Chapter 21 #2
Having seen this, I could now imagine the laboratory where occultism and alchemy had combined to turn a human into one of those pristine, blood-drinking people, with skin like porcelain and the gleaming eyes of a wolf.
“I didn’t understand until now how it must feel,” I whispered, letting my hand drop from my cheek. “To be of something else’s making, and be…entirely incapable of understanding why they would do it.”
Wroth knew of what I spoke. Offering a humorless smile, hardly more than a curl of the lips, he took my hand and squeezed it gently before guiding me away from the heads. “You are still you, regardless of what they may or may not have done.”
The door at the far end was not chthonium, but a plate of milky quartz, barely allowing the gleam of fulmen to shine through, and it slid soundlessly upwards into the ceiling as we approached. I almost breathed a sigh of relief to be gone from this laboratory.
Almost.
We both stared in silence at the empty walkway before us, with enormous, hollow glass cylinders lining the walls every few feet. Chthonium pipe systems curled around each one like arteries, and many of the cylinders were not empty.
With the ghostly light of the fulmen, it was impossible to know if the liquid swirling inside them was actually blue, or if my eyes were playing tricks on me.
I walked inside on numb legs, staring at the body hanging suspended in the first cylinder. A nude woman. A human woman, her legs slightly bent, her arms curled in towards her chest. Her entire body was a patchwork of color, white flesh interspersed with dark violet stains.
A rubbery tube hung from the pipe network above her, the end shoved into her open mouth. Every few seconds, bubbles spumed from her nose, swirling her white hair upwards in their wake. In the blue light, the light parts of her skin looked as pale as death.
As pale as someone kept asleep in a tube of Fae alchemy for two thousand years.
“Oh by the Light, do you think she’s still truly alive?” I couldn’t keep the quaver out of my voice. “She’s breathing. If she’s alive, we can’t leave her here.”
Wroth eyed the woman floating before us as another eddy of bubbles danced through the cylinder, then ran his gaze down the row of aquaria, some still occupied.
Others had been smashed, the shards glittering on the floor, and whatever had been inside them were now indistinguishable lumps of decayed matter.
“Possibly. Jesamin…do you really want to try to wake her?”
I met his eyes, startled that he would ask such a thing, but he elaborated.
“If she’s alive, she was put in here when the world was a very different place. She was a slave to the Fae. She probably does not speak our language. She has likely seen things we cannot understand. Would waking her now be doing her a favor?”
I tried to imagine a Fae relic creeping out, snatching me up, putting me to sleep in one of these cylinders. I tried to imagine waking to faces I didn’t recognize, one of which I might greatly fear, speaking words I couldn’t understand, in a world so far beyond me I couldn’t comprehend it.
“Yes. If she can’t handle it, then…then I suppose she can’t and I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it, but it's better to have the choice than none.” I tried to sound like I had conviction, but the cold horror of it was choking me. “I would want someone to save me.”
Wroth nodded slowly, though he didn’t look convinced. “Very well. Shall I smash it open?”
“Gods, no.” I slung my pack to the floor. “What if it kills her? Look at them.” I gestured to the desiccated lumps in the broken cylinders. “Let me test some things.”
The first thing I did was the most obvious: I ran my fingertips over the chthonium base, gritting my teeth at the oily, pitted sensation of the metal.
Nothing happened. It wasn’t until I slid around the side of the tube that I found an area of smooth metal that hummed beneath my questing fingers, but the cylinder made no response that I could see.
This close, I could see the woman’s face better, tilted down as it was; she couldn’t have been more than thirty or so in human years despite the snowy whiteness of her hair.
Her skin was flawless and unlined, her face classically beautiful.
There was a thin ring of chthonium encircling her throat, faint words inscribed on it, and my gorge rose when I realized it was a slave collar.
I leaned around the tube, nose almost to the glass, examining the crosshatching of old but tidy scars on the side of her neck, the purple stains that crept across her cheek and eyelid, and something shifted under my hand, distracting me from my study.
“Here,” I breathed, tearing my eyes away from her.
An oddly-sectioned piece of floor, spiraled like a nautilus shell and stained with old, dark flakes, had rattled under my foot at the base of the cylinder. I peeled the section aside, revealing the internal mechanisms of the Fae Artifice that could keep a human alive for several thousand years.
It was madness in miniature. Black, skeletal snakes of chthonium twined around each other, endlessly circling, protrusions like veins branching between geometric discs and tiny round nubs in rows, each prickling with fulmen.
The subaudible hum grew louder, vibrating in my teeth as I laid flat on my belly to peer down into the mechanisms.
A muscle twitched in my cheek as I examined them, pushing my waking mind to the back and letting my subconscious take over.
The energy the snake-like cords produced was an itch in my brain, but I had the definite sense that touching them would be deleterious to my health, and possibly the woman’s as well.
But the veins…black lines of chthonium, a solid acting as a liquid, feeding fulmen to the snakes…the connections were weak, on the verge of breaking.
I pulled a turnscrew from my waistcoat, and, lowering it into the hole with my hand contrasted against their Artifice, I saw for the first time what the Fae must have seen when they looked at us.
An animal, playing with sticks and stones. The turnscrew’s shape, as finely machined as any turnscrew produced by an Artificer, was no more than a crude tool against the Fae’s beautiful, machina-molded–as-flesh creations.
“Lover,” Wroth said behind me, his voice taut. “I do not wish to rush you…but they’re waiting on us.”
I realized I’d been staring for several minutes in a frozen tableau, both entranced by the complexity of the machina, and horrified that I was about to shove my primitive turnscrew into it with no idea of what would happen.
Hell with it. I would hope my intuition was correct, and if she died…well, I would be sorry for what I’d done, but at least her long purgatory would be over.
Using the very edge of the turnscrew’s blunt tip, feeling more like a stupid child than a true Artificer, I dipped into the liquid chthonium pearled at the base of the ‘veins’, and ever so gently slid along another bead of fluid towards the snakes.
The humming grew louder, higher, a piercing whine in my ear as I carefully re-established the filaments of the veins that had worn thin, some of them hardly thicker than threads, and guided the fluid chthonium into the slithering pipes.
Conduit by conduit, I reconnected the machina, barely aware of the blue light flaring with random spurts of brightness, or Wroth’s shifting uneasiness, or even the hum that made my teeth ache and grind together. The floor shuddered beneath me.
And then the snakes were flowing with fluid ease, and the hum died out, leaving my jaws clenched and sore. I sat up, carefully slid the nautilus plate back in place, and reached for the smooth patch of wall that had hummed.
There was a sense of life to it now; a machina with all function restored. I stroked my fingers upwards, but the machina did not respond; after a moment’s hesitation, I dragged them down.
A moment of silence, and then a loud gurgle filled the silence of the hall, followed by a shrieking, world-ending sound.
It blared from the base of the cylinder itself, both a screeching chorus of violins and a choir straight from the depths of hell struggling to out-scream each other.
Surely all of Liuridar heard it; I cringed and slammed my hands over my ears, imagining every relic in the city perking up, their ears twitching as they strained to pinpoint our location.
But, thank all the gods, the sound lasted no more than three seconds before abruptly cutting itself off, leaving me nearly too deafened to hear the gurgle of draining liquid.
The cylinder was rapidly emptying, the blue light flickering and dying out.
The woman slowly sank to the bottom, held upright only by the thick rubber tube in her throat.
I put my hands to the glass, glancing at Wroth in a panic, wondering if he’d need to find a way to shatter the cylinder, but as soon as the last of the liquid had drained through the holes, the glass rose.
The woman slumped sideways and I caught her, almost flinching at the iciness of her naked limbs.
Wroth helped me pull her out onto the floor, and I carefully pried at an odd, jelly-like substance sealing her lips around the air-tube.
It peeled away easily, but she did nothing as I slowly pulled the tube from her throat.
She laid there, limbs sprawled, and I realized it wasn’t just the blue light that made her appear deathly pale; she was simply the shade of a human being who might never have seen the sun in her life.
The violet patches all over her body revealed themselves to actually be port-wine stains, the deep, livid red contrasting starkly to her skin and hair.
Wroth plucked an old shirt from his pack, and as I carefully wrapped the woman in it, her hair shifted and my gaze caught on her ears.
The delicately pointed tips of her ears.
I sucked in a breath, ice pooling in my gut, my hands frozen where they held the shirt closed over her stomach. Gods, what if she was one of them?