Chapter 4 #2
I made my way to the main square, where a spring bubbled within a pool surrounded by glimmering granite stones, and found the only thing that was wholly out of place.
It sat on the stones of the square, looking like nothing so much as a metallic pair of blackened lungs, each lobe fused together.
What appeared to be a ridged trachea pointed upright, flaring out at the edges of the opening.
While I knew that it was not truly a piece of human anatomy, nor even biological, the overall form was so organic in line and structure that it was impossible not to think of some poor, jara root-smoking fool having his chest cut open and his sooty lungs ripped out.
The metal was intensely black and overlaid with faint iridescence, and hollow crystal tubes, each no thicker than a string, emerged from the trachea, bent at a profusion of angles.
A sigh escaped me. I sent a fruitless prayer to the ancestors that it wasn’t so, knowing they’d ignore it, and leaned in close.
The scent was like being kicked in the face; inoffensive in itself, but the memories of that place…were better left buried.
And yet here it was, in broad daylight, the same unnerving scent from the crate in the drying shed.
The tang of certain deep-earth minerals, of ancient dust and primordial rivers, the faintest coppery flavor of the terrible trees that grew in the deepest dark beneath the crust of the world.
I knelt, staring at the black lungs, this affront to all that lived.
It should not be here, and yet it was. And intermingled with the scent of that dark place was another familiar scent. A fresher one, from recent skin oils.
I thought that this was Kajarin’s knife in my back, finally slipping home.
I would need the Artificer. A sanguimancer or two. Men unafraid of what nested in the dark corners of the world.
Some men would not venture there for all the gold in the world, nor handfuls of jewels. Some would come for the glory of it, or the thrill of facing the forbidden, knowing the odds were against them.
Of those who went Below, many might not return. I would not order, only ask.
What would the Artificer want? She had a noble title, gold, jewels. She was doubtless already arranged to be married off to some foppish prettyboy. I could offer her a patronage…but she likely had patrons aplenty.
With a rumbling growl in my chest, I strode back to the gates. Perhaps she would give me the clue herself, and I could hold out all her hopes and dreams in a clawed hand…only if she descended Below with me.
The knights, the Artificer and her guardian, and Bram were all staring at me.
“I’ve gotten what I needed. Bram, you may look it over at will. The knights will seal the gates when we’re done. Fel Arron, come with me.”
She glanced at her man-at-arms, and dismounted, following swiftly.
I led her back to the square, and heard her draw in a sharp breath as her eyes landed on the Artifice.
“My gods,” she whispered, pacing around it. She practically ripped off the velvet cloak and threw it aside, squatting down next to the chthonium lungs. “It’s twice the size of the artifacts in the Collegium. I’ve never seen so much chthonium in one place. Have you touched it?”
“No.”
Fel Arron nodded, pushing her spectacles up her nose as she leaned closer. She pulled a small, palm-length tool from her waistcoat—a thin iron awl with a wickedly sharp tip, and a wooden grip well-polished from use.
She inserted the awl into one of the crystal pipes, gently swirled it around, and removed it. The awl tip now glistened with oily moisture.
“Bram!” Fel Arron stood, shouting for my bloodwitch like she had the right.
But there he was, ducking out of a wheelwright’s house, his own hands full of glass tubes, swabs, and a bloody cloth.
“Oh, now that is disconcerting,” he murmured, leaning close to fel Arron with a glance at the Artifice. Like a magician, he tucked away his tools in the blink of an eye and held out the bloodied square of muslin. “Wipe it on here.”
Fel Arron did so, the two of them locked in their cozy little world of fascination. I crossed my arms, aware my tail was lashing with annoyance.
Perhaps she did have a price, and I could offer her my bloodwitch. He always did have an eye for pretty girls.
Bram folded the cloth where she had wiped the oil, closing his eyes and murmuring under his breath. Thin skeins of blood flowed from his pricked fingertips, weaving into the fabric.
His face went pale, sweat standing out in beads on his forehead. When he opened his eyes, he looked straight at me.
“Unusual, and certainly dangerous,” he said quietly. “There are components that are, ah…familiar from particular places.” And he pointed down at the ground, while the Artificer’s back was to him.
Fel Arron had crouched over the device again while he spoke.
She poked at another crystal tube, leaning over the device without touching it.
“There’s a reservoir beneath these tubes, down in those chambers,” she whispered, poking deeper with the awl.
“I see some of the oil remaining. You know what it reminds me of? A lady’s perfume bottle…
ah, up here is a dispersal mechanism…by the fucking Light, it essentially is a perfume bottle. And look…”
She held up a hand to Bram, and he gave her a clean muslin cloth. She wiped one of the lungs, frowned at the cloth, then got up and hurried over to the nearest house.
Another wipe at the glass window, and she leaned in close, holding her spectacles to her nose as she stared at the muslin, then the glass itself.
“There’s a fine sheen of oil.” She turned to stare at me, brown eyes magnified so hugely she seemed to be all eyes.
“You can just see the droplets clinging to the glass if you get close enough. That device contained a reservoir of this mixture, and created a fine spray of particulates, distributing it through those pipes. Someone adapted this with pieces of human Artifice, ensuring an even distribution in all directions.” She turned in place, looking around.
“It’s in the dead center of this village. ”
The oilcloth blanket…if the children had cowered beneath it, as children are wont to do when monsters appear, they may have been protected from the alchemy by the impermeable barrier, while the spray had mixed with the air and crept through open doors and chimneys, even cracks in the walls.
And they had been surrounded by cold iron. The smith’s yard had been the most fortunate bastion in the village.
“Any idea what these particular components do?” I asked Bram.
He looked at the cloth, and frowned. “Not precisely, but…judging from the lack of signs of violence…the fact that everyone seems to have risen from their beds, or stopped what they were doing in the midst of it, I’d have to imagine some sort of mental effect, rather than physical.
And whatever it is, it loses efficacy within a day.
We’ve all been breathing in the remainder of these particulates since we entered Lonmire, and we’re unaffected. ”
And of course, the moment he said ‘unaffected’, fel Arron stuck her awl in her pocket and reached out to pick up the device.
She folded the lobes together and they locked into place with a nearly silent click. Cupped in her hands, it resembled a tear drop of light-sucking darkness with the trachea emerging like a swan’s neck. She hummed to herself, tilting the device as she studied it.
Both Bram and I recoiled in shock when she stuck out her tongue and pressed the very tip of it to one of the lobes.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I snarled.
Fel Arron ignored me. “I do believe I taste thornapple,” she mused, and then ran her finger down the side of one lung. The device snapped open, accompanied by a dry hissing sound from the hollow pipes in the trachea.
“As far as the Artificer’s Guild understands, many pieces of chthonium Artifice respond to touch,” fel Arron said. “Someone laid this here, and all they had to do was stroke it with a finger to activate the device.”
She snapped it closed again. “This was retrieved from Below, and recently. There’s no doubt about it—I could taste it on the chthonium.
Beyond that, this was not something taken from an Artificer’s collection.
Nobody possesses anything like it, and whoever made the modifications was clearly a Master Artificer. ”
I gazed at her. Nobody was a true expert on Fae Artifice, nor their occultism.
It was simply impossible to understand what our progenitors had done with their magic and machina, the purposes behind their strange devices.
Magus Olwyn, Bane’s bloodwitch and a renowned sanguimancer, had researched their artifacts for a lifetime, and even she remained utterly confounded by many of the things left behind.
But someone known to me had gone into the dark, and had figured out enough to know that this simple, strangely anatomical Artifice would be enough to make two hundred people disappear like a candle flame in a storm.
For what purpose?
My eyes moved to the Artifice. “Bram…we’re going Below.”
He exhaled, wiping sweat from his forehead. “I was afraid of that.”
And what could I offer fel Arron to entice her into the depths with me?
It was an ungodly place, filled with Fae-bred relics and their mysterious machina, an awful death lurking around every corner.
I required a Master Artificer immediately.
I didn’t have a week to wait for some old man to venture from Argent, let alone find a way to carry his old bones into the abyss without risking his life even further.
I needed someone young and healthy, who was willing to risk it all, and had a better understanding of their machina than many of us who had lived there before. Someone bold and determined enough to face untold dangers.