Line of Succession - Part 2

[LongTimeLurker]

(Continued from part 1)

Standing in the disheveled bedchamber next to the headless body of the automaton known as Autumn Lovelace, Roland faced the three armed men and offered a nervous, "Not entirely certain where to begin..."

"Start with you connection to the Lovelace family," Lord Wakefield said in a calm voice, turning Autumn's decapitated head to inspect once more.

"Not by blood... coincidence more than anything, really..." Roland was relieved to see this seemed to please the Lord, or at least did not upset him. "I was actually trying to find a Spring Lovelace when I encountered umm... her. Autumn Lovelace." He gestured at the body in her purple skirts and lavender corset. Her mechanical nature was betrayed by the piping protruding from her neck and the exposed panel on her back displaying dials clockwork beneath, steam seeping weakly from inside. He could still hear some internal mechanisms running, but they were faint. Roland wondered if she had finally broken, or if she were only feigning her currently immobile state.

"She claimed to be a Lovelace?" Lord Wakefield asked. "And this 'Spring' was a mechanical entity as well?"

Roland nodded 'yes' to both questions; he entertained no delusion that this man had Spring's best interests in mind, but he also was convinced that a clumsy lie would earn him a slow and painful death.

The nobleman held up Autumn's head in one hand. "And how did this come to pass?"

"Ahhh... she got into a state of imbalance and just...pop!" Roland made an accompanying hand gesture.

The Lord sighed. "Mr. Finch, please help this man with his presently inadequate explanation..."

The large man approached with a menacing swagger. Roland backed away, hands outstretched, saying, "H-half a moment! If you want to find Spring Lovelace, I know how to reach her estate! And I guarantee that she can answer all of your questions far better than I, who, as I have tried to explain, am really only involved by coincidence..."

Mr Finch had backed Roland into a corner when Lord Wakefield said, "Mr. Finch, do you take this man at his word?"

He nodded. "At present, m'Lord, I do."

Lord Wakefield addressed Roland once more. "Very well. Bring us to this 'Lovelace' estate... And should there be any trickery or forestalling-"

"There won't be, I assure you!" Roland promised, struck with a pang of guilt over how earnest this sounded. "I just need to get... her body to her carriage. If you should follow the driver, he'll bring you straight there."

Lord Wakefield gestured to Autumn's body. "Then let us not delay her return any further. Bring her to her carriage."

Roland closed the open panel on her upper back, trying to do the same with the smaller opening just above her backside, but the corset lace interfered. Sensing the Lord's impatience, he slid one arm under he legs, the other behind her back, and lifted. She wasn't light, but he felt he could manage her.

"The cellar door, Caleb," the lord instructed his oafish servant. Roland considered asking for her head, but worried such a request might cause the Lord to question his intentions; and so Roland left the hidden room carrying only her body.

The streets were still mercifully empty and Autumn's carriage was not far from where they had left it. Roland approached cautiously, worried at how the driver would react to seeing his mistress headless - but the driver only sat there, unflinching.

"Sir," Roland began, "If you would-"

The carriage door swung open on its own, and Roland hefted Autumn inside, climbing in after her.

"Driver, take us to-"

The reigns snapped and the carriage lurched into the street. Roland looked at Autumn's indecent and damaged body, hoping she was still with him. After a moment, he asked quietly, "Autumn, are you..."

Her leg lashed out blindly, the boot narrowly missing his leg and striking his seat with a hollow wooden thump.

"What was that-"

Her boot kicked again, this time striking his shin. "Ow! I'll have you know, I'm in this just as much as you are! Not to mention we would not be in this predicament if you had not tried to kill me."

She flattened one palm while the other pantomimed writing upon it with a pen.

"You want your pen and notebook! Of course... ah... looks like I... didn't... manage to collect your... ow! Look, stop kicking me!"

She folded her arms, slumping against her seat.

"Now if you're done with your abuse, I'd like to try and come up with a plan. You said I need to get to your workshop, correct? Is that still where I need to go?"

She bobbed forward, her breasts jostling in her corset, and he took it as a nod of confirmation.

"You were trying to warn me about something? Are there other... otto... ottomotto..."

She bobbed again.

"I mean other than your sisters... Less 'friendly' than you?"

Another bob.

"Can't I just explain to them-"

She shook her finger.

"So what should I do?"

Spreading her palm, she sped an alternating index and middle fingers along the surface as if they were legs.

"Run? That's all well and good, but if we should be caught..."

She sat for a moment as if in thought, then pantomimed firing a pistol.

"And where would I find a pistol?"

She began a series of complex gestures, which Roland proved incapable of understanding. Finally, after trembling with frustration, Autumn's body demonstrated firing the pistol again, then crossed her forearms and swept them apart, as if to negate the suggestion.

"Very well, no pistols... Is there just an 'off' switch I can flip-"

She leaned forward, blindly feeling with her hands. When she found his bicep, she ran her hand along his arm to take his wrist, then guided it to the breast of her corset. She shuddered slightly, her clockwork beginning to raise to a tinny pitch.

"I'm to... fondle them?"

She put her hand behind his head and pulled him forward, his face stopping him just short of where her head would have been. She dipped backwards, as if the two were locked in a passionate embrace, pulling him with her. Suddenly she began to twitch and fell to her seat. Roland worried she had broken down, but when she sat up once more he realized it had been part of the act.

"So I kiss them and... they just fall apart?"

She bobbed in affirmation.

"You lot seem to react very poorly to affection."

She made a dismissive gesture.

After a moment, he added. "The workshop - Spring is there?"

She bobbed.

"And she will know what to do?"

There was a pause. Finally, she made another bob.

From the window of his carriage, Roland watched the city outskirts yield to farmland and countryside.

---

Speeding through an untamed wood, the succession of trees going by the carriage window suddenly broke when they passed under a stone arch, then into the packed-earth procession rounding a large and gaudy fountain of trumpeting angels above a ring of mermaids. Beyond was an ostentatious manor house, a jarring collection of different styles of architecture with turrets and towers jutting at seemingly random intervals. The carriage stopped before the manor's main entrance, marble stairs leading to an iron-banded wooden door without knob or handle.

Roland moved to get up, but Autumn rose before him - the moment the carriage door swung open she hurried down the steps, gesturing urgently for him to follow. As he emerged from the carriage, he could already hear the sound of approaching hoofbeats.

Taking Autumn's hand, he ran to the front door, helping guide her up the steps. The door swung open before them automatically, revealing an opulent foyer filled with strange clocks and brass curios. Standing in the center of the marble floor was the brass statue of a maidservant in a scandalously shortened dress, her bare calves plainly visible beneath its polished hem. Her face held the classic beauty of a Grecian sculpture and featured the letter 'V' inexplicably stamped upon her brow.

"Stop!" he heard Lord Wakefield shout, and such was the command in his voice that Roland found himself freeze involuntarily. Still holding his hand, Autumn dragged him into the house and the door closed behind them. Autumn began to feel about the back of the door, running her hand over several complicated mechanisms in a frantic search.

The statue of the maidservant suddenly began to whirr noisily, as her bowed head looked up, fixing her shining brass eyes upon Roland. Two notes chimed from her, and those same notes were echoed throughout the house. After an initial halting lurch forward, she began to walk more naturally, her steps demure and wholly unthreatening.

"I trust that she's not what you were warned me about," Roland said with a smirk as she drew closer. He became slightly more concerned when her hand reached out to grab a bronze candlestick from one of the tables covered in bric-a-brac.

"Autumn?" he asked, backing away from the advancing maid. Suddenly the door swung open, pushing the still searching Autumn aside as Caleb charged in shoulder-first, evidently expecting more resistance from the heavy door. He plowed into the brass maid, bringing both of them down in a noisy clatter. As Caleb pushed himself off of her, she swung the candlestick into his head with a distressingly loud wet thump. He fell back on to the maid, his eyes wide and vacant.

Abandoning the door, Autumn began moving at a half-run down the hall. Roland followed, glancing over his shoulder to see the maid shrug Caleb's body off of her and sit bolt upright. The report of pistol sounded and her head jerked back. She refocused, her mouth in an 'o' of surprise, a single high-pitched note ringing in rapid staccato; a great portion of her head surrounding her temple had been shorn away, revealing spinning gears and a glowing filament crackling with energy. Her head recoiled again from the impact of a second shot and then burst apart in a flash of electricity, the chiming faltering then stopping entirely.

He turned his attention back to Autumn, and saw additional brass maidservants begin to filter in from adjoining and rooms, each identical save for distinct lettering emblazoned upon their heads. Roland and Autumn were moving quickly enough to avoid them despite Autumn navigating without sight. Behind him, Roland could hear Mr. Finch and Lord Wakefield were apparently embroiled in a melee with the converging automatons.

Stopping suddenly within a dark-carpeted study, Autumn turned and ran toward a door, her hands scrabbling for the knob. Roland could no longer see the pursuing Lord and his servant, but the sound of combat indicated they were not too far behind. Roland closed the door he and Autumn came through and was barricading it with furniture when he heard the whir of clockwork. Turning, he saw a maid 'awaken' from across the chamber and began her approach.

Finding the knob and turning a key just beneath it, Autumn flung the door open and lunged through, only to collide with another maid standing immediately on the other side. The two fell, rolling down the stone spiral steps with the maid clanging noisily on each impact. Roland went to follow, but the freshly awakened maid marked with 'XIX' seemed to guess his intent and moved to bar his path.

"I'm trying to help your mistress!" he insisted. "The men out there, they're the ones trying to hurt you!' But the mechanical chambermaid only emitted the same two notes as the first one had and continued in a wary but inexorable approach. As Roland maneuvered to try for a path to the door, she lunged, arms reaching for his neck. He ducked aside, but she caught his wrist. As he spun to escape, he ended up twirling them both in an odd sort of dance. The chambermaid paused in confusion with her outstretched arm clutching his, and Roland hoped he could trust Autumn's previous instructions.

In a dance step practiced upon many a girl at the tavern, he lifted their arms and spun the chambermaid back to him, her twirling ending abruptly with her metallic chest pressed against him. Her mechanical eyes blinked with a clicking sound, a few high pitched chimes sounding as if at random. He drew his other arm around her waist and leaned into her. Though her focus returned, she seemed to look at him in confusion, her chimes sounding hesitantly as her brass lips mutely parted.

He kissed her with as much passion as he could muster, and her clockwork immediately began to rattle and grind. She writhed unsteadily beneath him as her hand lost its grip on his wrist, her chimes playing an uneven scale of ascending notes. She lost her balance as her legs began to kick and he caught her bodily as she squirmed uncertainly, alternately trying to push him away and draw him closer whilst her chimes grew increasingly dissonant. With a metallic springing sound, he felt her grow lighter as a thud resounded beneath them, followed by another. He pulled away to see both her legs had fallen to the ground, her lips still searching for his as her arms sprang from her shoulders with a discordant twang. After a final convulsion, her mouth hanging open in a silent moan, her body emitted a hiss of steam and froze. A moment later, she broke down completely, her internal mechanisms falling apart along with sections of her body. He gently set her head amidst the pile of mechanical scrap, muttering, "React very poorly indeed," before taking the staircase down.

Toward the bottom of the long and winding stair, he came upon a brass arm, then a foot, then a steady trail of bits and pieces until he found what remained of the maid Autumn had collided with, a heap entangled with Autumn's headless form. Autumn herself now twitched amidst an unholy cacophony of damaged machinery.

"Autumn!" he called, but there was nothing he could read in her movement that seemed like acknowledgement. Roland looked ahead to her presumed destination and saw a room full of benches and devices - the workshop. He pulled Autumn's body from the wreckage of the chambermaid and drug her through the doorway, closing it behind them but sighting no locking mechanism.

He turned to survey the chamber - the instruments surrounding him, festooned with gauges, tubes, and odd protrusions, defied any understanding. Liquids of strange consistencies and coloring were held in innumerable glass containers, some travelling through spiraling tubes, others percolating over flames of an unnatural hue.

Most notable was the inert form of Winter Lovelace lying on a bench upon the back wall, staring blankly at the ceiling. She was dressed as he last saw her, nothing more than an embroidered underbust corset hooked to stockings covering her shapely legs, helping to conceal the doll-like ball-joints at her knees. It seemed her head had been re-attached, her exposed neck showing the re-connected piping and sutured tubing. She had been cleaned up, though residue still surrounded the seams around her hips where fluid had erupted from before.

On the floor beneath her, he could just make out a shock of coppery red hair emerging from behind a table. He rushed around it to find the Lady in Green, Spring Lovelace, lying motionless on her side. Her face was frozen in a stunned expression, emerald green eyes staring in shock, red lips open mid-gasp. Exposed panels covered her naked form, providing a detailed view of her internal mechanics but offering no insight to Roland as to why she was now inanimate.

He crouched beside her, looking at the numerous dials on her back, but seeing nothing so simple as an 'on' switch. Suddenly, a force slammed into his abdomen and he crumpled to the floor, rapidly followed by another blow that rolled him on to his back. He looked up to see Winter Lovelace, the haughty contempt unmistakable on her pale, cold, and beautiful face.

"We meet again, farmboy," she said softly as she bore her stockinged foot down upon his windpipe.

(Concluded in part 3)

[DukeNukem 2417]

EXCELLENT! Definitely looking forward to more.

[csoloist]

This is awesome!

[DollSpace]

I'm enjoying this story a lot, too! Good work!