Agatha H and the Voice of the Castle

Tarvek looked up while dropping into a squat.

“…me!”

And suddenly, there was Gil, also squatting, his grinning face centimeters from Tarvek’s own. He tapped Tarvek’s forehead with his forefinger. Tarvek went tumbling over backwards.

Gil rose to his feet and smiled down at him. “And that’s four. So now that we’ve got that all settled—”

Tarvek reached up and grabbed hold of Gil’s arm. “Forget finesse,” he growled, his own voice finally rising into the tones of the Spark. “I’ll just pound you, after all, like the worm you are!”

Suddenly, Gil was flying through the air. He twisted and his feet smacked into the wall. “That was surprising,” he admitted. He then launched himself back and sent Tarvek sprawling. “But then, I shouldn’t really be surprised, should I? You always were an underhanded fake.”

Tarvek’s foot connected with Gil’s jaw. He wrapped the cable that connected them around Gil’s neck. “Oh, and I suppose wallowing in the gutters of Paris was your idea of authenticity?” he snarled with a nasty grin. “Sooo Bohemian.”

Gil spun himself free. His fist barely missed Tarvek’s nose. “I had my reasons,” he roared.

“Well, sure!” Tarvek had to leap to avoid the leg sweep Gil aimed at him. “All your lowlife friends were there!” he roared back.

They collapsed, panting and glaring.

“Snitch,” Tarvek huffed.

“Sneak,” Gil wheezed back.

They rose to their knees and feebly tried to attack again.

“Libertine!” Tarvek growled weakly.

“Fop!” Gil shot back.

Tarvek’s head thudded to the floor. “I…I’d heard you could fight…I don’t feel so good…”

Gil tried to sneer, but realized that he lacked the strength to curl his lip. “You…you’re…pretty good…for a…a spoiled aristo…but this is…”

Suddenly, their chest devices were hooting urgently. Red lights flashed.

Tarvek looked worried. “Uh-oh…”

Gil poked weakly at the dials. “Maybe this wasn’t…um…the best plan we ever…”

The Castle had apparently been following their every move. “Plan?” it asked suspiciously. “What plan?”

“My plan!” Agatha shouted. She eyed Gil and Tarvek. “Or, at least, a small, inelegant, poorly thought-out part of it.”

Tarvek looked contrite. “Sorry.”

“I think we overdid it a bit,” mumbled Gil.

“Maybe just a bit, but it worked,” Agatha said.

She looked back to Snaug, who stood beside a new device, its belts spinning and coils glowing. Snaug gave her a thumbs-up signal.

She handed Tarvek a chest device similar to the ones he and Gil wore. “Here. Hook this up for all three of us.”

“NO!” the Castle screamed, “I told you! I forbid it!” The scream was broken into mechanical stutters, rising and falling in volume.

“Listen to you!” Agatha fumed. “You’re falling apart!”

“I see I must. Remove the problem. At the source!” the Castle sputtered. The instability in the voice was getting worse.

“That doesn’t sound good…” Tarvek began…

“Such. A pity…” it mourned.

There was a shudder in the stones around them. Gil grabbed Tarvek and rolled them both aside, just as a ceiling block crashed to the ground.

“They really are…” The Castle sent another stone dropping toward them as they dodged furiously,

“So entertaining…but ultimately…” A bolt of energy struck the ground as Tarvek grabbed Gil and leapt aside. “…they are replaceable.”

The Castle’s voice had deteriorated to a broken, echoing whisper. It sounded like three Castles, whose speech was overlapping slightly.

“NO!” Agatha screamed, as she threw a switch on the new machine. “They are not replaceable!” She threw a second lever. “But you—you are!”

There was a roar of electrical discharge. The Castle gave a ghastly, drawn-out shriek, shook to its deepest foundations, then abruptly cut off into silence.

_______________

⁸⁰ Just how Sparks are able to warp the laws of time and motion (among others) has never been successfully analyzed. People who try to carefully watch them report suffering a sort of cognitive dissonance where they simply cannot remember what happened even though it happened right in front of them. These, as it turns out, are the lucky ones, as most people who get too close to a Spark who is happily building something tend to wake up and realize that they have become components.

⁸¹ Herr Tyldon Üglemaach of Belarus could never quite believe, even right up until the very end, that not everyone liked molasses as much as he did.

⁸² Empire records show that the battle against the Black Mist Raiders, which military historians have called “The most dangerous game of chess in history,” took over three years and led to the death of almost a hundred of the Empire’s Intelligence officers. The scene of their final battle, the shadow-town secretly built by Klaus to lure Teufel in for their final battle, East Zagreb, remains uninhabitable to this day.