Demon in the Machine

by Lise MacTague

  The imps continued to jostle against Briar as they surged down the cramped hallway. She kept them at bay as best she could, then suddenly there was room all around her. The hall widened, but she could see no offshoots or doors to afford her the chance to slip away. The euronym was close again, urging the slower demons on with slaps, prods, even the occasional head butt from her impressive horns.

  She peered ahead, trying to see through the shifting curtain of flying imps, which proved impossible. The only thing she could make out was a green glow that they were headed straight toward. The corridor met with something. Around her, the imps’ shrieking rose to head-splitting levels. She couldn’t risk putting her fingers in her ears, that could easily be remarked upon, but oh how she wanted to. If this went on much longer, Briar was certain her ears would start bleeding.

  She was borne into the green room on the surge of imps. As the space opened up around them even more, she took her opportunity and scuttled to one side, pressing herself against the wall. The brick should have been cool against her skin, but the room was so warm that the bricks radiated heat as well. Her glance around told her everything she needed to know.

  This was a ritual room, one set up for something monumental. She’d never seen one in person in the mortal world. Even in her mother’s realm, she’d rarely seen one this size. Such workings weren’t uncommon among her mother’s people, but humans rarely cooperated in their magical workings and didn’t require large spaces as a result. Such things were undertaken in secret. The room wasn’t overly tall and most of the light was supplied by the wall of glowing machinery and the braziers around the large circle carved into the floor. Someone stood upon the raised dais. He was bent over to avoid hitting his head on the low ceiling. That couldn’t be comfortable at all.

  Even less comfortable was the poor soul who was laid out on the stone table at the center of the circle. He probably hadn’t been there long. Blood seeped from a dozen shallow cuts on his arms, legs, and torso. It pooled in the channels in the side of the table, then ran out the groove at the end of the table, filling the grooved inscription of the ritual circle. Or, more accurately, circles. The blood had filled a third of the first inscription. When that one was full, it would pool over into the next inscription. Whatever they had planned would take multiple spells.

  She squinted at the table. They wanted to keep the sacrifice alive as long as possible, or so she surmised from the inscription on the side. The poor sod was still breathing, his naked chest expanding slowly, but not by much. He turned his head as though looking directly at her, though she knew he wouldn’t be able to recognize her.

  The bottom dropped out of Briar’s stomach. It was Johnson.

  Chapter Forty

  No keyhole? There has to be a keyhole! Isabella ran her fingers over the door, searching for any indication that the keyhole was there somewhere. The face of the door was smooth and cold and with no hairline cracks that might be hiding the damn thing. Who builds a door that locks only from one side? Maybe part of the problem was that she couldn’t see so well. It was so dark in the room that even with her goggles on, she could barely see.

  Not far from the door was a switch. Isabella turned it. Light bloomed from three gas fixtures where the back wall met the ceiling. She turned the light up as far as it would go. Shadows still clung to the corners, but she could see well enough now. There was so much light it hurt her eyes, and she popped up the night vision lenses from her goggles for the time being. It would have been safer to remove them completely, but she didn’t plan on staying too long in this room, so instead she left them attached at the hinges.

  But extra light on the situation hadn’t changed anything about the missing keyhole. No matter where Isabella looked or how much she prodded, she couldn’t find anywhere to stick a damned key! She tugged experimentally on the large handle that operated the door. Nothing. She grasped it between both hands and threw all her weight behind it. Still nothing. She put every ounce of muscle into trying to get the wheel to move until she was practically doing a handstand on it, but to no avail. Her brow dripped sweat and she took a deep breath and held it for a moment to calm her breathing and heart rate. She would get out of there.

  Maybe something else in the room would help. Isabella turned to take in what she could. It was a converted storage room, most likely. It wasn’t huge, maybe fifteen feet on a side, and close enough to square as to make no difference. The lights above danced a bit in a draft, even underground. There was nothing like good English construction, her mother always said. Drafts were a constant thing, but no one had taken care to mitigate them down here. The crumbling brick walls would have looked quite silly covered with draperies, though the tapestries of a medieval castle wouldn’t have been too out of place given what was happening outside the room.

  Beyond that, it looked strikingly like Wellington’s room had back home. He’d never been the tidy sort. Isabella was aware she was casting stones, but his level of disarray made hers seem quite neat by comparison. Clothing draped every available surface in the corner where he’d set up a cot. Without a valet to pick up after him, Wellington seemed content to leave things where they fell. A stack of books teetered on a crate he was apparently using as a bedside table.

  Building materials were stacked in another corner, which was much neater than where Wellington was living. Isabella recognized the same impulse in herself, most likely a result of their father’s constant chiding to keep their workspaces neat. It was true that it was easier to work in a clean space, and Isabella’s workbench was always neater than her dressing table, especially at the beginning and end of a project. There was no actual workspace here, not that Isabella could see, but he clearly was using them for something. She cast a quick eye over the stack of tubing, glass, and rubber. That might come in handy.

  Large sheets of steel and bronze took up the far wall. The bronze was new and still gleamed in the light with not a trace of green verdigris upon its surface, but the steel was another matter. Dust and cobwebs hung from it. Steel resisted rust much better than iron, but after a while even it succumbed. These had been stacked in the damp long enough to have acquired a patina of rust across much of their surfaces, at least those Isabella could see. So Wellington had need for brass, but not for steel.

  What was that past the sheets of metal? Isabella moved forward for a better look. There was another vault door, identical to that which she’d entered through. And this one had a keyhole!

  She hummed to herself as she pulled out her lock picks. Things were looking up. If she was lucky, this door would lead to another hall and she could make her way back to the room where Wellington and his demon prince were up to no good. The lock was unusual, a lever tumbler lock not of the type she usually saw in the London homes of her peers. A skeleton key allowed her to bypass most of those. Althea had insisted she practice on all types of locks, of course, but she hadn’t had much opportunity to encounter these in the wild. She’d have to use picks in conjunction with the skeleton key.

  The lock stymied her, forcing her to keep picking at it, working her way around the problem as she’d been taught. No matter what she tried, it refused to give. Isabella pulled out the picks and tapped down over her right eye one of the lenses she used to see in the dark. She peered into the lock, trying to divine its secrets. If only she’d thought of a lens that would allow her to see through solid objects. She’d have to ask Briar about such a thing after this was all over.

  What was Briar up to now? Hopefully, she’d noticed when Isabella had rubbed out the rune on her chest, but what came next? She had no doubt that Briar was smart enough to find her way down here. Her hands shook a bit when she reached out for the lock again. The idea of Briar down here alone with all those imps and the repulsive imp-conglomeration monster was enough to drive all thoughts of moderation from her head. Their best bet was to be at each other’s backs, but she couldn’t do anything like that while trapped in here.

  In addition to the levers she ne
eded to bypass, the lock looked like it had more than one set of tumblers. That was going to be awkward. A third hand would certainly have been useful right then. She stashed the skeleton key and pulled out two curtain picks. She held one in her mouth while she felt around with a tension wrench and the other pick. One by one, she felt the levers lift as she probed at them delicately. She took her time, regardless of the pressure she felt within to rush the process. One thing that couldn’t be rushed was lockpicking.

  All the levers were taken care of on the first half of the lock. The pick had no more give to it, so she had to assume it was at the end of the lock, though she wouldn’t know until she triumphed over the other half. Would the pick hold when she let it go? Isabella held her breath and removed her hand. The levers snapped back down.

  “Damnation!” she whispered around the pick between her teeth and bent back to the task of lifting the levers and allowing the wrench to pass. The process wasn’t so tortuous the second time around, and quickly she was back where she’d been. Now what? How on earth was she going to keep the pick in place while working on the other side of the lock?

  She worked at the lock until sweat dripped down her face, the little beads unnecessary distractions, but she couldn’t reach up to wipe them away. Her hands were slick enough already, but she couldn’t wipe those either. Her jaw cramped as she held the pick steady with her mouth. Her eyes burned from the effort of trying to see into the lock, and she could barely see for blinking furiously to clear them. Her labored breathing left an expanding cloud of condensation on the cool metal surface of the door, but she was finally making some headway.

  Isabella let out a long slow breath, still taking care not to jostle the wrench. She held her breath and started turning all three wrenches at once, moving her head at the same rate as her right hand. A fraction of an inch at a time, the wrenches turned, then the tumblers inside the heavy door let free in a series of muted clunks. Isabella didn’t think she’d ever heard a sound so beautiful in all her days. This was the chirping of birds at the earliest dawn after a long night, the Messiah chorus on Christmas Eve. She relaxed, slumping where she knelt. Her back ached, her jaw was on fire, and she wondered if she’d ever be able to see properly again. Rubbing at her eyes only made the fire worse. She blinked rapidly, until at last she could see again, though the objects around her seemed fuzzy and diffuse.

  Isabella seized the great wheel between her hands and turned. It opened easily, the door swinging silently toward her.

  There was no corridor beyond the giant door, simply another room, this one tiny in comparison to the one she was in.

  “Blast!” Isabella gave the door a swift kick and regretted it immediately. There was no give to the brass at all; the only thing that gave was the toe of her boot. She bit back a series of curses, then thought better of it. Her mother wasn’t there to chastise her for using unladylike language. She cursed until it was a wonder the air didn’t turn blue around her. She grabbed her foot and hopped up and down. Tears of frustration welled up in her eyes and overflowed down her cheeks.

  Eventually the rage ran out and Isabella was left staring into the tiny little room. Someone, probably Wellington, had seen fit to cram a desk and a drafting table in there. An abundance of papers covered a small table to the right of the desk, with still more papers nailed to the wall behind it. Something about the design was familiar.

  Isabella moved in for a closer look. She lit the oil lamp on the table, then turned up the flame as high as possible. It seemed that almost every piece of machinery Wellington had built for the Mirabilia horseless manufactory was represented along the walls. The huge voltaic pile was missing, however. She rustled through the papers piled on the table, but those didn’t include finished schematics. Formulae covered those papers, along with the mysterious runes Briar manipulated so well. She found the schematics for the massive battery on the drafting table, along with the drawings for the series of smaller ones located in that terrible chamber.

  He’d made changes in pencil over top the ink to both sets of schematics. He’d crossed numbers and runes out, then rewritten them, sometimes multiple times. One page of the schematics looked like his plans for hooking the two sets of batteries together. Those had seen the most attention. What was he up to?

  Isabella hooked the stool out of the corner with one foot and scooted it under her, then leaned forward for a better look.

  Chapter Forty-One

  The longer Isabella stared at the schematics, the more convinced she was that she’d been wrong. The thing on the manufacturing floor above her wasn’t a battery, at least not exactly. If anything, it was a collection device, not a storage device. She glanced at the other set of schematics. Those were batteries, that was certain. They’d been hooked together to create a set of energy storage devices, though not for electricity. From the drawings, Isabella recognized them as the glowing green machines Wellington had in the large basement room where he and that demon had captured her.

  So what was the other device? She could be forgiven for mistaking it for a battery, certainly. It had some similar characteristics, but what battery needed to be opened up? Was that how the energy was accessed? No, that was impossible. The energy would simply dissipate back into the air. Or would it?

  She flipped a page and ran her finger over the notations there. She’d been right: the device was meant to generate energy. From the sketches, the big device collected it and the batteries in the basement captured the excess energy not necessary to keep the machine running. Even an energy-collection device required energy to run it. It was like an electro-magnet, the largest she’d ever seen, and instead of attracting metal, it attracted something else.

  The next page held more drawings, these of smaller internal components. Isabella flipped quickly through these. The last two pages were new, the paper of different stock and Wellington had shifted from black ink to blue. An interesting choice. Isabella wondered if the change of ink color had bothered him as much as it would her.

  The ink and paper weren’t the only things different about the newer pages. The drawings and figures were interspersed with scribblings in what she could only assume were magical characters. He’d switched around the components and added a new set of switches along one side of the machine. Isabella stared at it. Why? The changes were unnecessary, as far as she could tell. If he wanted the device to collect energy, then why create a shunt that reversed the direction of the flow?

  Her eyes widened when she understood.

  “Oh!” Her heart thundered in her ears and she jumped up from the stool, sending it flying behind her. “He’s changing the polarity!” Unable to help herself, she snagged a pencil from the cup on the table and added her own calculations to the margins. The collection matrix had been set up to acquire energy at a steady rate, but the polarity reverse had none of that sophistication. Had he been in a hurry, or had he not cared that when the energy was reversed it would come out in a massive wave? Isabella jotted down a few more calculations. The duration of the wave would depend on the amount of energy accumulated, but it would be violent and focused in one direction.

  That couldn’t be right, could it? She ran the numbers again, then flipped back a page, then forward again. If Wellington’s measurements were to be believed, and Isabella saw no reason not to believe them, the wave would let loose toward the middle of the room. It would have made more sense to disperse it out in a number of directions to lessen its deleterious effects. Hell, it would have been simpler to do so, but Wellington had chosen to do the opposite.

  A muffled thud shook the room. Isabella looked up as mortar cracked and sifted down onto her. What was going on? Again she heard it, but this time it didn’t stop. Rather, the thud continued, turning into a moan two hairs shy of a roar. The room shook steadily around her. She watched as a container of pencils and pens vibrated its way off the table and fell to the floor with a clatter that was barely audible over the din.

  “What the—” Isabella braced her ha
nds on the drafting table. Dust filled the room like smoke. There was no fire, at least none that she could smell.

  Briar. Her head jerked up at the thought. Did she do this? Regardless, she was out there, and Isabella had no idea what she was doing. Knowing Briar, she was in the center of whatever was going on.

  Enough of this. Keyhole or no, I need to get out of here. There was more than one way to get out of a room.

  * * *

  Johnson’s blood continued to drip steadily from the table to the inscription waiting on the floor. Briar watched, mesmerized, as each drop filled the first inscription further. His blood traced an intricate pattern, its redness shocking and stark against the dingy grey floor. A few areas were empty, but those were small and filling up rapidly. The imps jostled into each other and her as more packed their way in to the area. She could see a Behemoth, thankfully far enough away that the multitude of arms grasping blindly from its bulk had no chance of reaching her. The imps in that area gave the thing a wide berth. She shuddered at the idea of being pulled into its mass. If there was one Behemoth, there were likely others, a side effect of packed propagation pits.

  The voices of the gathered imps swelled with anticipation. They didn’t know what was happening any more than she did, of that Briar was certain. But imps being imps, they thrilled to any possibility of chaos and pain.

  She pulled the small stack of spells she’d prepared and shuffled through them. Whatever happened, she would be prepared.

  An unexpected elbow to her leg made her look down. One of her neighbors had noticed the papers and snatched at them. “Give!”

  “Get off,” Briar snarled. She shoved it away hard. It went careening into the imps next to it, pushing them over. They were packed in so tightly that they in turn took out their neighbors. Like dominoes placed on end then pushed over, they fell, each taking one or more imps down with them. The havoc spread, and imps took to the air to avoid the disturbance.