The Fire Cage

by Scott Hungerford

  From up top, the driver banged twice with his foot. Leaning forward a little, Davin could see that they were already entering Coventon, though the driver was braking a little quicker than Davin would expect. While they were still a few houses short of the inn, the driver pulled the carriage to the side with a couple of short whistles. When they had come to a full stop, Davin opened the door and got out of the carriage to see what the problem was ahead.

  It was two automatons, just like the ones Davin had seen in Vermeni’s laboratory, complete with spiked helmets and brass-plated exteriors. Standing about eight feet high and made of more tarnish than clean metal, they were blocking the middle of the road with a circle of women and children prisoners kneeling at their feet. Behind them, a tea-house was burning, plumes of black smoke rising up into the cloudless sky.

  “This is what you were worried about?” Davin asked nervously, as Rajon and Verona climbed out of the carriage as well.

  “No,” Rajon stated. “This isn’t a vanguard. This looks more like... larceny, and petty at best.” As they watched, an old man came out of the one of the homes, still dressed in his nightshirt and whiskers, and dumped a jewelry box on the ground in front of one of the metal soldiers. Nodding in acknowledgement, the automaton said something to a young girl at its feet, and she went fleeing into her grandfather’s arms unharmed.

  Verona scowled. “We ought to do something.”

  “We have to do something,” Rajon said. “They’re blocking our only path, and the last thing I want to do is to entice them to attack. To take one of the other roads around the other edge of the county would add hours to our trip. I suspect the Empire doesn’t have that long.”

  “Then let me deal with them,” Davin offered.

  “You can’t be serious,” Verona said.

  “I’m very serious,” Davin replied, giving her a kiss on the forehead. “Keep the steam engine running; I’ll be back in a minute.” As he began walking towards the automatons Davin kept his hands at his sides showing he wasn’t carrying a weapon. Davin knew he would only have one chance to get this right.

  Even though he was approaching in plain sight, it took longer for the machines to notice him than he had expected. As he watched the felons turn this way and that in their bodies, and stomp from one position to the next in the dust, he sensed that they hadn’t had much time to practice anything other than basic movement in the forms. That was good information to have, especially if it came down to a fight for the city’s survival this night.

  As he walked into the firelight cast from the burning building, no more than twenty feet away from the fiends, one of the automatons levered up one of its arms at him, where a single wide-spanned cross bolt was loaded up within a sizable harness affixed to its shoulder and forearm. A quiver of bolts stood up from behind its back, an arsenal of deadly projectiles that Davin felt fairly certain the felon knew how to use.

  “Halt where you stand,” the felon said in a tinny, mechanical voice, as if the man was speaking through a twine of harp strands. Davin stopped, followed his exact directions, even as he felt outward with his senses, feeling the fire cages burning just beneath the machine’s throats, each no more than a dozen paces ahead.

  “Get down on your knees,” the other one said through his own modulation, a bit more timidly than the first. Acknowledging his request as well, Davin got down on his knees, one at a time, still feeling for the ebb and the throb of the machine’s heart and center.

  The pushy one stomped up, and got right within range to cuff Davin to the ground if he cared to. “You’re not afraid of us,” he growled.

  “I used to work at Florin’s,” Davin said, carefully showing the automaton his cog tattoo. By the way the thing turned its head a little, he guessed either they didn’t have very good eyesight in the dark, or better yet, they didn’t have very good eyesight at all. “I spent a lot of time watching them build automatons on the floor.”

  “Well, we’re nothing like them,” the felon said angrily. “You got any goods?”

  “None, sir.”

  The ghost in the machine huffed, not believing Davin’s story, then turned his weapon so the point was leveled at one of the women clustered at his partner’s feet. “I bet you have something worth her life. You didn’t just come out of the dark for no good reason. Give us the goods, or I’ll punch her through, and it won’t be quick.”

  Davin, now as ready as he was ever going to be, made up his mind. “You’re from Stonegate, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “We all are,” the automaton replied. “Now hurry up with the pockets before my trigger gets itchy.”

  “What were you in for?” Davin said, feeling strangely calm.

  “Murder,” the felon said. “Five counts. What’s it to you?”

  “Everything,” Davin said dreamily, even as he crushed the automaton’s fire cage with a flex of his grandfather’s ancestral power. Like a wheelbarrow of spare parts, the automaton dropped where it stood, hundreds of pounds of metal crashing down by where Davin knelt. The other one looked up at Davin, astonished.

  “Verx! What’s wrong with you?”

  Davin stood up slowly, dusting off his knees. “And what were you in for?” He carefully felt outward, until he could sense, then grip the other man’s fire cage with his power.

  The remaining automaton paused, then took a careful step back, as if sensing that the young man was somehow responsible for Verx’s abrupt end.

  “Desertion… Ironic, isn’t it?”

  “Then since you’re not a murderer, we’re done here, aren’t we?” Davin asked, loosening his grip on the other man’s heart. “I would suggest you leave the field, and not return.”

  “I think might do that, sir,” the automaton said, taking another step back, looking this way and that with quick jerks of its head and neck. “Did you just do what I think you did?”

  “I just might have,” Davin said. “Ladies, you are free to go,” he told the captives. For a moment the women and children just stared at him as if were the coming of the Fifteenth Saint. “Really. Get moving.”

  “Who are you?” the automaton exclaimed, even as his assembled bounty went running in all directions. “Are you Charette’s kid or something?”

  “Charette’s dead,” Davin stated.

  “What?” the felon said, stunned at the revelation.

  “She’s dead. The lab is destroyed. Vermeni blew the lightning machine apart before he broke out of Stonegate.”

  “What! What about my body?”

  “It’s probably buried beneath ten feet of rubble and river water by now.”

  The machine wavered a bit back and forth, barely standing on its struts. “I can die?” it said to itself, as if proclaiming a warning, or perhaps, prophecy.

  “Your body is probably dead already,” Davin said calmly. “So, if you don’t want any trouble, you’d best just get out of here. Tell all the others when you see them, that their bodies are probably crushed too, because Vermeni brought down the entire tunnel complex with that giant flechette weapon of his. It’s all gone.”

  “Yes, sir,” the automaton said, taking a third step back. When it seemed as if Davin wasn’t going to do or say anything else to the deserter, he charged off down the road at a fairly rapid clip, banging and clanging off into the darkness.

  “Measuring the weight of another man’s soul,” Rajon said from behind Davin. “It’s not an easy burden.”

  “No it isn’t,” Davin said back, feeling like he was about a thousand years older in the passage of just the last few minutes. Turning, he was glad to see Rajon and Verona standing just a few feet away, with the steam horse and driver pulled up close behind. “I’m glad that the second one didn’t give me any reason to put an end to him.”

  “You may not have as much leisure to discriminate in the future,” Rajon told him. “But that was an admirable thing. The discernment. It’s important.”

  “Can we go now?” the driver asked.

  “Absol
utely,” Davin said. “But first, what’s your name?”

  “McCarthy, sir,” the old man said with a bow.

  “You don’t know need to bow,” Davin said with a trace of irritation.

  “It’s always best to bow before wizards,” McCarthy said with a completely straight face. “Just like in all the old stories.”

  Davin smiled after a moment, shaking his head at the oddity of it all. Stepping away from the downed automaton, and reached over and gave Verona a quick kiss on the cheek. “Let’s get moving. We have mad inventors to catch.”

  .oOo.

  As the carriage pulled out of Coventon, Davin stared absently out the window, even as Verona and Rajon talked excitedly amongst themselves about the ramifications of the day. After wielding his grandfather’s power, he felt somewhat reinvigorated by it, though somehow disconnected from his own self, like his body too was being ridden by a ghost. The act of crushing the fire cage, of taking a life, had been easier than Davin expected, and in a way, even easier than he’d hoped. That worried him. He knew that the Empire was at stake, and the Emperor would need his help to help fend off Vermeni’s army of spirit-populated machines. But what Davin wanted most was just to have time to think and to not have to judge another man’s soul before breakfast.

  He’d almost drowsed off when he became aware of a rumbling sound coming from all around him, with just enough of a base note to rattle the carriage windows in their frames. Sitting up, sitting forward, he looked out the window, peering into the moonlit darkness, trying to make out anything that wasn’t a tree or a far off farmhouse built alongside the fields that stretched along the road. But he could sense the vibrations getting closer, and with it there was a kind of distant music as well, a rising, falling cavalcade of music roaring from one crazed pitch to the next.

  As Davin sat forward a little more to get a better look, the driver pulled the brake on the cart, causing the carriage to shimmy back and forth as its wheels fought to get purchase on the loose gravel road. Rajon and Verona grabbed handles to keep their seats, but Davin was braced, as if he already knew the sudden stop was coming.

  “Get out!” he told them even as he opened the door and jumped down from his seat. “Get out! It’s coming!”

  Before he could even take a breath, Davin found himself waiting by the road in the cold moonlight, his muscles trembling with anticipation. Rajon and Verona soon gathered behind him, even as he focused upon source of the unearthly music.

  “You can hear it too?” Verona said.

  “We all can,” Rajon stated. “It’s like some kind of symphony of the damned, with dead men coming to play.”

  “Bloody hell,” the driver swore as a strange whistling sound began to rise. Right behind the wall of noise came Vermeni’s greatest invention in all of its terrible glory. Bigger than anything that Davin had seen moving in all of his life, the King Serpent came boiling up over the ridge like a titan of old, its eyes casting great beams of weirding red light out in front of its path. Taller than a house, taller than two houses, Davin could do nothing but stand and watch, mouth agape, as the monstrous machine moved towards them, each of its opposing coils twisting against the ground in order to maintain such a high rate of speed.

  Then it was going past them, its cutting wake as warm as a hot summer wind. By chance, the machine was close enough that a rain of pebbles, earth, and crushed tree branches, aromatic with the smells of sap and pine, rained down around them and pinged off of the steam horse’s back. It was close enough that its tail, located the end of a monstrous segment longer than a city block, nearly smashed the trio to pulp by its passing. By the time that Davin blinked, the massive automaton had passed them by, snaking down the hill to their left, cutting a broad swath across the flat farmland as it scouted the area around the city, a giant shadow moving amongst the gray. As it slithered away towards whatever destination it was heading for, the sound of the music, the crazy, demented music faded with it, until Davin could just barely hear notes in the distance, like a mournful piper’s tune at the end of a summer’s fair.

  They all just stood there, numbed by what they had seen, with McCarthy standing and holding onto the steam horse’s reins as if he feared the machine was going to rear and turn tail with fear. Only because he’d turned off the clockwork switch beneath its mane had the horse not gone mad from the cacophony of raw musical notes. Now that the King Serpent was gone, he turned it back up again, and whistled the horse to life with a little chirrup, causing the steed’s metal nostrils to flare steam.

  “What do we do now?” Verona asked.

  “We go after it,” Davin said.

  “We go to the capitol,” Rajon insisted.

  “We’ll never have a chance to catch it by morning,” Verona said. “It’s too fast for us. Not on these roads.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” Davin said, even as he moved a few feet forward onto the deep rutted tracks where the giant machine had passed. “I suspect that Vermeni’s offered us a right nice road, just by coming by.”

  “Well I’ll be sainted,” McCarthy said. Bending down, he touched at the compressed dirt, marveling at the truth of the young man’s words. “He’s right. We could follow it along this, at Bessie’s best clip at that.”

  All three of them looked at Davin, as if waiting for him to say something.

  “Well?” Davin finally said aloud. “Let’s go!”

  Rajon nodded, then turned to the driver. “Sir, I can’t ask you to put yourself in this much danger. But I can tell you that I’ll pay you for your horse and carriage if I wreck it along the way.”

  “Like hell you will,” McCarthy said with a grin. “I hate snakes. Let’s go catch and kill us a doozy.”

  .oOo.

  Within a minute, after Davin helped Verona back into the carriage with a bit more passionate verve that Rajon probably would have liked, they were off, turning onto the serpent’s track and moving at full speed across the landscape. While the full moon above was of some help in discerning the serpent’s track from farmland, at such high speed the carriage’s lanterns showed only the raised indentations of the makeshift road. They could afford no delay, and with that as a requirement, caution also had to be thrown to the wind.

  Moving through the countryside, cutting between stands of trees, houses, and straight through the crushed, burning wreck of a farmer’s home unlucky enough to lay in the Serpent’s path, they were making excellent time. Occasionally, as they surmounted a hill or a rise, they could see the serpent’s strangely lit eyes casting out across the hills ahead. Now that they were moving around to the northern side of the city, Davin knew that the beast would be kept at bay by the waters of the Dob. Structurally speaking, with the amount of raw heat and steam that was required to move the beast, immersing the snake in cold water would likely lead to buckling and a collapse of its outer shell. So, Davin figured than it would have to turn soon, probably towards Agora. When it slowed to begin to make its circuit, that would be the time for them to get close enough.

  The time came closer than he expected. At McCarthy’s beckoning shouts above, Davin opened the carriage window, then swung back the carriage door to get a better look, sticking his head up to get a sense of how close they were to the beast. From his best estimations, they were only a hundred yards behind the tail at best and gaining fast. Grabbing a side handle, risking his neck, Davin pulled himself up and out of the doorway and up next to singing McCarthy, perched right above the dizzying blur of the steam horse’s kicking heels. Hanging on to the edge of his seat, Davin watched as the carriage came closer and closer to the massive automaton, and the sound of the maniacal music could be barely heard over the rhythmic ka-da-da-da of the horse’s feet. From the other side of the carriage, Verona herself swung up on the other side of McCarthy, scooting the driver over a bit with a saucy bump of her hips.

  “Can you get us much closer?” Davin yelled over the wind and noise.

  “A bit yet,” McCarthy yelled back. “After that, it
will start to get too close to tell. I get the impression that the thing can cut a tight turn if it wants to and put us out of the rut and the race if it gets wind we’re here.”

  “What’s that?” Verona said, as she pointed towards the back of the snake.

  “Lights?” Davin said, guessing after a moment. “Lanterns?”

  “They’re like no lanterns I’ve ever seen,” McCarthy said. “They be blue, and flicker not a bit.”

  Davin watched with intent as they got closer, and closer still, until he could make out the very tail end of the snake. To his surprise, the rear platform looked a bit like a stoop of some kind, complete with a pair of wall-mounted lights and a very wide, very solid looking metal door. To either side of the door, hanging on for dear life, two of Vermeni’s automatons clung to the railings with one hand, and being the weapons on the other towards the oncoming carriage.

  “Get closer!” Davin ordered. “As fast as you can!”

  “Are you crazy?” Verona yelled.

  “Don’t question the likes of wizards,” McCarthy yelled back, before breaking into the fastest, most reckless jig he knew. Beneath them the horse’s cadence changed, from four beats to something that sounded like six or eight, and a screaming whine started to rise from her engines, a whine that Davin distinctly didn’t think she could make for long.

  But the gamble got them within reach of the stoop. Even as one of the machines raised to shoot something at them from within the hollow of its arm, Davin flared out his power, gripped the metal thing by the heart and crushed its fire cage with a single thought. The automaton toppled off the side and went whanging and clanging past the chariot, almost tangling beneath Bessie’s hooves. The second one launched a gout of fire at them, sending up a plume of roaring flame that threatened to singe off Davin’s whiskers.