CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
We knew what we would find long before we got there. The plume of smoke cut a black line through the sky, visible for miles. Still, we pressed on, coming to a smooth landing on the gravel road in front of the Lumiere Estate.
Flames consumed the house. As we descended the stairs from the Silverhawk, I could hear glass shattering inside, and the groan of support timbers turning into embers. Clouds of cinders blossomed from the roof, and jets of flame twisted out of the gables, like devil eyes against the curling tar shingles. We stood in a semicircle in front of the gate, watching the conflagration grow.
“So much for searching the house,” I said glumly.
“She must have known she was never coming back,” Tesla said. “Burning her bridges, and any evidence that might have convicted her. Literally.”
“Is there any hope of salvaging something?” Chesa asked. “You must have firefighting equipment on board.”
“I’m not risking my crew in there,” Skyhook answered. “No telling what sorts of surprises Evelyn left behind. All manner of nastiness in that lab.”
“Honorious is right. It would appear Evelyn sabotaged her home to keep us from finding out what she was doing. You can bet that she prepared accordingly for our return and possible salvage operation.” Tesla turned away from the blaze. “We can sift through the ashes later, but I doubt we’ll find anything.”
“It’s not a complete loss,” I said. “She brought a lot of stuff with her. Most of it is still on the ship.”
“Oh, gods!” Skyhook exclaimed. “It could be riddled with bombs! Lads! Evacuate the cargo hold!”
“But our stuff—” I started, to no avail.
At their captain’s signal, the team of Pinkertons streamed back on board. Moments later, every port and window cranked open, and piles of boxes, crates, folios, and gear tumbled down the side of the Silverhawk to land ingloriously on the gravel road. Including our kit, which flew so far it crashed into the cornfield across the way.
“Right. Greg, Bee, give me a hand retrieving that stuff,” I said. “The rest of you, see if you can help out inside. Try to prevent the Pinkertons from evicting anything fragile.”
“Little late for that,” Chesa said, as a hutch of delicate china pinwheeled clamorously to the ground.
Tesla sighed. “They can be a bit too enthusiastic,” he allowed. “Everyone on board as quickly as possible. If there are traps in that garbage, I want to be in the air before it detonates.”
“We should go through the things Evelyn left behind, in case there are clues,” Tembo said. “We need to make sense of why she would betray the Eccentrics’ confidence so readily.”
“I’m still not convinced she’s behind this,” Adelaide said. “I’ve known her my entire Gestalt-life. We’ve had tea together, hunted monsters side by side.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t feel likely.”
“She was a mother to me,” Cassius rumbled.
“Even mothers can go bad,” I said. “But you’re right. Once the Silverhawk is clear, we’ll go through the remains.” The armor stand, still holding my plate and chain, tipped out of the open cargo hatch to crash clamorously to the ground. “We’re going to need to reclaim some of that stuff anyway.”
“I’ll get a broom,” Ida said, skipping toward the Silverhawk.
It took the better part of an hour, but we found what we were looking for. I think Evelyn wanted us to find it. Why else would she have left it behind? It was like she was trying to explain herself to her former allies and friends. Still, Addie took it hard.
The evidence was contained in a single journal, written in Evelyn’s crabbed handwriting, sprinkled through with citations to her father’s notebooks and lab files, cross-referenced and dated in a cryptic classification system that made Dewey look like a paint-by-numbers coloring book. Since the lab, presumably with Claude Lumiere’s notes still inside, was currently burning enthusiastically behind us, we would never see the materials referenced. It didn’t matter.
Evelyn Lumiere had been raised to kill from a young age. Her parents had given her a very special kind of childhood, the sort of thing you might see in a montage at the beginning of a martial arts film. Weapon drills. Balance exercises. Fighting forms. An extensive codex of rules and regulations that formed her young body and mind into a weapon, with one purpose. To kill the living dead. To slay vampires.
It was as ZeeZee had implied. The Lumieres had founded the Vampire Slayer archetype in the Gestalt, with their daughter as the first student. It didn’t seem to fit with their personas, but knowing what we did about their covert dealings with the undead, and their attempts to enter the Unreal, it made more sense.
What readily became apparent in her notes was that Evelyn knew nothing of those dealings. That night when the vampires burst through the veil, she was in her room, distracted from the ritual going on below. She heard the racket and came downstairs to carnage. In the pages of the notebook, she described descending the stairs to witness a vampire dressed in white and crimson (doubtlessly Jakub Everlasting) consume her mother, while four others fed on the tattered remains of her father. The rest of the guests lay dead, scattered about the ballroom like broken dolls. She went into a rage and, tapping into her years of training, drove the vampires back into their realm. Too young to pursue, it wasn’t until Knight Watch, and Esther MacRae, got involved that she was able to follow through on her horrible revenge. She thought that task complete when she staked her mother, a decade later.
Evelyn was wrong.
Years later, as she went through her father’s notes, she came across the Story of the Night, the same book that I had found among her things in her father’s basement laboratory. It was no wonder she had distracted us from that discovery at the time. Through it, she learned of her father’s dealings with the vampires, and his original plans for her training. She was meant to aid him steal the secret of immortality from the undead, and help Claude Lumiere achieve his dream of defeating death. The journal tipped into madness after that. Evelyn became obsessed with rescuing her parents, continuing on with Claude’s research and Cecilia’s spiritual experiments. Her mother was the first refugee from death, drawn back by the soul cage described in Claude’s designs. With Cecilia’s help, Evelyn was able to complete her father’s experiments.
The result was the Immortality Scarab. With it, she could harness the power of death to bring life. By consuming the life essence of other creatures, Evelyn was able to strengthen her mother’s hold on the mortal plane. And if they could find souls powerful enough, they might be able to rescue her father. But it would take truly ancient spirits to pierce death and empower the engine her father had created, not just to rescue him from death, but to gift him eternal life. Evelyn knew where to find such souls. Over the years she had figured out some vampires still lived, hidden from her by some trick of the Unreal.
“We led her right to them,” I said, numb with shock. “And now she’s off to bring her crazy dad back to life.”
“Why is this our problem?” Addie asked. “Vampires truly are monsters, and Evelyn has always been kind to us. So she wants to reunite with her father. Let her, I say.”
“You don’t understand.” Tesla tossed Claude’s schematic onto the desk. “Such a ritual would destabilize the entire Gestalt. It would turn our timeline inside out, and consume it. The Unreal would spread through our world.”
“It’s not so bad,” I said. “You’d get used to magic.”
“It would not be your Unreal, but his.” Tesla stabbed a finger at the schematic. “A nightmare realm conceived by a man who murdered a house full of dinner guests, who dealt with vampires, who turned his own daughter into a murderer. Just to appease his ego. Just so he, and he alone, could escape death.”
“Ah. Well, when you put it that way . . .”
“Come. Burn all this. I want no trace of it left,” Tesla said. He turned on his heel and marched toward the Silverhawk. “Claude Lumiere was my friend. But I did not know the darkness in his heart. I will not see it return to this world, or the next.”
The raging inferno that had once been the Lumiere Estate faded into the distance. Both teams, in various states of undress, sat gloomily in the observation lounge, sipping period-appropriate drinks and staring into the middle distance. Eventually, I cleared my throat.
“It was the Story of the Night, wasn’t it?” I asked. Tesla looked at me curiously. “The Story of the Night. I found it when we visited Evelyn’s lab the first time through. Evelyn was pretty anxious to hide it away. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but there was something in there about a caged woman. That was all about Cecilia, wasn’t it?”
“Caged woman?” Gregory asked. “Are you sure, Rast?”
“Well, caged dame. Same thing, right?”
“That book was in French, John,” Chesa said. “Your French is terrible.”
“Are you sure that’s what it said, Sir John?” Tembo asked. “Caged Dame?”
“I . . . yeah, I think so. More or less.”
“Cage d’âme,” Tesla said patiently. “It means soul cage. It’s a device for capturing the essence of a living being after they have died. Usually in the immediate aftermath, though in some cases it can be used to find and attract wandering spirits with unfinished business in the mortal world.”
“Oh. Well.” I shrugged. “I was close.”
“That doesn’t sound very steampunk,” Bethany said. “Are you sure it’s even part of the Gestalt?”
“An artifact of the spiritualism movement,” Adelaide answered. “Séances and skeptics and all that.”
“So it did have something to do with Cecilia Lumiere!” I said triumphantly. “She was into all that stuff, right? Is that how Evelyn summoned her ghost?”
“Why didn’t I recognize this in the first place? It must be tied in with Claude’s dealings with the vampires,” Tesla said. “If he was trying to achieve immortality, and Evelyn continued his research, then the cage could be part of it.”
“But what does all this have to do with the scarabs? The fragments we showed Evelyn weren’t in the junk she left here, and they wouldn’t have survived that fire,” Adelaide said. “So the only remaining example is the one that was on Zofia. Speaking of which . . .”
The room turned to the corner, where Ida sat cross-legged on the floor, tinkering with the small brass contraption. It lay in carefully arranged pieces on the ground in front of her. Ida was dual-wielding sprocket wrenches, with a complicated pair of goggles pulled down over her eyes, the lenses twitching and telescoping as she muttered to herself.
“Find anything useful, Ida?” Tesla asked sweetly. When the mechanic didn’t respond, he walked over and tapped her on her curly head. “Ida, dear? Are you with us?”
“Hm? Oh, yes. Sorry. Just a fascinating little bug.” She pushed the goggles up onto her forehead, then sat there blinking for a few seconds while her eyes readjusted. “You’re all so tiny!”
“Ida!” Tesla barked. “What have you learned about the scarab?”
“It’s simple enough. I mean, mind-numbingly complex, and probably breaking a few laws of quantum, thermo-, and electrodynamics. And I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s got a little bit of the Unreal lurking in its gears. But, you know. Simple.” Ida gestured at the pieces. “As you suspected, it absorbs souls and stores the extracted psychoactualization in these vials. What Evelyn does with it after that?” She shrugged. “You’d have to ask her.”
“I would very much like to do that,” Tesla said. “The trouble is finding her.”
“I imagine that thing would show up on the Anomaly Actuator,” I said. “If we wanted to take the time to head back to Mundane Actual and try to calibrate it.”
“Landing the Silverhawk anywhere near HQ would cause catastrophic timeline instability, for both of us,” Tembo said. “Mr. Tesla, how do the Eccentrics find and detect anomalies?”
“I invented an ingenious little device called the aethervox.” Nik went to a cupboard tucked into a corner of the room and opened the doors. Something that looked very much like a television with the world’s most complicated antenna lurked inside. “It serves both as a kind of mystical radar as well as a communication device. We have stations all over the world that broadcast and receive signals. With it, we’re able to triangulate threats as well as communicate with other dwellers in the Gestalt. Better than that fool Edison and his telephone, don’t you think?”
“Does it get cartoons?” Chesa asked. Nik blinked at her in confusion. She waved her hand dismissively. “Never mind. Just miss my Miyazaki.”
“Could we use that to track these scarabs?” Tembo asked.
“There are hundreds of signals at any one time.” Tesla flipped a few switches, and the screen lit up with amber dots. “With no clarity on what each one means. We would need to visit each anomaly individually to see if Evelyn and her scarabs were somehow involved.”
“We could always split up to—”
“No!” I interrupted Addie before we could get too far down that route. “No splitting up, no leaving the healers behind, none of that!”
“It’s nice to feel wanted,” Matthew mused. “Makes a guy feel special, ya know?”
“I could calibrate the aethervox to a particular frequency,” Ida said. “Given how strange these devices are, it might give us a signal we could use.”
“Really?” Tesla asked. “Do you think that would work?”
“Better than wandering the skies, hoping to bump into her,” Ida said. “Especially considering that Evelyn isn’t a bird or something. You know, that you’d regularly expect to encounter in the sky.”
“Right. Get started on that. I’ll provide what technical assistance I can.” Tesla turned to face the members of Knight Watch. “I’m going to have to confine the six of you to quarters while we do this. The less interference there is, the better chance we have of succeeding.”
“Sounds great. I could use the rest,” Chesa said, standing up and stretching. “It’ll give us a chance to refill our magical batteries, too.”
“I’m afraid I must insist on leaving those horrible amulet things switched off. At least until we have a signal,” Tesla said.
“And I’d rather not crash the Silverhawk,” Skyhook added. “Given your history of breaking my ship.”
“Fine. But we’re not going to be much use once we get there.” I stood up, draining my goblet of warm mead. “Not without some time topping off.”
“We will figure that out later. For now, to your rooms!” Tesla said, shooing us away.
Reluctantly, we retreated to our hay-choked cargo bay. The Pinkertons had come through during the earlier panic. Our things were all over the place, though they had added a new layer of insulating straw and a fresh supply of bedbugs. I went to my cot and started to unbuckle my armor. The stench coming off my linens was substantial, even for the fourteenth century.
“Do they have baths on this thing?” I asked. “All I need is a wooden tub and some soap. And about four hours with a wire brush.”
“What you need is a dip in boiling lye, John.” Chesa wrinkled her nose before disappearing into her cubicle. She and Bethany shared the far corner, though I had yet to see Bee rest. She was the kind of girl who didn’t seem to sleep. Ah, to be that young again. “So what do you think about this soul cage thing?”
“Sounds familiar. Sounds like a lich, doesn’t it?” I shouted over the top of the curtain dividing us. “Isn’t that what they do with their souls? Put them in a cage?”
“Liches are distinctly not a steampunk archetype,” Tembo said. “They’re barely an Unreal archetype.”
“It’s in the Monster Manual, it’s in the Unreal,” Gregory said. “Except werewolves, for some reason.”
“And vampires,” I said. “Until recently.” I hung my armor on its rack and sat on my cot. “Hasn’t been easy. These things take forever to fill.” I lifted the amulet Tembo had given me out from under my gambeson. The hammered iron was cold against my skin. “Not having access to the domain is rough. I feel like I’m starving to death. That last fight absolutely emptied me out, and I suspect it’s going to be a while before I recover.”
“Hopefully we’ve got a bit of a break, while they figure out that voxxie device,” Chesa said. “Do you really think Lumiere is behind this whole thing?”
“Hard to argue with the facts,” Bethany said. “Evelyn has the most to gain from building her own domain. She’s trying to rescue her parents, or something along those lines. I get it. We all do crazy things for family.”
“It’s just . . . she didn’t seem the evil mastermind type,” I said. “We’re putting a lot of faith in a vampire.”
“At the very least, we need to find her and learn why she ran, and what she knows about this soul cage thing.” I leaned back on the cot, stretching my sore back. “There’s something both Evelyn and the vampire aren’t telling us.”
“Ain’t that always the way?” Chesa called. I heard the shimmer of elven chain mail, and tried not to think about my ex-girlfriend, and what lay beneath that silvered armor. “Good night, everyone.”
“Night!” echoed around the room. I nestled into my cot, and its aura of mildewing hay and filth, and tried to not feel too lonely.
Something immediately burrowed out of the straw and started nibbling on my shoulder.
“At least we’ve got each other, mattress-louse,” I whispered, before drifting off to a deep and dreamless sleep.