Of Steel and Steam

by Pauline Creeden et al.

  Aurelia shrugged and sank onto the trunk at the end of the bed, blowing out the candle and setting it aside. She fumbled with her sword belt and laid it on the trunk behind her. “I wish I knew. How is our new friend?”

  Helena glanced back at the daemon, who was watching Henryk’s face calmly. “I’ve a chemise for her, when she’s clean. She’s stopped shaking. But I didn’t know what such a creature might eat, so I took a guess.”

  “I wouldn’t know, either,” Aurelia confessed. She looked to Henryk, in case he had read something on the matter in Magnus’s journals, but he was not of a mind to speak. “They’re all different, unique. But this one seems made to appear human, and it will never have eaten before. I’d have made the same guess.”

  Together, they slipped the daemon into Helena’s chemise and tucked it into the bed.

  “She’ll stay here, for now,” Helena said. “I can open a room, later, but I feel she should be watched. New babies are fragile.”

  She brought the bowl of milk and a spoon, but Henryk stepped into her path and held out his hands for them. She stopped, perplexed. They regarded one another for a moment, and then she handed them over.

  Henryk took the bowl and sat beside the bed. The chair creaked horribly beneath his metal weight. He lifted the daemon’s head and tenderly began to feed it.

  Aurelia’s soul ached a little less.

  Helena touched her sleeve and stretched up to whisper, “He’s behaving strangely, tonight.”

  “Oh?” Aurelia leaned down.

  “I’m not sure how to explain. He doesn’t act without instruction. He doesn’t feel. But tonight…”

  “Plainly, he does. But why talk to me about it?”

  “Because you know about these things. And I can hardly talk to the boy. He doesn’t…” She trailed off and looked suddenly at Henryk, abandoning the whisper.

  “You’re as clever as any of us, aren’t you?” she asked aloud.

  He ignored her admirably. There had been that little slip in the laboratory, emotion he could not suppress, but he must have had years of practice hiding inside his own silver skin.

  “Boy.”

  His hand moved smoothly from the bowl to the daemon’s mouth and back again, and he turned an expressionless face toward Helena. There was as much intelligence in that gaze as in a tin soldier’s.

  But after only a heartbeat, his mask crumpled. The look he shot Aurelia was accusation and despair.

  “I said nothing,” she told him earnestly.

  Helena turned to her with wide eyes. “What do you know of it?”

  But she had given her word, and she looked to the golem, first. He lifted a shoulder in a gesture of resignation. Do what you like.

  “His name is Henryk,” she said. “And he prefers that, in the presence of your master, you behave toward him no differently than you ever have.”

  “Why?”

  Aurelia explained carefully, aware of the other woman’s struggle. Helena had heard what Magnus would wish to do to the daemon. She had seen the creature growing in a glass womb in a laboratory surrounded by tunnels patrolled by monsters. She had seen her master screaming and throwing things in rage. But she still could not believe in his guilt. She didn’t want to. Neither of them did.

  “Very well,” she agreed reluctantly. “I’ll say nothing. I’ll pretend.”

  On the bed, the daemon stirred. It breathed deeply and closed its eyes to sleep.

  The sun rose on Helena and the daemon asleep, Henryk still and watchful. Aurelia covered the window, in case the daemon should share her sensitivity, and went in search of Magnus.

  She paused beside the tapestry. He had seemed immovable when she had left him, as though he never meant to leave the laboratory again. But he had never been the kind to mope. She mounted the stairs and went to his bedroom.

  But it hadn’t been his bedroom. It had been theirs, and Aurelia should have expected to find it abandoned, the furniture shrouded in dustsheets, the fireplace cold. She stopped in the doorway and looked around. The dust was thick. The room had not been touched for years, perhaps not since Marcela had died. She had been sick, Helena said. He was a sensitive man. He could not have remarried and asked a new bride to sleep in a deathbed. He could not have borne it, himself.

  And then Alicja died, and he would have moved again. And then, later, a third woman.

  It was a wonder he had not abandoned the castle entirely. It was a wonder he had not fled Poland.

  But then, where would he sleep? Below? Aurelia had taken the little cot beside the laboratory to be Henryk’s, but she doubted now that he slept, and she doubted it would take his weight.

  She closed the door quietly on the preserved room and turned away.

  The chambers beneath the castle were quiet, but Aurelia did not relax her guard or sheathe her shotel until she had reached the laboratory. Much of the fluid had drained away through crevices in the floor, and the glass shards had been heaped into the remains of the sphere. Lamps lit the space more than adequately, perched on every flat surface. The workbench glittered with the fragments of alembics and retorts, flasks and vials. Magnus’s anger had destroyed much of his apparatus, but more remained intact.

  He stood with his back to her, wrapped in a frayed old robe worn at the elbows and spotted with chemical burns and bleach stains.

  “Did you sleep?” Aurelia asked quietly.

  “Some,” he replied. He closed the journal in front of him and turned to face her. She would not have guessed he had slept by looking at him.

  “Are you all right?”

  He met her gaze evenly and thrust his rigid hands into the pockets of his robe. “You tell me, magistrix.”

  There was nothing in his face or voice still, nothing to let her know if that was a challenge or a plea. Either way, she could only be honest.

  “I do not believe you are.” She descended the steps into the laboratory and picked her way between the puddles to come meet him. “How long have you been doing this, discipule?”

  He smiled icily. “Need you ask? You were there when I began.”

  “But when we were found out…”

  “I told you, I never had any intention of honoring an oath extracted from me by force. And they never found the laboratory. I convinced them I was merely a dilettante who read forbidden texts and had never attempted what they contained. They took what books they found above, but not what I kept down here, destroyed the little alchemical kitchen we kept by the library. But somehow, they weren’t quite clever enough to find a very obvious secret door.”

  “You never stopped, then.”

  He shrugged, picked up the journal, and moved to replace it on the shelf against the wall. Fortunately, the lowest shelves had contained only more supplies and glassware; no books had been destroyed. “I did briefly. Perhaps a year. They’d said they’d be watching me, and I did not wish to die. But I could not give up the study. You should understand that.”

  On the shelf beside the journals was something that hardly belonged in that place. A porcelain figurine, two small figures standing on a painted hillock. The woman wore a simple white frock with a blue sash and carried a violin. The man was hatless and held a book open before him. They were facing in opposite directions, as though they had just passed one another by, but their arms stretched out behind them, left hands firmly linked.

  It had used to sit on the mantel of that empty room upstairs.

  “I understand.”

  “And then Marcela sickened. You couldn’t imagine I’d have given up the practice, then?”

  “No.”

  “I tried everything I knew how. I even called for an ordinary physician, hoping a quack might stumble onto something out of sheer luck. And when it became clear there would not be a cure, I…” He touched the untitled spine of a book bound in undyed leather. “Can you guess? I’ve been a constant disappointment to you since you arrived. What worse deed could I hesitate to speak?”

  Aurelia stood silent, afr
aid that even a twitch might end the unexpected flow of words.

  He huffed a sigh. “I wrote to you. And when you did not answer, I wrote to someone else. Our friend Polunov. I asked him for a certain book. You see, there is one remedy that can render all diseases of the body irrelevant. At a cost, of course, but one that some do not consider excessive…

  “What, no revulsion? Or have you merely come to expect the worst of me, by now?” He took down another volume, a broad folio stuffed with loose papers. “The plan for the amniotic chamber is in here. Money is one of the few things remaining to me. Send it to your glassmaker. I don’t mind the price.”

  She ignored the folio and turned away, seizing a lamp from the workbench.

  “Ah, a reaction. Are you going to flee this cursed house? Leave me to my Faustian devices?”

  She ignored him, as well. But he knew her better than to think she would ever storm away in outrage, and she heard his steps behind her as she strode out of the lab and up the corridor.

  Movement whispered in the dark, but it did not approach her lamp’s circle of light. Eyes glinted and then vanished into the blackness.

  “Aurelia.” He had figured out where she was going, and his voice was tight. “Don’t.”

  “I will see.”

  “Must you?” his hand caught at her sleeve. “You know what it looks like. Leave them alone.”

  Aurelia’s back stiffened, and she lengthened her stride. “Them? You did this to each of them?”

  He struggled to keep up, breath quickening, and she made no effort to slow.

  The crypts opened beside them suddenly, the door looming up, a deeper black in the darkness. She brushed his grasping hand aside and entered. She had paid her respects to the dead years ago, but she had not thought to visit Marcela. They passed crumbling sarcophagi and carved ossuaries, generations upon generations resting beneath the mountain, until Aurelia found the newest of the tombs.

  “Don’t,” Magnus repeated weakly.

  Aurelia put all her strength against the stone lid, driving the little sparks inside her to the tissues of her arms and back, and shoved it aside. She raised the lamp high.

  Marcela lay peacefully within. There was no smell. No putrefaction gases hissed out to make the lamp leap and sputter. The body had not collapsed, nor even mummified. She was still wrapped in the plain nightdress in which she had died. They might have cut it off of her, but they could never have gotten her into something more acceptable. Her disease-withered flesh had frozen into a substance like opal, hard and iridescent. Beneath the shifting green and blue and scarlet, Aurelia could make out some of the hue she remembered in the woman’s cheeks. Her eyes and mouth were open in an expression of mild surprise.

  “As you expected?” Magnus asked bitterly.

  Her gaze slid to the two slightly newer sarcophagi nearby.

  “Don’t,” he said once more, almost too quietly for her to hear.

  So she did not.

  “Did they agree to this?” she asked, picking up the lamp. She felt an almost overpowering urge to reach out and close Marcela’s eyes, but that would be as useful as trying to close the eyes of a marble statue.

  Magnus said nothing, and she twisted to look at him.

  “Did they even know?”

  He shook his head. “I worked every moment to cure them. Up to the very end.” His voice cracked. “I administered the serum only when there was no hope left. None of them were conscious, by then. Marcela woke for only a moment when the reaction began. Alicja woke and talked with me for more than an hour. Her eyes even began to change. Then it went bad. Julia never woke at all.”

  He deserved a berating, but she found she could not give it. She set the lamp aside and closed the coffin. “Magnus, that formula was abandoned ages ago precisely because of its low success rate. Even in a healthy subject, under the most tightly controlled conditions, you could only hope for one in three to survive, much less recover. In a subject at death’s very door…”

  “A slim probability is better than none.”

  And death is better than what might have happened to them, she wanted to snap. She held her tongue. Anger wouldn’t help anything, not when he had finally decided to talk to her.

  “Hence the golem,” she said at length. “He was a test. If he had retained the personality of the source of the ennoea, you would have done the same for them.” She nodded through the gloom toward the sarcophagi.

  He was silent, and she sighed and placed a hand on his shoulder. “It doesn’t work like that, discipule. There’s no evidence Hibernica ever succeeded, only stories.”

  “As I discovered,” he growled, shaking her off.

  And the daemon. He could not save the lives that mattered most to him. He could not restore life once it was gone. So he created it, instead, an immortal child invulnerable to any ordinary disease, one he would never have to lose.

  “I understand.”

  His head snapped up, incredulity slashed across his face as he met her gaze. This close, in the dark, she could see the gold haze creeping across his pupils.

  “Magnus…”

  “Do you think you understand?” he demanded. “Do you? You, who’ve never loved anything with a heartbeat half so much as you love a rare book? You, who would rather know than feel?”

  “Magnus, you…”

  His voice rose, shoulders hunching. “Have you lost a child, magistrix? Or have you always been too fossilized for anything human to live in you!”

  He raised a hand and thoughtlessly tried to clench it into a fist, then dropped it with a yelp of pain. His breath came harsh and fast.

  “Many,” she whispered. “And I fear I am about to lose another.”

  He did not jerk away as she brushed the hair back from his face. Dark strands came away with her fingertips. And there, something she could not have seen if there were any more light than a single lamp. On his scalp, hidden beneath his hair, patches of tiny blisters glowed faintly with blue-green light.

  “You’ve given yourself ennoea poisoning,” she said. “The insomnia, lack of appetite, nausea, pain…”

  He knocked her hand away. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve been more than careful, always.”

  “And yet.”

  His face was changing, hardening again, building into another outburst. Aurelia had heard enough of that. She drew herself up, towering over him, and abandoned familiarity. When she spoke again, they were not old friends. She was the master, he the pupil.

  “You will not come down here again until I give you leave. It may be possible to reverse the damage, but not if you continue to expose yourself. We’ll return to your projects when I’m certain you’re not dying.”

  He bent before the force of her. Submission would be too much to hope for, but she at least commanded silence. He met her gaze coolly, then turned suddenly and marched into the darkness.

  Aurelia took up the lamp and followed.

  But she had seen those lesions too many times. By the time they appeared on the skin, their roots were already deep in the victim’s flesh. Deep in his brain.

  Chapter 11

  Magnus would not sleep. That was one of the common symptoms. His love of the coffee wouldn’t help anything, but it was the ennoea lighting a fire in his brain, driving it to furious activity.

  It might have begun as an idea that would not go away. A curiosity could become an interest. An interest could become a passion. A passion could become an obsession. He would think and think and think until the idea spread through his entire being and drove out everything else. The very prospect of sleep would fill him with horror at the waste of time.

  Eventually, the poison would spread further, and he would forget the simple fact that he could not obtain his goal if he died. He would cease to sleep at all, would stop forcing himself to emerge for occasional meals. Sooner or later, his body would collapse down in the dark. The very substance of Life would kill him.

  And what were the odds he would listen if Aurelia trie
d to tell him any of that?

  She had warned him, long ago, during his apprenticeship. He knew the dangers of their science. But his mind had been compromised. He had already shown that he could no longer listen to reason.

  So Aurelia drugged his coffee.

  She despised it, but the alternative was to do nothing, and that was even more abhorrent. She tipped a half a grain of powder into the pot, confident in the formula she’d used herself so many times, and took the tray to the library. The thought crossed her mind that Magnus might be gone, but he remained by the fire where she’d left him. He had found a small hand mirror and was scrutinizing his sparse hairline and the blisters beneath. He angled the mirror to look at her as she entered.

  “I don’t know how long it had been since I last noticed my reflection,” he commented. “How long do you suppose these have been there?”

  She set down the tray. “More than a year, certainly. Probably more than two.”

  “Am I dying?”

  “Possibly. Though it’s just as likely you’ll lose your reason and bodily integrity and deteriorate into something like those creatures wandering the valley.”

  He set down the mirror and picked up the poker instead, grasping it between both hands to stab it into the fire. “I see.” He was incredibly calm, though perhaps it was just that he had already used up all his intense emotion. “And if I wish to halt the progress of the disease and survive, I must give up my studies. Is that correct?”

  “Only for a time. You won’t be able to continue them, anyway, if you become a monster.”

  “Ha. That’s fair.” He replaced the poker and came to sit beside Aurelia. Gingerly, he poured a cup of the coffee. “Those monsters. You thought the Orphics might be responsible for them, or somebody else.”

  “I did say that.” But that had been before she knew he was playing with unproven formulae too advanced for his skill, before she knew he might be keeping more from her than the Hibernica text. She watched him balance the cup precariously in his palm.

  “And if this plague of monsters was intended to kill me, or to induce the villagers to do so, it has failed. So this unseen enemy of mine has poisoned me, instead.”