The Architect's Explanation

If people saw me, they would not see the man represented in the alabaster statues. They would not see, perhaps, what they imagined their Creator to look like.
They would see a man; plain and simple.

Ophelia carried Nataniel over to a lounge chair at one side of the small room, resting his head on a soft pillow. He appeared to be muttering words; strange, incoherent and meaningless.

Delerium,she thought, fearful. This is gripping him far quickly than I thought it would.
The Architect’s room was surprisingly small. It was circular, and every piece of furniture was altered to suit it. His bookshelves had an angle about them so that they could stand up against the wall, a small water feature against another wall was curved to suit the contours of the wall. Everything that sat against the wall was altered, except for the lounge Nataniel now lay upon, and the table in the middle of the room—though the table was circular. Candles filled the room, covering every spare space, sitting in alcoves, lining the windows to avoid the infiltration of fiends.

“Tell me,” she said, “how long does he have before he turns into a fiend.”

As if they had heard her, the monstrosities climbing the tower outside roared and hissed and called. Her head snapped in the direction of the open balcony, and she caught sight of the second tower over the wall of the Tyndibar Well, with its fire burning brightly.

“Not long,” Castoro replied coldly. “An hour, if that. But this is what I need to explain.”

“Why?” she asked. “What?”

He smiled arrogantly, laughing. “Well, if you are going to be my wife and bear my child, you ought to know my secrets.”

Ophelia found herself speechless, letting in a sudden gasp of air. She looked about the room, confused. She felt sickness well up within her. Not just an abhorrent feeling, or an unwell sense, but the acrid taste of bile as it rose up.

“I’m sorry? Did I hear you right?”

“I’m judging by your expression, that yes, you did.”

“What? No! No! I can’t do that. I’m only twenty! It would be wrong…in more ways than one.”

“Just hear me out,” Castoro said, raising one hand in a signal for silence. “I will explain everything you need to know. Just hear me out.”

“I will hear you out,” she retorted, “when you tell me the truth and the whole truth. What’s happening to Nataniel?”

Castoro nodded in understanding. “Don’t ever say I’m not merciful.” He glanced quickly over to the small, flowing water feature at one side of the room. He wandered slowly over to it, taking a mug from the table, to fill it up. He returned and held the cup to Nataniel’s lips.
“Drink,” he said. There was some resistance, but he eventually managed to force it down his throat. “You’ll feel better.”

Nataniel ultimately swallowed it all, the colour returning slowly to his face, the darkness of his markings becoming lighter, as if they were moving deeper below the skin. The hair receded some, but there was still some on the surface covering one arm. “Thank you,” he murmured.

“What is that?” Ophelia asked incredulously.

“In time,” he said, putting the mug aside. “For now, I will tell you what’s happening to poor young Nataniel here.”

He took a seat near Ophelia, crossing one leg over the other. He was close now, the side of his leg touching hers. It didn’t feel right. She could almost foresee coming events, and so she quickly shifted across the seat away from the Architect. Clearly being locked within a tower for so long meant that one had no notion of personal space.

Or morality,she added inwardly, as she forced down another sickening wave.

“Now as I’m sure you realise, Nataniel was Blessed as a child.”

“Of course,” she said. “The markings on his face tell me that.”

“Excellent. I don’t need to explain that bit. Well,” he sighed, “a Blessed wouldn’t be as good a word to describe the boy as the word ‘contractee’ would be. You see, when we first discovered the Well, my brother and I—I suppose I can explain that later.”
“No, I understand,” she said.
“Ah, yes.” He paused. “What did you say your surname was?”
“I didn’t,” she said, “but it’s Blackwell.”
It seemed like a lamp had been ignited behind his eyes. “Ah, of course. Your mother…” He trailed off in thought for a time, but pulled himself back to reality. “When my brother and I first discovered the Well, we knew there were qualities in it we didn’t quite understand. Both he and I have been Blessed, but with no contract to bind us to. We weren’t trustful of each other when we first built this city, so whenever we made agreements, we bound them in people, using the waters of the Well to write these contracts in. Obligaturgy, we called it. Neither Castoro nor Pollock trusted each other, so every little thing was put into an Obligaturgical agreement. People were given gifts for becoming a contractee, and we were obliged to keep these contracts; but nevertheless, there were complications.

“The first instance of a fiend happened in the Blue Guards. A man by the name of Eustance was under the contract that stated that brothers shall have an equal share of the city. Of course, when the measurments were made, just to check, it was realised that Castore had a few feet more space than Pollror. Minimal, but ultimately disastrous. I kept this a secret, for fear of the contract becoming null and void. You see, a contract set into a person is almost sentient itself. For it to be null and void, both parties must be aware of the complication. In this case, my brother did his own measurements after a tip from within my own people. The best way to put it is that the contract has been twisted in some way, so by extension, the person imbued with this contract becomes twisted too. In this case, they become a fiend. They’ll wake up one morning with a hearthfly, and the moment they shun it away, they’ll begin their descent into beasthood. You see, the hearthfly is their heart and soul personified into the creatures. In order to minimise this, I created a positive air about the hearthflies, so that few would dismiss them so quickly. Perhaps I could stall the Curse.”

Ophelia let out a long sigh. “So whatever Nataniel’s contract was, it’s been broken.”

“I know the exact contract too.” He paused. “Well I suppose I can tell you. His contract was made between I and a lady named Harriet.”

It was like the ground had opened up and swallowed her. She seemed to fall, helplessly for miles, until she crashed back into the chair, shaken and shocked. Now she truly felt ill.

“She agreed to me, thirteen years ago when she was fourteen, that she would carry my child. She would set up a fake relationship with a man, and when it appeared she’d fallen pregnant, she would retreat into my tower, leaving the man and her life behind.”

“So why couldn’t you just take her in and get her pregnant within the tower, rather than breaking a man’s heart?” she asked, thinking of Faulkner, of the way he had looked dead himself after Harriet had been killed.

“Because I cannot give forth a seed to birth a child. It is a side-effect of my…Blessing. When the couple are in bed together, I am there in presence. I will the child to be like me, to grow like me, but it will well and truly be the child of the father and mother. There is only so much a man can do, you see. I inseminate vicariously, rather than directly. It’s a rather tricky process, but one which I have learnt.

“So when this woman died quite recently…”

You mean when you murdered her,Ophelia thought.

“…the contract was broken. The contract within Nataniel, to be precise. I didn’t even realise he had been imprisoned until quite recently.”

“But there has to be something we can do to stop this. Something to…save him.”

He shook his head, but he showed no emotion. He was cold. Careless. “I wish there was,” he said. “But there isn’t. There are a number of different contracts we put into people. A few were concrete contracts—agreements on matters happening at the time. Nataniel’s, however, is a precautionary contract. Something done to avoid any failures in action or agreement. I knew that Harriet was in some part, a very moral person. If she knew that other’s lives were on the line, she wouldn’t fail completing what had to be done.

“So when she died, the contract was broken, and Nataniel began his descent.”

“But he never shunned a hearthfly away,” she yelled. “Did you?”

Nataniel looked much better than before, though still very shaken from the curse gripping him. She didn’t need a reply, though, to know his answer. She could see it in his hopeless expression, and in the tears now rolling down the poor boy’s cheeks.

No!

“There is nothing we can do,” Castoro said coldly.

“But there has to be something!” Ophelia retorted. “There has to be a way to revoke the contract…or break it. He can’t turn into a monster. Give him more of whatever that was you gave him!” She paused, suddenly feeling very stupid. “That water feature there. That’s water from the Tyndibar Well isn’t it.”

“It is,” he nodded.

“Well what is it doing here? The Well has dried up!”

“Our Well has dried,” Castoro said, “but not my brothers. I have this pumped into my room, so that I may drink from it and keep my own Curse at bay It keeps my magic powerful, so that I may shield my citizens from what lies beyond the wall. I’m sure you noticed that I have the same markings as Nataniel. I, however, haven’t rejected my hearthfly. Actually, I’m yet to meet my hearthfly. Had Nataniel not shunned his hearthfly, we would be able to save him. I could submerge him in the waters, and his contract would be revoked. But it has been too long since his hearthfly has left him. If, perhaps, it had only been an hour or so, and his hearthfly was still near him, we might be able to save him. But his hearthfly is gone; long gone. We can’t restore his heart and soul to his body. We have only two options. We can execute him to save him from suffering, or we can let him become a monster. Both are abhorrent, I assure you, even for me. But we have no other choice.” There was no conviction in his words, though. No sadness at this painful truth.

“There’s a third choice!” she retorted. “If we keep letting him drink from the Well, he could survive.”

“But even I only have a finite amount. I have to be careful and ration it as required.”

“I thought it was tainted. Someone was killed in it.”

“A fabrication,” he said simply. “I needed something to cover up what was causing the water to recede, in order to let it be pumped up here. I needed people to have something to hold on to, so I told people the water was tainted. That also helped cover up the breaking of the contracts.”

“So it was never tainted? There was never any death?”

“Oh, there was death. I slit a man’s throat in the water, but the water remained pure. I needed it more than my people though, to keep the order in the city. I needed it to stay alive!”

“But you’re immortal!”

“No!” he yelled. There was a hint of anger in his voice. Or was it jealousy? “My brother was the immortal one. He was the one that got Father’s gift of perfect life. I exist, really, as a symbol and nothing more.”

“But if you’re not immortal, how is it you’ve stayed alive?” She paused. “For that matter, why do you need an heir?” She had a momentary lapse in concentration as she realised the answer, only a moment before Castoro said it.

“I need an heir to take my place. I am not immortal. I am a mortal man. It was Castoro XI’s greatest secret. He would exist through time, but only through his heirs that shared his name. It is why I have never left the tower. If people saw that I only looked vaguely like the statues depicted, then they would grow suspicious. It is bad enough that this city is built on a foundation of lies and secrets, let alone their Architect, their supposed God King is actually only a mortal man. I drink from the waters so that I can create the rainclouds that constantly hang over the city, and keep the citizens from knowing of my brother’s city. I was bought up reading the journal of Castoro XI—the one that eventually formed the LampLighter Guild.” He took a leather-bound book from the table, opening it to the very first page. “I often wonder what my city would have looked like had the Well not been tainted. I quickly push the thought aside. It hurts too much.” He threw it aside. “Dreadfully boring, self-righteous stuff, but useful nevertheless. He speaks of himself as if he were Castoro I. I think he wasn’ In fact, it contains the one thing that will save this city. Or rather, the spark that birthed this idea.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean exactly what I mean. I am going to save this city. I already have the contract made up and bound in a person.”

Ophelia tried her best not to yell and swear and hit the man before her. She felt such a dreadful hate grip her heart, but she managed to contain it.

“What are you going to do?” she hissed.

“I’m going to destroy the fiends the only way we know how.” He paused mystically. “With fire.”

“How?”

“The lamps,” he said. “And the statues. A lot of them run off gas, which is pumped and processed underground and pushed through the lamps. If that gas were, say, displaced by rushing water, it would rise up at an enormous speed causing a number of explosions across a large portion of the city to burn away the fiends.”

Of course!Ophelia thought. The flooded undercity. The drilling accident. The conversion of some of the lamps to gas. It all makes sense!

“But what about the people?” Ophelia asked, thinking of her mother, and Nataniel’s. She thought of Faulkner, too, wherever he may be.

“Sacrifice must be made. It’s all for the greater good. Castoro XI wrote that, and now I am putting it into action.”

“But thousands of people will die.”

“But it is necessary.” He rose up, walking quickly to Ophelia. He took her hand and tugged her to her feet. He pulled her towards him and breathed in deeply the scent of her hair. His eyes rolled back, as if the smell was intoxicating or he was in some kind of ecstasy.

“It is a shame I cannot give you my gift,” he said coldly, stroking Ophelia’s black hair with his hand. “I would love to see what a beautiful child we would make. But I’m sure there is no harm in feeling your body against mine.”

Ophelia stepped away, and in Castoro’s confusion, rose her hand to slap him across the face.

“I am a lady,” she said, “and I demand that you talk to me like I am one, thank you very much. I’ll have none of that…vulgarity from you.”

She fought back another wave of sickness. What had confinement done to this mad man? Had he no morals? No sense? No inhibitions? He may have never walked amongst his people, but surely he knew the difference between right or wrong,

What have I gotten myself into,she thought desperately.

“But do you not think it would be wonderful,” he said. It seemed that this man got his pleasures in another fashion. She pushed the disguating thoughts aside, trying to focus on the here and now. She had to save herself from whatever it was Castoro intended. She had to keep him off her.

Save your energy,she thought. You may need it.

“Come now,” he said, pushing his body against hers, forcing her against the wall. He moved too quickly for her to stop him from unbuttoning the top button on her coat. “Just let me see you.”

There was no other way to save herself. There was only one way to escape.

You can do it,she thought. Pretend you’re weak.

She feigned helplessness as she reached for her gas stick, which she had dropped. In order to keep him side-tracked—not that he wasn’t already quite occupied—she let out a few resistant pleas and cries, hoping that they were convincing. She could smell his hot breath against her face as he pushed himself closer to her, but refused to look directly as him, even as he tried to kiss her. Again, bile rose within her. Thick and strong, stinging her throat and tongue. Castoro didn’t seem to recognise her resistance, though. He just moved onwards. Nataniel was still on the lounge chair, too sick to notice them, and too helpless to be able to do anything.

At least if it comes to that,she thought, he won’t have to remember it. It was a sad thought, but it kept her from speculating on what Castoro was about the do to her, however blatantly obvious that already was. She had always considered herself strong, but now, more than ever, she felt helpless and weak. She clung desperately to hope, though. If she let the sickness waiting in the wings overcome her, she would be lost. She had to resist this man and his actions. What he was doing was evil, and she had to stop him.
It was like this single though gave her strength she hadn’t had before.

She finally found a good grip on the gas stick with her left hand, while her right hand was busy trying to push Castoro off her. She struggled and whimpered, suddenly becoming desperate. If she didn’t act now, she would lose. He would have her. She flicked the sparking mechanism again and again, waiting for it to catch. She could hear Castoro’s breath become more frantic, assuring her that he could not hear her gas-stick’s clicking over his own racing heartbeat and desperation.

Finally, she felt the gas rush through the tube and out the end, igniting at the tip of the stick. She moved quickly, raising the gas stick up. The flames consumed Castoro’s face, and he let out a loud cry of shock. There was a wave of heat against her, but it was clean heat. Not dirty and old and hot like the breath of Castoro. The Architect covered his face with his hands, tumbling backwards. He struck the table, and fell over, crashing against the floor with a massive thump. Ophelia took a moment to watch the man writhe about on the floor, wondering whether she should subject him to the fire again. His face was red, the stubble-length hair around his chin singed away.

But she looked to Nataniel, noting his deteriorating state.

No,she thought. I have to get him to his mother.

She took him by the hand, rushing to the small fountain. “Drink!” she said. He slumped to his knees, spooning the shimmering liquid in with cupped hands. He slurped it down in heaps, but stopped after three gulps, as Ophelia grabbed his arms and tugged him away once more.

They lifted up the hatch, and descended into the dark stairway, taking each step two at a time. Ophelia was bewildered as to why she didn’t trip over, especially given Nataniel’s inclination to stumble in this weak state, but they managed.

“Ophelia!” Castoro roared.

“If we hurry,” Ophelia said, “we can get you home, and I can stop Castoro’s plan to destroy the city.”

Against the wall beside them, they both caught sight of Castoro’s shadow, flashing intermittently as he passed the high-burning candles.

“He’s catching up!” Ophelia said, picking up her pace. She kept one hand running across the wall beside her to keep stabilised. “If we’re lucky, the Vindicator’s will still be busy with the prisoners. We might be able to get out.”

Ophelia was thankful she had remembered the path she had taken while following Castoro, which meant she knew she wasn’t about to run into a dead end. She passed tapestries and suits of armour and paintings along the walls. She noticed none of these, though, for she was focussed on running away from their pursuer.

“How are you feeling?” she puffed, as they began down another flight of stairs.

“I feel a bit better with the water,” he croaked, “but I can feel it burning inside me. It’s fading away quickly.”

Damn! “Well it will just have to do for now. Keep going.”

She glanced behind her, letting out a slight yelp as Castoro came careening around the corner, his feet seeming to bounce on air as he dashed. No! He isfloating on air. He’s flying, like the Vindicators!

“You can’t run forever!” he yelled. “I will catch up.”

No! Suddenly, she remembered the bags about her waist filled with gas.

That’s it!

She took on, twisting the notch for the gas release.
She the ignited the end of the gas stick, and threw the bag. For a moment, it hung in the air, and then she aimed the gas stick, and turned the flow of gas to its highest. Flame spurted from the end of the rod like it was being burst from a dragon’s maw. It quickly consumed the bag, igniting the gas it was leaking and quickly spreading to the gas within. It exploded brilliantly, the heat and force of the blow pushing Ophelia and Nataniel forward. Glass frames fell and windows shattered, candles were blown out, tapestries caught alight. For a millisecond, a section of hallway was chaos. She was momentarily deafened as the sheer impact blasted against her back. For a second, it was just her breath and her heartbeat, blasting against the silence.

And then her senses returned, rocketing her back into reality. She turned around, noting the way the gas had burnt for such a short moment, and was pleased to see Castoro had been knocked onto his backside, the front of his jacket caught alight. His hands patted his own chest madly, attempting to extinguish the flames.

She rounded the last corner with Nataniel, descending the stairs in the entry hall at breakneck speed. “Quick!” she yelled, “before the Vindicators come. They’re bound to have heard that explosion.”

They took the last few metres at a mad sprint, crossing the marble flooring to reach the front doors. They were heavy, but Ophelia managed to pull one of them open, revealing the dark, storm-swept night outside. The grass of the courtyard was drowned beneath an inch of water, as was the path that would lead them to their escape. She swore loudly.

“We’ll just have to do our best,” she said, pulling Nataniel along behind her. As she ran between the lamps, she could hear the gas flowing through the tubing. It was like her ears were suddenly attuned to it, aware that unless something was done, people would surely die.

“No you don’t!” roared Castoro from the doorway. Ophelia screamed as she turned around and watched Castoro leap into the air.

She tried to pick up her pace, but there was only so fast she could go through the water without slipping. Within moments, Castoro had both of them gripped in his arms, and was lifting them away from the ground, over the tower’s wall and into the sky.

“Looks like I’ll have to deal with you both now.”

Ophelia struggled, but Castoro was too strong for her. Even with the burdensome weight of her and Nataniel combined, he had no trouble holding them close.

“What do you plan to do with us?” Ophelia said.

“What I planned to do all along,” he said. “You shall be my wife, and the boy shall perish.”

“I’ll never let you do it!” Ophelia roared, struggling more now. She didn’t care if she fell to her death now. Any fate was better than living in that tower of lies.

“You will,” Castoro said, arrogance rich in his voice. “Because you, my dear, shall be the contract.”

She fell still.