Free Furnace 5 - Execution by Alexander Gordon Smith Page A

duke or something. He was famous for his army, led them in the November Uprising against the Russian Empire in 1830, the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, and in the January Uprising twenty years later, too.’ He paused, swallowing, his eyes flitting up to the window over my head. ‘Y’ know, I’ve heard about all this stuff. We did it in history. It’s real.’
    ‘He got about a bit, didn’t he?’ I said. ‘How come he wasn’t made a king or anything?’
    ‘Hungary was still part of the Austrian Empire then. They didn’t have their own king. Besides, Alfred Furnace was a peasant. As far as we can tell, anyway. But he was certainly as powerful as one. His soldiers were feared across Europe, across the world.’
    ‘Let me guess: super fast, super strong, more animal than human.’
    ‘You got it,’ Zee said. ‘And famous for wearing black on the battlefield. But they were an elite group, never more than a handful of them.’
    ‘I don’t remember hearing his name at school, though,’ I said.
    ‘That’s because he wasn’t called Furnace, not back then. Alfred Furnace is a translation of his Hungarian name, Alfréd Kazán.’
    ‘Kazán? Sounds like a magician.’
    ‘Yeah, and people thought he was, too. Black magic and stuff. Anyway, he had this terrible reputation for bloodshed and murder on the battlefield all the way through the 1800s, and then he just disappears, vanishes into thin air. The records, what few there are, assume he died.’
    ‘But he didn’t.’
    ‘No, he didn’t. He just moved.’
    ‘Where?’ I asked, trying to stretch the cramped muscles of my legs, the wire holding me tight. ‘Here?’
    ‘No, to Austria, Vienna. Except he told the authorities he was his own grandson, Heinrich.’
    ‘Tricky,’ I said.
    ‘Yeah, you could say that,’ grinned Zee. ‘Anyway, he had connections with the university, built his own college up there. Any of this sounding familiar?’
    ‘Should it?’ I asked. Zee’s smile flashed back for a second, uncertain.
    ‘It’s like the plot of Frankenstein,’ he said. ‘Furnace got into trouble, was accused of meddling with stuff that shouldn’t be meddled with. Some sort of eugenics, they thought; selective breeding. Only it wasn’t that, it was nectar. There’s nothing specific in any of the papers or anything, just that he was pretty much forced out of the city. If you ask me, Vienna’s when he started trying to reproduce the nectar artificially, rather than just lettingpeople drink his blood or whatever. I guess he couldn’t make many soldiers by just feeding them his own nectar so he wanted to replicate it, find a way to generate it, maybe make it even more powerful.’
    I imagined how much of his own supply it would have taken to build an army. It must have been a constant drain on him.
    ‘I think that’s why he went there in the first place,’ Zee continued. ‘Because it was like the scientific capital of the world.’
    ‘So what happened next?’
    Zee shook his head.
    ‘That’s where the trail runs cold. There are dispatches that mention a Kazán during the First World War, in Germany, but they’re too vague to confirm anything. He must have been in Germany during the rise of the Nazis, though. He’s not mentioned by name in any history books, but I think Hitler and those other creeps gave Furnace the chance to work on the nectar. I think they recruited him, charged him with creating the ultimate super soldier.’
    ‘Yeah, that makes sense,’ I said, remembering what the warden had told me, what he had shown me. ‘And when they lost the war Furnace came here, changed his name from Kazán, set himself up as a businessman, opened the prison, built his tower, and carried on perfecting the nectar.’
    ‘Bingo,’ said Zee. ‘Except, of course, they don’t believe he’s three hundred years old. They’re working on the theory that the man who built the prison, the manbehind the attacks, is a distant relative of Alfréd Kazán.