Demon in the Machine

by Lise MacTague

  Isabella shook her head to focus back on the matter at hand. Briar didn’t believe her, preferring to place her trust in what she saw. They would have to discuss that. But since Briar was set on completing their exploration of the factory building, Isabella couldn’t leave, not without her.

  “What’s so interesting?” she whispered to Johnson. He’d been investigating the exterior of the battery for a little bit now. He knelt on the floor a ways off, tracing his finger over a glyph at its base. It was so covered in dust that Isabella could barely make it out.

  “The pile is covered with them funny letters,” he said, much more loudly that she would have preferred. “There’s more of ’em on the floor.”

  “Is that important? The factory is covered in them.” Runes glowed a sullen green almost everywhere she looked. They were fading, with none of the brilliance she’d come to associate with a new inscription.

  “But there’s none ’ere.”

  “That’s odd. Maybe we should go get Briar.”

  “Wait a tick.” Johnson got to his feet but didn’t straighten. He ran his hand through the thick layer of dust on the floor. Free of the dusty blanket, the floor was indeed blank. “It makes a square,” he said. He followed the edge of the runes, brushing at the floor with his hand until he was hard to see, obscured by clouds of dust and darkness.

  Isabella looked about, trying to keep an eye on the catwalks above and peer into the pitch-black corners while making sure the doors were all still closed. She gripped the grapple gun in her hand. If an imp popped up, she would put a twelve-inch length of steel through it. Then she would stop being polite.

  “It’s ’iding something,” Johnson called over to her. “Come see.”

  Isabella made her way over to him. She looked up to where the roof met the wall, convinced she’d seen something, but nothing was there. She hunched her shoulders defensively, then relaxed them when she realized what she was doing. Her shoulders were going to ache the next morning. Maybe she’d be able to convince Briar to rub some of the tension out when they got home.

  Home. It seemed a while before Sherard House would be habitable again. Maybe she could stay in the earl’s stately townhouse.

  She joined Johnson and looked down where he indicated. There wasn’t much to see except the dust-laden stone floor. He’d uncovered a square devoid of runes that was maybe ten feet on a side. Isabella wracked her memory for what had been there when she’d seen it last, but couldn’t recall. Her memories revolved mostly around the imps and the book, then her panicked escape across the rooftops. Beyond knots of imps being driven to work on engines by larger demons, she had no clear idea of the floor’s layout.

  “I don’t remember that,” she said. “It could have been anything.”

  “What d’ye make of it?” Johnson walked out into the center of the blank square and turned to face her.

  “I think we ask Briar.”

  “Who?” Johnson leaned forward to peer at something under the dust.

  “Brionie. Miss Riley. What are you doing?” Her voice echoed through the room at the last, but Johnson didn’t stop.

  He brushed dust away to reveal a small inscription, then jerked his hand away from it. “Somethin’ cut me,” he said, shaking his hand. Drops of blood were flung free of his fingers, landing on the ground with barely audible splats. The inscription sprang to life in virulent green. The floor rippled once, twice, then they were standing on a metal grate.

  “What the devil?” Johnson said. He took a step back, the soles of his boots clanging softly on the metal, then stopped.

  Below them, first one pair, then another, then dozens of glowing green eyes turned their way. She aimed her grapple gun at them but didn’t depress the trigger. The chances that it would make it through the grate were slim. She took a step to the side. Her foot came down on something soft and she was met with a shriek of pain. Whatever she was standing on wriggled beneath the sole of her boot. More shrieks, these of rage, took up the call. She looked down. Fingers tipped with sharp claws stuck through the gaps in the metal. They reached for her but of course could get nowhere near her.

  “We have to go!” Isabella yelled to Johnson. He was a statue in the midst of chaos, frozen in place and staring at the fingers that grasped for him. The top of the grate writhed with them, like red maggots crawling in search for flesh.

  He reached out for her, grabbing her forearm and shoulder, slinging her toward the edge of the grate. Isabella slid for a few feet, then the soles of her shoes caught on something and she pitched forward. In a flash, the fingers stopped their crawling motion. Isabella looked down. The imps had their fingers hooked through the grate. They stared up at her; their fetid breath burned her nasal passages as their beady eyes locked to hers.

  This is not good. Metal groaned beneath them, sounding for all the world like a great beast in gastric distress. The grate flexed under her feet, shifted, then she was falling. Isabella aimed down and pulled the trigger. The flash of powder in the gun lit up a hellscape of claws, teeth, and eyes, all trained on her and Johnson. One imp fell back, as did the one behind it as the length of sharpened steel from her gun ripped through them. It was wrested from her hand and pulled away into the mass of imps.

  Johnson howled and tried to swing the hammer as he attempted to dislodge the hands upon him, all to no avail. Claws ripped at her clothes, trying to gouge out the soft flesh beneath. So far the heavy canvas of her jump suit kept her from serious harm, but it was being rapidly shredded. Johnson wasn’t so lucky. His uniform wasn’t meant to stand up to demon claws and he already bled from half a dozen or more scratches.

  A roar split the heaving mass of imps. They scattered to either side, dropping Isabella flat on her back in the darkness. Johnson moaned in the back of his throat beside her. The imps were bad enough, but what could scare them off? Isabella scrambled backward, trying to find a wall to put her back to. There was nothing.

  The dark was quiet now, no roars or shrieks, but something was there. Was that? Yes, it was. Breathing, in and out from a dozen throats in unison, and coming ever closer. Isabella gripped the glove on her right hand between her teeth and yanked it off. She licked trembling fingers, then drew them through the rune that was somehow still intact in the middle of her chest. The crimson flame winked out immediately. For better or worse, Briar would know they were in trouble.

  If this was how she was going to go, Isabella would be damned if she would meet her end scrabbling backward like a crab. She pushed herself to her feet and made herself face the direction of the breathing. Feeling a bit like a gunslinger in a Western novel, she pushed back the corner of her canvas coat and drew one of her mother’s revolvers. Johnson looked over at her, then clambered slowly to his feet. He located the sledge a few paces away and picked it up. Her heart still raced, but her hand was as steady as the stones beneath her feet. She pointed the pistol into the darkness and waited.

  The inventor’s quarters looked as if someone had stepped out only moments earlier. There was not a mote of dust to be seen. Aside from the room with the bed, everything was neat and tidy. She’d spent little time in the curtained off bed-chamber. One glance at the bed and the runes carved into the wood had told her all she needed to know about it. Strong emotion imbued the body’s fluids with a more potent capacity for infernal magic. Those fluids produced during sexual relations were known to her mother’s people to be quite potent, though she’d had neither the opportunity nor the urge to experiment firsthand. The inventor used magic as easily and almost as often as breathing, it seemed.

  The toys arrayed carelessly along the floor next to the bed had never had any capacity to shock her. She was impressed at the range of phalluses the inventor had at his disposal, but his predilections were his own.

  She’d moved on to the next room, but there had been little to discover. He liked his power. She could tell as much from the inscriptions on almost every surface. Many of the chairs had been marked with runes to render the person sit
ting in it more docile and more suggestible. The long conference table was graven with inscriptions along the same lines, as well as one that made it impossible for ink to soak into the surface. That was a useful inscription, and Briar tucked it away for later. She wondered if she could somehow work it into the weave of her clothes. She was forever getting ink stains on the wrists of her dresses.

  While the inscription was useful to her, she doubted the earl would be overly enthralled by her discovery. She moved on, scouring the rooms for hidden compartments or objects disguised by spells. The bricks around the fireplace seemed reasonable candidates for such trickery. Briar moved in, eying the hearth from all angles, trying to discern an inscription of deception among the other layers of charms. There was a square enchantment graven into the bricks. Briar squinted to make out the runes. She ran her hand across the bricks but felt nothing to indicate the hearth wasn’t one piece. Finally, Briar winkled out the key-rune. She licked her fingertip and obliterated the glyph. The spell blinked out of existence, revealing a hole carved into the fireplace. It was the right size and shape for the grimoire, but of course it was now empty. With exaggerated care, Briar ran her hands around the interior of the small compartment. Beyond some grime on her fingertips, she had nothing to show for her efforts.

  This was getting her nowhere. Her hopes that the inventor had cleared his belongings out in a hurry, leaving some damning piece of evidence behind were rapidly fading. Maybe Isabella was having a more successful time of it.

  At the thought of her lover, Briar dropped her eyes to the front of her dress, hoping to take solace in the rune there. Her stomach plummeted, and she put her hands against the rough bricks of the fireplace to steady herself. The rune was dark. Something had happened.

  She crossed the room in a hurry, cursing the skirts that bound at her legs and forced her into an inefficient shuffle. Finally, she took a second to reach down with her athame and slit the binding fabric. Able to move more freely, she barely noticed the depravity that saturated the bedroom before she was back in the hallway between buildings.

  Again, the walls shifted in front of her eyes and the floor dipped beneath her feet.

  “I do not have time for this,” Briar said aloud. The runes didn’t care and she forged on despite the acid that burned at the back of her throat. She swallowed to keep it down and ran, stumbling every few steps to the far end of the hall. She yanked it open and stepped through into satin drapes and the still-lingering smell of sex.

  “No!” There was no time. Isabella was in danger, and this carnival fun house of a hallway wouldn’t let her through. Briar clenched her fists, her fingernails dug into the soft flesh of her right palm. She’d lost her glove. It didn’t matter.

  She placed her palm up against the door to the hallway. With deliberate strokes and gritted teeth, Briar used the knife’s tip to etch the rune of Isabella’s name into the thin skin over the tendons, then added a glyph for location. She would follow Isabella right back to herself.

  Briar shoved the door open, then stepped forward, her eyes on Isabella’s name. The rune burned red and she didn’t look away.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  By all the gods, but the little hallway had been stifling. Briar breathed deeply of the slightly-less-fetid air in the engine room. The rune on her hand still glowed brightly. She wished it was a guarantee that Isabella was well, but the rune would only take her to Isabella’s body. It gave no indication of her well-being. Briar turned, watching the rune glow brighter, then darker. According to her magic, Isabella was somewhere beneath her.

  “Of course she is,” Briar muttered. “I’m thirty feet in the air. Most of humanity is down there.”

  There was no sign of Isabella on the manufacturing floor. She peered into the shadows by the battery but could see nothing. There was no evidence that something had gone wrong, at least not that she could see from her current vantage. Briar fought the urge to run down to the floor below. She would help no one, least of all Isabella, if she got herself captured. Despite a thorough scan of the area, she saw nothing amiss. Forcing herself to move cautiously, she made her way down the stairs.

  How could something have happened to Isabella? Johnson too, since there was as little sign of him as there was of Isabella. She’d felt nothing to indicate the presence of demons in the manufactory. She still felt nothing, though she opened herself up to the point of being dangerously exposed. As best she could tell, there were no demons here. It felt almost as if there had never been any demonic presence.

  Briar mulled that over as she crossed the floor. They’d been investigating the battery, so that was where she would start. Dust rose in little puffs around her feet, threatening her with another upper respiratory spasm. She wished for something to cover her nose and mouth, but had nothing. If she’d known the factory would be so dashed dusty, she would have brought a handkerchief or asked Isabella for a mask.

  Briar stopped dead in her tracks. She looked down at the sea of dust around her. The unbroken sea of dust, save for the tracks of her own footprints. That wasn’t possible. She’d seen Johnson and Isabella take much this same path to investigate the voltaic pile, at her request no less. This dust wasn’t natural. When she turned to track her footprints back, she noticed that even the tracks she’d made upon entering the cavernous room and making her way over to the stairs were gone.

  What else beside footprints did the dust conceal? Briar licked her fingertips and knelt, not heeding the grime coating her knees. The inscription was simple enough; she’d used it on more than one occasion to dust the earl’s archives. She finished drawing in the runes and keyed the inscription. The dust disappeared, drawn upward in a sheet to filter between cracks in the bricks and around the boarded-over windows. In the earl’s library, it had been simple enough to send it out the chimney, but she couldn’t see the like here.

  The floor fairly gleamed, even in the dark. Without the dust to obscure them, dozens of inscriptions littered the floor. Many centered on invisible points throughout the area. They served to amplify power, possibly from the battery. This must have been where the engines were built, each with a group of imps or other demons to impress the magic upon them. That was all well and good, but it got her no closer to finding Isabella. She stood on the tip of her toes, trying to get a better view of the floor. There had to be a pattern to the inscriptions. If she could see that, Briar could discern the breaks in the patterns. The most interesting things seemed to occur in the gaps between order and chaos.

  She held out her hand, scanning for Isabella. Still underneath. Now that was fascinating. The earl hadn’t indicated that the factory had a basement. Now that she thought about it, it seemed likely. Most buildings in London did. When space was at a premium, as it always was, people built up or tunneled deeper. Sometimes both. Isabella and Johnson must have stumbled upon an entry to the lower level. Perhaps they’d fallen in the dark.

  Her laugh was low and derisive. They hadn’t fallen. The dust hadn’t covered everyone’s tracks on its own. The earl’s men had missed something, and now something terrible had befallen Isabella and Johnson. She should have listened to Isabella. They never should have split up.

  Her eye caught a glimmer of green fire on a nearby wall. The inscriptions on the walls were mostly older, and this one stuck out. She made her way over to it and examined the runes closely. An inscription of disguise, like the one hiding the grimoire’s previous resting place upstairs. It traced a rectangle into the wall, one easily big enough to be a door. The glyphs were perfect. That was cause for concern. The inventor had more than imps bound to his control. Imps didn’t have the intelligence to work infernal magic; they certainly didn’t have the vocabulary for it. He’d bound at least one higher order demon.

  This changed everything. Briar took her notebook out of the pocket sewn into her skirts. Though her heart urged her to go through that door and rush to Isabella’s aid as quickly as possible, her head reminded her that she would get nowhere if not properly
prepared. She slit the top of her finger, ignoring the jolt of pain, and proceeded to inscribe a spell in her own blood. She stopped short of keying the spell. When she finished that one, she turned the page and inscribed another, and another, and still another. By the time she finished the last inscription, her heart was screaming at her to move and her head was no longer proof against its urging. But there was one thing left to do yet.

  Briar took a deep breath and starting drawing out runes and a circle upon the front of her dress. She needed to change her appearance. The shroud could be shifted, but it couldn’t deviate too far from her regular appearance. Taking on the appearance of an imp was more complicated. She hated the things, but to get close enough to Isabella—and Johnson—she would need to look like one or they’d turn on her. With the urgency impelling her to move, it was a relief when she completed the inscription and keyed it to life. She felt no different, but when she looked down at her arms, the brick red skin of an imp was unmistakable.

  With that, Briar reached forward and drew her fingers through the key-rune on the wall. The section within the square shimmered, then cleared, revealing a steel door where before there had been only bricks. Was it too much to hope that the door was unlocked? Briar grasped the handle and it turned easily under her hand. Apparently not. They’d relied upon the spell, then. A short-sighted reliance, but one she wasn’t going to argue with.

  Stairs led down, curving into darkness so deep it was almost tactile. Her eyes could only penetrate a short way into the gloom, but she started down nonetheless. Isabella was waiting for her.