The War Clock
Inquisitor de Costa stomped bits of mud and heretic off his boot and walked into the tavern. The rain had not done much to improve a disposition already put foul by the uncooperative nature of the last three establishments he had visited. For this one’s sake, the local color had best be a shade of helpful blue. The alternative was a palette of excommunication purple with highlights of burned at the stake. Inquisitor de Costa’s job gave him an ever increasing appreciation for painting.
The inn he found himself in was poorly lit and filled with a smattered selection of Milan’s lower class, save for one. De Costa’s boots reverberated off the grit sanded floorboards as he hobbled towards an unoccupied table. The brass fittings of his clockwork leg rattled with every conspicuously heavy step made. The flesh and bruised stump he called a thigh ached for relief. Travel had been taxing, but God’s Work demanded fortitude of body and spirit.
With a baritone thud, the Inquisitor’s bulk settled into a wooden chair. His claw of a hand slapped a rosary wrapped sword down on the table in front of him.
“Wine,” he growled.
Behind him, he could hear the nervous shuffle of the owner’s wife seeing to his demands. As she set down the bottle and grubby cup in front of him, de Costa pulled her closer. He whispered words to her. Words like “thinking machine” and “heresy”. Then he whispered a name. She tried to pull away and her mouth tightened in the devil’s defiance. Her eyes saw the righteousness of his cause, glanced toward the table near the door, and the occupant sitting at it.
With a fluid motion, the Inquisitor shoved the woman to the ground and twisted as the thrown dagger passed through the space they had occupied. The betrayed man in the corner swore blasphemies at his failed aim and lurched towards the door. De Costa slapped at a lever at his thigh. Springs which had patiently held their contained energy in check, shouted life into the gears and wires connected to them. Together they gave the Inquisitor godspeed across the distance. The tip of his rapier plunged into his target’s chest and pinned them to the wall like a still wriggling insect.
The would be assassin squirmed silently and bled as de Costa’s grip closed around his neck. It felt wrong. He wore some type of bulky and hard collar around his throat, hidden by the folds of cloak and coat. The assassin’s mouth opened wide as the artificer voice box dispelled the mystery with a shrieking whistle that forced the Inquisitor to clasp his hands over his ears in pain.
De Costa’s vision started to blur at the unholy tone. He drew a dagger, judged the distance below the collar, and hoped his memory of “A Comprehensive Codex of Anatomies” held true as he plunged the blade neck-ward. The ungodly sound transformed into a hoarse wheeze through the new breathing hole the Inquisitor had fashioned.
What moment of satisfaction the man of God may have indulged in was slowly crushed over the rumble and shudder that shook the boards holding the tavern together. Whispers of revelation in de Costa’s mind broached the idea that the shrieking was not a mode of attack. The tavern door and its surrounding woodwork disintegrated into a shower of splinters and wreckage as the assassin’s accomplice lumbered out of the pouring rain and into candlelight’s glow.
The brass golem was anathema to the Church’s dogma. “Only God may create a mind,” was the Papal decree. Despite this, heretics still tried to create mechanisms that produced thought. Spring, slot, and cog that gave birth to a homoculus of will. The more malicious of these blasphemies were placed inside war-clocks and used to sew fear and lay siege. This one seemed intent on only destroying this tavern in general, and Inquisitor de Costa in particular.
The war-clock ticked and tocked as its mallet-like arm was winched back up by springs and counter-weights. It’s finely ground optics clicked through various sizes of lenses before settling on the one that gave it a clear picture of his target. De Costa heard the release lever pop free and rolled backwards into a lump of dark swaddling fabrics. His ears rang as the war-clock hammered the floor where he had been. It left a crater of crushed wood and kicked up a small cloud of dirt and grit into the air.
As the siege limb was ratcheted back into place, de Costa squinted through the fallout at the crime against God. His eye twitched and focused on a singular point. He whispered a prayer filled with more rote than pathos before slapping several levers on his person. He started to count.
Potential energies became kinetic and launched the Inquisitor at the war-clock. As the bulk of his body hit the abomination’s barrel chest, his legs locked around it like whore that had been paid in advance. The wrappings around his left arm tore away, exposing the brass and ivory of his arm as he raised it up into air. The artificial arm punched into the neck of the war-clock and met with a sudden stop against the hardened shell.
“Three”, said de Costa.
The hiss of metal on metal followed a thunder crack as the foot long blade extended from de Costa’s arm into the war-clock. The tip of it poked through the monster’s back and dripped with a foul ichor and alchemy as the dissonant chorus of severed cables stuttered somewhere deep inside of it.
Inquisitor de Costa pulled his fist out and dismounted the war-clock. It stayed frozen where it stood, as if imitating the other tavern patrons who were still unsure of what had just unfolded before him. De Costa ignored them, and hobbled towards the assassin who was still pinned to the wall. He twisted the rapier’s blade and the bug squirmed.
“Now, you will speak to me of your friends,” said de Costa, and found himself unbothered that the man was mute.
Copyright 2007, JJ Kahrs.