For two days, the rhythm held.

  Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

  It was not the stone, for the stone was dead. It was the house. It was the work-room. It was the dread beat of two souls trapped in a room grown too small for breath.

  August abode in his cage. upon the cot he sat, and he carved a piece of firewood into a chain, link by wooden link, until his fingers were raw. He listened to the sounds of the work-room through the thin door.

  The scratch of a quill.

  The clink of a tea-cup.

  The silence that stretched between them, heavy as a wet wool blanket.

  She came not to the door. Valerius brought the bread and the water. Valerius brought the bucket. Valerius, who looked upon August with the bright, hunter’s gaze of a magpie eyeing a shard of glass, yet said nothing.

  Upon the morning of the third day, the bolt slid back.

  Clack.

  "Time," Valerius said.

  August stood. His legs were stiff, and the brass placard swung against his chest, a pendulum counting down the seconds of his doom.

  He walked out.

  The work-room was changed.

  It was no longer a place of study, but a fortress.

  Bella had raised walls. Tall, slate-backed boards stood in ranks, a barrier betwixt her bench and the center of the room. Tables were piled high with crates, blocking the sight. She had built a maze to keep herself safe from the thing she could not reckon.

  Behind the main table she stood. She wore her heavy leather apron, stained with grease and flux, and her hair was pulled back so tight the skin of her brow was taut. Goggles she wore, dark lenses hiding her eyes.

  She looked like a smith preparing to stare into the sun. Or a headsman preparing to strike.

  "Sit," she said.

  She pointed not. She looked not at him. She looked at the engine.

  It was new. upon the tripod where the gauges had been it sat, yet it was no measure. It was a beast. A tangle of brass horns, spinning copper discs, and glass tubes filled with a milky, thick fluid. It was hooked to a bank of heavy Voltaic Piles that stank of brimstone.

  Even idle, it throbbed. A low, deep pulse that made the water in the glass on the desk tremble.

  August sat upon the stool, and the wood felt cold through his trousers.

  "This is too much, Arabella," Valerius said. The scholar stood in the corner, clutching his satchel, and his face was pale. "The strength of it goes beyond what the braces can hold. If you force a meeting of sounds of such weight..."

  "The silent watchers failed," Bella cut him off. Her voice was brittle. Glass under strain. "The feeling-counts were... guesswork. Unsound. We must have a sign I can measure. A forced waking."

  "It sounds hungry," August said.

  Bella stiffened, and she turned a dial on the casing of the engine.

  "It is a maker of resonance. It has no hunger. It is a tool. Sit still, Chattel."

  August looked at the brass horn aimed at his chest. It looked like a throat. A metal throat waiting to scream.

  "You fear," he said.

  "I am thorough." She seized a set of heavy leather straps bound to the stool. "Arms."

  August halted.

  "Arms, Chattel."

  He lifted his arms, and she strapped his wrists to the legs of the stool. She moved quickly, her hands shunning his skin. She touched only the leather, only the buckles. She worked with the haste of one smothering a fuse.

  She bound his chest. The leather band went across the brass placard, pressing it into his ribs.

  "Tight," he wheezed.

  "Needful," she said. "Fits are likely."

  "Fits?" Valerius stepped forward. "Arabella, the way—"

  "The way is to get results!" She spun on him, and the goggles flashed in the gaslight. "The way is to mend the wall! To mend the name! To mend the... the ruin."

  She turned back to the engine. She gripped the main lever, and her knuckles were white.

  "Ready," she said.

  Whirrrr-click-whirrrr.

  The engine woke.

  The copper discs began to spin. Faster. Blurring into a single reddish halo. The milky fluid in the tubes began to bubble, stirred by an unseen tide.

  The sound hit him first.

  It was not loud. Not yet. It was a weight. A change in the air’s heaviness. It felt like sinking into a deep mine shaft, the air thickening, pressing against the ears.

  The dust motes dancing in the shaft of light from the high window ceased their drifting.

  They shook.

  They drew themselves into shapes, rings within rings, sharp angles, hung in the air by the sheer force of the sound.

  August flinched. He sought to pull his arms in, but the straps held him.

  "It is too sharp," he gasped. "It scrapes the bone."

  "That is the base tone," Bella said, her voice without feeling. She read a gauge, her quill scratching hard. "It must cut deep to pierce the walls of your mind. You resist, Chattel. Cease your struggle."

  "I cannot... it digs."

  It felt like a hook. A rusted fish-hook dragging through the gray matter of his brain, hunting for the nerve that bound him to the stone.

  "His heart beats too fast," Valerius warned, leaning over Bella’s shoulder. "The terror has taken his wit! The vital spirits swamp the humors. If you push him into stupor—"

  "Then hold him still!" Bella snapped. "If you cannot summon the power yourself, August, I will drag it out of you. I will pull it out by the roots if I must."

  She looked at him then.

  Through the smoked glass of the goggles, he could not see her eyes. But he saw the set of her jaw. He saw the tremble in her lip that she bit down on to kill.

  "Bella," he whispered. "Do not."

  She halted. Her hand hovered over the main dial. For a breath, one heartbeat, two, she looked like she might stop. She looked like the girl who had slept on the bench.

  Then she remembered the debt. She remembered the fire.

  She hardened her heart. It was a thing to be seen, like iron cooling in a mold.

  "Rubbing holds that pressure begets fire," she murmured. "Let us see if you burn."

  She turned the dial.

  SCREEEEEEEEE.

  The whine became a shriek.

  It was sound no more. It was an auger.

  For August, the room dissolved. The floor was pine boards and varnish no more; it was a bedrock shelf screaming in pain. The sound went past his ears and straight to the marrow. It shook his teeth in his skull.

  His sight cracked.

  He saw the sound. It was jagged. Red. A saw blade cutting through the air.

  Stop. Cease. Too loud. Too heavy.

  He opened his mouth to scream, but the air was sucked from his lungs. The engine drank the room.

  The First Dominion stone in the corner, the shard he had held, the shard that had listened, woke.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  It woke not gently. It woke in wrath.

  It began to glow. Not with light, but with heat. Friction heat. The dust inside the rock grinding against itself as the tone forced it to dance a rhythm it hated.

  CRACK.

  The glass face of the weather-glass on the wall shattered. The quicksilver sprayed out like silver blood.

  "The needles!" Valerius shouted, his voice sounding thin and far, as if he spoke from the end of a long tunnel. "They strike the stops! The shaking doubles and doubles again! Arabella, cut the power!"

  "But a little more!" Bella shouted back. She shouted to be heard over the hum, but she looked not at the needles. She looked at August. "The chart forms! The shape comes!"

  It is not a song, August thought. The thought was a frail thing, a leaf in a gale. It is not a song. It is a drill. It eats the silence.

  The floorboards under the stool began to smoke. The varnish bubbled.

  August arched his back. The leather strap cut into his chest. The brass placard burned his skin.

  Let go.

  The thought came from the stone. Not a voice. A feeling. An urge. The urge of a dam holding back a flood.

  Let go.

  "Break it," August gagged. "Bella... break... it."

  "Nigh done," she whispered. She turned the dial to the stop.

  The world turned white.

  BOOM.

  It sounded like thunder inside a jar. A bound, crushing sphere of pure force.

  The Resonator sparked, a shower of blue fire that rained down like slag from the forge. And died. The copper discs shattered, flinging shards into the walls.

  But the force was already loose.

  It faded not. It hunted.

  It hit the supports of the work-room. The timber beams groaned, a low, beast-like sound of distress. The floor heaved, rolling like the deck of a ship in a storm.

  Tools danced off the benches. Wrenches, hammers, calipers, they lifted into the air, hung for a second, floating, before crashing down in a hail of steel.

  But the true weight was behind Bella.

  The gear-press.

  It was a cast-iron beast from the age before. A massive, towering frame used for stamping heavy brass plates. It weighed three tons. It was bolted to the floor with iron studs the size of a man’s thumb.

  The blow hit it.

  PING. PING. PING.

  The bolts sheared. They popped like musket shots, the heads flying across the room.

  The press groaned.

  It began to tip.

  Time stopped not. It stretched. It turned into molasses.

  August saw it happen. He saw the fall. He saw the angle.

  The massive iron slab, top-heavy and loose, was tilting forward. Slow. Heavy. Certain. A mountain deciding to kneel.

  Bella was in its shadow.

  She was frozen. She stared at her board, her quill hovering over a row of numbers that mattered no more. She had not heard the bolts shear. The ringing in her ears from the Resonator hid the sound of her own doom approaching.

  "Arabella!" Valerius screamed. "Move!"

  She looked up. She blinked behind the goggles.

  "The... the notes..."

  She saw not the shadow falling over her.

  Whoosh.

  The sound of air pushed aside. The sound of three tons of iron gathering speed.

  August thought not.

  Thinking was slow. Thinking was Valerius. Thinking was Bella.

  August was stone. Stone moves when the earth moves.

  He snapped the leather.

  He untied it not. He unbuckled it not. He surged against the bond with a fury that tore the heavy strap right out of the wood of the stool. The leather snapped with a sound like a pistol shot.

  He launched himself.

  He was not a man running. He was a stone from a sling.

  He hit Bella low.

  He tried not to grab her. He drove his shoulder into her stomach, a blow meant to break ribs, meant to clear ground.

  "Argh!"

  The air left her in a rush. Her feet left the floor.

  They flew backward.

  For a split second, they were aloft. A tangle of limbs and leather aprons hung in the dust-choked air.

  August twisted. It was a knowing he wist not he had. A sense of space born of the stone. He knew where the floor was. He knew where the engine was.

  He forced himself atop. He curled his body around hers, tucking his head, making himself a shell. A shield of flesh and bone.

  They hit the floor. Hard. His elbow cracked against the wood.

  CRASH.

  The gear-press slammed into the floorboards where Bella had stood a heartbeat ago.

  The blow shook the fillings in August’s teeth. The floor jumped, bucking them upward. A wave of force rolled through the wood, splitting the planks.

  Then, the second blow.

  The top of the press, the heavy iron flywheel, clipped August.

  It missed his head. It missed his spine. But the edge of the iron wheel, moving with the weight of a falling house, caught the shoulder of the armor Bella had made him. The breastplate underlay. The steel spring-plates.

  CRUNCH.

  Metal shrieked. The armor crumpled.

  Pain.

  White-hot. Jagged. A star of agony in his right shoulder blade that shot down his arm and up his neck.

  Then, dust.

  A choking, gray cloud of plaster and ground wood billowed up, swallowing the room.

  Silence returned. But it was not the silence of the library. It was the silence of a field after the cannons cease. The ringing silence of life.

  August could not breathe. His lungs were flat. There was a weight on his chest. Not the placard, but the blow.

  He lay there. Eyes squeezed shut. Waiting for the end. Waiting for the roof to fall.

  Nothing fell. Just the dust.

  He heard a cough. Dry. Racking.

  "By the Saints..." Valerius’s voice. Trembling. Coming from somewhere near the door. "By the Celestials... do you live?"

  August opened his eyes.

  Gray fog. Swirling.

  He was heavy. He pressed something down.

  Warmth.

  Softness.

  Bella.

  He lay atop her. His legs were tangled with hers. His chest was pressed against hers. His face was buried in the curve of her neck.

  He pushed himself up. His arms shook. His right shoulder screamed. A hot, tearing pain. But the arm worked.

  He braced his hands on the floor on either side of her head, making a cage of his arms. Keeping his weight off her.

  He looked down.

  Bella’s goggles had been knocked askew. One lens was cracked. Her hair had come loose, spilling over the floorboards in a brown tide. Her face was gray with dust.

  Her eyes were wide. Great. Staring up at him.

  The blow had stripped her bare. The Artificer was gone. There was but a woman, lying on the floor, looking at the man who bled upon her.

  He panted. Breath rasping in his throat. Blood trickled from his nose. Dark drops falling onto the white collar of her shirt. Drip. Drip.

  She moved not. She barely breathed.

  He could feel the heat of her through the layers of clothes. He could smell the sweat and the stone-dust and the fear.

  Ten seconds.

  One.

  She stared at his mouth. Her lips parted. A small, silent gasp.

  Two.

  He stared at the pulse fluttering in her throat. Fast. A bird trapped in a net.

  Three.

  The pain in his shoulder was no more. A signal from a far kingdom. The only thing that was real was the curve of her hips under his. The rise and fall of her chest against the brass placard.

  Four.

  She reached up. Her hand trembled. Her fingers were stained with ink and grease.

  Five.

  She touched the armor. The dented steel plate over his shoulder. The metal was hot from the blow.

  Six.

  "You..." Her voice was a whisper. A ghost. "The engine... it fell."

  Seven.

  "I caught it," August rasped. He had not caught the engine; he had caught the doom meant for her.

  Eight.

  Her eyes searched his face. She looked at the blood on his lip. She looked at the white streak in his hair. She looked at him as if she had never seen him before.

  "You are hurt," she whispered.

  Nine.

  "Metal holds," August said. "Flesh heals."

  Ten.

  The moment shattered.

  It broke like the glass face of the weather-glass. It could not be put back together. He was not an unknown thing. He was not a task.

  He was the man who had just put his body betwixt her and the dark.

  "August," she breathed. It was not a command. It was a name.

  Valerius scrambled over the debris.

  "Arabella! August! Is anyone dead? Pray tell me no one is dead, the writing of it would be ruinous!"

  The spell broke.

  August groaned. The pain came rushing back, a tide of fire. He rolled off her, collapsing onto the floorboards with a heavy thud. He curled onto his side, clutching his shoulder.

  "Ah. Curse it."

  Bella sat up. She scrambled backward, crab-walking away from the crushed spot where she had stood. She hit the leg of a bench and stopped.

  She shook. Violently. Her teeth chattered. She looked at the gear-press.

  It lay on its side, a dark, iron stone. It had punched a hole through the floor. The place where she had stood, the place where she had held her board, was gone. Split wood and twisted metal.

  If she had stayed there...

  If he had not moved...

  She looked at August.

  He lay in the dust, groaning softly. The armor on his shoulder was mangled, the steel plate folded in like paper. Blood soaked into the sleeve of his shirt.

  She looked at her hands. They were empty. No board. No quill. No reckoning.

  "Arabella?" Valerius reached her. He touched her shoulder. "Are you whole?"

  She flinched. She looked at Valerius, then back at August.

  "He..." She could not finish the sentence.

  She stood. Her legs were unsteady, and she walked over to August.

  Valerius stepped back, giving her room.

  She knelt beside him. She checked not the engine. She checked not the gauge.

  "Let me see," she said. Her voice shook, but it was the shake of dread, not weakness.

  "It is well," August grunted, eyes squeezed shut. "But a bruise."

  "Lie not to me."

  She reached out. Her hands hovered over the broken armor.

  "I must get this off," she said. "The metal is bent. It presses on the... on the bone."

  She began to undo the buckles. Her fingers were clumsy. She fumbled with the leather.

  "Damn it," she hissed. "Damn it, damn it."

  August opened his eyes. He looked at her.

  She wept.

  Not the silent, angry tears of the work-room. Real tears. Ugly tears. They cut tracks through the dust on her face.

  "Bella," he said.

  "Cease moving," she snapped, sniffing loudly. "You... you hinder the work."

  She got the buckle loose. She peeled the armor back.

  The shirt underneath was torn. The skin was purple, spotted with red. A great bruise formed, dark and angry.

  She touched the skin. Gently. Her fingers were cold.

  "Broken?" August asked.

  "No," she whispered. "Bruised. Badly. But the bone... the bone held."

  She looked at the armor in her hands. The dented plate with the songbird etched on the inside. The songbird she had put there.

  It had held.

  She dropped the armor. It clattered to the floor.

  She sat back on her heels. She covered her face with her hands.

  "I nigh killed you," she said. Her voice was muffled. "I saw the needles. I stopped not."

  "I live, Bella."

  "You bleed!" She dropped her hands. Her eyes were wild. "You bleed because I sought measures! Because I sought to mend a mistake! I treated you like... like a shard!"

  "I am but a shard," August said. "Chattel, remember?"

  "Silence!" She screamed it. It echoed in the ruined room. "Dare you not call yourself that! Not now! Not after..."

  She swept her hand at the gear-press. At the hole in the floor.

  "You saved me," she whispered. "Why?"

  August pushed himself up to sit. He winced, clutching his shoulder. He looked at her. He looked at the ruin of the lab.

  "Because it screamed," he said. "And I would not have it be right."

  "Right about what?"

  "About the end."

  Valerius cleared his throat. He stood by the door, holding the handle as if ready to bolt.

  "The Watch will have heard that," the scholar said. "The blast was... great. We need a tale. A boiler burst? A failure of the wood due to... rot?"

  Bella stood. She wiped her face with her sleeve, smearing the dust and the tears into a gray mask.

  She walked over to the wreck of the Resonator. The brass horns were twisted. The glass tubes were shattered.

  She looked at it.

  Then she kicked it.

  She kicked it hard enough to bruise her toe. She kicked it again. And again.

  "Arabella?" Valerius asked cautiously.

  "Refuse," she panted. "It is refuse. All of it."

  She turned to August.

  "Rise," she said.

  August stood, swaying slightly.

  "We leave," she said.

  "Leave?" Valerius blinked. "Leave the work-room? But the rules—"

  "Burn the rules," Bella said. She walked over to August. She reached out and took his good arm. She pulled it over her shoulder, supporting his weight.

  "He needs a healer. Not a smith. And he stays not in that cage."

  "But the law," Valerius stammered. "The placard. If he leaves..."

  Bella looked at Valerius. Her eyes were hard. Blue steel. But the fire behind them was cold no more. It was hot.

  "Let them come," she said. "Let them try to unmake him. I shall kill them first."

  She looked up at August. Their faces were inches apart again.

  "Can you walk?" she asked.

  "If you lead," he said.

  She nodded. She tightened her grip on his waist.

  "I have you," she said.

  They walked toward the door. Past the ruined engine. Past the walls. Past the lie of the maker and the tool.

  The cage was broken.

  And as they stepped out into the cool, damp air of the Artisan Nexus, August knew something.

  The heartbeat in hell had stopped.

  For hell was empty. They had walked out of it together.