The movement woke Helena at the far end of the bed, and she pushed herself up onto an elbow. “What is it?”
“Nothing to worry about.” A problem wouldn’t knock.
Probably.
She opened the door a crack and peered out into the dark corridor. Henryk’s pale eyelights peered back, and behind his shoulder, the gold glow of Miel’s pupilless irises.
“I heard him moving about,” he creaked.
Aurelia understood. The day before had been better, less awful, but the night had made optimism difficult. She didn’t want them to encounter Magnus unsupervised, either. She stood aside to let them in. “You can stay in here, if you like.”
They crept past the embers of the fire and settled in at the two chairs by the table with a glance toward Helena.
“We woke you,” Henryk said. “I’m sorry.”
Helena blinked, still surprised by his ability to speak. “It’s all right,” she assured them. “It was probably time to rise, anyway.” She crawled out from under the blankets and stuffed her feet into her slippers.
“I’ll bring something to eat, shall I?” She directed a calculating glance at Miel, eyes narrowed. “You haven’t had eggs, yet.”
“A valuable experiment,” Aurelia said almost under her breath.
Helena grinned. “Eggs, bread and honey, tea.” And she slipped away.
Silence descended in the room, except for the drumming of raindrops against the window. Aurelia built the fire up and dressed quickly, noting with interest that, for all his secret reading, Henryk had never learned embarrassment around bodies. He did not stare, but he did not turn entirely away, either. Miel did stare, curious and constantly absorbing new information. The little daemon would need explicit instruction in so many things. Language, anatomy, society… Society would prove especially challenging for someone who looked like her.
Henryk touched the daemon’s shoulder and captured her attention, taking her hand in his. His fingertips traced signs into her palm, and she watched closely. He pointed at her, then stretched his own hand out flat and took hold of her forefinger like a pen, tracing the same signs.
Aurelia watched. He had an innate understanding of how to teach. First demonstrate, then assist, then allow the learner to perform the action independently.
The daemon’s finger twirled aimlessly, and he repeated the process. Demonstration, writing the letters into her palm. Assistance, guiding her hand to make the same letters in his palm. Then waiting for her to imitate.
She had seen the pattern, the second time. Her focus narrowed, watching more closely, and she moved her hand slowly, carefully replicating what she had seen.
It was close, but not quite right. The process was repeated once more.
And Henryk smiled broadly, squeezing Miel’s hand in his own. He began tracing again, and when he was done, he pointed to himself.
Aurelia sat back on the bed to observe. It was a peculiar spectacle. Miel had been growing in that chamber for seven years, so Henryk had to be older than seven. But he had certainly not existed when Aurelia fled, and so he had to be younger than twenty. How had he taught himself to read and write when there had been no one to teach him the rudiments of society? He did a good job of it, she was ready to admit. There would be things he could not teach, and they would come to those later. The daemon would have a better time of it than her mentor had.
But perhaps not merely a mentor.
Aurelia hesitated to try to interpret their body language. Gestures and movements are learned, not innate, and who could they have learned from? But the way they sat so close together that their shoulders touched, heads angled toward one another, each alert to the smallest movement of the other…
They almost seemed to respond to one another too quickly, as though some extraphysical sense connected them. A creature animated by ennoea and a creature grown from it, living seven years in close proximity, resonating with one another like tuning forks until their minds hummed at an identical pitch. It was no wonder Miel was learning so quickly, with a teacher who knew instinctively how to teach her.
Two of a kind.
“What is this?”
The door stood open, and Magnus loomed outside, his eyes wide and furious.
“What is this?”
What had he seen? Aurelia was not sure how long he had been watching. She could not remember whether she had heard the latch click when Helena left. Why hadn’t she made sure the door was closed?
“Good morning,” she told him, standing. A glance back showed her Henryk sitting frozen, his eyelights brilliant with fear. He still held Miel’s hand between his own, fingers poised to write into her palm.
Magnus crossed the room faster than Aurelia could react and seized the golem’s collar. He had not the strength in his hands or his upper body to haul the metal man to his feet, but Henryk rose anyway, eyes fixed on his creator’s face.
Miel cringed away in alarm.
“What are you doing, boy? How dare you touch her like that!”
Aurelia blinked. “Like what? Let go of him, Magnus. We’re only caring for your daemon.”
He rounded on her, and she knew immediately that reason would not calm him, this time. She might be called upon to lie.
“It’s crude,” he spat. “It’s repulsive. Did you instigate this? What have you done to my manservant?”
Crude? Repulsive? It might be easy to think of the two creatures as siblings, but they weren’t, really. And Magnus had been clear that he did not think of Henryk as a living thing at all.
“I’ve done nothing. Magnus, try to breathe.”
“Nothing? I never had a moment of trouble before, and then you come and it disobeys, it neglects its duties, it skulks and sneaks and makes lecherous advances—”
“What?”
“It writes now, does it? Are you training it to report to you?”
A noise caught his attention, and he whirled to discover Henryk trying to creep away, his arm around Miel’s shoulders.
Magnus growled. Something appeared in his hand, a shine on brown glass, and then it was flying through the air.
Henryk shoved Miel aside, and the bottle struck him square in the chest. There was a flash as it shattered, the tinkle of glass pattering to the floor, blue-green sparks and the stench of ozone.
The world froze.
Magnus froze, his mouth hanging open as though he could not quite understand what he had done.
Miel froze, sprawled against a trunk where she had fallen, watching without comprehension.
Aurelia froze, her heart clogging her throat.
Henryk froze, watching the fluid spread, the sparks grow brighter.
Then his horror changed to agony, and he screamed.
Chapter 14
Magnus was gone, somehow, and Aurelia had no idea where.
He was there, and then he wasn’t, and she had not seen him leave.
Because Henryk’s tunic was darkening, the fibers burning, writhing, alive somehow, fusing with the metal skin beneath. The ennoea was eating into him.
Miel was pulling herself to her feet, approaching, and Aurelia caught her automatically and held her back.
“Don’t touch it,” she said. “Do you understand? The stuff that glows. You must absolutely not touch it.”
For a moment, she feared the daemon’s language was not advanced enough, but Miel nodded.
Aurelia released her and quickly drew her cases out from under the bed, scattering flasks and jars and pouches until she found the one she wanted. But there was too little of the red-brown liquid in the bottle, enough to neutralize the small amounts of heavily-processed and diluted ennoea Aurelia carried with her, not enough to do much good now.
But she carried it to the golem, steadied him with a hand, and poured it over the deadly splatter. The reaction slowed, she thought. Some.
There was only one option. She belted on her shotel.
“We have to get him below,” she said to Miel. “To the place wh
ere you were born. Do you remember it?”
Miel nodded again, and they carefully took Henryk beneath the arms and maneuvered him to the door.
Helena arrived as they entered the corridor, out of breath from running. “I heard—” she began, then saw the damage and trailed off.
“Fetch a light,” Aurelia told her. “And your pistols. There’s bound to be something to neutralize it down in the laboratory.”
Helena hesitated only a moment, then dashed off again. Aurelia said a silent prayer that she would not encounter Magnus. That none of them would. But where would he have gone except below? And what would she do if they found him there?
Helena met them by the tapestry, two pistols at her belt, two muskets slung over her shoulders, and her ammunition bag by her side. She lifted her lantern and pushed the tapestry aside, then manipulated the latch of the secret door and led the way down into the mountain.
The darkness throbbed with movement. The storm had passed. Dawn would be coming, soon, and the monsters had returned home for the day. They skittered, crept, slithered, bounded beyond the light of the lantern, filling the tunnels with clicks and grunts and howls. The engine’s rising eerie cry seemed to spur them on. One approached, a flayed thing with a vaguely canine shape, and Helena put a lead ball into its skull. The others kept their distance.
Aurelia bolted the doors of the laboratory and lit the lamps. Magnus was not there, a surprise and a relief, but it worried her also. Where was he?
Henryk groaned miserably. His limbs were shaking, metal rattling against metal, and Aurelia swore she would kill Magnus if he did not keep a supply of the neutralizing agent.
No, she wouldn’t. But she would allow herself to want to.
There was a jug in one of the cabinets beneath the bookcases, nearly a gallon, and nearly full. She breathed a sigh of relief as she unstoppered it and jogged back to Henryk. Without wasting time on explanation, she simply dumped the contents over him, saturating his tunic. The blue-green sparks drowned in the thick, red-brown deluge, and his shaking lessened.
But she knew better than to be less than thorough. She donned gloves and retrieved a knife and a cotton rag and cut his tunic away from his torso. The silver skin of his chest was tarnished and warped, bubbling and melted. The fibers of his tunic had fused with his skin, but they had also grown, spreading into his metal flesh like roots.
She doused the rag with what was left of the neutralizing agent and pressed it to his chest.
His skin crumbled away beneath her fingers.
Helena let out a little shriek, and Aurelia jumped. She had almost forgotten there was anyone else there.
“I’m afraid some of it may have gotten inside you,” she said softly. “Here, let me…”
More skin flaked away as she swabbed cautiously, revealing the clockwork movement inside. Blue-green sparks slid along the gears and wheels, springs and balances. She dabbed them away. Human or golem, one could survive losing some skin. It was harder to survive the melting of one’s insides.
Henryk stayed remarkably still and remarkably quiet as she worked.
There was something unusual about the parts. They were not quite metal. And they were joined not with pins and rods, but… No, they weren’t joined with anything at all. The entire system was one, cohesive, organic. Something like metal, something like bone. That’s what it was.
She chased a spark further into the metal man’s chest and extinguished it, trying not to disrupt the workings of the amazing organism in front of her. There. That was the last of it. Minimal internal damage, and if Henryk was more animal than she had thought, perhaps the damage would even heal, in time.
She began to pull her hand back out, but there was one last spark of something inside, a glint of light that flashed and then was gone, vanished among the clockwork organs.
There was no way to get her entire hand further into the works without knocking something loose or breaking one of those delicate small parts. She withdrew and glanced around.
“Would you bring me one of the glass rods from the workbench?” she asked, and cut a small strip from the rag as Helena complied. She wound the strip around the tip of the rod and pushed it inside, toward where she had seen the spark.
“Raise the light a little, please. Bring it closer.”
The flash came again, and Aurelia reared back, nearly dropping the rod.
Not a spark. A sparkle.
Light on shards of opalescent stone, embedded in the withered mummy of a six-month fetus.
Chapter 15
One by one, the horrible realizations fell into place like the tumblers of a lock, opening onto a brutal truth.
Magnus had been trying to restore a lost life. Lost lives.
He began with animals and failed miserably. Perhaps he truly did try to dispose of the failures, but the engine was already leaking by then, pumping ennoea into the tunnels, and the dead things did not stay dead. They fused together like Henryk’s skin to his tunic, transforming, distorting into ravenous terrors.
The village men knew what Magnus’s failing mind would not let him see, and they came to confront him. The monsters killed them, and he… What? Collected the bodies? More raw material. Human experiments would give more useful results.
But he was getting nowhere with corpses, was he? So he built a body, something new, at the prompting of that damned Hibernica text. What had it told him? That it was the flesh itself, the invisible pattern written into the cells, which shaped ennoea into one particular person or another?
Henryk had said it, himself. He never wanted a steel son.
Aurelia lurched to her feet and crossed the laboratory in five long strides.
“Aurelia?” Helena’s voice was tense. “What is it?”
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t, too busy praying that her suspicions were wildly inaccurate. She tore a swath of books from the nearest shelf and dumped them onto the workbench, flipping through the pages of each and discarding them.
“Aurelia?”
That damned book had to be there somewhere, or the journal in which he had begun this miserable journey. A page ripped between her fingers, and she found she did not even care.
Condition unchanged from yesterday.
Condition unchanged from yesterday.
Condition unchanged from yesterday.
Then, suddenly, the handwriting was firm and clear.
The ennoea was not difficult to extract, despite the impossibility of the normal process, as it seems to pool beneath the sternum after the transmutation. A drill with a diamond bit obtained it for me. The nature of the compound into which the flesh is transformed seems to prevent the dispersal of ennoea, and I was able to obtain from the first subject barely less than I would expect to find in a newly-dead body; however, there is still too little for me to be confident in an outcome.
Aurelia hunched over the book, her nose nearly touching the page.
Likewise, after the transmutation, there is little enough organic matter remaining to act as a pattern. The book demands muscle or organ tissue, ideally from the liver, which is impossible. I do have a lock of hair from each, though the samples are several years old. I do not know whether the pattern will be strong enough, but the odds of success may be increased by combining the three. That should provide sufficient of the original ennoea, and a sufficient seed for the germination of a body.
She had never vomited on a book, before, and it took all her will not to do so, then. She snapped the volume shut and leaned heavily against the workbench, controlling her breath carefully.
“Aurelia?”
They were all three watching her with alarm. Even Henryk’s anxiety had overcome his pain.
And Miel. Little daemon.
“Oh,” Aurelia breathed. “Oh, you poor thing. He won’t stop. He won’t let you live. What you’re made of is too precious to him.”
The daemon did not understand all the words, but she seemed to understand the tone, and she shifted nervously with a
frightened chirp.
“And you.” Aurelia turned to Henryk. “You read all of his writings. Do you know who those three subjects were? Do you know whose life you were meant to continue?”
He shook his head slowly and painfully.
“You told me he never wanted a steel son.”
His brow furrowed, and then his eyes widened, the lights flaring bright in their depths. He looked at Miel and held his arms out to her, and she came. How would he explain that one to her, when she had the words to understand?
“He’ll kill her again and again until she is who he wants her to be.” And she never would be, because it didn’t work like that. Ennoea is not a soul. Marcela, Alicja, and Julia were gone, and Julia’s nameless child. And Miel and Henryk would be, too, sooner or later, unless they got them out of there.
“We have to leave here,” she said, and this time, Helena nodded.
There were tears in the young woman’s eyes, the pain of revelation. “But the monsters,” she protested. “That thing you found, the engine. What about the village?”
“We’ll take care of it. But these two cannot remain here. They cannot remain around Magnus, even if I do find a way to help him.”
The engine’s horrible wail rose again, higher and higher, shaking the stone, and another realization struck her.
A creature animated by ennoea and a creature grown from it, living seven years in close proximity, resonating with one another like tuning forks until their minds hummed at an identical pitch.
A man corrupted by ennoea and an unnatural machine pumping it out, a twisted mind and twisted flesh resonating together in their shared agony. Fusing and merging. A dark eye with a lighter ring just around the pupil, two greenish flecks almost opposite one another. Luminous pustules spreading roots down into a human brain.
Humming—howling—at an identical pitch.
He’d made that thing. Perhaps he hadn’t seen it in years to know what it had become, but he’d made it from part of himself, and it was part of him, still. That was his ennoea, his life-force, his animus dribbling across the stones, suffusing the air, animating the dead things that crawled through the tunnels…
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