The door was sealed shut. Its edges were encrusted with strange, colourful fungi which seeped into the cracks in the intricate design of carved brass covering its surface. In the light, which was fast becoming white, it looked unnaturally vibrant. Ironic, considering. The Former Baron stood before it, stroking his chin in thought as Ellis and Siren reached him.
“No luck?” Ellis asked, having seen the old man pushing at the surface a few seconds previously.
“Perhaps if we have a go?” Siren asked, trying to sound tactful.
“No, no, that would be no good,” the Former Baron said in a distant sort of voice. His mind was clearly on other things, so his two young companions waited patiently until his deliberations were over. There was silence for a minute and then, “No, we can’t go this way!” He turned on the spot and began marching back down the corridor at an incredible pace. Ellis and Siren shared a glance and then rushed to catch up.
“Why?” Ellis asked once he had drawn abreast of the crazy old inventor.
“Because the door has been sealed recently, and not just by the fungi!”
“But surely,” Siren began, sounding very confused, “that sort of growth takes centuries.”
“Not if you know the right kind of Philosophikal equations, it doesn’t! My Great Aunt Bertrude once destroyed an entire greenhouse in an afternoon with nothing more than a few clematis bulbs, a watering can and four pages of algebra.”
“Do you mean that Amy sealed it?” Ellis asked.
“Who else could have?”
“But how do you know it was sealed at all?” Siren asked, exasperated. “Wouldn’t the effect of centuries of dark, damp conditions be a much more reasonable explanation?”
“No. There were scraping marks on the floor. The door had been opened recently, then sealed again. Besides, I could feel it. You get a sense for these things when you spend as much time around hypostatick fluids as I have. That’s why we have to hurry!”
“Why?” Ellis and Siren asked in unison.
“Because, if Amy is sealing doors in our path, then she is doing something that she does not want interrupted and I am beginning to think that that cannot be a good thing. We have to find another way around and fast!”
“Amy seemed so nice,” Ellis said wistfully.
“Amy didn’t know who she was,” Siren replied, “I mean, we don’t even know what her real name is. If she’s remembered, there’s no telling what kind of person she might be.”
“But… if what she’s doing right now is something bad… I’m a part of that, aren’t I?”
“We’ll worry about that when we catch up to her, for now, perhaps you could both focus your energies more on moving and less on conversation!”
Ellis opened his mouth to reply and then thought better of it, shutting it again with an echoing snap. The Former Baron glared at him briefly out of the corner of his sunken eyes and then put on another burst of speed that had Ellis and Siren nearly running. He took a sudden left turn, leading them into another corridor, much like the main one they had been traversing, filled with puddles and fungi, but this one was also lined with doorways, some of which still had the rotten remains of doors in them and beyond could be seen the hollow remains of rooms which might once have been offices, or staterooms, or labs.
One room was almost completely filled by an elaborate arrangement of brass plates, shaped like fragments of broken mirror and curved into spirals and waves, all hanging from the ceiling like a giant chandelier and lit from above by the few lights which remained working. It went back a long way and the effect was quite eerie, as if anything could be hiding in that forest of still wires and metal. He thought he could hear a tinkling sound, like wind chimes, as they passed.
Another room was filled with an unfathomably complex clockwork mechanism which, to Ellis at least, seemed to have no particular purpose, save to go around and around in circles. The machine had been corroded and gunged up with fungus and so it was now steadily dismantling itself with each rotation of the main gear. The sounds of grinding metal and of parts flying off at high speed seemed to follow them long after they’d left the room behind.
In other rooms Ellis saw orreries and clocks, aquaria and display cases filled with glittering artefacts. He knew that Von Spektr must have been wanting to explore every single one of them, but instead he moved on with unerring focus, taking each turn as they came and leading them deeper and deeper into the maze-like complex of the Silverspire.
Eventually they came to another door, much like the first, carved in brass and covered in fungi.
“Is it sealed like the first one?” Siren asked impatiently as the Former Baron began to poke at the fruiting bodies of a few colourful mushrooms, releasing a cloud of yellow spores.
“Yes, he said at last, nodding thoughtfully, “but not as thoroughly. Amy must have been a bit more careless when she got to this door.”
“Can you open it?” Ellis asked.
“With a little bit of time, yes, I think I can.”
“Do we have a little bit of time?”
“Not really.” He leaned in towards the brass surface of the door and put his ear against it. When he took it away a few seconds later he was frowning. “I can hear machines. Whatever she’s doing, it would seem to be well underway.”
“She’s trying to break through into my world, isn’t she!” Ellis said, “You might as well just say it.”
“It’s a strong possibility, but I don’t like to jump to conclusions when it might just be easier to hop to the next bit of evidence first. It can save you from getting wet.”
Ellis frowned, not really following the image.
“Now, let me concentrate for a moment. I need to see if I can break this seal!”
Ellis stepped back into the corridor, leaving the Former Baron to do his stuff and Siren followed. They moved around the corner slightly, so that they wouldn’t be in Von Spektr’s way and then Ellis broke the silence.
“I’m in the middle of so many different plans and schemes,” he said, “it’s like… everyone wants a piece of me, just because I’m from another world and… most people don’t even know that yet. If more people find out…”
“They won’t,” Siren replied, her tone soft and sincere, “we’ll find a way to get you home and then no one will ever have to know. You’ll be safe again.”
“Will I? I’m beginning to have trouble imagining a normal life back in Larksborough now. I mean… I’ll always remember the things I’ve seen here, won’t I?”
“I hope so,” Siren said without thinking, then blushed, “the good parts, I mean.”
Ellis sighed, “This is stupid. I don’t know if I’ll ever get home again. It’s better to focus on the here and now. What are we going to do once we get through that door?”
“Confront Amy, I guess, and try to find out what she’s doing?”
“But, if she can make fungi grow out of nowhere – and bring me back from the… from the dead – how are we supposed to stop her if we have to?”
Siren fingered the hilt of one of the knives on her belt. “There’s always steel,” she said.
“There!” exclaimed the Former Baron and Ellis and Siren turned just in time to see a bright green flash, followed by a flickering of the overhead lights for a few seconds afterwards. Then the Former Baron emerged from the recess of the doorway, stepping back slowly. They stepped forward to join him and watched as the brass doorway slid open with a creak, its motion painfully slow.
“What did you do?” Ellis asked.
“I just tried a little equation of my own,” the Former Baron replied with one of his thin smiles, “you know, just a minor alteration of reality, nothing fancy.” He stretched and cracked his knuckles. “It’s been a long time since I last meddled with arithmetic.”
The steadily widening gap of doorway revealed an eerie darkness. Here and there could be seen points of green, purple or yellow light, but they were few and far between and barely illuminated their immediate surrounds, let alone the rest of the room. Shadows moved swiftly around and between them, accompanied by the chug and whirr of mechanical action. Some giant mechanism of gears and pistons, loops and pipes was working away in the darkness, filling the space between the pinpoint lights.
“Whoah!” Ellis gasped as his gaze rose steadily upwards. There were more points of light up there and more moving shadows, higher and higher than he would have thought possible.
“But this building isn’t that tall,” Siren whispered.
“Nor is it this deep,” the Former Baron pointed out. “Were you not concerned by how far you’ve walked inside?”
Ellis thought of the façade of the building he had seen before entering. Von Spektr was right; it wasn’t this big.
“It’s bending reality?” he asked as the details began to sink in.
“Yes. That’s the very purpose of the Silverspire. It’s a giant machine designed to alter the shape of space and time. Ultimately it was to bend it to the point of breaking so that we might punch through the aether and access the blue skies of your world. As you must have gathered by now, it was, essentially, successful.”
“So this is the epicentre of the destruction of this region?”
“Yes, and all because of that machine, most likely.” The Former Baron pointed into the chamber beyond the door with a long, thin, quavering finger.
“Are you scared?” Siren asked.
“Not scared, just… less confident than usual. I’ve never faced technology on quite this scale before.”
“And Amy’s in there somewhere?” Ellis asked, starting to feel the enormity of the situation himself.
“Assumedly. This is going to be like finding a ghost in a dark room full of extremely complicated and ancient machinery.”
“Not a great use of simile there, Franck,” Siren replied, trying to smile, “and that’s assuming she’s still, you know, ghostly.”
“Yes,” the Former Baron replied thoughtfully, “I have my suspicions that she’s more human than when we saw her last.” He paused. “Have I ever told you about the ghosts of the Grand Chateau Von Spektr?”
“No,” Ellis replied with caution, worried that the Former Baron was stalling.
“They weren’t so much ghosts as Hypostatick imprints, deliberately created by their owners prior to their deaths. The idea was that they might live on in a way and serve some useful function in the future of the Von Spektr family.”
“Oh, how did that work?”
“The patterns of their hypostatick energies were recorded, much in the same way that I recorded yours, but with fluid only, and pumped into a picture frame so that they might join their ancestors in the gallery.
“I have to say, it was a wonderful idea, until certain of the more ancient ‘paintings’, began to have rather dramatic ideas about how the family was being run. There was a kind of brief, ghostly coup which resulted in the death, by heart attack, of a chamber maid; a fatal accident involving a gardener and a set of secateurs, and a lot of spilled tea and biscuit crumbs. My Grandfather was in charge at the time and would not put up with such things, and so the paintings came down.”
“Are those the frames sitting in your hall now?”
“Yes. It seemed wrong to throw them away and, technically, they can still be used to summon various diverse members of my ancestry, should I ever wish to.”
“Why are you telling him this now?” Siren asked, impatiently.
“To demonstrate that there is a way to summon a ‘ghost’ – in fact, you can use it to bring forth the hypostatick energies of any being, alive or dead, providing they are nearby.”
“And?”
“Hypostatick energy glows.”
“Oh.”
“So, how do you do this?” Ellis asked, staring at the Former Baron intently now.
“There’s another equation,” he sighed, “you know, even with that monstrous thing in the room ahead of us, I really do prefer machines to mathematics.”
He held out a finger and began to draw in mid air. At first nothing happened, but then suddenly the Former Baron’s finger was glowing a faint purple colour and the trails of light it left behind as he drew lingered on, hanging in mid air, as a luminous equation. It stretched out over several lines of symbols and numbers and then the Former Baron drew a final full-stop and there was a flash of light.
The next thing Ellis knew he was feeling light headed and was staring at his hands. They were glowing, faintly, with a pale green light that was becoming annoyingly familiar. He glanced over to his companions and saw that they too were glowing, with little loops and arcs and jets of light shooting off them occasionally only to circle back and join the main aura once more. Neither of them were paying any attention to it, however, but were, instead, aghast, their gazes fixed on the room ahead.
It was no longer dark, Ellis saw, but filled with fluorescing figures, mostly about seven feet tall, with long, lizard-like tails. and heads which had, burning just above where one might expect eyes to be, those pinpoints of light.
Ellis was frozen to the spot, so it was lucky that the Former Baron was on hand to express what he could not.
“Oh,” the old man said, followed quickly by, “bugger.”
AUTHOR COMMENT: What peril have our heroes gotten into this time? I really liked writing their journey into the depths of the Silverspire. I wanted to create this place which was part Aztec temple, part steampunk factory and to mix and match some of the tropes from each. I can only hope I've been successful, but rest assured, you'll be seeing plenty more of the Silverspire in the next few episodes.
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