The front doors are hanging open and a single lantern burns somewhere inside. Something is not quite right here. The estate is not large, but the nearest neighbor is several hundred yards away. Perhaps someone out there heard you ring the gate-bell, or perhaps not. But the front door should not be open.
You almost stumble over a lump of metal at your feet. A two-headed canine lying on its side. A lean body of iron and bronze covered in fuzzy, elastic skin. Both its necks have been broken, and the inner workings of its guts have been torn out. A scattered mess of cogs and gears litters the foyer.
You walk cautiously toward the dim light, already knowing what you will find. Ahead lies the parlor where the Keymaker keeps his bookshelves. You were here twelve years ago for a party honoring his fourteenth decade of service. You remember his great easy chair, where he sat and entertained his guests with stories of his youth. Now you slip into that curtained room and see him sitting in the same chair, dressed in a satin night-robe. The lantern flickers unsteadily on the table beside him. He is headless, his body reclining on the cushioned velvet, gloved hands resting on his lap. His head lies a few feet away, fractured porcelain cheek against the burgundy carpet. Scattered bits of copper and wire spill across his chest and lap. Once again fear steals your ability to move.
The Keymaker is dead.
You press your ear to his breast, but you hear no mechanized whirring, no clicking of cogs or sighing springs. The lantern oil burns low; this happened hours ago. You know his brain has died inside that severed skull. He is gone.
You stumble backwards until you fall into the soft embrace of a couch.
The Keymaker was not a true Beatific…he did not inherit his title…he worked to earn it. He was a laborer, basically. He had no fortune or noble lineage. But he was a man of honor. And he was the only man who could save your life.
A noise breaks the silence of the dead man’s study. Something heavy, moving on the terrace. No, in the foyer. You glance around for a weapon, an exit, something, anything…an ancient cutlass hangs on the wall, blade eaten by rust. You pull it down and brandish it, fists wrapped around the hilt. You have no idea how to fight with blade or pistol.
The sound moves nearer. Heavy footsteps. Now the hissing of steam through a vent.
You remember the sound of the Clatterpox following you, and sure enough he stands in the doorway of the parlor. A terrible thing of corroded iron, leaking pistons, purple vapors, and swiveling joints. He stares at you with his flat gray opticals. His mouth is a horizontal slit, dividing round chin from oval head. He sighs at you…no, it’s the sound of hot air leaking from his heart-furnace. The grill of his chest emits orange light where the anthracite burns hot.
“Honore,” he says, voice flat like the ringing of tin. “We have something you want.”
Now you recognize the weapon he carries in his left hand.
It is your walking stick with the bronze toad head.
“Who are you?” You wave the useless cutlass at the Clatterpox like some protective talisman. But you know it offers no protection.
“My name is Flux.”
“You’re with the Doxie.”
“Yes.”
“You assaulted me and stole the key to my heart.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
The Clatterpox shrugs its rusted shoulders. Something pings inside its whirring guts.
“Because you have wealth. We need it.”
“Extortion…the device of cowards.” Your words sound brave. But terror swims in your chest cavity, runs along your plastic skin like spilled oil.
“That may be, but we have your brass key. We want a hundred-thousand brilliants. Bring them to the Well of Bones at sunrise. Or we will drop your key in the well and you will never find it. You’ll wind down. Your brain will rot and die.”
You consider this. Your ancestral fortune is vast. You won’t miss a hundred thousand brilliants. Besides, there are no other options.
“You…you killed the Keymaker.”
“Of course,” says the Clatterpox. “Don’t be late.” He thumps across the foyer and out into the courtyard, then beyond the gate and down the road into the Rusted Zone.
You lay the ancient sword down at the Keymaker’s feet. There is no time to mourn for him. The sun will rise in less than two hours.
You run along the winding avenues of the Good Hills, ignoring the stone domiciles of your fellow Beatifics. Rarely do any lights glow in the oval windows at this rude hour. You dash north, heading toward your manor house, and the fractured moon rises above the palace of the Potentates at the top of the great hill. Its crumbling walls and crenellated towers are older than the Urbille itself, and large enough to house a second city, which according to rumor, it does. The Potentates live inside its walls of mossy stone, and not even Beatifics are allowed to sully its precincts with their presence. Once per year the Potentates emerge for the Parade of Iniquities, carried by clockwork horses through the streets of the Urbille, wrapped in their dark robes and chains of gold, their bulbous heads veiled, the dark shadows of their opticals scanning the populace in silent judgment. They are terribly tall, the Potentates, hence the immensity of their stone citadel. Rumors speak also of the labyrinth below that towering fortress…a dungeon into which only the most evil and unrepentant of lawbreakers are cast. You imagine the Doxie and her murderous Clatterpox cast into that dark maze, pursued by terrible ancient things.
The Honore Estate lies three miles from the outer wall of the great palace. You reach it an hour before sunrise and race through your front doors toward the sealed portal that guards the lower vaults. Once the house was full of servants, semi-organic toadlings imported from stabilized vacuities. They kept the manse from disintegrating and the cobwebs from accumulating. Now, many years after Siormah wound down and left you, your outer garden is a hideous collection of weeds and vine. Your walls are clammy and the stone crumbles a bit more each year. You often sit here, in the heart of your inherited power, and contemplate the transitory nature of things. At times you can almost feel the pillars and the stone slabs of your walls decaying slowly into blackened sand. Stone is no more permanent than metal. You realized this long ago. Your stone mansion will one day collapse, as will all the Beatific dwellings, and eventually the stone palace itself will tumble down upon the bloated skulls of the Potentates. Will anyone still be alive when that day comes?
At the bottom of the spiral stair you speak the Word of Lineage and the round vault door swings open. Inside a hung lantern lights itself automatically and a world of clashing colors fills the chamber. The floor is hidden under pile after pile of brilliants, precious stones in all the shades of ruby, amber, emerald, topaz, sapphire, violet, opal, and diamond. Here is the great fortune that your ancestors built. And on the four walls of this chamber, emerging from the gray stone in bas-relief, are the faces of those ancestors.
Your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, and a dozen more, going back a thousand years to the last Organic Age. Their opticals open and stare at you with flame-bright lenses. Somehow, as you wade into the room and begin scooping brilliants into an iron chest, their stone lips move and they speak in whispering voices. You try to ignore them, you know their cruel wisdom. You’ve long passed the days when you would come down here for advice. You learned eventually that your ancestors were just as ignorant of the world as you. Their accumulation of wealth and title was their only virtue.
“What are you doing, René?” asks the stone face of your father.
“You fool!” seethes your grandfather’s visage. “Wasting our wealth again!”
“I need this…all of it,” you say, not bothering to meet their radiant opticals. “Leave me alone.”