Of Steel and Steam

by Pauline Creeden et al.

  He was controlling them. Not consciously, Aurelia was sure. She believed he earnestly had no idea that he had anything to do with them. They had probably looked quite different when he first discarded them. But they responded to him, all the same, just as Henryk and Miel responded to one another.

  And just now, he was irrationally furious. Just now, he wanted Henryk dead, blamed Aurelia for every misfortune that had brought his life to this point, needed Miel whole but certainly not alive. And some part of him suspected Helena of poisoning him.

  “We have to leave this place now. In the daylight.”

  “In the daylight? But…”

  Something crashed against the door, making it shudder in its frame. Helena jumped.

  Aurelia drew her shotel. “While they cannot follow.”

  But the village.

  She approached the door. “I’m going above to get something to destroy the engine. When I open the door, shoot what comes through, and then bar it behind me when I leave. Pack whatever you find in here that you think might be useful.”

  “But…”

  Aurelia opened the door, and the dog-thing burst through, with no trace of having been shot until Helena shot it again. It dropped, and Aurelia hurled the corpse back out into the passage. She picked up the lantern and slipped out and heard the bolt sliding home behind her.

  They would be coming.

  She sprinted up the tunnel, delivering a passing slash to a goggle-eyed creature that dove for her from the entrance to the crypts. Something bit at her back, and she spun, hearing the hollow thunk of a cranium rolling away across stone. The secret door slid open for her, and she was through, and it was quiet.

  There was no safe way to destroy the engine, but there was a sure way. A reaction. Uncontrolled, violent, unpredictable, deadly. It would have to be blown up.

  Perhaps the explosion would be large enough that it would even rid the tunnels of monsters.

  She raced up the stairs and toward her room. There would be no time to take everything, but she had to have her cases, and if they were to flee immediately, she had to have her cloak and another for the daemon, just in case. She should have money, and she would not leave her books, if she could help it, not merely out of sentiment but because she no longer trusted what Magnus would do with them. She should…

  She turned a corner and pulled up short, skidding to a stop before she could race straight into a beam of strong morning sunlight. Her skin tingled as she backed away.

  “Where are they?”

  Magnus stood in the shadow beside the window, his hand on the curtain cord. Something in his voice was wrong, barely more human than the engine’s wailing.

  She took another step away. “I know what you did, Magnus. What you were trying to do. It doesn’t work like that. A soul and a life aren’t the same thing, Magnus. You can’t restore one by transplanting the other.”

  But while he believed she had taken everything from him, he refused to let her take away his hope. Her words slid past him with no effect.

  “I don’t believe that’s what I asked you.” He stepped into the light, and Aurelia saw that he held not one, but a bundle of cords. “Where are you going in such a hurry?”

  Would the answer infuriate him further, or would it ground him? If he became angrier, the monsters below would become more active, and the others would be in even greater danger. But if she presented him with a solution, any solution, to just one of the problems plaguing them…

  “I found your engine,” she said. “It has a leak. It’s been leaking for years. Those monsters… You discarded your early experiments down there, didn’t you? But the tunnels were full of ennoea, and it brought them back. If we could…” No, he wouldn’t allow her to destroy the engine. He still needed it. “If we could patch the leak, then drive the monsters out of the tunnels and into the daylight…”

  “They’d burn, wouldn’t they?”

  He tugged at one of the cords in his hand, and Aurelia realized where it led with only a moment to spare. She tripped backward just as the curtains beside her parted and a shaft of sunlight sliced through the spot where she had been.

  “So you went below. To save the golem, no doubt. Did you succeed?”

  “He’s badly hurt. He may not be what you wanted, Magnus, but you wouldn’t kill him. He’s a living, thinking thing.”

  “Yes, how did you manage that?”

  She saw his hand twitch and stumbled back another step, narrowly avoiding another slashing ray of light.

  “I didn’t. You did. You succeeded that far. But he’s spent his entire life in fear of you, just waiting to be taken apart and made into a new creature.”

  “Perhaps I should have. It would have prevented this morning’s perversions.”

  “What?” But even as the word left her mouth, she understood and was repulsed. Her temper flared. “She is not Julia, Magnus! And he is not that child. They are new, unique. They are their own. If there is any perversion here, it is one that would grow a lover in a vat!”

  She anticipated him, this time, and her back hit the wall as another ray of light cut through the air.

  He began to speak, but she wasn’t finished.

  “It was a wasting sickness, wasn’t it?” she spat at him. “The disease that took all three of them? It was the same each time, wasn’t it? They grew thinner and weaker, couldn’t eat, finally couldn’t stand?”

  He had been advancing, but he stopped, half in shadow and half in light.

  “Do you know what it was? Ennoea poisoning.”

  He made a sound somewhere between a snarl and a laugh. “How peculiar that their symptoms should be precisely the opposite of mine. And I think I would have noticed glowing blisters.”

  She shook her head. “They weren’t poisoned, Magnus. You were. I thought it was kinder not to tell you, but clearly, you needed to know. And the terrible thing is, if you had actually given up your studies when you swore to, they might still be alive. You altered your body, changed the fundamental way it works. You absorb ennoea whenever you’re near it, accelerating the progress of your own disease.”

  He had frozen, even his pockmarked brain not quite able to disbelieve the sincerity in her voice.

  “And you lay beside those women night after night, touching their skin. You sucked the life out of them, Magnus.”

  He shuddered, and for a moment, she thought she might have finally reached him, that maybe grief could temper the anger.

  Then he simply turned and left.

  “Magnus!”

  The corridor echoed emptily.

  “Magnus!”

  The sun crept closer.

  Chapter 16

  Aurelia had been gone too long.

  The sounds outside continued at odd intervals, but the door held. There were things out there, things that could not be truly killed, and if one of them had gotten the better of her…

  Helena listened to the strained wood creaking. The door’s hinges were deformed, slowly bending out of shape under the repeated assaults. It would hold a while longer, but not forever. She looked between Miel and Henryk and saw both of them watching her expectantly. What they hoped she might do, she could not imagine.

  She had patched the hole in the golem’s torso with blank pages torn from the end of one of the journals, though she doubted the crude job of paper and paste would hold for very long. The important thing was that nothing got inside him and gummed up the works.

  She had scoured the laboratory for anything that might prove useful in their flight. A box of candles. There was a small stoppered jar of gold filings and one of silver, and she bagged those. A stack of clean rags. If she was creative, she could fashion a crude tunic for Henryk to replace the contaminated one. But most of the laboratory’s contents she could not begin to identify.

  She had entrusted a musket each to Henryk and Miel and showed them how to reload. The daemon was a quick study. It would not have surprised Helena at all if she hit what she aimed for on the firs
t try.

  But that was all she could do, and they looked at her as though they expected her to do something more.

  And Aurelia had been gone too long. She was the one who would know what to do.

  “I’m going to find her,” Helena told them.

  It had been some minutes since the last attack on the door, and Helena heard nothing when she pressed her ear to the wood. She picked up a lamp.

  “Come lock it behind me,” she said, and she slipped out into the tunnel.

  She did not encounter Aurelia’s broken body immediately, which was a comfort. Even better, nothing charged her from out of the darkness, not until she reached the place where the tunnel forked.

  This one was slow-moving. Its legs had twisted up underneath itself, flattening and splaying as though they had tried to become fish tails. It rolled at her with a painful, lolloping gait, and she put a lead ball roughly where she thought its heart might be. Blue-green sparks dripped from the wound, and she pushed onward.

  One pistol and one shot left, but taking the time to reload would give these things a chance to close in around her, and by that time, it wouldn’t matter if she had one shot or two.

  Eyes glittered at her from the dark mouth of the catacombs, green and faintly luminous, and she stopped.

  “Hehhh,” it rasped. “Hehhh.”

  It stepped forward, a starved, gangling thing covered in short, wiry dark hair, with protruding ribs and a hollow belly and too-long arms that dangled past its knees.

  Helena raised the remaining pistol, but this one didn’t seem eager to attack. Perhaps if she could just edge past it and conserve her shot…

  “Hehhh, hehhh…”

  It moved fast, startling her, but her shot took it in the spine, and it crumpled.

  A metallic note chimed as its body hit the stone. Curious. She lifted the lamp and stepped a little closer. Something was tangled in the coarse fur around its throat. She bent down.

  A rosary. A silver cross and wooden beads, the red paint almost all flaked away.

  “No… No, no, no, no.”

  She went to her knees, setting the lamp aside. “No, no…”

  That was still a human face under the hair. She could imagine its lines and contours clearly, even if it had been nine years.

  “Oh, God, Papa.”

  If she just left him alone, he would come back, wouldn’t he? That was what the terrible engine did. Blue-green sparks danced along the edges of the wound in his chest. If she just waited, he would come back, and there had to be some way to help him. They had to be able to take him with them…

  But he’d come back like this, wouldn’t he? Or worse. Aurelia had said you couldn’t put a person whole into a new body. But this wasn’t, was it? It was changed, but this body had been him. Did that matter? She could ask, but if she left to find Aurelia, would he get up and wander away?

  She touched the hollow cheek, smoothed the fur.

  And heard gunfire.

  Her head whipped in the direction of the laboratory. Only one shot, for now, but that meant the door had been breached.

  Hurriedly, she put her back against the wall and began to reload her pistols.

  “Hehhh…”

  Her hands froze.

  “Hehhh…”

  God, it was moving.

  There had to be a way to help him. There had to be a way to help him.

  Its limbs were twitching.

  It wasn’t actually him, was it? It was just an aimless fury and hunger wearing her father’s skin. She’d shot it, but that was before she knew. If it came at her, could she shoot it again?

  “Hehhh.”

  Gunpowder spilled over her hands.

  “Hehhh… lehhh… nahhh…”

  “Papa? I’m here.”

  She scrambled closer, setting the pistol down.

  There was a second gunshot. She had to go. She had to help. She couldn’t move.

  His eyes were open. They weren’t her father’s eyes, not even the color. They looked more like a wildcat’s, the pupils wide but slightly oblong, reflecting the light of the lamp. She couldn’t tell if he knew her or if her name was merely the word he had died saying, and he had been saying it ever since.

  The engine’s wail began to rise again, and he shuddered in response.

  He moved.

  A long, wiry ape-arm suddenly crushed her into the tunnel floor, too-long fingers groping at her waist. Something shifted, and the air above her head exploded, and something dropped heavily to the floor of the tunnel behind her. She scrambled away, straight into a hulking, twitching body like a boar, a gaping hole glowing blue-green beneath its eye. She hadn’t even heard it approaching.

  “Papa?”

  He dropped the pistol, shaking, and clapped his hands to his ears with a grimace.

  “What is it?”

  A growl escaped him, rising in pitch with the sound of the engine. The tendons in his throat and back stood taut.

  And suddenly, his eyes snapped open again, and he lunged. Not at Helena, but at the other pistol she had left on the stone.

  She dove for it, too, but he was closer and faster, and in the space of a heartbeat, he shoved the muzzle up beneath his jaw and fired.

  She stumbled back numbly, brain stumbling through repetitive nonsense.

  If she just left him alone, he would come back, wouldn’t he? But he would come back like this, and when there was a means in front of him, he chose to die. If there was any hope, it would begin with destroying the engine.

  She pried the pistol from his hand and reloaded both.

  The noise was still rising, the walls of the tunnel vibrating. Shapes moved in the darkness, drawing closer.

  But one of them carried a candle. Helena saw the shine of gold eyes and breathed a sigh of relief.

  Almost over.

  But the candle’s light fell on dull, sallow skin, not gleaming ebony.

  The shivering shadows pooled in his eye sockets and beneath his stark cheekbones, giving his face the appearance of a skull. Count Death, they called him in the valley, and Helena had always scolded those who did, but no other name would come to her, just then.

  He paused in front of her, eying the pistols and the bodies on the ground.

  “How did you come to be down here?”

  “I… my lord, I…”

  He shook his head, face creased with grief. Behind him, the darkness writhed.

  “Did I deserve this, child?”

  “Sir…”

  “Do what you like,” he said. “I don’t care, anymore.”

  He stepped past her, and the wall of darkness crashed in.

  Then something exploded out of the darkness in a storm of steel, carving a swath through the converging monsters.

  Aurelia jerked the blade of her shotel free from a horse-like skull, sliced two crab-legs from an eel-body, seized Helena’s arm and ran for the laboratory. A pistol fired beside her once, but she did not look to see what it had hit. The tunnels rang with chaos. Voices, howls, screams, clicks, snarls. She lashed out blindly at whatever got in her way.

  And then, somehow, they were in the laboratory.

  Which, she realized a moment later, should not have been so easy. But the door was standing open, the bolt broken, the hinges nearly torn free. She dropped her shotel and shoved the nearest workbench up against the door just as it shuddered with an impact outside.

  Henryk and Miel watched wide-eyed, each clutching a musket. That would do. Not ideal. She’d rather have a cannon. But it would do.

  She strode across the room and held a hand out.

  “Give me one of those. Henryk, you’ve spent enough time down here. I’m sure you know some of the ways out. Take what you think you can use and go.”

  Bewildered, he offered the musket over and took the satchel she handed him in return.

  “There’s money in there, and a cloak. And my notebook.”

  He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

  She took a folde
d slip of paper from the top of the satchel and extended it to Helena. “Use the money wisely and find yourself discreet passage to Krakow. Find this woman—”

  “Aurelia…”

  “—and tell her I am dead. She’ll know what needs to be done, and she will be able to help you. All three of you.”

  Helena only stared at her dumbfounded, and she wondered what she must look like. Her blood smoldered in her veins, and she could feel the blisters tightening the skin of her face and throat. Were they glowing blue-green?

  She held out the scrap of paper. “Quickly, now. You’ll be safest if you’re nowhere in the mountain when I destroy the engine.”

  Helena made a choked sound and stepped forward as though to embrace her, and Aurelia stepped back.

  “I’d most likely poison you, just now. Go.”

  For a moment, she feared there would be stupid, heroic refusals, but Helena’s eyes strayed toward Henryk and Miel. She had a sense of duty to match Aurelia’s. She took the paper and shoved it deep into her pocket.

  The door groaned, and the workbench slid a few inches.

  “Now.”

  Helena picked up the few things she had gathered and herded the two unnatural creatures toward the far door, drawing a pistol. Then she paused and turned back.

  “If, by some strange circumstance, you should fail to die, I’ll be waiting for you.”

  Then she was gone.

  The workbench slid a few inches further.

  Aurelia picked up her shotel and wiped it on the leg of her trousers, sliding it back into its sheath. She set her back against the far wall and settled the stock of the musket against her shoulder. One shot, but she only needed one to get their attention.

  A few more inches. The wooden legs of the workbench ground loudly against the stone.

  A few more inches.

  A head poked in around the door. It spotted her. It shrieked. And suddenly the door burst open.

  One shot.

  She aimed.

  Hot pain flared in her chest, and the shot went wide, rebounding from the wall with a crack of stone and an angry buzz.