Free Carpe Corpus by Rachel Caine Page B

level of trust she really never wanted to have with Myrnin, but . . . there was no sign of mania in him, and he watched her with steady concentration.
    “If you don’t catch me, I’m totally killing you. You know that, right?”
    He raised a skeptical eyebrow, but didn’t dispute that. “Jump!”
    She did, squealing as she fell—and then she landed in his strong, cold arms, and at close range, his eyes were wide and dark and almost— almost —human.
    “See?” he murmured. “Not so bad as all that, was it?”
    “Yeah, it was great. You can put me down now.”
    “What? Oh. Yes.” He let her slide to the ground, and picked up the oil lamp. “This way.”
    “Where are we?” Because it looked like wide, industrial tunnels, obviously pretty old. Original construction, probably.
    “Catacombs,” he said. “Or drainage tunnels? I forget how we originally planned it. Doesn’t matter; it’s all been sealed off for ages. Mind the dead man, my dear.”
    She looked down and saw that she was standing not on some random sticks, but on bones. Bones in a tattered, ancient shirt and trousers. And there was a white skull staring at her from nearby, too. Claire screamed and jumped aside. “What the hell, Myrnin?”
    “Unwanted visitor,” he said. “It happens. Oh, don’t worry; I didn’t kill him. I didn’t have to—there are plenty of safeguards in place. Now come on, stop acting like you’ve never seen a dead man before. I told you, this is important.”
    “Who was he?”
    “What does it matter? He’s dust, child. And we are not, as yet, although at this rate we certainly may be before we get where we’re going. Come on!”
    She didn’t want to, but she wanted to stay inside the circle of the lamplight. Dark places in Morganville really were full of things that could eat you. She joined Myrnin, breathless, as he marched down an endlessly long tunnel that seemed to appear ten feet ahead and disappear ten feet behind them.
    And suddenly, the roof disappeared, and there was a cave. A big one.
    “Hold this,” Myrnin said, and passed her the lamp. She juggled it, careful to avoid hot glass and metal, and Myrnin opened a rusty cabinet on the wall of the tunnel and pulled down an enormous lever.
    The lamp became completely redundant as bright lights began to shine, snapping on one by one in a circle around the huge cavern. The beams glittered off a tangled mass of glass and metal, and as Claire blinked, things came into focus.
    “What is that?”
    “My difference engine,” Myrnin said. “The latest version, at least. I built the core of it three hundred years ago, but I’ve added to and embroidered on it over the years. Oh, I know what you’re thinking—this isn’t Bab bage’s design, that limited and stupid thing. No, this is half art, half artifice. With a good dash of genius, if I might say so.”
    It looked like a huge pipe organ, with rows and rows of thin metal plates all moving and clacking together in vertical columns. The whole thing hissed with steam. In and around that were spaghetti tangles of cables, tubes, and—in some cases—colorful duct tape. There were three huge glass squares, too thick to be monitors, and in the middle was a giant keyboard with every key the size of Claire’s entire hand. Only instead of letters on it, there were symbols. Some of them—many of them—she knew from her studies with Myrnin about alchemy. Some of them were vampire symbols. A few were just . . . blank, like maybe there’d been something on them once, but it had worn completely off.
    Myrnin patted the dirty metal flank of the beast affectionately. It let out a hiss from several holes in the tubing. “This is Ada. She’s what drives Morganville,” Myrnin said. “And I want you to learn how to use her.”
    Claire stared at it, then at him, then at the machine once again. “You’re kidding.”
    And the machine said, “No. He’s not. Unfortunately.”
    Claire had seen a lot of weird stuff since