ducked down beneath the tables once more when the barrage grew too great for him, removing himself as a target from Davin’s explosive assault.

  Verona, after ducking under the length of the metal grapnel rope, was heading for the far side of the room. Following her lead, Davin continued after her, looking for anything else mechanical or otherwise that might give him the advantage. But when a large metal saw-blade whistled past his head, then S-curved right past Verona’s neck with seemingly lethal intent, the attack caused both of them to dive to the floor for cover.

  Grabbing the first thing she found, Verona’s hands came off the table with something that looked like a nozzled steam-pump but with a number of strange gauges bolted to the handles with sheaths of silver wire. To her dismay, before she could even raise the weird device to strike, the assassin had found her first — and a whirling makeshift bola, a pair of round counter-weights tied by a thin metal chain, suddenly wrapped around the neck twice before the weights on the end clonked together and drove her to the ground.

  Scrabbling at the choking chain, Verona made quick headway on the tangled chain, winning a new, great breath of air within just a few seconds. But then she could see the assassin coming for her, running right down between the tables towards her with his hook knife held in a low hand grip. Struggling backwards, one hand clawing at the entangling chain and the other pulling herself along with the table leg, Verona tried to get away but she just wasn’t fast enough. The butler, moving like a hunting cat, stood over her in a flash, ready to cut her to ribbons.

  “This fight is over,” he announced to Davin who was still hidden somewhere else in the room. “Surrender yourself, or your girlfriend loses an eye.”

  “Not a chance!” Davin yelled from right behind him. Spinning, the assassin made his strike, driving his blade to cut the boy right across the face — only to come away from the blow empty handed. Davin, wearing Verona’s electric glove, was holding onto a thick metal wrench to which the butler’s magnetized blade was now hopelessly attached.

  But the assassin didn’t falter at the loss of his weapon. Spinning a distracting kick at Davin’s face, he then dodged low and tripped the young man in the back of the ankle, sending the young man tumbling to the ground. While Davin was able to force the butler back once with a lunge of his foot, the second time he tried to kick the hunter merely batted aside Davin’s feeble attempt with his knee and dealt a crushing punch straight down into the boy’s stomach. But even as Davin took the blow, he swung down with the metal wrench, right across the top of the butler’s head — only to have the most unexpected result.

  For a fraction of a second, the assassin’s skull glowed with a nimbus of bright green electricity, and his eyes boggled wide at the sudden, terrible sensation electric power coursing through his brain. In trying to desperately tug the wrench away for a second blow, Davin realized that the makeshift weapon was stuck securely to the side of the butler’s head, and that the hair on the other man’s skull was starting to smoke and burn.

  Struggling back, as Davin was yet unable to let go of the wrench, Davin was amazed to see a rain of smaller metal parts, screws and nails, plates and ratchets, and bolts and rings start to fly off the nearby tables and stick to the side of the assassin’s head. With an anguished cry, the man tried to pull and paw the wrench off of himself, to rip it away from the metal plate that was starting to come up off of the inside of his skull like a shingle in the wind. But the device’s magnetism was too strong, and the glove’s power too great. With a great spanging sound, the metal plate in the man’s head popped free, and the butler went down in a crumpled heap without another sound.

  Moments later, the glove powered down, its green lightning subsiding at first to a hum, and then to a final discharged silence. The only thing that could be heard is the man’s brains lightly sizzling within his own brainpan. Letting go of the wrench, then pulling his hand free of the glove, Davin let the amazing invention flop harmlessly to the floor. But the metal bar still stayed embedded into the butler’s skull, and the collection of metal odds and ends adhered there gave him the man the appearance of having a pod of rusty carbuncles growing out of his scalp.

  “What was he?” Verona said, even as she painfully unwrapped the last vestiges of the tangle chain from her neck and shoulders.

  “A person,” Davin said, as he tried to stand up, using a nearby table to help him right himself. While nothing felt broken, and his guts hadn’t burst, the butler’s punch had certainly blasted the wind out of him. “He
was a person with a metal plate in his head, which strikes me as very odd.” He looked over at Verona, trying to get a sense of what blood on her was hers, and what belonged to the earlier concoction of wine and pepper soup. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right enough,” she said. “Enough to get out of here, before somebody else comes in, and we have to do all this over again.”

  Looking down at the smoking wreck of Charette’s butler, Davin shook his head. “I’d much rather not do this again.” Getting his bearings, he stepped over the body, took Verona by the hand, and led her of them out of Vermeni’s mad workshop and out the far door into a hallway blissfully empty of death machines, magnetic grappling gloves, and any other inhuman menaces that might get in their way.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Lit by the flaring light of the flame-torch, Charette hunched into the interior of the gigantic machine, welding together a particularly difficult-to-reach piece of bracket housing tucked up beneath strands of cables and fist-sized resistors. Swearing and sweating, she bent further into the device, trying to complete these last few adjustments. Most of all, she just wished that the overhead candyglass lighting would just stop flickering for once, just for a moment, for just long enough that she could get this last bit of work done without having to squint.

  “Can’t you work any faster?” Vermeni said from behind her. He paced back and forth in his favorite suit, a nine-foot automaton fitted with armor plating similar to the Teutonic generals of old, right down to the flanged shoulder-plates and a heavy iron mace strapped to its hip. Amidst the vast machines, housings, and conduits encircling the floor of the Electric Death, as he stalked to and fro amidst the tables and the carts, Vermeni’s automaton seemed more like a child’s toy rather than a machine of war and conquest.

  “It’s very delicate work, father,” Charette replied. “You can’t rush genius. You’re the one that taught me that.” Bending over just a little bit further, trying to maintain her focus through her father’s continued distractions, she pushed aside a flight of rubber coolant hoses in order to flame-weld a particularly difficult spot. If the Flame Heart was to rest perfectly in place, rather than the original Multi-Facet Control Housing she had spent the last six months devising, she wouldn’t have a second chance to tinker with the structure once the heart was at rest. Charette hadn’t even expected to be able to use the heart, not until Altius’s news, not until Davin had capitulated in her chair of pain and gave her the key to her father’s dreams of rule and conquest.

  Struggling, she pushed aside one of the trio of foot-thick hoses that dangled down from above, still piping in pressurized coolant throughout the interior of the machine’s crude circulatory system. Davin’s interference wasn’t something that she had planned on, and she feared what would happen when her father was finally able to engage his greatest invention. For the last twenty-five years that Vermeni had been sequestered underground in the lair beneath the estate, ever since his mock death some two years after Mercuri had died, he had depended upon Charette as his surrogate inventor. His automaton hands lacked the fine motor finesse required to build anything intricate.

  All that was about to come to an end, as he would soon have a body that could match all of his technical requirements. Charette was loyal to her father, just as much as her pretty-boys were loyal to her without fault. But the idea of becoming something lesser in Vermeni’s eyes worried her, and Charette feared that with the change in bodies would come a change in their personal balance of power. For years she’d been her own woman, both at home and abroad, with her own contacts, lovers, and assassins, and she enjoyed the personal freedom that Vermeni’s continued imprisonment offered her. She even liked the idea of her father ruling the Brass Empire, and the power and wealth that it would provide her — even though she didn’t know for certain exactly how her father planned to share that significant bounty with his offspring. But the occult knowledge that such an Empire could gather and control… She’d long had fantasies about conducting expeditions into the unknown east, to search for greater powers and to unlock the mysteries of the twin worlds of spirits and men. To finally achieve that goal, to quest for the source of mystic power, that alone thrilled her more than any tin-plated throne ever would.

  “There,” she said, as she got the last set of the brackets burned perfectly into place. Leaning back up out of the central core of the automaton, she turned down the flame torch and set it on the rolling workbench next to her to cool. Standing amidst the complicated tangle of legs and arms, it was hard to maintain which way was up. But Charette knew the heart faced forward, which meant the head would rise up — there. Once the work was complete, the entire spider-legged affair would rise some fourteen feet off of the floor. A master-work achievement requiring more than a year of planning and three years of off-and-on again construction with materials gathered secretly from all across the world.

  “Soon, the Empire shall feel my wrath,” Vermeni announced to the air, working himself back up into one of his frenzies. “Soon, the Emperor shall learn what it is to challenge the mastery of Vermeni!” He spun on Charette, stalking up to her on heavy, clanking feet, his red eyes glaring red with the glowing heat from his internal stoke-furnace. “I want to see Mercuri’s grandson. Now. He needs to bow before my will.”

  “No,” Charette replied, looking up into her father’s eyes with disapproval. “Control yourself. We awakened his talent because of you. We can’t be sure that he won’t be able to destroy the Flame Heart in the same fashion, like Mercuri used to do with failed fire cages. We can’t let him within sight of you, not until your plans are fully in place.”

  “Not fully in place?” Vermeni mocked. “I have an army of subjects loyal to my will and hungry for my promises of eternity and power. I have my greatest creation waiting for me at Stonegate, awaiting my beck and call. I have my Diallium Spheres and a wealth of weapons that the world hasn’t even imagined in their darkest dreams. Now, in these next few hours, I will finally sit within the greatest automaton the world has ever seen. If Davin is wise, and is as spineless as his father, he will see the wisdom of joining my particular view of the world.”

  “Davin isn’t his father,” Charette insisted. “He has a lot more of Mercuri in him than I’d expected.” Charette said, even as she rubbed at a bit of grime stuck into her father’s shoulder with a cloth. “We can’t afford that. We’re on a tight enough schedule with Jacob Florin as it is to risk that kind of interference.”

  “Florin is being paid well for his betrayal. As is your husband.”

  “My mewling excuse for a husband leads your armies out of greed — but Jacob is already one of the richest men in the Empire. He does this deed for you, from the screws he delivered to the war automatons he has constructed inside the prison gates, not for money but for the promise of power. Jacob is not a patient man, and will not seed revolution within the gates of Agora unless your victory is absolutely assured.”

  Nodding, Vermeni put a heavy metal hand on her shoulder, nearly making her knees buckle with the bruising, but kindly gesture. “Of course you are correct, my daughter. But how is your own machine coming along?”

  “My work comes along well enough.” A marvel of invention, the Chassis was her own novel invention, right down to hand-molding each of the metal pieces would allow her to have sinuous, womanly curves and a degree of lithe dexterity for centuries beyond count. While she loathed the day when she would finally have to reside within the machine, to forever give up the ways of food, wine, and the flesh, she understood the necessity of such a device when facing the unyielding ages of eternity.

  “You should be prepared as soon as possible,” Vermeni insisted. “You should be ready when the time comes to ascend. Only then will your knowledge be truly safe, beyond the knives and loathing of mortal men.”

  “You are more important than my own safety, father,” Charette said. “Soon, when you are complete, and I have rested from my endeavors, then I shall complete my own master
-work. Then I shall join you in ascension.” Going over to a table littered with longdrivers and sets of delicate clock-maker’s tools, Charette gazed down upon the beating heart sitting in the center of the clutter. Taking a deep breath, doing her best to repress any doubts, she picked up the clockwork heart, designed from Mercuri’s final Ignis notes, and carried it back to the waiting machine. With Vermeni hovering expectantly over her shoulder, he watched as she lowered the prize into place, then spun and locked the restraining bolts one after another, binding the Flame Heart in tightly amidst the frame.

  “Excellent!” Vermeni said. “What remains?”

  “Just a few last moments of adjustments, Father,” Charette replied. “But if you are ready to translocate yourself, I expect the machine is ready to have you.”

  “I am more than ready!” Vermeni said grandly. “The time has come! The beginning is finally here! The world shall tremble before the might of Vermeni!”

  “Yes, father,” Charette said dutifully, slightly bored in her father’s moment of ultimate triumph.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Keeping an eye out for more adversaries, Davin and Verona skulked down the hallway, Davin with a blunt forger’s hammer in hand and Verona armed with a forearm-long length of pipe that shouldn’t explode, vent fire, or do anything other than allow her to handily bludgeon people that got in her way.

  After the events that occurred in the laboratory, with the odd death of Charette’s butler, Davin knew that the odds were still stacked against them. But he felt better about it now, as two significant lackeys were out of the way. Now, Davin knew, the problem lay in finding Charette and forcing her to give back his and Verona’s fathers, all for the price of her skin.