Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

“What are you doing ?” cried Estelle. “Why must you ruin everything? Don’t I deserve this, don’t I deserve this after what my father and my husband put me through?”

Clef was almost in the keyhole now.

“I will give you,” Sancia breathed, “ exactly what you deserve.”

She shoved Clef into the golden lock, and turned the key.

She was sure it would work. She was so, so sure she’d be victorious.

But then Clef started screaming.

It all happened in a blistering flash of a second.

Sancia turned the key, and she heard his voice, shouting:

Then his voice devolved into wordless, mindless shrieks of pain and fear.

She understood immediately. Clef had warned her about this for some time, after all — he’d said one day he’d decay, and fall apart, and every time she used him, he decayed a little more.

And opening Valeria’s box — that must have eroded the last bit of his strength.

Sancia screamed in despair and terror — and what she did next was purely instinctive: she tried to tamper with Clef, just as she had so many other scrived tools. But this took focus — and she’d never really focused on him before. Clef had always just been there, a presence within her, a voice in the back of her mind. Yet when she touched that presence, when she engaged with it, now at this most delicate moment, it opened and, and blossomed, and…

The world blurred.

Sancia stood in the darkness, staring forward, breathing hard. She didn’t understand what had just happened. Mere seconds ago she’d been in the Mountain, Estelle was about to finish the ritual…and now Sancia was standing in what appeared to be a huge cavern, staring at a blank stone wall.

She looked around. The cavern wall was behind her, and the stone wall before her, its face dark and gleaming. Watery white light came from above, as if there were a gap somewhere in the top of the cavern.

“What in hell?” she said quietly.

A voice echoed through the cavern — Clef’s voice: “ I suppose ,” he said, “ that this is a consequence of our bond. ”

She looked around, startled. The huge cavern seemed empty and abandoned.

“Clef?” she called.

His voice echoed back to her: “ Come and find me. It might take some walking. I’m at the center .”

She started walking along the wall. For a long while it seemed blank and solid, but then, finally, she came to a hole. The stone there appeared to have aged and rotted away, and she was able to push through. On the other side was a short gap, and then another wall.

She walked along this wall as well, pacing its long, smooth surface, until she came to another rotting hole in it. The stone was soft and crumbly, and much of the wall had collapsed. She was able to pass through easily — and on the other side of this, of course, was another wall.

And on the other side of that, another wall. And another. And another.

Until she came to the center.

She crawled through yet another hole in the wall, and she saw that at the center sat a machine. A huge machine. An impossibly complicated machine, a stupefying array of wheels and gears and chains and spokes, arranged in a tower. It was all stopped, all still and silent, yet she understood that it would only be still for a moment — soon it would begin to whirl and clatter and clank again.

Then there was a cough, and she saw — there was a gap below the device.

Sancia knelt, peered in, and gasped.

There was a man trapped in the gap, lying on his back beneath the machine — which had mutilated him beyond description. His torso and legs and arms were shot through with shafts and spokes, his rib cage was torn by chains and metal teeth, his feet were twisted and tattered from chains and springs…

And yet, he lived. He wheezed and choked, and when he heard Sancia’s gasp, he looked up at her and — to her astonishment — he smiled.

“Ah,” he said weakly. “Sancia. It’s nice to finally talk to you in person.” He looked around. “In a way, I mean.”

She stared at him. The man was unfamiliar — upper-middle-aged, pale skin with white hair — but she knew that voice. The man spoke with the voice of Clef. “Who…” she said. “Who are…”

“I’m not the key,” said the man, sighing. “Just like the wind is not the windmill, I’m not Clef. I’m merely the thing that powers the device.” He glanced around at the wheels and teeth around him. “Do you see?”

She thought she understood. “You…you were the man they killed to make Clef,” she said. “They ripped you from your body and put you in the key.” She looked at the vast amalgam of wheels and teeth around them. “And…this is it? This is the key? This is Clef?”

He smiled again. “It’s a…representation. You’re doing what people have always been so talented at doing — reinterpreting what is before you in understandable terms.”

“So…we’re inside Clef. Right now.”

“In a way, yes. I’d have put out wine and cakes for you, but…” He glanced down at himself. “Just didn’t get around to it, I’m afraid.”

“How?” asked Sancia. “How the hell is this happening?”

“Simple. You’ve been changed. Now you can do many of the same things that I can do, kid,” said the man. “I’ve lived in your thoughts for a long time. I’ve been inside your mind. So, now that you have the tools, it’s perfectly possible for you to come into mine.”

She looked at him, and sensed he wasn’t telling her something. She looked back at the hole in the wall behind her, and thought. “And it’s because you’re falling apart, aren’t you,” she said. “I can get in because the walls are breaking down. Because you’re dying.”

The smile faded from his face. “The key’s breaking down, yes. The box…just engaging with such a thing is destroying whatever strength the key had left.”

“So we can’t open it,” she said quietly.

“Not like this,” he said. “No.”

“But we…we have to do something!” said Sancia. “Can we do something?”

“We have some time,” said the man. “Time in here’s not the same as time out there, and I know…I’ve been imprisoned within this machine since time immemorial.”

“Can Valeria stop the ritual?” asked Sancia. “Even though it’s already started?”

“Valeria? Is that the name she gave you?” asked the man. “Interesting. She’s had many over the years. And that one…” His face filled with a curious horror. “I hope,” he said softly, “that it’s just coincidence.”

“She said she could stop this madness,” said Sancia. “Can she?”

“She can,” said the man, still shaken. “She can stop many things. I should know. I was one of the people who built her.”

Sancia stared at him. She realized there was an obvious question she had not asked yet. “What’s your name?” she asked. “It’s not Clef, is it?”

“I…I was once a man named Claviedes,” he said, smiling wearily. “But you can call me Clef, if you like. It’s an old nickname of mine. I once made many things. I made the box you wish to open, for instance, as well as what lies within. Long, long ago.”