The Fire Cage

by Scott Hungerford

  Desperately, she swung around, trying to make her next guess, when she heard a knocking, a faint rapping from the far side of the room. Leaping over pipes and hoses, nearly slipping on a patch of treacherous ice, Verona made her way to the other coffin and threw it open — to find Rajon shivering inside.

  “Father!” she exclaimed, taking his slightly blue hand in her own as he struggled to sit up on his own power.

  “Praise the S-saints… You found m-me... Ch-char-rette? Where is sh-she?” he demanded.

  “Davin has her.”

  “We have to stop her. Ver-Vermeni. He’ll kill us all.”

  In the distance, the sound of a giant flechette gun firing dozens upon dozens of rounds could suddenly be heard, like a giant steam-cannon firing over and over again inside of an echoing chamber. The ground beneath their feet bucked and shuddered from the impact of the explosions.

  “By the Saints,” Verona said. “I think we’re already too late.”

  .oOo.

  With a start Davin dodged off to one side even as the enraged automaton opened fire, chewing up tables and machinery with a seemingly endless supply of metal darts. Charette screamed and managed to buck the automaton’s gun just high enough to let Davin scamper away, only to be bodily thrown backwards by her father when the old man determinedly chased the young man across the lab with a whickering, high-pitched wail of dart-fire.

  Diving behind one of the control boxes, Davin just barely managed to avoid becoming minced. Instead, he got burned in a dozen places as a rain of hot sparks and metal fragments burned and slashed across his forearms and ankles from where a flurry of darts punched into the front of his sheltering box.

  “Father!” Charette screamed. “Stop this madness!”

  “You won’t tell me what to do,” Vermeni growled, his voice making the whole room shake. “For twenty-five years I’ve waited for you to build me a body that I could rule with. I’m not going to let you or anyone else take that power from me. Not now! Not again! Not ever!”

  “But I’m on your side!” Charette yelled, even as he brought the gun to bear upon her.

  “You’re on your own side,” Vermeni yelled, and fired a burst of flechettes through Charette’s body, knocking her backwards to the floor like a discarded toy. “And I’m on mine.”

  Concentrating, Davin rolled out from behind the box, raised his hand, and quested for Vermeni’s heart once more. This time, reaching through the rear of the machine, he felt his will get a hold of it, get a hold of the old man’s soul trapped within the mechanical box. He started to twist, to squeeze, and to crush the life out of the spell holding the fire cage together, hoping he would be fast enough to do the deed.

  But Vermeni, screaming out a growl of rage and pain, reflexively fired his flechette cannon. Standing in the center of the room, he jetted hundreds of inch-long darts into the turbine pipes, into the coils, into the control boxes, into the candyglass-wrapped wires above, all while looking around wildly for the source of the terrible, questing, soul-quenching pain. Stepping forward on his pincer needle feet, with a tug of his shoulders Vermeni ripped free of the three coolant pipes attaching him to the ceiling, sending flailing geysers of icy fog flailing in every direction.

  Davin, even amongst all the tumult, was starting to get the hang of how he might put an end to Vermeni’s terrible machine once and for all with his power. But when the spider started to move in earnest, its legs giving it a speed that Davin would have never bet on in any gambling house, Davin was forced to watch helplessly as it scurried and clanked on its needle feet down an adjoining hallway, scrambling towards a quick escape at a rate far faster than any man could run. Davin stood up and tried desperately stop the creature at range, but another wave of falling debris, followed by an impressive blast of hydrostatic lightning that lashed the room from one side to the other, cut him off from his cause.

  “Davin!” Verona yelled out from behind him. He turned to see a sight that warmed his heart. It was Verona, with Rajon, alive, limping along at her side. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  “Tell me about it!” Davin announced, even as a torrent of tearing pipes and seals began to rip out of their moorings high above. Desperately, having already lost his first prey, Davin scampered across the floor, through the steam and the chaos, looking for Charette. Soon, he found her, a victim of her father’s rage, a line of ragged dart holes blasting her through her shirt and coat just below the breastbone. Even as blood gushed out of the wounds, her face had already gone pale in the lightning haze.

  “Give me my father,” Davin demanded. “Now.”

  “Even if I did, you don’t have the training to make him whole again.” With bloody fingers, she lifted up the necklace, showing the diamond-shaped fire cage, a different model than any of the other cube-like models he’d seen. “It was a gift from your grandfather. It was one of the first he ever made, just for me. But it fits no automaton ever made in the whole wide world.”

  Without a word, Davin stepped up to the dying woman, reached down to her collar, and ripped off the necklace containing his father’s spirit, breaking the clasp. “I’ll make due. I’ll get him back. I promise.”

  “I doubt it,” Charette said, her lips colored with her own ruby blood. “Not without my help. Now go, before this whole place comes down around you. We will meet again, you and I.”

  “We will?” Davin said, the disbelief plain on his face. “I’d doubt that, too.”

  “Oh, yes…” Charette stated, as her eyes flickered and her strength started to fade. “I just have to die a little more first…”

  “Come on!” Verona yelled from behind him, as another blast of lightning ripped from somewhere above, and a torrent of water began to flood down one of the room’s circular walls. When he looked down again, Charette’s eyes were closed as if she were already at peace.

  More than a little creeped out by Charette’s final words, Davin bowed to her, as he thought a gentleman would to a fallen foe, then turned and ran splashing through the spreading water. He joined up with Verona and Rajon as they passed the Cold Room, heading for a flight of stairs as fast as Rajon could walk.

  “What did she say?” Rajon demanded.

  “I’ll tell you later,” Davin replied. Somewhere in the distance behind them a boiler exploded, followed by two sharp metallic bangs that shook a torrent of bricks out of the tunnel ceiling behind them. Right afterwards, the candyglass lights abruptly winked out, leaving the trio in total darkness. But just up ahead, where the passage widened, Davin could see a shaft of light coming down from above, indicating another one of the spiral staircases that frequented Vermeni’s rapidly disintegrating underground sanctuary.

  Soon, climbing up and out, Davin found himself leading Verona and Rajon into Vermeni’s main kitchens. With the back door standing wide open, and a cup of tea and a half-eaten plate of biscuits left abandoned on a tea-tray by the servant’s stairs, the three of them hastily made their way into the dusky evening light, coming out onto the back lawn just as the sun was starting to set on the Thorny.

  “We made it,” Davin said.

  “For now,” Rajon replied. “There,” Rajon said, pointing off in the distance. “That is what I was expecting.”

  “By the Saints,” Verona said, following her father’s direction. Across the river and down the way a mile or so, the brooding castle that had to be Stonegate Prison seemed to be on fire, with smoke pouring out of every upper window, creating a carpet of black haze that drifted westwards towards the sea. But even more to his surprise, at Davin’s feet the Thorny was starting to run dry. Even as they watched, the water level seemed to be dropping a few inches every second, leaving bare mud and flapping fish in its wake. Huge tubes were beginning to show themselves in the river muck, with dozens of mesh-screens covering openings along the top and sides of the pipes, festering with fronds of riverweed, mud-grass and a dozen seasons of entangled sticks and debris.

  “But where is the water going?” Verona asked
.

  “The water is going down, into Vermeni’s dungeons,” Rajon answered. “Up here, we may not be on safe ground much longer. We’d best hurry.”

  Turning back to the elegant four story house, Davin looked up at the windows on the top floor of Vermeni’s red-painted manse, noting how some of the older panes of glass were already starting to crack and burst out of their seams. Nails shrieked from the side of the house, and puffs of steam and gas were erupting out of the lawn, filling the air with their shrieking, choking plumes.

  Without much other choice, Davin led the way for Verona and Rajon across the shaking ground, dodging plumes and moving carefully around expanding sinkholes in the earth. By the time they crossed around the side of Vermeni’s house, with Verona supporting Rajon at his every step, a sizable veranda garden on the side was being sucked into a giant sinkhole, and bricks from the chimney were starting to rain and bounce down along the roof, smashing down through the solarium’s roof panes below.

  After cutting through a stand of swaying apple trees and avoiding a troublesome rain of falling fruit, they finally reached the edge of the grassy rise that led up onto the road. Beyond exhausted, Rajon started to flag, and it took all of Davin’s strength to pull him and Verona up the bank and onto the safety of the open lane. Grateful they had made it that far, Davin turned with Verona to look behind them at the ongoing destruction, even as Rajon dropped to his knees and on the trembling ground, no longer able to stand.

  “Look!” Verona said, pointing out towards the smoking keep in the distance. At first Davin didn’t see what she was pointing at, as he was too involved with watching the house’s foundations starting to rip asunder at the root. But out across the Thorny, Davin sucked in his breath when he saw the whole side of Stonegate Prison start to split asunder, with its centuries-old watchtowers and crenellated walls collapsing under the onslaught of something from within.

  With awe, he and Verona watched as an army of metal soldiers started to march out of the breach, four by four in perfect unison. First forty, then eighty, then another eighty, the line of felon-haunted automatons seemed endless. But when something else came out of the breach, something at least thirty feet high and made entirely of metal plating, Davin’s jaw dropped with disbelief. Davin suddenly knew what it was, and finally put together the reason for the terrible tally of foot-long screws.

  “It’s a Serpent,” Rajon declared from behind them, before Davin could find a word to describe what he was seeing. “It’s a giant version of the Serpent, Vermeni’s master achievement, and it is going to tear down the Empire to component stones.”

  Davin goggled; Rajon was right. It was a serpent, just like the one that had pursued him and Verona through the Abbey, but built on a much larger, impossibly gigantic scale. In the fading light, the sunset colors reflected off of the giant creature’s back and sides, giving it an aura of fire and lethality. With gaping, fanged mouth, blazing red eyes, and a lashing tail, the giant machine somehow glided around its lines of marching metal soldiers, and headed into the trees, crushing century-old elms and oaks beneath its massive weight.

  “Dear Saints,” Verona exclaimed, as she watched its tail vanish into the trees. For a moment, once it had cleared the ruined copse, the Serpent paused, raising its head up another thirty feet in the air in order to best observe the landscape. Then it let itself down with enough crushing force to cause the earth to jump beneath their feet, and started to slither off in the direction of the capitol. “It’s going to crush everything in its path. Agora is done for.”

  “Not if I can help it,” Davin said bravely. “We have to ride for the city. They have to be warned! Then, we take the fight to Vermeni and we end his madness once and for all!”

  “But what about the automaton army?” Rajon asked. “What about the army of thieves and murderers coming to claim their due?”

  “We’ll stop them too,” Davin said, looking down at his hands and whatever alchemical mysteries they still contained. “Just as soon as I figure out how...”

  Chapter Nineteen

  To Davin, the long walk back up the road to Mercuri’s estate took forever. Exhausted, sore and battered from their incarceration and resulting escape, the walk up a half mile of winding road to where the carriage awaited them threatened to drain the last of his strength. Verona kept him and Rajon both going, though, with her lively chatter and the occasional badgering when they started moving too slowly for her liking. Rajon, the longer he kept moving, seemed to do better perhaps as he warmed up from the effects of his impossible confinement. But for Davin, the longer the road went on, the more tired he got as the enormity of the day’s events began to overtake him.

  As they walked along the dried-up Thorny, Davin had expected to see more destruction, more carnage up here but the water level upriver of Vermeni’s ruined estate seemed normal. A few servants and nosy busy-bodies stopped them along the way, holding out lanterns in the falling darkness, trying to find out what all the fuss was about. But Rajon just told them politely to return to their houses, to lock themselves in good and tight and wait for the authorities to arrive.

  “That advice won’t do them much good,” Verona chided, once they were out of range of the most recent batch of onlookers. “They’ll just come out on the roads more, or head down to Coventon to try and figure out what is to be done.”

  “I’m just doing my part,” Rajon said. “Once Vermeni gets his foot-soldiers across the Thorny, none of these folks will be safe. Hopefully he’ll keep his attention on the capitol and won’t think about doubling back and putting these houses to the torch.”

  Davin nodded, having already reached the same conclusion himself. Amongst the dark trees, with the full moon starting to rise over the eastern hills, the setting seemed nearly idyllic, a peaceful night for a walk out along the river’s edge. More than anything, he just wanted to go back to the Lane and throw himself into a soft feather bed and sleep until morning. But the occasional smell of smoke drifting in the wind from the still-burning Stonegate disrupted his hopes over and over again. Giving Verona’s hand a little squeeze, he took the broken necklace out of his pocket for the hundredth time, marveling at the primitive nature of its prototypical design.

  “I think it really is him,” Davin said as he held onto the fire cage and felt the soul within. “I think it really is my father in there.”

  “I think it is too,” Rajon said, as he nearly tripped and stumbled over a loose rock. “I don’t see why Charette would have any reason to lie.” On the way here, Davin had told Rajon the whole story, right down to Charette’s strange admission that they hadn’t seen the last of her yet. “But you should probably stop playing with it. It’s pretty old, and you don’t want to risk damaging it any more than it already has been.”

  “Is that the coach up ahead?” Verona said, hope bubbling up in her voice.

  “That it is,” Davin said with a sigh of relief. Even more so, he was glad to see Mercuri’s house was still standing, without a leaf out of place. The terrible calamity that had destroyed Vermeni’s ancestral home had seemingly left the Mercuri estate untouched. But Davin wondered about the wonders and laboratories down below, and whether they were still intact, or floating in a dozen feet of murky river water.

  “Am I glad to see you!” the driver said as he hopped down off the bench. “Quite the ruckus downriver. Got any news?”

  “A madman has broken out of Stonegate Prison with a thirty-foot high mechanical serpent and an army of felon-driven automatons. He means to march upon the capitol, tonight if not first thing in the morning.”

  “Well,” the driver said, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. “That’s a bit more than spilled porridge, isn’t it?”

  “That it is,” Verona told him. “How fast can you get us to Coventon?”

  “And then to Agora?” Davin followed up.

  “Quicker than we got here, that’s for certain. You three get in and hang on. This could be a bumpy ride!”

  Davin opened
the door for Rajon and Verona and helped them in one by one. He’d barely pulled himself inside the coach himself when the driver whistled up a tune. In a smooth half-circle the steam horse turned towards town, and then accelerated up to a speed that Davin had no way to describe except as perfectly unsafe.

  It wasn’t long before the driver turned them down the lane that led to the covered bridge, and then drove the wheeled trap right onto it with a hefty double-bang of the wheels. Rolling across, Davin could feel the unpleasant sensation of the bridge starting to lean, just a little to the left, as if the pilings below were starting to come undone underneath the force and weight of the carriage’s passing. But they hopped up on the far side quickly enough, before the bridge had time to fall, and accelerated towards town.

  “Vermeni will be expecting us,” Rajon said. “He knows that we stand a good chance of being alive, even with the loss of his house. He knows that we mean to stop him, so we’re going to have to take precautions.”

  “But his army is already afield?” Verona asked. “Isn’t the time for subtlety in the past?”

  “Vermeni knows that I got really close to crushing out his fire cage a few hours ago,” Davin said. “He also knows that if I can do it to him, I can probably do it to the automatons in his army if I can get close enough.”

  “Getting close is the problem,” Rajon stated. “But we’ll just have to drive on and see what we can learn. If we’re lucky enough to get to the city gates before they close up tight, you can offer your services to the Emperor and he can decide what the best use is of you.”

  “What?” Davin blurted out.

  “Stop playing games,” Verona scolded her father. “You’d never hand him over to the Emperor.”

  “I’m not playing games,” Rajon stated. “We can do very little out here in the wilds. With the might of the Empire’s military resources backing Davin, we might well be able to turn this rout into a victory. Many innocent lives depend on Vermeni being stopped.” For a moment, Rajon looked out of the window into the darkness, measuring his thoughts. “But I fear that Vermeni has already won. Many of the automatons in the city aren’t constructed for combat, and the ones that were built at Florin’s in the first place are probably already being used by those in league with Charette. We may have forced Vermeni’s hand, but I suspect he is still holding the winning play.”