Of Steel and Steam

by Pauline Creeden et al.

  Aurelia nearly wondered aloud where the Count was, but Helena wouldn’t know. They’d been together through the night, and then since Helena returned from the village.

  But the butchering and preparation had taken several hours, and Magnus had not appeared.

  Did he mean to hide from her until she left? That wasn’t like him.

  But constructing murderous monstrosities was not like him, either.

  Perhaps Helena was right. Aurelia had almost had to smile at the thought of bad wizards, but such a creature could never have occurred naturally. It must have been created by someone like her, like Magnus, practitioner of their particular science. By their enemies, perhaps? And what were they but bad wizards?

  She stood aside as Helena slowly poured out one of the buckets of blood into the big glass flask she had brought down to one of the unused servants’ rooms. They had laid out several of the dust sheets, but Helena was careful and didn’t spill a drop. Then she stood back, expectant.

  Aurelia unfolded the larger of her two leather cases, the one that had contained the flask. At home, she had equipment that could have managed the entire animal at once, but one could hardly travel with a vat the size of a man. She would have to take it in batches, this time.

  “You must never attempt what you see here,” she said severely, “nor speak of it to anyone. The knowledge itself is dangerous, but there are also those who will kill to keep it secret. Do you understand?”

  Helena nodded, but the dire warning did not seem to cool her keen interest.

  Aurelia set a small balance scales on the empty desk and calibrated it against her set of weights.

  She added first a quantity of yellow-white powder no greater than the tip of her thumb. The clots in the flask liquefied again as she stirred it with a glass rod.

  Next, twelve drops of a dense, milky fluid. As the twelfth drop fell, the entire mass of blood shuddered, and the red in it turned to brown dust and began to sink to the bottom of the now-clear liquid. Aurelia waited for the precipitation to be complete.

  “Is this how you usually do it?” Helena asked, watching with interest.

  “Usually. Have you ever drunk raw blood? It upsets the stomach.”

  “I’ve had czernina, duck blood soup. I doubt that’s the same.”

  “No, it really isn’t.” Aurelia sprinkled a spoonful of gray powder over the surface of the liquid. It dissolved and disappeared as it sank, and after a few seconds, everything in the flask turned cloudy and dark.

  “That’s a relief. This valley is bizarre enough already. I’d have been disappointed if you were a vampire.”

  Aurelia paused and looked up, her eyebrows raised. “Don’t be absurd.”

  Helena’s lips tightened. “You’ve seen the things that hunt here at night. I serve here with a clockwork man. The only absurdity would be a closed mind.”

  Aurelia sighed. The liquid in the flask was lightening again, still opaque, and faint streaks of color swirled through it. “I suppose. I’m sorry. But there’s nothing supernatural about those things. Unnatural, perhaps. But there’s no magic about it, no devils or evil spirits. I could make one, myself, if I wished.”

  The streaks of color were shifting from mostly blue to mostly yellow and began to fade.

  Helena trimmed the wick of the lamp. “Do you know how to destroy them?”

  “If I can find out more about them. I think so. You’ve dealt with this for far too long.”

  Helena was silent.

  “I don’t look forward to trying to catch one. I don’t suppose you’ve seen any smaller ones?”

  “No two of them are quite the same.”

  “Then it’ll be interesting, at least.” The liquid was cloudy and white, now. Aurelia brought out one more bottle, this one opaque, black glass. “Cover the window, now, as well as you can. There should be no sunlight coming in.”

  Helena tacked a heavy woolen blanket over the window, and the only light was the lamp.

  One drop from the black glass bottle. It plinked into the surface of the liquid, and its progress was marked with a bloom of pale light in the depths.

  “We leave it, now,” Aurelia said in a whisper. “It’ll take some hours before it’s finished. The ennoea disperses after a creature dies, so there’ll be less in the next batch and the one after, but it’s still worth the effort. Tread softly.”

  They tiptoed from the room. Aurelia’s hand throbbed. The ennoea would help with that.

  The opened windows had kept the kitchen from becoming completely uninhabitable, but they also let in a breeze, and the unpleasant smell wafted down the corridor.

  Helena’s nose wrinkled. “That’s not very appetizing. I don’t know what I could possibly cook today that’d be any good. Will you do the same thing with the body?”

  “Once it’s liquefied,” Aurelia answered. “That probably doesn’t help with your appetite, sorry. But it should be finished soon, and we can take it out of there and let the place start to air. I should check its progress.”

  But movement caught her eye. The same tapestry shifted in front of the hidden door, and a shape emerged from behind it.

  Magnus.

  Helena dropped a curtsy. Aurelia only stared.

  He looked infinitely worse during the day than he had by firelight. His skin was sallow and loose on his frame, and his eyes were sunken and bloodshot, the glistening red ectropion tugging at his face. He heard some sound and turned, spotting them. His dark eyes took in Aurelia’s bandages, the cuts and scrapes on her face.

  “What is that stench?”

  Had she expected him to ask after her welfare? Yes, she really had.

  “I’m extracting ennoea. Helena is assisting.”

  At least there was no hostility in his gaze as it flicked from her to Helena and back again. “You might have asked me.”

  “You were nowhere to be found. And besides, you swore to give up your studies. Surely you don’t have ennoea sitting around.”

  “Would you give it up if you were forced to swear?”

  That brought a smile to her lips. That was the sort of quick answer she had known, the reason he had been one of her favorite students. “No, I certainly would not. Come talk with me, Magnus. It’s been so long.”

  But his next answer was just as quick.

  “That’s no fault of mine, magistrix.”

  Helena made a small sound and slipped away toward the kitchen. Aurelia didn’t blame her. She’d not have been there, either, if there had been anywhere else she could go.

  “I should have been where you could reach me,” she said softly. It was nothing like an adequate apology.

  He only shrugged. “It’s long over, now. Perhaps you might have been able to help. Perhaps not. It hardly matters.”

  “But I should have been here to try. I’m sorry, Magnus.”

  “Are you looking for forgiveness, magistrix? You have it, then, if that will make you go away.”

  Aurelia drew back as though stung. “I can’t go away now that I’ve seen this place. The creatures, Magnus. There are things terrorizing the people who should be under your protection. You know what they are.”

  His hands clenched in their gloves. “Accusing me again?”

  “Tcha! Magnus, use your mind. If you no longer being watched, there must be a reason. Were these things sent? Are they here to kill you? To contain you? To punish you?”

  He relaxed slightly, his brow creasing. “They wouldn’t… They wouldn’t murder innocents.” There he was again, the man she had known.

  “The Orphics wouldn’t, but there are others to consider. If these things killed your watchers…”

  “Who, magistrix? Who would have that kind of grudge against me?”

  “I don’t know. But someone made them.”

  But he was gone again. The coldness settled back over his features. “And what would you know about these things? Talking with the girl? She should know better than to gossip.”

  Aurelia’s jaw tighte
ned, and she forced herself to relax. “No. If someone had told me about them, I could have avoided meeting one.”

  He glanced at her injuries as though he had seen them but had not bothered to wonder where she got them. “You won’t repeat that mistake, I trust. Come and go as you like, but keep to daylight, like a normal person.”

  “You know that I—”

  But he pushed past her and swept away, leaving Aurelia to stare after him. He knew the danger for her; she had not changed much since his interrupted apprenticeship, even if he had. She donned her heavy pilgrim’s cloak and risked the sun to reach him as quickly as possible, but that was urgent. That was duty. He couldn’t have forgotten.

  Could he?

  “Talk to me!” she barked down the empty corridor after him.

  Her voice rang from the stones, bouncing and distorting into a low, unearthly moan.

  In the darkness, Aurelia slipped from her bed. The cold leached through the carpets and deep into her before she had a chance to slide her feet into slippers and her arms into a clean coat. Helena had taken the blue one away to mend it, but it was probably beyond repair. A shame. Aurelia herself had been more easily restored. Her cuts stung, and her body ached with bruises, but feeling and flexion had returned to her left hand. The fingers were clumsy, but they worked. When the ennoea was distilled and processed, she would be as good as new.

  The wind outside was freshening again, howling along the castle walls with an almost human voice.

  Aurelia laid more wood on the low fire, then used the tongs to pull out a coal and applied it to the wick of a candle. The flame bloomed and added its golden light to the red of the fire.

  She eased the door open.

  Then some uneasy flicker of premonition made her stop and go back to the bed. She pulled her shotel out from beneath it and buckled it around her waist.

  She froze a moment.

  Why go armed inside? She didn’t mean to leave the castle and risk encountering one of those abominations. So why did she feel safer with a sword at her side? She told herself it wasn’t Magnus. She wasn’t afraid of Magnus. She wouldn’t turn her blade on him, even if he had lost his mind.

  No, it was merely that she didn’t know what she might find. It was only a precaution.

  Only a precaution.

  She slipped into the black corridor, bringing her candle’s little pool of light. Her odd eyes were more sensitive than most, but she didn’t relish the idea of creeping around that place in the darkness. Her slippers made almost no sound on the carpets, only the faintest tap where they touched stone. What else might be creeping in the night?

  The windows she passed were dark. There had been a moon, earlier, but the clouds had blocked it out. They weren’t even storm clouds, this time; lightning would have provided at least brief illumination, a sense of movement and life. But there was only the dark and the voice of the wind.

  Somewhere, Magnus had set up shop. He had built Henryk, and he would have to have had a workspace. Due to the volatile nature of the materials, it would be someplace always cool and quiet, with few vibrations and no chance of exposure to sunlight. It would be more permanent and more secure than the empty servant’s room she and Helena had taken over. It would have no windows that had to be covered, no corridor just outside where too many careless voices and footsteps could ring.

  When they worked together, back in the days of light and laughter, he had used the natural tunnels and caverns that stretched deep into the mountain. She had seen him coming up from the depths, him and Henryk both. She did not suppose they had been lurking in the wine cellar.

  No, he had rebuilt, down there. But when? When his wife sickened and Aurelia did not come? When the illness struck the village and he was called upon to aid them? When the monsters began to appear?

  She descended the great stairs and slipped cautiously through the night to stand in front of the tapestry. The woven art depicted a tangle of pink and yellow roses twisting around the forms of real creatures and mythical things. She supposed the beasts were supposed to be dancing, but in the flickering candlelight their contorted forms looked trapped and tortured by the thorns. It had never been intended to hide the door behind it, just to block the drafts that might come sweeping up from below. So why did she feel now like it guarded a secret?

  Because, she told herself firmly, it is dark, and I am tired, and I am afraid for my friend and for those who live with him and for the villagers. I have been attacked, and I am weak from lack of ennoea, and I had no supper, and I am hungry. But I am also the Archivist, the Librifex, the Unnatural, one of the last of my order, and I am not afraid of the dark.

  She glanced down the hallway. At the end of it was the kitchen, and Helena would doubtless be nearby, close to the warmth. The young woman could certainly take care of herself. And others. If asked, she might be willing to go down into the mountain. Might? She would insist Aurelia not go alone. Or at all. And they could talk through the night and let the secrets lie.

  Aurelia shook herself, swept the tapestry aside, and pushed through the door.

  The castle was cold, but the chill in the wine cellar was perceptibly deeper. She closed the door behind her and descended the wooden steps, stopping at the bottom to get her bearings. The room was long and narrow, lined with dusty barrels and casks that would once have entertained guests. Some had even been tapped, and their contents would have soured, by now.

  She turned right and made her way down to the short wall at the very end, against which was built a sturdy wooden rack for bottles. The dust on the bottles was not as thick as on the barrels. They had not been touched, but they had moved, faint air currents shaking some of the dust free.

  There was no trick to this one, no clever mechanism. She set the candle atop a barrel and tripped the lock, a short iron bar made to look as though it were meant to fix the rack to the wall. Then she reached between the slats of the rack and pushed her flat palms against the stone behind. It slid backward about two feet on well-greased tracks, and she picked up her candle and slipped around it. Then she closed it, though she could not have said why.

  The floor sloped downward, hewn smooth at first, but roughening as she went on. A dark doorway opened to her left, but she ignored it. Then another, and another. The family catacombs. There were hulking stone sarcophagi down there, and the rotting fragments of wooden coffins, alabaster urns and ossuaries, and deeper still, bare bones reposing on shelves carved into the rock. She had explored them before and paid her respects to the dead. Another passage led back up toward the castle, opening into the actual medieval dungeons, though all the iron bars were only mounds of rusty flakes, by now. She ignored that, too. Magnus would be deeper.

  And what if he was there right now? What if he was working through the night?

  So what? If he had rebuilt, it was because there was something to rebuild, the laboratory she had designed and constructed in the first place. The castle was his, but the laboratory had been hers. She the master, he the student. She had the right, with or without invitation.

  The chill deepened, pressing hard on her bandaged wounds. Her left hand ached fiercely.

  Her footfalls echoed strangely, multiplying.

  Her breath reverberated. Two throats. Four.

  She stopped a moment, listening, but the footsteps did not pause with her. Beyond the circle of candlelight, something moved.

  She set her back against the wall of the tunnel and placed the candle on a small protrusion of rock just above the level of her shoulders. And she drew her shotel.

  “Come, then,” she told the darkness.

  And the darkness came.

  Chapter 8

  It was shaped like a man, and Aurelia hesitated for an instant, thinking it might be Magnus.

  But Magnus’s skin was pale and thin, his head roughly round, his teeth no longer than most.

  And Magnus had eyes.

  It paused just inside the circle of candlelight, a whiplike tongue lashing back and fort
h, testing the air. Ribbons of a tunic dripped from its body, all but disintegrated by the elements; the rest of its clothes were gone, but its cloven, spatulate feet didn’t seem to mind the cold or the roughness of the stone.

  “What happened to you?” Aurelia asked quietly.

  Its head tilted, turning toward her a smooth hole where an ear should have been.

  “Are you able to understand me?”

  Its mouth was no longer suited to human speech. Those teeth would flay that tongue if it attempted to form words.

  “Can you nod or shake your head?”

  It breathed harshly and twisted its neck to turn the other ear hole toward her. Was that an attempt? Was it trying to comply? Perhaps it didn’t have even that much control of its movement.

  “There may not be much I can do to help you,” she said. “But I’ll try. We’ll find some way for you to communicate…”

  It threw itself at her, arms outstretched. It had no hands to speak of, only flat, fleshy discs studded around the rim with short, barbed hooks. That wasn’t anger. It was hunger.

  She raised her shotel, and its long tongue wrapped around the blade. But she kept her weapon sharp, and when the tongue tightened to try to tear it from her hand, it severed itself. It flinched away, the stump waving, twisting its head back and forth to locate her by hearing. She carved a gash across its belly, and with the return swing parted its head from its shoulders.

  It collapsed, a few blue-green sparks leaking from the wounds.

  “I’m sorry.”

  But there was not silence in the dark. The sound of breath and footsteps circled beyond her small pool of light. Something gulped wetly. An almost-human voice rasped, “Hehhh, hehhh, hehhh.”

  She tightened her grip on her shotel. The tunnel echoed and distorted sound, and she could not tell how many of them there might be. And there was no reason to assume they all had two feet.

  “Do any of you have enough mind left to accept my help? Come forward and let me see you.”