The Last Spellbound House: A Steampunk Dark Fantasy Thriller
Page 39
To Serra’s credit, Tamelios noted that unlike most humans, she seemed only a little startled and not at all discomfited by the sudden invasion of her personal space.
Melianne ran interested hands along the shoulder of the woman’s worn brown travelling cloak. “No human I’ve ever met wields such power, nor holds such depths of hidden mystery. What are you?”
“Oh, I’m human, all right,” Serra responded with a friendly smile, “Just… different from what you’re probably used to.”
“Different how?” Tamelios asked, amplifying the flow of Res to the mind-dominating Workings built into his vocal module. He failed to be surprised, this time, when the resilient woman was unaffected.
“It’s a long story, and to tell it would take more time than we have. I’m in a hurry today… perhaps some other century.”
“I sense your tale must be a fascinating one.” Melianne’s snowfield eyes flashed with bright avarice, and she wrapped her arms comfortably around Serra’s shoulders. “You said perhaps some other century? If you’ll swear a binding oath to tell me everything about you in one hundred cycles’ time, I will in exchange give you a blessing of unending youth for as long as you stay with me of your own accord. I’ll lavish great comforts upon you. You’ll want for nothing, and each night I shall take you to my bed and show you pleasures you cannot yet imagine.”
Tamelios caused his vocal module to generate a sound like a human clearing his throat. “Beloved, please do not promise our… guest… such lavish comforts. We have need of every last dram of Res we have gathered, and more. I intend to learn what I seek through much more direct means.”
“I sense she doesn’t lie when she says she can help us. There’s something otherworldly to her, a strangeness I’ve never before seen in a mortal.” Melianne’s expression and her voice were both warm. “Please, maerisrei, may we keep her?”
“That remains to be seen.” Tamelios tried not to display in his voice how irked he was at his beloved’s tendency to take mortal playthings at inopportune times. However, he knew also that he would be a fool to ignore his wife’s ability to divine hidden truths. “Serra, it seems you are not what you appear in more than one way.”
“I’ll have to decline your offer. Like I said, I’m operating on limited time.” Serra gently pried Melianne from her shoulders and moved a few steps across the room toward Tamelios. Her attitude was nonchalant, as though Fae enchantresses cloaked in intoxicating Glamours draped themselves around her on a regular basis. Melianne stared, shocked and perhaps a little impressed at having been rebuffed.
“I didn’t come to make trouble, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Serra said. “Those light-creatures were a nice touch. Until I realized they only appeared to have intelligence, I was worried about hurting them. Unlike the average lord and lady, you’ve chosen to defend your holdings with simulacra instead of living beings. I like it! Very humane.”
“You misunderstand. They were chosen because they are more efficient, not because I value mortal life.” Tamelios carefully adjusted his vocal modulators to betray no emotion. “If you believe that we are friendly to humans, and expect to prevail upon our imagined generosity, you are sadly mistaken.”
Serra shrugged. “Your loss.” She turned toward the doorway.
“Our loss? Not so,” Tamelios said, and the doors to the entry hall slammed shut. “You know too much to be allowed to leave here. Further, I intend to find out how a mere mortal like you came by your power, as well as how to reproduce it. You can either co-operate, or not: it matters little to me.”
Serra straightened her torso to face him again, an implied threat in the sharpness of her gaze. In response, Tamelios drew a finely crafted, slender sword from its sheath at his side. As he channelled a modest portion of his stored Res from his Phylactery into the Relic-blade, its black iron grew darker and its edge glinted keenly with captured light.
Melianne vanished and reappeared next to the Dead Lord, smiling again and draping a glamour of protection like a cloak over her husband’s shoulders. Tamelios knew she considered seeing him make use of his combat skills a rare treat.
“It’s a fight, then?” Serra asked, placing a hand on the hilt of her own weapon as though unwilling to unsheath it without an even more overt show of aggression from Tamelios.
“If you will not submit to me,” the Dead Lord replied, “Then yes. It is a fight.”
He gathered some of the Manse-Heart’s power around him in a coruscating white halo, which faded as it fed into his various combat-oriented Relics of protection and strength.
“Your funeral.” Serra shrugged and drew her blade.
Chapter 22
The memory lapsed. Back in the present, Alendras held extremely still to avoid showing his discomfiture. If Serra had put up a fight against his past self, then she was certainly more than a match for him now. He didn’t yet remember how the encounter had ended, but it appeared he and Melianne had trapped her in the manse’s heart.
In spite of her captivity, the woman seemed benevolent enough so far… but Alendras deeply disliked knowing that if her attitude were to change, he was as good as doomed. After all, this Serra might only be preserving him now in order to exact revenge later.
Shaking off another wave of exhaustion, Alendras scanned his surroundings. It appeared he had missed much while he experienced the memory. Most of the others stood grouped around Serra and Vino, watching intently. She held the Risker’s hands clasped between hers. Perhaps some Working was being enacted, though Alendras had no means of knowing its nature without an Invention of Res-vision.
Jenna was the exception. She still knelt in front of him, supporting his fragile arms and torso with her own, though by the shaking of her legs she was no doubt deeply uncomfortable.
“Adjust yourself, dear one. I can fortify myself with Res from the manse,” Alendras whispered, exerting his will to lend his brittle bones the strength to support their own mass.
Jenna’s gasp of relief hitched as Alendras’s weight lifted from her trembling arms, and she collapsed. Despite his swift reflexes, Alendras’s withered muscles barely responded in time to cushion her head before it struck the metal of the platform.
“Pyke?” she murmured, blinking up at him. “Are you okay?”
“I’m Alendras now,” he replied. “And, against all probability, I believe I will survive.”
“Good.” Jenna reached up and patted his cheek with a weak hand. “I’m… very tired. Am I gonna die?”
Alendras ran his hands gently over Jenna’s forehead, across her temples and along her spine, analyzing the flow of her natural Res by the subtle variations in the firmness of her skin and muscles. So many of his past capabilities were returning to him, now that his analytical and intuitive selves had been reintegrated… but the powers, though familiar, seemed new to him at the same time. He felt like a completely different person than the Tamelios of his memories.
“You’ll be fine, Jenna. That said, I must apologize again. Thanks to my actions, you and everyone else in the Last Spellbound House have aged twenty cycles.”
Jenna waved a weak hand, dismissing the apology. “Occupational hazard of living near magic. Consider yourself forgiven, though for what, I surely don’t know.”
Alendras shook his head at the sheer pluck of her. Though deeply exhausted and drained of Res, still she was determined to reassure him. “Thank you, Jenna. I may not deserve your forgiveness, but I accept it.”
Jenna opened her mouth to reply, but a noise of creaking metal interrupted her as Vino shifted for the first time since Alendras had emerged from his vision. With the circlet Relic in his hands, the Risker stepped back, gazing vacantly into the distance with a blissful smile on his face.
Eiten stepped forward in a rush, and Serra turned to face him. The Relic-seeker’s fists were trembling at his sides, and his voice when he spoke was that of a broken man. “Merana, she…”
“I... I saw. I�
�m so sorry for your loss.”
“Bring her back.” The feverish intensity of Eiten’s gaze haunted Alendras. It reminded him deeply of his own regrets, of his hundreds of cycles of wandering with his grief and self-hatred. “I don’t care what it costs. Please, bring her back.”
A shadow of some emotion passed across Serra’s features. Alendras didn’t know the woman well enough to identify it positively, but he could tell it was painful.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I can do a lot of things… but I can’t resurrect the dead. Nobody I’ve ever met, in this or any other world, has that power.”
Eiten’s shoulders slumped. Then rage ignited in his eyes, dancing like fire. “Then make the Fae pay. She killed Merana, sure as if she’d pushed her from the cliff herself.”
Serra frowned. “You want revenge? I’m… not willing to be the instrument of that.”
Eiten’s scarred face twisted, grief and hatred spilling from his eyes in the form of hot, heartfelt tears. “Then what good are you?”
“What good am I?” Serra looked down, and Alendras glimpsed a yawning emptiness in her eyes which frightened him. It spoke of age and eternity, not the passions and cares of humanity. He was struck with the certainty that between himself and Serra, she was the older. “For some things, not much.”
Then the woman’s body language shifted subtly, and she walked to stand in front of Melianne. Her posture was still subdued, but now her movements were purposeful. “...for others, more. Your Majesty, are you willing to atone for what you’ve done?”
Melianne drew herself up to her full height, which for now was only eight feet. “I was… not myself,” she protested, looking down imperiously at Serra.
“Even so. We all have to accept responsibility for our actions when those we’ve harmed call for it. If we don’t, what hypocrites must we be to demand restitution when we’re the ones wronged?”
“You know, then,” Melianne asked quietly.
“I do. As I’m sure you suspected, I’ve been watching from inside your Engine. In the coming centuries, what you hoped was forgotten may yet be your saving grace. You’d do well to have room for justice in your heart today if you want it shown to you tomorrow.”
There was a long, tense pause. Then, after a careful, cold appraisal of Serra, the Fae Queen spoke again. “Very well. I submit myself to your… justice.”
Without another word, Serra traced a circle in the air between herself and Melianne with her extended index and ring fingers. Twin trails of white light followed the gesture, hanging in the air in the shape of a perfect disc. Along a track on the outer rim, a sentence appeared in the Language of Magic: it read, Vakhshadis Santei, or ‘Curse of Recollection.’ To Alendras’s unfolding memories, the technique was reminiscent of the rune-inscribed mandalas woven from seaweed by the shamans of the Mosoleios culture to harness their species’ inner magics.
Serra closed her eyes, holding her palms against the interior of the circular template. There, pinpricks of blue and purple light appeared, glimmering in an intricate pattern: hundreds of overlapping constellations like stars made of Res, their colours ranging from the cyan of summer sky through the deep violet of flowering lavender.
Yet again, Alendras increased his estimation of the danger Serra posed. The woman was writing a code: an adaptation of a language he himself had developed in co-operation with Melianne. He had used the logic statements of this language, which he called ‘programs,’ as the basis for his most sophisticated Inventions, vastly outstripping the capabilities of even the largest clockwork logic engines. It was a hybrid technique even the greatest of the Dead had never before conceived of, for it relied on blending Fae arts and Dead technology.
Watching from within the Manse-Heart, it appeared Serra had learned Alendras’s programming language, and had improved upon it: where he would have needed to construct a control terminal and connect it to a subject just so to enact such a complex Working, Serra was doing it in her mind and channelling it through a matrix crafted of pure Res.
After a long minute, during which Alendras struggled to remain awake beneath wave after wave of exhaustion, Serra opened her eyes. The outer circle and its Old Ancient characters turned a deep indigo, and Serra made a gentle pushing motion with her hands. The disc moved through the air toward Melianne and sank into the Fae Queen’s chest.
Melianne’s regal bearing crumpled. Her shoulders shook, and down her face ran tiny lights which twinkled like stars. They fell to the ground in the form of flawless diamonds, collecting in a small pile at her feet as she wept bitterly.
“What did you do?” Eiten’s expression was still one of grief and anger, but it held the beginnings of curiosity: another reaction deeply familiar to Alendras, and one which gave him hope.
Serra took a deep, wavering breath, and let it out slowly before replying. “I gave her the experience of Merana’s final moments. I drew forth a copy of Merana’s last memories as she fell from the precipice. It was all I could do from inside the Engine. Melianne will know, intimately and for eternity, the pain her actions caused.”
Eiten’s eyes widened, and he inhaled sharply. “Give me the same curse, to remember Merana by. I beg you!”
“The memories are gone from me: I couldn’t do it again even if I wanted to.” Serra shook her head. “As much as you feel the need to punish yourself right now, you aren’t responsible for her death. She chose her own path, and you couldn’t have stopped her. If it helps, I can tell you that at the end she felt real relief. Until that moment, she’d never known how to show her feelings for you… not in a way that meant something to her.”
Eiten turned away, looking out over the vast chamber and its machinery. The fury had gone out of the man’s expression, leaving only misery and exhaustion. “It’s cold comfort.”
“I wish I could have helped, but if I’d tried to leave the Engine, the blast would’ve killed everyone.” Serra bowed her head, her shoulder-length hair falling forward as a tear collected at the tip of her short nose. “Let’s be silent for a time. Those of you who lost someone today, think of the things they would’ve liked to be remembered for.”
Alendras tried to focus his sluggish thoughts on the memory of Merana. He hadn’t known the Relic-seeker well enough to eulogize, so instead he considered what she’d meant to him over the past day. The woman had been aggressive and contentious, certainly… but even when he’d been bothered by her attitude, he’d known it was her way of protecting herself and her team.
Even as Pyke, he had been responsible in part for her group’s entrapment in the Place Aside, and then he’d led her here to the manse’s core. The analytical part of his mind told Alendras he couldn’t have known this would spell Merana’s death, but the remainder of him couldn’t help but feel culpable for her demise and for Eiten’s pain. He related to the bereft, regret-filled man, in ways which were becoming ever clearer as his memories of B’kosk and Tamelios returned: if Eiten chose the same path as B’kosk had, there would be a long road of wandering and self-blame in the man’s future.
“May their memories be a blessing for the River.” Serra’s voice was clear and solemn, carrying over the omnipresent churning of gears and thrum of belts from the machine around them.
Vino shuffled uncomfortably, and Raine grunted out a brief phrase in her people’s tongue. At some point, someone had healed the worst of the Gigant’s severe injuries.
“So… first Tamelios, then Pyke, now Alendras?” Jenna asked, pronouncing the names quite well in Alendras’s opinion. “I’m gonna need a history lesson on what name is from when.”
“We… we’ll have a great deal of time for such lessons,” Melianne said, trying and failing to muster a smile as she knelt down on Alendras’s other side. “Our love’s death and sealing have been averted, though we shall have to get him a more seemly body at our earliest convenience. Perhaps a recent corpse whose vital functions can still be restored?”
Alendras noticed
Jenna’s shudder at that suggestion, and shot Melianne an eyebrows-raised look of now is not the time! before rising to his feet. The Res Serra had given him was enough to calm the pain of his muscles and ease the creaking of his old joints, but he couldn’t deny the cost in Res of maintaining this body would soon grow untenable.
“I’ll be able to make it at least a few weeks before I have to consider the logistics of a new vessel. For now, I’m just glad to be here.”
The name carried a gentle breath of Res, and Alendras smiled wryly as his eyes drifted shut of their own accord. He could have drawn his Phylactery’s power through him to resist the command to sleep… but that, too, might have killed him. Besides, after the day he’d had, a nap sounded wonderful.
A memory. Ninety-nine cycles before the Cataclysm. The entry hall of the manse-weapon
Tamelios had been brought to one knee, his finest Inventions of might and protection shattered to pieces around him. His black blade lay sundered halfway across the entry hall, and Melianne stood helpless at the top of the stairs, encapsulated in a transparent bubble of green light which would not yield even to her craftiest arts of dispelling.