Kell's Legend

bastard.”
    “Why so?”
    “You have played me like a jaralga hand. I must help you. I must help end this atrocity.”
    “Your father’s atrocity,” corrected Vashell.
    “Yes,” she said, face ashen, voice like the tomb.
    Anukis walked down long corridors of stone. She walked down long tunnels of metal. She became disorientated by it all; by the directions, the elevations, the dips and curves and banks, the smells of hot oil and cold metal. In weakness, she resigned herself. She was a puppet now, a creature to be controlled by Vashell. He had taken away her gifts, taken away her special gifts. She felt hollow. Abused. In pain. But more…she felt less than vachine, less than human, a limbo creature of neither one world or the next. She was a shadow; a shadow, mocked by shadows. Tears welled within her, but she would not let them come. No, she thought. I will be strong. Despite everything, despite my weakness, despite my abuse, I will be strong. I need my strength. I will need it as I hunt down my…father.
    “Good girl,” soothed Vashell, misunderstanding her compliance, and keeping her leash tight in his gloved fist. Anukis did not struggle, did not pull, did not fight her taming.
    She smiled inwardly, although her face was stone. She was beyond the displaying of hatred. And when she killed him, when she massacred Vashell, as she knew, coldly, deep down in her breast and heart and soul that she would, it would be a long and painful death. It would be an absolution. A penance. An act of purifying like nothing the Engineers had before witnessed.
    They walked, boots padding.
    “Where are we going?” she asked, eventually.
    “You will see.”
    Gradually, the stone and metal walls started to show signs of the Engineers; symbols replaced numbers, and decorations became evident as the wall design became not just more opulent, but more instructive. Anukis found herself staring at the designs on the wall, the artwork, the very shape of the stones. Many were fashioned into toothed cogs, gears of stone, and the whole corridor began to twist with design as the stone gave way to metal, gave way to brass and gold, laced with silver-quartz mortar. Slowly, the walls changed, became more than walls, became machines, mechanisms, clockwork, and Anukis recognised that this was no longer a corridor, but a living breathing working machine and the Engineer’s Palace was more than just a building: it was a live thing, with a pulse of quartz and a heart of gold.
    “Stop.”
    Vashell held something, what looked like a tiny circle of bone, up to a mechanism beside a blank metal door. There came several hisses, of oiled metal on metal, as the object in his hand slid out pins andintegrated with the machine. The portal opened, but in the manner of nothing Anukis had ever seen; it was a series of curves, oiled and gleaming, which curled around one another, twisted like coils as the door didn’t just open, it unpeeled.
    They stepped through, into a working engine.
    The room was crammed with a giant mechanism of clockwork, a machine made up of thousands and thousands of smaller machines. Brass and gold gleamed everywhere. Cogs turned, integrated, shafts spun, steam hissed from tiny nozzles, brass pistons beat vertically, horizontally, diagonally, and everywhere Anukis looked there were a hundred movements, of rockers and cams, valves and pistons, and she shivered for it reminded her of the clockwork she had watched inserted into babies…only on a much, much larger scale; a vast scale. A terrible scale.
    Vashell led her forward, through a natural tunnel amidst the heart of the vast machine which stretched above them for as far as the eye could see, away into darkness. She could smell hot oil, and the sweet narcoleptic essence of blood-oil. And another smell…a metallic undertone, acidic, insectile, the metal perfume of a million moving parts.
    Vashell’s boots stamped to a halt, muffled against the brass floor, and Anukis looked up, blinking in the poor golden light. There was a simple metal bench, and behind it sat a woman. Her hands toyed with a complex mechanism, which moved and spun and gyrated and morphed, even as her hands moved endlessly around and within the machine. It was like watching a doctor performing high-speed surgeryinside an organism, a living, beating, functioning organism. Anu looked to the woman’s face. It was perfect and distorted at the same time. She seemed to wear a brass mask, which glittered