Of Steel and Steam

by Pauline Creeden et al.

  That low moan came again, louder, this time, rising to a rumble, a roar. A shriek. The liquid swirled faster, flickers of blue-green light appearing in the heart of the sphere. The door at the far end of the chamber exploded inward, and a blast of icy wind tore the lantern from her fingers. Blackness crashed in.

  Aurelia hurled the useless lantern aside and drew her shotel from its scabbard, immediately putting her back against the wall as she tried to force her eyes to adjust. The wind passed through, howling down the tunnel, and then there was silence. No footfalls, only her own harsh breath.

  “Helena?” she whispered.

  The sphere was growing brighter, the flickers coming faster, sparks becoming arcs, arcs branching into tiny, turquoise bolts of lightning. She could begin to hear the crackle, feel the tingle against her skin, like a coming storm.

  She jumped. There, against the glass. A handprint, glowing violet amid the lights.

  And she knew what they had found, there in the deep dark, amid the crypts.

  A womb.

  Chapter 9

  A crack like lightning rebounded through the laboratory.

  Aurelia flinched away, her ears ringing, skin tingling.

  Within the crystal sphere, the luminous fluid churned. The lights flashed brighter, faster. The air was beginning to heat. The sphere was beginning to heat. Warm orange and gold appeared among the lights as the crystal reached furnace temperatures.

  Another tremendous crack rang from the walls, and Aurelia could see this one. A cobweb tracery of brighter lines appeared on the surface of the globe. She drew in another breath to call out, to urge Helena to run.

  The sphere shattered, the lights winking out all at once, and in the sudden blackness, a torrent of warm, thick liquid and razor shards of glass knocked Aurelia’s legs out from under her.

  She splashed and thrashed her way upright, choking. The liquid didn’t burn. She didn’t feel raw ennoea burrowing beneath her skin to twist her insides. She should have. But something had drawn it all away.

  Light flared suddenly, bright and then gentler. Helena had relighted her candle. But in the moment of darkness, Aurelia was sure she had seen something, a faint glow amid the wreckage of the sphere.

  Gestation chamber.

  “God, Magnus, you fool.”

  “Aurelia?”

  “Stay where you are,” she called back. “I don’t know what this stuff is.”

  The light of the candle appeared in the doorway, and Helena looked down into the pool of liquid. The pearly quality was gone, and it was merely murky. “Then perhaps you’d better not keep standing in it.”

  “There’s no other way to get to the books.”

  There was no reason to wade blindly through the shards of glass, though. Aurelia picked her way cautiously to the nearer workbench and retrieved a lamp, then returned to the doorway so Helena could light it. The illumination showed her the lantern she’d dropped, useless now. She left it. But she reached through the murky mess to retrieve her shotel. The gentle splash of her steps echoed from the stone walls.

  “What was it?” Helena asked as Aurelia waded away.

  “A…” No, there was too much to explain. That could come later, when they had time for questions and books and demonstration. “He was growing something,” she said simply.

  “Something?” Helena echoed. “What could grow down here?”

  Aurelia stopped before the wreck and stared at the jagged glass bowl that still sat atop the iron stand. The rubber cushion beneath it had blackened and melted down the iron legs.

  “A creature.”

  It lay curled in the sphere’s remains, half-submerged in a pool of the fluid. It was human in form and small in stature, perhaps a bit shorter than Helena, its figure youthfully sexless. Its skin was white. Not like a European. Not like an albino. White like the other things born in caves, like blind fish and fronded salamanders, like the underneath side of skin, the side that touches muscle but never light. White and translucent-thin, displaying the fluttering blue vasculature and connective tissue beneath.

  A single blue-green spark skittered along the curve of its back and vanished.

  It shifted weakly, muscles twitching without control, limbs trembling with the inability to lift itself.

  It was drowning, Aurelia realized. The ennoea-saturated solution had been sufficient, but now that was gone, and it needed to breathe.

  She hesitated, but only for a moment.

  “Come,” she called. “If this stuff was going to eat my feet off, it would have done it already. I need you to hold the light for me.”

  After a skeptical beat, Helena’s feet splashed down into the lab, picking carefully around the drifts of glass, and she took the lamp from Aurelia’s hand. She recoiled, stifling the urge to gag, as its light combined with her candle fell more fully on the twitching thing.

  “At least this one doesn’t seem strong enough to attack, yet.”

  But Aurelia set her shotel aside and folded her jacket over the shattered edges of the shallow glass bowl. She climbed inside. Her feet slid on the concave surface, and she stumbled into the creature’s side with a soft curse. She gathered it up—it was heavier than she had expected—and dragged herself back out of the bowl.

  The limp thing shivered against her, its head lolling as she pulled it upright, wrapped her arms around its abdomen, and compressed with sudden force. It shuddered. She did it again.

  “What are you doing?” Helena demanded.

  “Saving a life.”

  On the third try, the creature vomited murky fluid, retched and choked and finally took its first breath.

  She sank down onto a stool still miraculously upright after the flood, cradling the shaking thing. Its face was delicate, features smooth and graceful. It might have been beautiful, if only she couldn’t see the tiny muscles twitching inside its eyelids, the veins pulsing beneath its scalp.

  “Why?” Helena asked. “Why not kill this one?”

  It was a real question, not a veiled accusation, and Aurelia smiled. “I knew you had promise. This isn’t like the others. Those are perversions, distortions of living and dead flesh. Monsters. This is something new. It’s just been born.”

  “It won’t grow to be violent?”

  Aurelia shrugged. “It may. But it’s done no harm, yet.”

  Helena set the lamp and candle aside and folded her arms, thinking. “I suppose any infant may grow to be a monster. Or not.” Slowly, she retrieved Aurelia’s coat, shook the glass from it, and laid it over the creature’s torso.

  “Precisely.”

  “What is it, then?”

  Aurelia wiped delicately at the creature’s face with the cuff of her sleeve. “You’ve used your master’s telescope to see things unimaginably far away. There is another device, a microscope, that allows one to see things unimaginably small. If you have a very powerful one, you can see that all flesh is made of minute parcels, which are now called cells.”

  Helena listened intently, skeptical but attentive. The young woman was hungry to learn.

  “These cells are like small living things in their own right. When you’re injured, they reproduce themselves to fill the wound. Children grow for the same reason, their cells multiplying and building up their bodies. They can’t survive long when separated from their fellows, but in some circumstances, in the presence of sufficient ennoea, a single cell may act as a seed, growing an entire body. We call such a creature a daemon.”

  A footstep rang in the passage outside, and both women stiffened, but there was another light growing nearer, and after a moment, Henryk appeared in the doorway. His shoulders went back, silver face contorting in shock at the destruction.

  Helena breathed her relief. “Ah, boy. Good. We need—”

  But panic had overridden his obedient deception, and he was not listening to her. He surged forward, eye-lights falling onto the wreckage of the sphere, and he choked. At least, that’s what Aurelia assumed the sound was. It was like th
e gears of a gristmill grinding to a halt.

  “Here,” Aurelia said softly. “Look here. It’s all right.”

  He turned and looked more closely at the bundle in Aurelia’s lap, and his posture relaxed by a fraction. He set his candle down and splashed across to her, holding out his arms insistently.

  Suddenly, the daemon’s eyes opened. Golden eyes, faintly luminous. And they had no pupils.

  “Ah,” Helena said drily. “You take after your Aunt Aurelia.”

  Aurelia’s eyebrows rose as she handed the daemon over to Henryk. “Perhaps more a grandmother than an aunt.” She was trying to make light and join the joke, to lift some of the heaviness in the air, but she realized that it was true. Magnus was her student, a child of her mind, and the thing he grew in a glass womb in the dark was… her grandchild.

  She looked up sharply at the pale, cave-born thing and the silver golem. They both were. They existed only because of the things she taught their creator. Her grandchildren.

  Henryk carried his charge away and left through the door that led toward the pool. Aurelia rose to follow and heard Helena behind her. He slipped into a tiny chamber not much bigger than a wardrobe and laid the daemon carefully on a small cot, using the linens to clean the amniotic fluid from its body. His touch was tender, and the daemon’s trembling slowly stopped. It looked at him with recognition. Almost familiarity.

  “This is where you stay, isn’t it?” Aurelia asked. “You’ve been tending it while it grew.”

  He nodded, not looking back, as he gently wrapped it in one of the blankets.

  A terrible sound split the air, a roar of rage and frustration. Helena jumped, and the light of her candle wavered on the walls. The daemon jerked futilely away from the noise, its eyes widening.

  “What happened here? What is this!”

  The pale lights in the depths of Henryk’s eyes flickered with anxiety. He touched the daemon once more, a gesture of comfort, and moved back toward the laboratory.

  But Aurelia placed a hand on his arm. “If he wishes to lay blame, I had better be the one to take it.”

  He looked about to protest, but she swept away.

  Magnus stood ankle-deep in the mess, shaking with fury. He rounded on her when his eye caught her movement, but he stopped in surprise.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see what you’d been working on,” she replied calmly. “It’s—”

  He cut her off, splashing toward her with teeth clenched. “Do not patronize me, Aurelia. What the hell are you doing down here?”

  What on earth did he think she was doing? She took a step forward to meet him, when he had clearly expected her to step back. “I came to see what you’d been working on,” she repeated. “And it’s fortunate I was here when the reaction occurred, or your daemon would have been stillborn.”

  “Fortunate,” he spat. His blue lips trembled with the effort of forming the words. “I suppose it was fortune that opened the amniotic chamber months prematurely? Fortune that destroyed the entire apparatus in the process? How very fortunate that you arrive just as a chance reaction destroys years of my work!”

  She blinked. “Perhaps it is sensitive to ennoea and reacted to my presence, but this is not something I did, Magnus. But then, if I had known that, I could have avoided the laboratory.”

  “You smug, glib, arrogant…” He seized a retort from the workbench and hurled it at her, his crippled hand causing it to fly wide. “I discovered something you didn’t know, and you couldn’t bear it!”

  A flask flew at her, and she dodged it. “Magnus, your creature is quite alive. It’s weak, and it needs care and warmth. It needs a fire, and a bed, and something to wear, something to eat…”

  He paused, breathing hard to calm himself. “She’s all right?” He swallowed. “How does she seem? Has she said anything?”

  She? The son he had built was not to his liking, so he grew himself a daughter?

  “She’s an infant in the shape of an adult. Her body is too large for her strength. She can barely move at all, right now. Let us care for her and see what the coming days bring.”

  Henryk must have been listening, because he stepped in, then, bearing the daemon.

  Magnus stepped forward with a hesitant hope. And then he saw its face.

  His lips curled in revulsion. “This… What is this?”

  “Is she not as you designed her?”

  He glared at her, his fury returning in full. “You’ve done this. You’ve interrupted her development. I designed a butterfly. You cut open the chrysalis and pulled out a malformed grub!”

  He splashed toward Henryk, arms outstretched to seize the daemon away. It made a tiny, terrified noise, like the distant rattle of locusts, and Henryk stepped back.

  Magnus stopped, staring in surprise at the small act of disobedience. “Give it to me,” he said.

  But Henryk did not move.

  “He can take her upstairs,” Aurelia said. “He can care for her, if you do not wish to.”

  Magnus looked at her incredulously. “Care for that? Look at it. It’s a failure. An abortion. I have to start over, thanks to you. Do you have any idea how long that will take? And with the chamber destroyed, there is little I can do to get started except to extract the ennoea.”

  If Henryk had human skin, he would have gone as white as the creature in his arms. Magnus reached out again to take the daemon, and Henryk stepped away, holding it even closer.

  Magnus bared his teeth and rounded on Aurelia. “You’ve found some way to control my manservant? You take all of my work from me, the new and the old?”

  “Listen to yourself,” she whispered.

  He swept his arm across the workbench, scattering glassware. Liquids and powders began to diffuse in colored clouds through the fluid they were standing in. Aurelia edged away just as a ceramic mortar flew at her face and clipped her ear.

  “Years!” he screamed. “You’ve taken years from me! No help when I call for you, and when you do come, it’s to take all that remains?”

  A corked jar followed the mortar, and Aurelia caught it. It rattled faintly, and she glanced at the label. Metallic Soda, which the Englishman Davy called sodium. The fluid covering the floor was not pure water, but she didn’t doubt it was close enough. If that cork had come loose…

  “Are you trying to set me on fire?” she asked mildly. “That seems like a slight overreaction.”

  He was reaching for something else to throw, and she closed the space between them, setting the jar down, and seized his wrists. She was tough and strong from hard travel, revived by ennoea, and not clumsy with rage. She squeezed hard and steered him to a chair, pushing him down into it ungently.

  Behind his back, she saw Helena emerge and urge Henryk away. They fled, carrying the daemon.

  She released Magnus’s hands and stared him down.

  “Start over if you like. If you truly blame me for the failure, I’ll even stay and help. Perhaps it will be quicker with my knowledge. But we’ll find the ennoea elsewhere. You’re not going to cut the thing to pieces and draw the life from its flesh just because you find it unlovely.”

  She drew in a deep breath through her nose and let it out in a puff. “We are not sculptors, Magnus. We do not tear down what isn’t perfect and use the same clay again. You made something with a brain and a heart, and it is not yours.”

  He watched her coldly. The rage was gone from his eyes, but so was everything else. “Is that today’s lesson, magistrix? That I am not a god?”

  “I thought it was one you already knew,” she said wearily. “And I am ashamed that I had to speak it aloud.”

  She left him and picked up her shotel and the candle Henryk had brought.

  “I know a glassmaker in Buda who may be able to replicate your chamber if you’ll let me copy the plans to send.”

  He said nothing, and she looked back to see him watching her from the chair, his entire body utterly still. His eyes glittered in the cand
lelight.

  “Compose yourself, Magnus, and sleep tonight. There’s nothing to be done until this place is cleaned out and your equipment is replaced. Give yourself some rest.”

  She turned to go, but his voice stopped her.

  “Aurelia.”

  Goosebumps prickled along her scalp.

  “I am a mere mortal. But so are you.”

  Chapter 10

  Aurelia paused briefly at the fork in the tunnel. The monster she and Helena had slain was gone, taken by its fellows. Or it had gotten up and walked away. She would have sworn she had killed that one twice, now.

  Shapes scuttled through the darkness beyond her candle, but they did not come near. Well, they seemed not to bother Henryk or Magnus, who both came down into the tunnels frequently. Neither had carried a weapon down into the dark.

  She ascended back into the castle and emerged from behind the tapestry with a sigh. Her bones hurt. Her soul hurt.

  How difficult would it be to kidnap Magnus? She could drug him and take him somewhere safe and isolated. But that wouldn’t solve the villagers’ monster problem. It wouldn’t provide for Helena and Henryk and the little daemon.

  Where had they gone?

  Probably to the place that always stays warmest in large, drafty old ruins.

  Helena’s room shared a wall with the kitchen, behind the great hearth they had lit to prepare the ennoea. The stones between were still warm to the touch, and there was a fire in the much smaller fireplace that connected to the kitchen’s chimney. They were there, Helena warming a pan of milk, Henryk bathing the daemon with a soft cloth and warm water.

  Helena looked up with alarm, but her face cleared when she saw it was Aurelia.

  “All is well?”