The Dire King (Jackaby #4)(56)
“Up here,” Serif whispered from above us. Jackaby and I clambered up on the swaying scaffolding to reach her. A thick pipe emerged from the brickwork where she stood. It ran up the wall several meters and reentered the building near the domed roof. The stones had clearly been knocked out to make room for the addition, and several of them were cracked and falling apart. There was space enough for someone very thin to squeeze through between the metal and the wall.
Serif plunged through the gap sword-first. Her lithe frame caught at the hips, though, and a cracked brick the size of my head began to slip loose. I grabbed for it before it could fall and crash down the scaffolding. It was lighter than I expected.
“What sort of stone is this?” I asked Jackaby. “It’s like lifting a stale loaf of bread! Here, we can make the hole a little larger if we—” But the moment I pulled the brick away from the wall it wrenched my arms downward and smashed into the rickety platform. The scaffolding rocked perilously for several seconds.
“That would be the coherence charm,” said Jackaby. “It’s designed to prevent the building from collapsing by nullifying the material’s gravitational burdens. Outside of the charm’s range, gravity still exists.”
We widened the gap, taking care to set the rest of the stones down as gently as we could on the scaffolding, and then pressed our way into the building.
The keep was four stories tall. The floorboards on each level had been almost entirely knocked out to make room for the metal girders and myriad pipes and cables winding through the building. We found ourselves on what was left of the second-story landing.
On the ground level, just below us, a pair of rumbling generators sat against the wall. In the center of the floor, away from the cascade of coiling cables, stood three identical metal frames. Each was about eight feet tall, but they looked distinctly like empty coffins stood on end—albeit coffins constructed by an emotionally troubled metalsmith.
I looked up. Right ahead of us was suspended a curious contraption, hanging from a huge articulated metal arm. Its design was not unlike that of an enormous microscope: a brass canister as big as a bathtub with three smaller cylinders affixed to the bottom. Instead of lenses, each of these was capped with something halfway between a lightning rod and the nozzle of a fireman’s hose. All three were attached to the larger canister by a series of interlocking cogs and joints, as though each could be finely adjusted. At present, they were aimed directly at the metal coffin-like frames below.
“My word,” Jackaby breathed.
“What do you suppose it does?” I asked, but then I realized Jackaby was not looking at the brass device. I followed his eyes up. The landing above housed some sort of platform, although I could not make out what was on it from where we stood. Higher still, fabricated out of gleaming copper and burnished bronze, unfurled a mechanical marvel unlike anything I had ever seen.
It was twenty feet across, its framework butting against the walls around it on every side. It looked like a glorious rose made of living metal, every petal a polished disc, constantly circling in a pattern of inscrutable complexity. The discs on the rim glowed faintly, like an iron just pulled from the fire, and those in the very center were almost too bright to look at directly. It was beautiful, it was brilliant, and it was trying very hard to destroy the world.
Shadows danced in the dark tower as a pulsing beam of warm, golden light issued from the whirring discs. Sparkles of white light twinkled in the golden rays, moving upward, drawn in toward the center of the mechanical rose by the inscrutable forces of the machine.
Where the rippling light illuminated the wall, the tower shredded, stones ripping apart like weathered linen. Emerald light burst through the gaps, and through these I could see not the forests of the Annwyn, but a surprisingly pale sky and a simple country church. It made my insides feel strange—not only because it did not belong in this alien countryside, but because it belonged to a different horizon altogether. The spires of the church stood at a crooked angle, jutting off to the left, the trees beyond it doing the same.
Gears clicked and cogs spun, and the beautiful machine swiveled, its glowing light sliding down along the wall. As soon as the rippling golden beam passed, the rends between the two dimensions began to seal again. The stones knit together, leaving a few chips and spiderweb cracks as the only trace that they had been ruptured moments before. In the light of the pivoting machine, new rips began to form farther down.
“It’s healing itself,” said Jackaby. “The veil is healing itself faster than they can tear it apart. The machine still isn’t powerful enough!”
“No machine is powerful enough to breach the veil.” Serif scowled. She crept along the creaking floorboards until she had reached the edge of our broken landing. The newest split in the veil was only a few feet up from where she stood. Through it, I could see a stained glass window. The glass depicted the Blessed Virgin Mary, upside down, in a mosaic of cheery blues. It felt very out of place inside the grim tower. “This cannot be. The veil is the most powerful force on either of our worlds. This . . . this cannot be real.” She stood on her toes and reached up toward the stained glass window with the tips of her fingers.
That’s when everything went wrong.
The moment the wavering light touched Serif’s hand, she shuddered. Jackaby leapt forward before I could see what was happening. Serif turned her head limply toward us just as her eyes rolled back in her head and her legs went limp. If Jackaby had been a moment slower, she would have tumbled over the edge and to the floor below us. He caught her with both hands and pulled her away from the ledge.