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new_kateTitle: Steam
Pairings/characters: Arthur/Merlin
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 40k
Warnings: reincarnation, violence, captivity, deaths of minor characters, alternative history, bad science, extreme nerdiness, evil mecha.
Summary: It's been centuries since King Arthur united Albion and lifted the ban on magic. Ruled by Pendragon dynasty, the kingdom had prospered till a feud between the magicians and King Uther the Second drove the country to the brink of collapse. Now it's up to Prince Arthur and his Knights of the Engine to harness steam power to replace the magic Albion had lost, and it's up to Merlin to protect Arthur while he fulfils his destiny.
Author's notes: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
paperlegends. Reincarnation story. Renaissance-era post-apocalyptic steampunk AU set 300 years after canon timeline. Betaed by the wonderful ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deadwoodmt
Art link: HERE ARE 3 (THREE!!!) AWESOME PIECES byaqualillium who also made beautiful icons and banners featured here.
Podfic!!!! Performed wonderfully bypennyplainknits, zip of all 5 parts is HERE!!!
Also on AOOO for all your e-booking needs
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
On the last day of the age of the magicians, seventeen years ago, King Uther the Second had summoned Archmage Cornelius for a private meeting. This time he sent armed guards to deliver the invitation and to escort the Archmage to the royal chambers whether he complied or not.
"It is a sad day for Albion when her Archmage is paraded through the capital under guard like a common criminal," snarled Cornelius, stomping into the room.
"You left me little choice, magician," said Uther. "Twice I had summoned you, and you ignored my orders. I'm not a scullery maid whom you can stand up for a date; when I summon, you come."
"You should have received a note of apology each time," said Cornelius breezily. "As I said, I'm not yet ready to present my project."
"It's not up to you to decide whether to grace me with your presence. Archmage or not, you're still my subject. Your work is funded with my money, and I will receive your report when I ask for it."
They stared each other down, alone in the great room.
In the old times, the court magician was the king's closest friend and his most trusted advisor. The candidates were chosen by the court and the magicians. They would go through many trials to determine the winner, who would work to bind the state and the magic together. But those days were long past. The magicians had an Archmage now who was their undisputed leader, selected through means known only to them. No other would even enter the contest for the title.
The king was no longer invited to the meetings of magicians' council, as it used to be in the days of King Arthur and his successors. Nobody knew if there still was a council or if the Archmage ruled the magic folk unchallenged. The deeper magic entered into everyday lives of Albion's people through increasingly ubiquitous machines and magical remedies, the more withdrawn and secretive the magicians became and the less eager they seemed to serve.
Uther had no choice but to deal with Cornelius, and it had been a battle of wills ever since he took the throne. Cornelius was more than twice his age, and from the very start it rankled him to bow to the young king. Uther didn't have his late father's patience for such things. In fact, he believed that the liberties afforded to magicians by the previous kings had been a mistake, that it was because of this that the crown now had to deal with the dangerous, barely disguised impudence.
"Very well," Cornelius said. "You shall see it now."
He fished something out of his bag and handed it to Uther.
It was an object the size of a child's head, made of mostly stone with reddish crystals embedded into it. It was an elaborate work, finely carved in layers of minute runes; it was hollow inside or perhaps was only unusually light. It was warm to the touch, and it seemed almost alive, as though if Uther concentrated very hard he'd feel it pulse and shiver in his hands.
"This is the culmination of my life's work," said the magician. "It's something that was previously unheard of. It challenges the very foundation of what we know about the world."
"What does it do?"
"Potentially anything."
Uther gave the thing another puzzled once-over and handed it back to Cornelius. He cradled it softly in his wrinkled hands, as if he was gentling a kitten.
"This is an ultimate power conduit, and yet it is so much more than that. It shall be heart, soul and mind of a machine worthy to house it. With it, nothing is quite beyond the realm of possible. We're already building a shell for it, a machine of our own design. It will eclipse everything we've done so far. It's not quite ready, but if you give me just another month-"
"Now."
Cornelius shook his head disapprovingly and moved to the desk to unfurl the scrolls he brought with him.
Uther was well versed in mechanics, as a king had to be to properly oversee the work of the magicians. It took him bare minutes of studying the drawings to grasp the concept of the device. The more he read, the colder the air around him seemed to feel. A leaden weight was settling in his chest, and he knew that here, in this room, the future history of Albion would be defined. He didn't wish for this responsibility. In that moment, he was terrified.
"Tell me what it is," he demanded, because he needed to hear the Archmage say it.
"It's a soldier," the man said readily. "An ultimate soldier, a machine of war. It can annihilate an army before it's overwhelmed. It can level a city all on its own. It will have the wits to defend itself and the power and cunning to destroy whatever it's set upon. With just one of them at your disposal, you'll never be challenged. With a few of them, you will conquer the world."
Uther closed his eyes and breathed deeply to steady his heart.
"I've no wish for conquest," he said. "My kingdom is vast and rich, and my people are free and prosperous. I don't want to put either of them through an ordeal of war."
"With this you won't have to! The war machines will only require a few magicians to constantly power each, but they can do it safely from a considerable distance. The only ones in any peril shall be your enemies. You see now why I was so busy lately, why I delayed seeing you. I was waiting to present you with your new soldiers in their full glory, to really let you see the power we'd bring you."
"I see. Well. This project shall be stopped immediately."
He wouldn't look at the magician for fear of losing his resolve, but he heard the sharp intake of breath behind him.
"Don't you understand what I'm offering you?" Cornelius asked. "This is the ultimate dream of every monarch in the known world. An unstoppable army, power without limit. Don't you understand?"
"I've no interest in this war machine," said Uther as lightly as he could. "And I don't see why you'd want your magicians involved in combat. I think the magic is much better suited for peaceful pursuits. The ploughs were a great accomplishment. Now perhaps you could build something in that vein to enhance the lives of a common folk? A brighter light source, for example; oil lamps can only do so much. Or something I feel is greatly needed: some sort of magical enclosure for cattle, to protect them from predators and safeguard the fields from grazing."
"Are you mocking me, boy?"
Uther turned and faced him. The Archmage was pale with quiet fury, his lips shaking. Uther drew himself up, preparing to duck a spell if necessary or to call out for the guards.
"You're forgetting yourself," he said. "I am your king, and this is my kingdom. You will do as I tell you."
"Your kingdom owes everything to us. It's built on magic. It's high time you truly realised what we mean for this kingdom's survival."
Years of restrained contempt and quiet scheming were finally coming to a head, and the old man wasn't even keeping up appearances anymore. Uther decided to drop the pretence as well.
"So you thought you'd give me an army that's fully controlled by you?" he asked bluntly. "An army I couldn't run without your magic? Mindless metal soldiers that you could turn against me if you chose to? That's not going to happen, magician."
"You'd deny us any power in your kingdom, any voice! All you want is to keep us working your machines, cleaning up your filth and bowing to your rule. You'd use us like slaves - you'd use us as cattle, as beasts of burden! This can't go on forever."
"No, this can't go on forever. For years now, I watched as you wove your own little plots behind my back. The magicians now treat you as their king. They barely speak to any outsiders, as if they're a state of their own. Well, this won't go on. Albion is one country, and it has one king. You will destroy that war machine of yours, and I believe it's time you retired from your post. You're old, and you no longer think clearly. We'll hold an open trial for the next court magician, and if less than a dozen pretenders turn up, I'll assume the magicians don't want their voice to be heard."
Cornelius laughed. It was an awful sound, like the crowing of a carrion bird.
"You've just doomed your kingdom, Uther Pendragon." With a wave of his hand, he conjured a wisp of black smoke, coiled it around his feet and drew up another, thicker cloud. "So be it. Next time I see you, you shall be on your knees, bowing to me. Then my people will finally claim what's theirs."
Uther was expecting an attack; too late he realised that the man was weaving a vanishing spell. He didn't know what Cornelius planned to do if he escaped - wage a magic war on Camelot, somehow finish his grotesque war machines and set them loose, or ally himself with foreign kings and lead the conquering armies into Albion. Uther wasn't planning to find out. He yelled for the guards and grabbed his old ceremonial sword from its mount on the wall. The magician's figure was already fading, taking on a translucent sheen. Uther thrust his sword into the man's stomach, clumsy with lack of practice, wincing as the dull untended blade pared flesh and scraped bone.
He had not held a sword since he was a young prince being forced to learn fencing along with music and dancing. But this task didn't take much skill.
"The Archmage has committed high treason," he announced to the guards. "Immediately seize the main workshop and arrest everyone in it. Arrest all magicians who had access to it and everyone who was involved in that work. We must pull this up by the roots before it's too late. In fact, detain all magicians for questioning. It’s best to be thorough. And burn this body. For all we know, they'd raise him otherwise."
He knew that magicians could communicate with each other instantly and invisibly over great distances. It didn't come as a surprise that the workshop was already empty when the guards reached it, that the whole of magician's quarter was abandoned, that not a single arrest had been made. At least they couldn't take the half-finished metal monstrosity with them. The war machine was still in the workshop, and Uther ordered it disassembled and all parts melted down.
He thought to destroy the stone that Cornelius had brought to the audience, but the warmth of the stone and the glittering of the crystals held a strange, soothing promise, and this was a source of great power, after all. The reality of the magician's betrayal was starting to sink in, and with it the possibility that he might have truly doomed his kingdom. The machines were still working, but he knew that they wouldn't last even a few days, not without constant supply of magic. The stone could be useful if it could be harnessed. One day it could be their salvation.
He locked it away in the treasury, praying that he was doing the right thing. He spent the day in counsel with his court, drawing up a strategy to lessen the blow to the kingdom. Afterwards he went to see his son. Cornelius used to send the prince an occasional gift; for all Uther knew, those things could have been cursed.
Arthur was already bathed and dressed for bed, but he was still up. He was playing with the old steamboat, racing it across his bathtub still full of soapy water. He got up to greet his king, bowing properly, and then ran over to Uther and gave him a hug.
Uther still couldn't reprimand him for that, even though it was time to be firmer. Arthur was getting too old for these indulgences. He knew he was spoiling the boy. But spoiling their child should be Igraine's job, had she survived the labour, so occasionally he felt the need to do it in her stead.
"Where are the toys Cornelius gave you?" he asked. Arthur nodded at the chest in the corner, suddenly sulky, and Uther went to gather them.
The toys were at the very bottom of the chest, some still twitching weakly. They were weighted down by picture books, painted wooden blocks and a few old shoes; Uther extracted them all - a few steel knights, a silver princess doll, a golden lion - and bundled them in a blanket, ready to be tossed into a crucible and melted down.
"You didn't play with them much, did you?" he asked.
"I hate them."
"Why?"
"Because Cornelius is a creep," said Arthur and clenched his jaws and shut his eyes, waiting for a slap. He wasn't flinching, wasn't scared or ashamed; he stood tall, prepared to accept consequences of his actions as a man should.
"He is," Uther said and petted his son's fair hair. Arthur's smile was blinding. He giggled and hopped in excitement, grabbed Uther's hand and pulled him toward the tub.
"I like this one the best," he said, feeding wood chips into the fire that smouldered under the boat's tiny boiler. The turbine spat out a new jet of steam, and the boat jerkily jumped forward. "Because it was yours and granddad's, and because I know how it works."
"Yes," Uther said. Here, in this cosy room, all the worries of the world seemed to disappear for a time. Even now, facing the greatest disaster Albion had ever known, one glance at his son's sweet, peaceful face was enough to fill him with strength and hope. "Yes, so do I."
Waking up was always somewhat of an ordeal for Arthur, but this awakening was the worst ever. This was miles worse than the most horrid hangover in his admittedly limited experience of inadvisable debauchery. His head was spinning, throbbing every time he took a breath. He was cold, and he tried to burrow under the blankets but couldn't move or even feel his arms.
A sharp smell suddenly invaded his senses, choking him. It was intense to the point of pain. He jerked backwards, trying to get away, and the back of his head hit stone.
He opened his eyes, blinking fast till his vision cleared. Everything was still blurry and slowly turning about. In the centre of it all was the face of the court physician, very close, blocking out the light.
"Finally," the physician said, pocketing the bottle of smelling salts. "I was starting to worry that the dose was too high."
They weren't in Arthur's room any longer. They were in a cave of bare, damp rock. Arthur was on the ground, propped against a wall, still in his nightclothes. There was a shackle around his left ankle with a chain attached to it. His hands were bound at the wrists behind his back. He tried to reach for the knots, but his fingers were too cold and numb, and he could barely flex them.
The light wasn't coming from outside. Behind the physician, in the middle of the cave, there were two glowing spheres suspended mid-air. The light they emitted was white, harsh and flat, like cold winter sunlight bouncing off pristine snow. Magic craft.
The physician stood over him, smiling gleefully. There were three other men nearby, watching with similar detached, cruel excitement as Arthur squirmed against the bindings, his panic pathetically obvious. He thought to scream for help, but he was pretty certain they were far, far away from Camelot.
He planted his bare feet on the cold rock and took a steadying breath. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt huge in his mouth; he swallowed, cleared his throat and said, keeping his voice level:
"Where am I?"
"All you need to know, sweet prince," said the physician. "Is that you're at our mercy."
He waited for more, but they just stared at him, clearly enjoying the moment. Maybe this was as far as they got when they'd been preparing their dramatic speech.
"This is madness," he spat out, impatient. "Let's get this over with - what do you want?"
"Straight to business, how commendable," Edwin stepped to the side, letting Arthur see the rest of the room.
It was a workshop, a poor and shoddy one but a workshop still, with three workbenches that had an array of tools and parts scattered over them. On the biggest workbench was some work in progress, a mechanical contraption in a partially stripped, thick casing. It was rather large, as thick as a man's torso and at least four feet long. The design of the exposed joint was very ambitious, sturdy but reaching for great range of movement. The gear trains, however, were assembled wrongly; he could see it even from here. The ratios were visibly off.
"We've been working on a little engineering project of our own," Edwin said. "Most of the work is already done. Unfortunately, when it came to the finer points, my esteemed colleagues seem to have hit a wall. This design is rather beyond their skill and knowledge. Not surprising, really, seeing as your father made damn sure we had no opportunities to learn. But this is where you come in."
He gestured at the far wall, where several large technical drawings were pinned up.
"We have all you need to understand, correct and finish this device. We'll assist you and get you all the materials and equipment you require. You are the best among the engineers, Arthur. The best one in Albion, everyone knows that. This should be quite in your power."
Arthur stared upwards into their faces, waiting for the punch line, but they looked completely serious.
"You've kidnapped the crown prince of Camelot. You've committed high treason. Your lives are, as of now, forfeit. And you're telling me you did it all to ask for my help with your little engineering project?"
"Well," Edwin said. "We wanted the best, you see."
"You're crazy. My father will find you, and he will skin you alive," said Arthur with all the certainty he could muster. "All right, let me get this straight. You're magicians."
"How very astute," sneered Edwin, glancing at the glowing orbs by the ceiling.
"We didn't know where you all went, nor did we really care. We suspected some of you would flock to the foreign courts, suck up to some other king. But magic on its own isn't all that much, is it? Most of what we heard in legends is probably just exaggeration. An average magician can perform some showy tricks or do a bit of healing, maybe. It's all very amusing and can be useful, but that wasn't enough for you. You wanted more power. You always wanted more power. That was your downfall. And it will be again, mark my words."
He shifted against the wall, trying to get comfortable. His arms ached, and he couldn't stop shivering. Every time he managed to loosen his muscles they would seize up again in tiny tremors.
"So you've decided to try and rebuild the position you held in Albion," he continued. "With the machines, multiplied and facilitated like that, magic can be quite impressive. You would be indispensable again. The kingdom of your choice would come to depend on you, like Albion had before we knew better. But you need a working model to sell this idea. So who do you want to take this to? The Franks? The Norse? The southern kingdoms?"
He searched their faces for the smallest flicker in their expressions that would confirm his accusations, but there was nothing.
"Will you do it?" Edwin asked.
Arthur tossed his head back and laughed heartily. It made his throbbing head hurt more, and probably didn't sound all that natural or convincing, but it was worth it just to see their faces twist in ugly grimaces.
"Not a bloody chance," he said. "I won't have any part in selling out our trade secrets. And really, if you were on fire and asked me to piss on you, I would refuse. You haven't just assaulted me. I'm an heir to the throne. This is a direct attack on my kingdom. There will be no place for you to hide; Camelot will find you."
Edwin nodded, walked over to the workbench and rummaged through the clutter there.
"I was hoping you'd say that," he said, picking up one tool after the other - pincers, a chisel, a cutting knife. He held each for a moment, thoughtfully considering them in turns before putting them down. "You know, Arthur, I've spent a very long time preparing for this. It took considerable resolve to work my way up to a high enough position in your court, bowing, kowtowing, always being so helpful. Every time I tended to your father's disgusting stump or treated his aged bowels, every time I cleaned up your little scrapes and bruises like a common nursemaid, I was hoping that when this time came you'd be stubborn."
He chose a foot-long metal rod, cupped a tip of it with his left palm and whispered something. When he lowered his hand the metal was glowing red, like it was just pulled out of a furnace.
"Hold him down," he said, advancing. The men grabbed Arthur by the shoulders and pinned his legs. There wasn't much he could do, tied up and chained to the wall, so he stopped struggling, clenched his teeth and waited.
Edwin yanked on Arthur's sleeve until it ripped at the shoulder seam and slowly, terribly slowly, brought blazing metal to his bared skin. The pain was awful; Arthur tried to let it wash over him, accept it, remember that he'd been hurt before and worse than this. He wasn't going to scream. Sobs and moans were raking up his throat and tearing through his chest, but he wouldn't scream; he was determined not to. But then the smell of his own flesh burning onto metal hit his nose, and there was nothing left except agony and blind panic. He screamed then, pushing all the air out of his lungs. He felt the darkness roll closer, and begged for it to take him.
The pain stopped abruptly. He still felt like he was about to pass out, and he tried to go with it, let his body go slack, loosen his hold on consciousness. But Edwin shoved those damn smelling salts in his face and jolted him awake.
"Changed your mind yet?" he asked.
"I'd sooner die," Arthur told him.
After a moment's respite the burn started to ache all over again. Now that the heat damage was spreading deeper into the tissue, it hurt almost as bad as the brand did. He knew that, untreated, this pain would linger for hours, compounding whatever else they would do to him. But his head was clear again. He could hold on.
"Oh, Arthur. You're forgetting that I'm an excellent physician. I won't let you die."
Edwin raised the rod again, its tip still bright red. Arthur recoiled a little on pure instinct biting his lips to keep quiet. Edwin chuckled and paused with the metal inches from Arthur's shoulder, aiming just below the first burn mark.
"I wonder how much of this you'll be able to endure," he mused. "Minutes, you think? Once more, or perhaps twice? Maybe it'll take hours. I do hope you won't give in for hours, at least. You're not going to disappoint me, are you Arthur?"
"Edwin, I understand that you've been looking forward to this," one of the men suddenly said. Arthur had thought them to be obedient, silent thugs, but it seemed he was wrong. "But this will get tiresome very quickly, and we have work to do."
"Do we have to waste time breaking him?" said another one. "I know we wanted the best, but I'd settle for good enough. What about that boy with freckles, what's his name, Owain? I heard he was a prodigy. Let's take him instead."
"He's not very experienced. I think we should go for Pelinor," said the third one.
"No," said Arthur weakly. "No, no, I know what you're trying to do. I don't believe you. Your cover is blown. Merlin will tell the king he last saw me with you. Everyone will know you're a traitor. You can't come back, and you can't take anyone else."
"Do you really think it was just me?" Edwin asked with a short amused laugh. "You think I dragged your great snoring carcass out of the castle all by myself? Do you think the four of us is all there is?"
"I don't believe you," Arthur repeated dumbly, sickened by the very thought. "I don't."
"Hush," said Edwin. "Actually, we'd have the same problem with Owain and Pelinor. Engineers are a stubborn lot. I have an idea, if you want fast results. The girl who runs the smithy is actually a very handy mechanic herself."
"No! Not her. Why her? She's never had any formal training!" Arthur protested.
"Maybe she wouldn't be very helpful," said one of the men holding him down. "But something tells me you will, once she's here."
"Actually, you know who had some formal training?" said Edwin, as if the thought just occurred to him. "Merlin! He's been reading a lot, and he was a savant to start with. He'd be the easiest to grab, as well. He's just a servant, nobody would even care."
Arthur tried to think about it rationally, to use logic as he was trained to. He knew they were playing him. He knew they were only doing this because they didn't believe they could break him with pain and threats. He didn't think they had the means to kidnap anyone else. Not now, when the castle would be raised in alarm, looking for him and those who took him. But the mere thought of his men or Gwen or Merlin being dragged here, chained and tortured - he couldn't bear it. It was beyond his ability to endure. He felt cornered, utterly defeated; horror was choking him, and he couldn't get enough air into his chest. His breaths were coming shallow and fast, and sounded a lot like sobs.
"Let's talk to our people and make plans," Edwin said. The men released Arthur, but he couldn't even find the strength to move. "It'll take some time. Maybe Arthur will reconsider by then."
They cut the bindings on his wrists. He brought his hands forward, rubbed at the deep grooves the ropes left in his skin. He was only dimly aware of the pain as the blood rushed back; his fingers felt huge and limp, like uncooked sausages.
"Here is something to keep you amused," Edwin brought over some scrolls and put them at his feet. "You can start familiarising yourself with the design. These are, of course, merely copies. But if you damage them, I'll still punish you."
They left through the only opening in the cave. He heard their voices echoing through the passageway, but he couldn't make out any words, no matter how he strained his hearing.
The manacle around his ankle didn't have a lock and was completely seamless, as if it had been welded onto his leg. The chain links were just as solid, and the other end of the chain went right into the stone of the cave wall with no give there at all. The chain was about ten feet long, which put the nearest workbench out of his reach by a good yard, so he couldn't get to any of the tools.
He tore a strip of cloth from the bottom of his nightshirt and tightly wrapped it around the burn, trying not to look at the wound. They left him an empty bucket, and he pissed in it, hoping to put off the indignity of doing it in their presence for as long as possible. He paced a little to warm up and did some exercises he remembered from his childhood fencing lessons. It helped. Working his body always helped him think more clearly. He made a mental note to increase the exercise his engineers were getting. It always seemed like a waste of time when you were in the throes of a scientific zeal, but in the long run it would keep them all healthier, happier, more productive.
Now he could see that things weren’t as hopeless as they had seemed moments ago. Camelot would be looking for him; they'd have started the moment his absence was discovered. Every resource they had would be dedicated to his rescue right now. Help would come. He just needed to trust it would and stay alive.
While he was at it, it would be prudent to gather information. He needed to learn as much about the enemy's intentions as he could.
He considered that for a while, poking the scrolls with his bare toes.
"Oh, it wouldn't hurt to look," he told himself and opened the first one.
"Arthur! Arthur! Highness!"
He lifted his head and blinked, coming back to himself. He couldn't begin to fathom how much time had passed. He tended to lose time when he was working. The magicians were back, standing over him. He was on all fours on the floor, crawling from one drawing to the next and tracing the lines with his fingers; his chain was strewn all over the scrolls to keep them open, and he even used the waste bucket to pin down one of the corners. He wasn't done yet, but he had a general idea. The design was bold but deeply flawed, and the most fascinating thing about it was that whoever conceived this device obviously knew better than to make these very mistakes.
"Well, look at that," said one of the magicians with an amused smile.
"I think," said another, "That at a certain level of dedication any craft might become as fulfilling and addictive as magic. I'm just glad we don't have to rely on that theory."
Arthur sat back on his heels and tried to organise his thoughts enough to convey them to laymen.
"This won't work," he said. "Not the way you expect it to. There is nothing to bind it all together, nothing to control it, no pattern to any of this. I don't care how clever you think your magic is, it's not this clever. The device will be nothing but a puppet without strings. It's a huge waste of work and metal. If you expect me or anyone else to fix it, well, it's not possible. Not for years yet, anyway."
"No. We need it assembled exactly as the drawings say."
"The drawings aren't that precise, which is why you're having troubles with it in the first place. For example, what's this?" he poked at the place at the crossing of the main axles where the insane inventor have given up completely and hand-drawn a wobbly circle without any explanatory text. "I've no idea what that is. Do you know what it is? You said you're almost done assembling it. What do you have there? I need to see it."
"Later," said Edwin and, with a short spell and a wave of his hand, he moved the workbench a few yards closer. The legs skidded on the rock with a screech, the metal on the table jangled and settled down, and it was all within reach now: the comfortingly familiar tools and the part of the device he already knew so well from the drawings. He could see the errors even better now, and he itched to fix them out of some primal yearning to bring order to chaos. "I'll go get you some water now. We'll feed you when we see some results."
"I didn't say I'd do it," Arthur said. He was very thirsty, now that he'd thought about it, and wouldn't say no to food either. "Before I even begin to consider it, there are conditions to be met, and I'll need some guarantees. I want to be sure you won't take or hurt anyone else if I comply. And when I'm done you will release me unharmed, even if this thing doesn't work. Which it won't."
"We never planned to kill you."
He barely heard that, busy thinking. He felt that he should be putting up more of a fight, for the sake of appearances if nothing else. He could endure pain for a lot longer, and he was almost sure that the threats to kidnap his people were just that, empty threats and mind games.
But he didn't dare risk it. Not when there was the slightest chance that Merlin - or Gwen or any of them - could end up in the hands of these madmen. Not when he knew just how to defeat the magicians and ruin their plans. If anyone was going to do more work on this device, it had to be him. He knew exactly what to do.
He was handed a clay mug full of stale, tepid water. He drank it down, got up and stepped closer to the workbench.
"What a mess," he said and picked up a spanner. The tools weren't his, but they felt almost as good to hold.
Merlin spent the first day of Arthur's absence in Camelot's dungeons.
When he first walked into the empty room in the morning, he dropped the breakfast tray on the floor, eggs and sausages and all, and ran straight for the guard station.
"Arthur is gone," he told the captain of the guard, forgetting all about titles and pleasantries. "He wouldn't just go, would he? Something is wrong."
The commotion started right then and didn't let up for hours. People wouldn't talk to him. They would, however, ask him to tell the whole story over and over again, even though it seemed that no one was listening. And they would drag him around in what seemed like a stupid, aimless pattern.
The captain and a squad of guards took Merlin back to Arthur's room and then all around the castle, out to the gates and the drawbridge, back to Arthur's room, outside again, to the great cart's station at the bottom of the hill, and again back to Arthur's room. Some of the men would be sent out to run somewhere else, others would return with reports. It all was a pointless waste of time, a giant, castle-wide flailing in panic disguised as security procedure.
Once they were in Arthur's room again, Merlin tried to calm down and think it through. There was no reason to jump to the worst conclusions - except there was. There was a cold twist in his stomach and something heavy sitting in his chest and he knew, he knew. But he could be wrong. He'd give anything to be wrong.
"He probably just went out," he said out loud: to himself and to the men who were rummaging around the room as if Arthur could be hiding behind the curtains or in the washing bowl. "Maybe he went to meet a secret lover and fell asleep in their bed. He'll be so angry at all the fuss. He'll kill me for spilling the food. He'll be so mad."
He stared at the door. It stood thrown open - it was never like that, because Arthur valued his privacy. He imagined Arthur walking in, stomping his boots, filling the room with his annoyed, radiant presence. If Merlin knew any spells, he'd make that happen, right in front of everybody. He'd gladly go into exile and never see Arthur again if only he walked through that door right now, alive and safe.
He went to the wardrobe and started rifling through the clothes, trying to see if anything was missing. Everything seemed to be there, but Arthur had so many clothes; he had five red velvet jackets alone. Something could be missing. Arthur could have gotten dressed and walked out on his own volition, and he could be back soon. Merlin wanted to bury his face in the fabric and breathe in Arthur's smell - it seemed the only way to be able to breathe right again, to purge that tightness from his chest.
Suddenly, the king was in the room, and his right hand was gripping Merlin's arm, squeezing painfully tight, shaking him. He was being asked questions again; he repeated everything he could remember from last night: their talk about round fields, the physician's visit. Everything seemed disjointed in his head, and it sounded like lies from too much repetition.
Then he was being led somewhere again. Only when the locks clicked shut and the guards walked away did he realise he was in the dungeon cell.
"Why am I here? I should be out there," he told the prison guard. "I should be looking for him."
"Everyone's looking for him," said the man. He looked just as lost as everyone else did this morning. "His Majesty wants you detained for questioning. Just sit tight. I'm sure His Highness would be back any minute now."
Merlin sat on the straw and tried not to think, just empty his head and let time pass. By the afternoon, he'd bitten his fingernails to the quick and took to rocking back and forth. That's how the girls found him when they came down to see him.
He rushed to the bars and clung to Gwen's arms.
"Something horrible is happening to him, I just feel it," he said. "We need to do something."
"We found an empty vial in his room. It's just like you said," Morgana told him. "We've analysed it - it held a potent sleeping draught. Gaius thinks it might have been imbued with magic."
Merlin moaned in frustrated rage at the thought of Arthur, drugged and helpless. Gwen's fingers were moving in his hair in soothing circles, but he didn't want to be comforted, not when Arthur had no one to comfort him right now.
"Just don't do anything stupid," said Morgause.
"Like what?"
"Like break out. Just wait."
They left, and he waited, slowly losing his mind. The sun went down, and he thought of sleeping, but every part of him was impossibly alert and tense. He couldn't even bear to lie down.
Eventually the door opened, and the guards led him up the stairs, back into the wing where the royal chambers were. They walked past Arthur's room; it still stood open, the terrible mess inside exposed for everyone to see. The breakfast was still all over the floor, bits of it trampled into the thick white rug by Arthur's bed.
He was shoved into the king's private audience chamber and pressed into a chair. The king leaned over him, his face dark and worn and his eyes utterly mad.
"I'm sorry," Merlin said, hiccuping from choked sobs.
"So you admit-" the king started, but Merlin couldn't listen, couldn't shut up.
"I'm so sorry," he babbled. "I should have protected him. I was supposed to protect him. That was the whole point of me being here. The one thing I had to do. I'm so sorry."
He might have cried then; later he wasn't sure. The king's left hand, the soft one, might have been stroking his hair at some point. That didn't seem at all likely on sober reflection.
Then he was let out, and he stumbled aimlessly around the hallways for some time. He tried to walk out of the castle and look for clues, but he was turned back by the guards. Soon he found himself in Gaius's laboratory. Dawn was breaking outside. Morgana was asleep in a chair, covered by Gaius's ratty blanket. Her hair was tangled and flat, without its usual lustre.
"How can she sleep?" Merlin said. "Gaius, we need to do something."
"Yes, yes, in a minute," Gaius said. "Drink this now."
He did, and it tasted sweet and vile at the same time, and then he slept.
The second day brought some news. The gamekeeper found tracks and traced them to the forest of Arador; specifically, to the sacred grove. Arthur had been taken through the magicians' portal.
"I'll go there," Merlin told Morgana. "I'll bargain with them. But I don't know where it is, so I need a map. Can you get me a map?"
"What do you have to bargain with, exactly?" she asked ruthlessly. "You think you can just talk it out with the people who kidnapped the heir to the throne?"
"But we need to do something."
"It's about ransom, it has to be. They won't harm him. We just have to wait for the ransom note."
He waited and waited. He cleaned Arthur's room, shined all his shoes and spent the rest of the time lying on top of the covers of Arthur's bed staring at the cracks on the ceiling.
"Where does the portal lead to?" he asked Morgause on the third day.
"Nobody knows. It could be a number of places. There could be dozens of portals, though I'm sure they only used the known one to make a point."
"Maybe we could find Arthur with our, you know. Gift. Maybe we can scry for him or something."
"Do you know how?"
"I thought maybe you did. I thought you might have had some training before it was forbidden. You look old enough."
"I forgive you because you're more insane than usual right now," she said. "And no, I don't know a single spell."
Somehow Merlin still ate every day, washed his face, changed his socks and puttered around Arthur's room looking for more chores to do. Gaius drugged him and Morgana for a few more days until they started to outright ask him for it at supper.
"I used to have such a crush on Arthur," Gwen told him on the sixth day. He was in the smithy - he'd had enough of the frozen emptiness of Arthur's room and the quiet despair hanging over the laboratory.
"Who hasn't," he sighed. "Tell you what. When he's back, I'll set you two up. I'm really good at it. I write the best love notes."
She smiled weakly and pulled him to his feet.
"We need to stop this, it's not helping anyone," she said. "We should keep working. Come on, join in."
He worked the bellows and tried swinging the sledge hammer for a while, but it didn't help settle his mind. Their work gave them purpose and solace, but his job was looking after Arthur, and he'd failed. He didn't have a job anymore.
A full week had passed like that, and then the ransom note arrived.
The guards posted at the forest of Arador found a bag in the grove. It held a sealed letter addressed to the king and a handful of golden hair.
The council and the king had already been talking about paying the ransom. They'd discussed how much gold they had in the treasury, how much more could be raised in a matter of days, how much could be squeezed out of the city's population and the nearby villages in lieu of next year's taxes. The numbers repeated in the kitchens were unbelievable, unimaginable. They could have been exaggerated, but it was, essentially, the whole kingdom's wealth, and it was all to be traded away for one man. The king wouldn't stop ordering the council to find more resources, and Merlin understood him perfectly - huge as the sums were, it just didn't seem like it would be enough. It couldn't possibly be worth as much as Arthur's life.
Now the council had gathered again, but the meeting didn't last a minute. The king opened the note and read it to himself. Then he ripped it to tiny shreds and left the room.
Merlin had charmed the cleaning maid, or more likely terrified her with his frantic begging and manic queasy smiles, and she surrendered the contents of the dust pan to him. He took bits of the note to Arthur's room and assembled them on the work desk with the help of Arthur's tweezers and magnifying glass. When he could read enough, he went to the alchemical laboratory.
"What's an Archmage's stone?" he demanded as soon as he was through the door. Gaius flinched and did something impossible with his eyebrows.
"I don't exactly know," he said. "It's best not to pry into that."
"How is it best? We need it to save Arthur!"
"If the stone ever fell into the hands of the magicians, this kingdom would be doomed," said Gaius. "That's as much as I know. Uther would strike a different bargain with the people who took Arthur; they know they've nothing to gain by killing the boy. Don't worry. Uther loves his son above all else. He'll come up with something."
Before an hour had passed, Uther called for the council to assemble again. This time Merlin was in the room in the place of one of the serving boys whom he'd bribed with the best pair of Arthur's socks. As he'd thought, everyone was too agitated to notice the difference. Not that court people normally paid much attention to the servants.
"I have dispatched a messenger with my answer to the ransom demand," said the king to the council. "I've offered to trade my life for my son's."
With a gesture he silenced a chorus of questions and protests and continued:
"I'm still waiting for the reply, but I'm certain my offer won't be declined. They want revenge, and they can have it. I'm an old man. Arthur was going to succeed me in a decade or two; it would only be a little earlier. He's of age, he's strong and capable, and he's ready. His whole life is before him, he'll achieve great things. But he's still very young, and he'll need your help."
Merlin barely heard a word of what was said for the rest of the meeting. Arthur would be returned, but it would crush him to learn the price. Maybe they could never tell him, just lie about that somehow - create a huge conspiracy and stick to it forever.
The answer didn't come that day or the next morning. More men were dispatched to the grove, and they found the guards slaughtered and the body of the messenger laid out at the edge of the stone circle. A note was pinned to it, unsealed, for everyone to see: "We've named our price. You have three days before we start sending your prince home in pieces."
Merlin was one of the first to hear the story because he'd been waiting at the gates almost constantly. He saw the note before the king did, and then he went to Gwen's smithy.
"So hypothetically," he said. "You could make a key to any lock in Camelot, couldn't you?"
She hushed him and led him by the hand to Morgana's quarters. Morgause was there, in bed with Morgana, holding her. They were both dressed, Merlin noticed, and then was disgusted at himself for thinking of that right now. Morgana's dark head rested on her sister's shoulder, and her eyes were rimmed in red so bright it almost seemed like they'd been bleeding.
"I remember now," said Morgause, barely acknowledging their presence. "I once overheard Father argue with the king about that. Father was saying that the Archmage's stone could be tamed and used. The king insisted that the engines were the only safe way."
Morgana let out a brittle laugh.
"Shows how much we can trust his judgement," she said. "Merlin. Oh, Merlin. Brave, loyal Merlin. You don't even have any doubts, do you?"
"Not really," he said. "Well, you know. Kingdom, doomed, that's bad, yeah. But that's - maybe in the future, in some way we can still prevent. Arthur's in danger right now."
"It must be in the treasury," said Morgause. "You should know what it is when you see it. It's well guarded, though. I'll send the guards some wine tonight. They won't think twice about it. Everybody knows I love a man in uniform."
"I'll add my special warming spice to it," Morgana nodded. "It won't even be odd if they wouldn't wake up for days. Arthur always told anyone willing to listen that alchemy wasn't a proper exact science."
Merlin turned to Gwen, but she was already handing the key to him.
"Don't you need a wax impression or something?" he asked.
"This key opens every lock in Camelot. I'll have it back, please, when you bring Arthur home."
Once Arthur got his hands on the machine he couldn't stop working. He reassembled the part they gave him, then he ate the food they brought him, absently spooning bland stew into his mouth while they tested the joints by sending jolts of magic down the pathways. He knew they'd be satisfied. He was already eyeing the next part, mentally plotting out the work to be done on that.
There wasn't anything to do but work or sleep, or be idle and miserable. When his hands were busy and his mind was on a problem he could solve with a few twists of a spanner, everything else fell away. He forgot all about the pain and the cold, and soon he was warm and sweating, nearly whistling to himself.
From the first glance at the drawings of the design he understood how he'd fight back. They brought him here because he was an excellent engineer: it was what made him their target, and it was going to be his weapon against them.
The machine wasn't going to work. It couldn't work the way it was designed. But on the off-chance that somehow it did - he understood its intended function well enough to know that it couldn't be allowed.
The design was streamlined for agility, with great attention paid to proper balance and weight distribution, and that was the main weakness. There were very few redundancies to the whole construction. If one joint was to fail, it would immediately put the adjacent ones under doubled stress. If those were weakened as well, failure would spread through the whole frame, spiralling and escalating.
He wouldn't do anything as obvious as leaving a screw loose - they checked for that. Besides, he was good enough to make it more subtle, more certain. He'd weigh down certain parts under the guise of reinforcing them, he'd put the gears ever so slightly out of sync, make the recoil just a touch more jarring, shift the brunt of it closer to more delicate connections. It wouldn't be anything they'd notice in the workshop during tests, but once the machine was up and running, shaking and heating up, it would only take minutes before the first cog slipped. Soon the whole thing would start tearing itself apart with every move.
Arthur ate when he was fed, worked until his head clouded and his hands started shaking, and then he curled up by the wall and slept. They let him sleep his fill, never dictating when it was time for rest and when it wasn't. Sometimes they'd just carry on reviewing and testing his work, and sometimes they'd leave him alone in the cave, presumably to go sleep somewhere less damp and smelly. He was glad for the privacy, but whenever they left they pushed the workbench out of his reach again. If he woke up before they came back he couldn't work. He had to wait for their return, pacing, stretching, twiddling his thumbs, wondering how it was possible that he still hadn't been found and what his odds were of living through this.
He suspected he was working sixteen hours a day, if not more, at a frantic pace. He thought to slow down, but it must have been at least five days, maybe over a week judging by the stubble on his face alone. The rescue still didn't come, and was looking less likely by the hour. He could stall, but he didn't know if it would be of any use. By depriving himself of work he'd only spend less time as an engineer and more time chained up in a cave like a dumb animal.
He dreamt a lot. They brought him enough blankets to keep him reasonably warm, but the rock floor of the cave was too hard for him to sleep deeply enough. He'd rarely left the castle, too busy with work, and he'd never even slept on the ground or on the forest floor before the way his ancestor kings would have done during war campaigns or hunting trips. He still slept, pulled under by fatigue and worn down more by the sheer fact of being in captivity than anything else. His dreams were frighteningly vivid, and they wouldn't fade quickly enough on waking.
He dreamt of machines, as always, and over and over he dreamt that he'd somehow found the way to bring the magicians' device to life and turn it on them. He sicced it on Edwin like he would a dog and watched blood flow as the machine tore him apart.
He saw his merlin-bird, only it wasn't silver. It was alive, and it looked at him with wide, blue human eyes. Merlin was stroking its neck, and he was beautiful, his soft lips smiling gently. He was saying, "I'm doing this for you, Arthur, because I love you." But it probably wasn't Merlin because his fingers were made of metal, and they closed on the bird's neck, wringing it mercilessly. Arthur woke up, panting for breath, completely sure for that one moment that Merlin was the accomplice Edwin told him about.
He couldn't be, of course, because he was Merlin. But if Arthur was honest with himself, he didn't really know that much about him. He knew that Merlin was from some village and he had a mother and he was clever and lazy and ridiculous in equal measures. Sometimes it felt like he'd been around for the whole of Arthur's life, his presence more familiar – and certainly less terrifying - than Morgana's, and sometimes he was a mystery, an odd, quirky miracle. For all the time they'd spent together, they hadn't spoken much of anything outside their work. Arthur hardly ever touched him, except to cuff him upside the head occasionally.
Merlin was kind to the point of self-sacrifice, stupidly trusting and easily swayed by emotion; that could be exploited by the wrong sort of people. Merlin's gift could have been magical in nature, Arthur knew that was possible. Banned or not, magic had been in the blood of his people since the dawn of time, and it would take more than a generation or two for it to dry out. Merlin's intuition could have been latent magic, dormant because he was never taught to use it. He'd always been taught that he wasn't allowed to try. He'd always been in the dark, sitting still with his eyes closed, and if someone like Edwin promised to take him into the light and teach him to see...
Then he realised that he was already making excuses for a possible betrayal, and he stopped thinking about it.
He tried talking to his jailers, to procure useful information of any kind. They weren't forthcoming and he loathed them so much that he couldn't even carry a conversation, so he quickly drifted back to his work. He wasn't treated too badly, all things considered. There was plenty of food that came often enough and the waste bucket was emptied promptly. The burn on his shoulder got infected and Edwin treated that, took away all the pain somehow, and now Arthur barely felt that the wound was there. When his hands blistered and bled they got cleaned and bandaged, and there was always a mug of water within his reach.
Apart from the very first day, he'd been assaulted only twice. The first time it happened he'd been asleep. Someone's hand yanked hard on his hair, and before he could wake enough to fight back the magician hacked off a great clump of his hair with a knife and walked away without an explanation.
The second time he'd been working and he saw it coming. Edwin stormed into the cave, shaking with fury, and threw up his hands. Arthur ducked behind the workbench, and the first spell went over him, quivering in the air above him like a heavy wave of heat. The next moment he was hit and got slammed into the stone wall. Then there was pain, pure and raw, rolling through his body jolt after jolt.
The others rushed to Edwin and restrained him. He exchanged a glance with them and shook his head, looking more defeated than angry now.
Arthur had been cutting cogs when he was attacked, and he still had a small chisel clasped in his hand. He crawled to his nest of blankets, still breathless from the pain. He curled up on his side to wait it out and furtively tucked the chisel into the folds of cloth.
"We should just kill him," said Edwin.
"What would be the point? Let's talk about this once he's done with the machine."
They moved the workbench away and left. For a while he still heard them arguing outside. He picked up the chisel, chose a link in his chain and started working on it, more to keep busy than really hoping this would be the path to his escape. He couldn't score the link deeply enough, not without a hammer. But given enough time, even the shallow scratches would add up to something. When his fingers cramped and wouldn't hold the chisel anymore, he put it through the scored link and used it as a lever to try and twist the metal, again and again.
He couldn't begin to guess how long it would take for the chain to get tired enough to snap; it could be days, months or years. But metal didn't get rested, Merlin said so. And he would rest and eat and sleep; the metal wouldn't stand a chance. Sooner or later it would be the first one to give up.
Next Part
Pairings/characters: Arthur/Merlin
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 40k
Warnings: reincarnation, violence, captivity, deaths of minor characters, alternative history, bad science, extreme nerdiness, evil mecha.
Summary: It's been centuries since King Arthur united Albion and lifted the ban on magic. Ruled by Pendragon dynasty, the kingdom had prospered till a feud between the magicians and King Uther the Second drove the country to the brink of collapse. Now it's up to Prince Arthur and his Knights of the Engine to harness steam power to replace the magic Albion had lost, and it's up to Merlin to protect Arthur while he fulfils his destiny.
Author's notes: Written for
paperlegends. Reincarnation story. Renaissance-era post-apocalyptic steampunk AU set 300 years after canon timeline. Betaed by the wonderful deadwoodmt Art link: HERE ARE 3 (THREE!!!) AWESOME PIECES by
aqualillium who also made beautiful icons and banners featured here.Podfic!!!! Performed wonderfully by
pennyplainknits, zip of all 5 parts is HERE!!! Also on AOOO for all your e-booking needs
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
On the last day of the age of the magicians, seventeen years ago, King Uther the Second had summoned Archmage Cornelius for a private meeting. This time he sent armed guards to deliver the invitation and to escort the Archmage to the royal chambers whether he complied or not.
"It is a sad day for Albion when her Archmage is paraded through the capital under guard like a common criminal," snarled Cornelius, stomping into the room.
"You left me little choice, magician," said Uther. "Twice I had summoned you, and you ignored my orders. I'm not a scullery maid whom you can stand up for a date; when I summon, you come."
"You should have received a note of apology each time," said Cornelius breezily. "As I said, I'm not yet ready to present my project."
"It's not up to you to decide whether to grace me with your presence. Archmage or not, you're still my subject. Your work is funded with my money, and I will receive your report when I ask for it."
They stared each other down, alone in the great room.
In the old times, the court magician was the king's closest friend and his most trusted advisor. The candidates were chosen by the court and the magicians. They would go through many trials to determine the winner, who would work to bind the state and the magic together. But those days were long past. The magicians had an Archmage now who was their undisputed leader, selected through means known only to them. No other would even enter the contest for the title.
The king was no longer invited to the meetings of magicians' council, as it used to be in the days of King Arthur and his successors. Nobody knew if there still was a council or if the Archmage ruled the magic folk unchallenged. The deeper magic entered into everyday lives of Albion's people through increasingly ubiquitous machines and magical remedies, the more withdrawn and secretive the magicians became and the less eager they seemed to serve.
Uther had no choice but to deal with Cornelius, and it had been a battle of wills ever since he took the throne. Cornelius was more than twice his age, and from the very start it rankled him to bow to the young king. Uther didn't have his late father's patience for such things. In fact, he believed that the liberties afforded to magicians by the previous kings had been a mistake, that it was because of this that the crown now had to deal with the dangerous, barely disguised impudence.
"Very well," Cornelius said. "You shall see it now."
He fished something out of his bag and handed it to Uther.
It was an object the size of a child's head, made of mostly stone with reddish crystals embedded into it. It was an elaborate work, finely carved in layers of minute runes; it was hollow inside or perhaps was only unusually light. It was warm to the touch, and it seemed almost alive, as though if Uther concentrated very hard he'd feel it pulse and shiver in his hands.
"This is the culmination of my life's work," said the magician. "It's something that was previously unheard of. It challenges the very foundation of what we know about the world."
"What does it do?"
"Potentially anything."
Uther gave the thing another puzzled once-over and handed it back to Cornelius. He cradled it softly in his wrinkled hands, as if he was gentling a kitten.
"This is an ultimate power conduit, and yet it is so much more than that. It shall be heart, soul and mind of a machine worthy to house it. With it, nothing is quite beyond the realm of possible. We're already building a shell for it, a machine of our own design. It will eclipse everything we've done so far. It's not quite ready, but if you give me just another month-"
"Now."
Cornelius shook his head disapprovingly and moved to the desk to unfurl the scrolls he brought with him.
Uther was well versed in mechanics, as a king had to be to properly oversee the work of the magicians. It took him bare minutes of studying the drawings to grasp the concept of the device. The more he read, the colder the air around him seemed to feel. A leaden weight was settling in his chest, and he knew that here, in this room, the future history of Albion would be defined. He didn't wish for this responsibility. In that moment, he was terrified.
"Tell me what it is," he demanded, because he needed to hear the Archmage say it.
"It's a soldier," the man said readily. "An ultimate soldier, a machine of war. It can annihilate an army before it's overwhelmed. It can level a city all on its own. It will have the wits to defend itself and the power and cunning to destroy whatever it's set upon. With just one of them at your disposal, you'll never be challenged. With a few of them, you will conquer the world."
Uther closed his eyes and breathed deeply to steady his heart.
"I've no wish for conquest," he said. "My kingdom is vast and rich, and my people are free and prosperous. I don't want to put either of them through an ordeal of war."
"With this you won't have to! The war machines will only require a few magicians to constantly power each, but they can do it safely from a considerable distance. The only ones in any peril shall be your enemies. You see now why I was so busy lately, why I delayed seeing you. I was waiting to present you with your new soldiers in their full glory, to really let you see the power we'd bring you."
"I see. Well. This project shall be stopped immediately."
He wouldn't look at the magician for fear of losing his resolve, but he heard the sharp intake of breath behind him.
"Don't you understand what I'm offering you?" Cornelius asked. "This is the ultimate dream of every monarch in the known world. An unstoppable army, power without limit. Don't you understand?"
"I've no interest in this war machine," said Uther as lightly as he could. "And I don't see why you'd want your magicians involved in combat. I think the magic is much better suited for peaceful pursuits. The ploughs were a great accomplishment. Now perhaps you could build something in that vein to enhance the lives of a common folk? A brighter light source, for example; oil lamps can only do so much. Or something I feel is greatly needed: some sort of magical enclosure for cattle, to protect them from predators and safeguard the fields from grazing."
"Are you mocking me, boy?"
Uther turned and faced him. The Archmage was pale with quiet fury, his lips shaking. Uther drew himself up, preparing to duck a spell if necessary or to call out for the guards.
"You're forgetting yourself," he said. "I am your king, and this is my kingdom. You will do as I tell you."
"Your kingdom owes everything to us. It's built on magic. It's high time you truly realised what we mean for this kingdom's survival."
Years of restrained contempt and quiet scheming were finally coming to a head, and the old man wasn't even keeping up appearances anymore. Uther decided to drop the pretence as well.
"So you thought you'd give me an army that's fully controlled by you?" he asked bluntly. "An army I couldn't run without your magic? Mindless metal soldiers that you could turn against me if you chose to? That's not going to happen, magician."
"You'd deny us any power in your kingdom, any voice! All you want is to keep us working your machines, cleaning up your filth and bowing to your rule. You'd use us like slaves - you'd use us as cattle, as beasts of burden! This can't go on forever."
"No, this can't go on forever. For years now, I watched as you wove your own little plots behind my back. The magicians now treat you as their king. They barely speak to any outsiders, as if they're a state of their own. Well, this won't go on. Albion is one country, and it has one king. You will destroy that war machine of yours, and I believe it's time you retired from your post. You're old, and you no longer think clearly. We'll hold an open trial for the next court magician, and if less than a dozen pretenders turn up, I'll assume the magicians don't want their voice to be heard."
Cornelius laughed. It was an awful sound, like the crowing of a carrion bird.
"You've just doomed your kingdom, Uther Pendragon." With a wave of his hand, he conjured a wisp of black smoke, coiled it around his feet and drew up another, thicker cloud. "So be it. Next time I see you, you shall be on your knees, bowing to me. Then my people will finally claim what's theirs."
Uther was expecting an attack; too late he realised that the man was weaving a vanishing spell. He didn't know what Cornelius planned to do if he escaped - wage a magic war on Camelot, somehow finish his grotesque war machines and set them loose, or ally himself with foreign kings and lead the conquering armies into Albion. Uther wasn't planning to find out. He yelled for the guards and grabbed his old ceremonial sword from its mount on the wall. The magician's figure was already fading, taking on a translucent sheen. Uther thrust his sword into the man's stomach, clumsy with lack of practice, wincing as the dull untended blade pared flesh and scraped bone.
He had not held a sword since he was a young prince being forced to learn fencing along with music and dancing. But this task didn't take much skill.
"The Archmage has committed high treason," he announced to the guards. "Immediately seize the main workshop and arrest everyone in it. Arrest all magicians who had access to it and everyone who was involved in that work. We must pull this up by the roots before it's too late. In fact, detain all magicians for questioning. It’s best to be thorough. And burn this body. For all we know, they'd raise him otherwise."
He knew that magicians could communicate with each other instantly and invisibly over great distances. It didn't come as a surprise that the workshop was already empty when the guards reached it, that the whole of magician's quarter was abandoned, that not a single arrest had been made. At least they couldn't take the half-finished metal monstrosity with them. The war machine was still in the workshop, and Uther ordered it disassembled and all parts melted down.
He thought to destroy the stone that Cornelius had brought to the audience, but the warmth of the stone and the glittering of the crystals held a strange, soothing promise, and this was a source of great power, after all. The reality of the magician's betrayal was starting to sink in, and with it the possibility that he might have truly doomed his kingdom. The machines were still working, but he knew that they wouldn't last even a few days, not without constant supply of magic. The stone could be useful if it could be harnessed. One day it could be their salvation.
He locked it away in the treasury, praying that he was doing the right thing. He spent the day in counsel with his court, drawing up a strategy to lessen the blow to the kingdom. Afterwards he went to see his son. Cornelius used to send the prince an occasional gift; for all Uther knew, those things could have been cursed.
Arthur was already bathed and dressed for bed, but he was still up. He was playing with the old steamboat, racing it across his bathtub still full of soapy water. He got up to greet his king, bowing properly, and then ran over to Uther and gave him a hug.
Uther still couldn't reprimand him for that, even though it was time to be firmer. Arthur was getting too old for these indulgences. He knew he was spoiling the boy. But spoiling their child should be Igraine's job, had she survived the labour, so occasionally he felt the need to do it in her stead.
"Where are the toys Cornelius gave you?" he asked. Arthur nodded at the chest in the corner, suddenly sulky, and Uther went to gather them.
The toys were at the very bottom of the chest, some still twitching weakly. They were weighted down by picture books, painted wooden blocks and a few old shoes; Uther extracted them all - a few steel knights, a silver princess doll, a golden lion - and bundled them in a blanket, ready to be tossed into a crucible and melted down.
"You didn't play with them much, did you?" he asked.
"I hate them."
"Why?"
"Because Cornelius is a creep," said Arthur and clenched his jaws and shut his eyes, waiting for a slap. He wasn't flinching, wasn't scared or ashamed; he stood tall, prepared to accept consequences of his actions as a man should.
"He is," Uther said and petted his son's fair hair. Arthur's smile was blinding. He giggled and hopped in excitement, grabbed Uther's hand and pulled him toward the tub.
"I like this one the best," he said, feeding wood chips into the fire that smouldered under the boat's tiny boiler. The turbine spat out a new jet of steam, and the boat jerkily jumped forward. "Because it was yours and granddad's, and because I know how it works."
"Yes," Uther said. Here, in this cosy room, all the worries of the world seemed to disappear for a time. Even now, facing the greatest disaster Albion had ever known, one glance at his son's sweet, peaceful face was enough to fill him with strength and hope. "Yes, so do I."
Waking up was always somewhat of an ordeal for Arthur, but this awakening was the worst ever. This was miles worse than the most horrid hangover in his admittedly limited experience of inadvisable debauchery. His head was spinning, throbbing every time he took a breath. He was cold, and he tried to burrow under the blankets but couldn't move or even feel his arms.
A sharp smell suddenly invaded his senses, choking him. It was intense to the point of pain. He jerked backwards, trying to get away, and the back of his head hit stone.
He opened his eyes, blinking fast till his vision cleared. Everything was still blurry and slowly turning about. In the centre of it all was the face of the court physician, very close, blocking out the light.
"Finally," the physician said, pocketing the bottle of smelling salts. "I was starting to worry that the dose was too high."
They weren't in Arthur's room any longer. They were in a cave of bare, damp rock. Arthur was on the ground, propped against a wall, still in his nightclothes. There was a shackle around his left ankle with a chain attached to it. His hands were bound at the wrists behind his back. He tried to reach for the knots, but his fingers were too cold and numb, and he could barely flex them.
The light wasn't coming from outside. Behind the physician, in the middle of the cave, there were two glowing spheres suspended mid-air. The light they emitted was white, harsh and flat, like cold winter sunlight bouncing off pristine snow. Magic craft.
The physician stood over him, smiling gleefully. There were three other men nearby, watching with similar detached, cruel excitement as Arthur squirmed against the bindings, his panic pathetically obvious. He thought to scream for help, but he was pretty certain they were far, far away from Camelot.
He planted his bare feet on the cold rock and took a steadying breath. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt huge in his mouth; he swallowed, cleared his throat and said, keeping his voice level:
"Where am I?"
"All you need to know, sweet prince," said the physician. "Is that you're at our mercy."
He waited for more, but they just stared at him, clearly enjoying the moment. Maybe this was as far as they got when they'd been preparing their dramatic speech.
"This is madness," he spat out, impatient. "Let's get this over with - what do you want?"
"Straight to business, how commendable," Edwin stepped to the side, letting Arthur see the rest of the room.
It was a workshop, a poor and shoddy one but a workshop still, with three workbenches that had an array of tools and parts scattered over them. On the biggest workbench was some work in progress, a mechanical contraption in a partially stripped, thick casing. It was rather large, as thick as a man's torso and at least four feet long. The design of the exposed joint was very ambitious, sturdy but reaching for great range of movement. The gear trains, however, were assembled wrongly; he could see it even from here. The ratios were visibly off.
"We've been working on a little engineering project of our own," Edwin said. "Most of the work is already done. Unfortunately, when it came to the finer points, my esteemed colleagues seem to have hit a wall. This design is rather beyond their skill and knowledge. Not surprising, really, seeing as your father made damn sure we had no opportunities to learn. But this is where you come in."
He gestured at the far wall, where several large technical drawings were pinned up.
"We have all you need to understand, correct and finish this device. We'll assist you and get you all the materials and equipment you require. You are the best among the engineers, Arthur. The best one in Albion, everyone knows that. This should be quite in your power."
Arthur stared upwards into their faces, waiting for the punch line, but they looked completely serious.
"You've kidnapped the crown prince of Camelot. You've committed high treason. Your lives are, as of now, forfeit. And you're telling me you did it all to ask for my help with your little engineering project?"
"Well," Edwin said. "We wanted the best, you see."
"You're crazy. My father will find you, and he will skin you alive," said Arthur with all the certainty he could muster. "All right, let me get this straight. You're magicians."
"How very astute," sneered Edwin, glancing at the glowing orbs by the ceiling.
"We didn't know where you all went, nor did we really care. We suspected some of you would flock to the foreign courts, suck up to some other king. But magic on its own isn't all that much, is it? Most of what we heard in legends is probably just exaggeration. An average magician can perform some showy tricks or do a bit of healing, maybe. It's all very amusing and can be useful, but that wasn't enough for you. You wanted more power. You always wanted more power. That was your downfall. And it will be again, mark my words."
He shifted against the wall, trying to get comfortable. His arms ached, and he couldn't stop shivering. Every time he managed to loosen his muscles they would seize up again in tiny tremors.
"So you've decided to try and rebuild the position you held in Albion," he continued. "With the machines, multiplied and facilitated like that, magic can be quite impressive. You would be indispensable again. The kingdom of your choice would come to depend on you, like Albion had before we knew better. But you need a working model to sell this idea. So who do you want to take this to? The Franks? The Norse? The southern kingdoms?"
He searched their faces for the smallest flicker in their expressions that would confirm his accusations, but there was nothing.
"Will you do it?" Edwin asked.
Arthur tossed his head back and laughed heartily. It made his throbbing head hurt more, and probably didn't sound all that natural or convincing, but it was worth it just to see their faces twist in ugly grimaces.
"Not a bloody chance," he said. "I won't have any part in selling out our trade secrets. And really, if you were on fire and asked me to piss on you, I would refuse. You haven't just assaulted me. I'm an heir to the throne. This is a direct attack on my kingdom. There will be no place for you to hide; Camelot will find you."
Edwin nodded, walked over to the workbench and rummaged through the clutter there.
"I was hoping you'd say that," he said, picking up one tool after the other - pincers, a chisel, a cutting knife. He held each for a moment, thoughtfully considering them in turns before putting them down. "You know, Arthur, I've spent a very long time preparing for this. It took considerable resolve to work my way up to a high enough position in your court, bowing, kowtowing, always being so helpful. Every time I tended to your father's disgusting stump or treated his aged bowels, every time I cleaned up your little scrapes and bruises like a common nursemaid, I was hoping that when this time came you'd be stubborn."
He chose a foot-long metal rod, cupped a tip of it with his left palm and whispered something. When he lowered his hand the metal was glowing red, like it was just pulled out of a furnace.
"Hold him down," he said, advancing. The men grabbed Arthur by the shoulders and pinned his legs. There wasn't much he could do, tied up and chained to the wall, so he stopped struggling, clenched his teeth and waited.
Edwin yanked on Arthur's sleeve until it ripped at the shoulder seam and slowly, terribly slowly, brought blazing metal to his bared skin. The pain was awful; Arthur tried to let it wash over him, accept it, remember that he'd been hurt before and worse than this. He wasn't going to scream. Sobs and moans were raking up his throat and tearing through his chest, but he wouldn't scream; he was determined not to. But then the smell of his own flesh burning onto metal hit his nose, and there was nothing left except agony and blind panic. He screamed then, pushing all the air out of his lungs. He felt the darkness roll closer, and begged for it to take him.
The pain stopped abruptly. He still felt like he was about to pass out, and he tried to go with it, let his body go slack, loosen his hold on consciousness. But Edwin shoved those damn smelling salts in his face and jolted him awake.
"Changed your mind yet?" he asked.
"I'd sooner die," Arthur told him.
After a moment's respite the burn started to ache all over again. Now that the heat damage was spreading deeper into the tissue, it hurt almost as bad as the brand did. He knew that, untreated, this pain would linger for hours, compounding whatever else they would do to him. But his head was clear again. He could hold on.
"Oh, Arthur. You're forgetting that I'm an excellent physician. I won't let you die."
Edwin raised the rod again, its tip still bright red. Arthur recoiled a little on pure instinct biting his lips to keep quiet. Edwin chuckled and paused with the metal inches from Arthur's shoulder, aiming just below the first burn mark.
"I wonder how much of this you'll be able to endure," he mused. "Minutes, you think? Once more, or perhaps twice? Maybe it'll take hours. I do hope you won't give in for hours, at least. You're not going to disappoint me, are you Arthur?"
"Edwin, I understand that you've been looking forward to this," one of the men suddenly said. Arthur had thought them to be obedient, silent thugs, but it seemed he was wrong. "But this will get tiresome very quickly, and we have work to do."
"Do we have to waste time breaking him?" said another one. "I know we wanted the best, but I'd settle for good enough. What about that boy with freckles, what's his name, Owain? I heard he was a prodigy. Let's take him instead."
"He's not very experienced. I think we should go for Pelinor," said the third one.
"No," said Arthur weakly. "No, no, I know what you're trying to do. I don't believe you. Your cover is blown. Merlin will tell the king he last saw me with you. Everyone will know you're a traitor. You can't come back, and you can't take anyone else."
"Do you really think it was just me?" Edwin asked with a short amused laugh. "You think I dragged your great snoring carcass out of the castle all by myself? Do you think the four of us is all there is?"
"I don't believe you," Arthur repeated dumbly, sickened by the very thought. "I don't."
"Hush," said Edwin. "Actually, we'd have the same problem with Owain and Pelinor. Engineers are a stubborn lot. I have an idea, if you want fast results. The girl who runs the smithy is actually a very handy mechanic herself."
"No! Not her. Why her? She's never had any formal training!" Arthur protested.
"Maybe she wouldn't be very helpful," said one of the men holding him down. "But something tells me you will, once she's here."
"Actually, you know who had some formal training?" said Edwin, as if the thought just occurred to him. "Merlin! He's been reading a lot, and he was a savant to start with. He'd be the easiest to grab, as well. He's just a servant, nobody would even care."
Arthur tried to think about it rationally, to use logic as he was trained to. He knew they were playing him. He knew they were only doing this because they didn't believe they could break him with pain and threats. He didn't think they had the means to kidnap anyone else. Not now, when the castle would be raised in alarm, looking for him and those who took him. But the mere thought of his men or Gwen or Merlin being dragged here, chained and tortured - he couldn't bear it. It was beyond his ability to endure. He felt cornered, utterly defeated; horror was choking him, and he couldn't get enough air into his chest. His breaths were coming shallow and fast, and sounded a lot like sobs.
"Let's talk to our people and make plans," Edwin said. The men released Arthur, but he couldn't even find the strength to move. "It'll take some time. Maybe Arthur will reconsider by then."
They cut the bindings on his wrists. He brought his hands forward, rubbed at the deep grooves the ropes left in his skin. He was only dimly aware of the pain as the blood rushed back; his fingers felt huge and limp, like uncooked sausages.
"Here is something to keep you amused," Edwin brought over some scrolls and put them at his feet. "You can start familiarising yourself with the design. These are, of course, merely copies. But if you damage them, I'll still punish you."
They left through the only opening in the cave. He heard their voices echoing through the passageway, but he couldn't make out any words, no matter how he strained his hearing.
The manacle around his ankle didn't have a lock and was completely seamless, as if it had been welded onto his leg. The chain links were just as solid, and the other end of the chain went right into the stone of the cave wall with no give there at all. The chain was about ten feet long, which put the nearest workbench out of his reach by a good yard, so he couldn't get to any of the tools.
He tore a strip of cloth from the bottom of his nightshirt and tightly wrapped it around the burn, trying not to look at the wound. They left him an empty bucket, and he pissed in it, hoping to put off the indignity of doing it in their presence for as long as possible. He paced a little to warm up and did some exercises he remembered from his childhood fencing lessons. It helped. Working his body always helped him think more clearly. He made a mental note to increase the exercise his engineers were getting. It always seemed like a waste of time when you were in the throes of a scientific zeal, but in the long run it would keep them all healthier, happier, more productive.
Now he could see that things weren’t as hopeless as they had seemed moments ago. Camelot would be looking for him; they'd have started the moment his absence was discovered. Every resource they had would be dedicated to his rescue right now. Help would come. He just needed to trust it would and stay alive.
While he was at it, it would be prudent to gather information. He needed to learn as much about the enemy's intentions as he could.
He considered that for a while, poking the scrolls with his bare toes.
"Oh, it wouldn't hurt to look," he told himself and opened the first one.
"Arthur! Arthur! Highness!"
He lifted his head and blinked, coming back to himself. He couldn't begin to fathom how much time had passed. He tended to lose time when he was working. The magicians were back, standing over him. He was on all fours on the floor, crawling from one drawing to the next and tracing the lines with his fingers; his chain was strewn all over the scrolls to keep them open, and he even used the waste bucket to pin down one of the corners. He wasn't done yet, but he had a general idea. The design was bold but deeply flawed, and the most fascinating thing about it was that whoever conceived this device obviously knew better than to make these very mistakes.
"Well, look at that," said one of the magicians with an amused smile.
"I think," said another, "That at a certain level of dedication any craft might become as fulfilling and addictive as magic. I'm just glad we don't have to rely on that theory."
Arthur sat back on his heels and tried to organise his thoughts enough to convey them to laymen.
"This won't work," he said. "Not the way you expect it to. There is nothing to bind it all together, nothing to control it, no pattern to any of this. I don't care how clever you think your magic is, it's not this clever. The device will be nothing but a puppet without strings. It's a huge waste of work and metal. If you expect me or anyone else to fix it, well, it's not possible. Not for years yet, anyway."
"No. We need it assembled exactly as the drawings say."
"The drawings aren't that precise, which is why you're having troubles with it in the first place. For example, what's this?" he poked at the place at the crossing of the main axles where the insane inventor have given up completely and hand-drawn a wobbly circle without any explanatory text. "I've no idea what that is. Do you know what it is? You said you're almost done assembling it. What do you have there? I need to see it."
"Later," said Edwin and, with a short spell and a wave of his hand, he moved the workbench a few yards closer. The legs skidded on the rock with a screech, the metal on the table jangled and settled down, and it was all within reach now: the comfortingly familiar tools and the part of the device he already knew so well from the drawings. He could see the errors even better now, and he itched to fix them out of some primal yearning to bring order to chaos. "I'll go get you some water now. We'll feed you when we see some results."
"I didn't say I'd do it," Arthur said. He was very thirsty, now that he'd thought about it, and wouldn't say no to food either. "Before I even begin to consider it, there are conditions to be met, and I'll need some guarantees. I want to be sure you won't take or hurt anyone else if I comply. And when I'm done you will release me unharmed, even if this thing doesn't work. Which it won't."
"We never planned to kill you."
He barely heard that, busy thinking. He felt that he should be putting up more of a fight, for the sake of appearances if nothing else. He could endure pain for a lot longer, and he was almost sure that the threats to kidnap his people were just that, empty threats and mind games.
But he didn't dare risk it. Not when there was the slightest chance that Merlin - or Gwen or any of them - could end up in the hands of these madmen. Not when he knew just how to defeat the magicians and ruin their plans. If anyone was going to do more work on this device, it had to be him. He knew exactly what to do.
He was handed a clay mug full of stale, tepid water. He drank it down, got up and stepped closer to the workbench.
"What a mess," he said and picked up a spanner. The tools weren't his, but they felt almost as good to hold.
Merlin spent the first day of Arthur's absence in Camelot's dungeons.
When he first walked into the empty room in the morning, he dropped the breakfast tray on the floor, eggs and sausages and all, and ran straight for the guard station.
"Arthur is gone," he told the captain of the guard, forgetting all about titles and pleasantries. "He wouldn't just go, would he? Something is wrong."
The commotion started right then and didn't let up for hours. People wouldn't talk to him. They would, however, ask him to tell the whole story over and over again, even though it seemed that no one was listening. And they would drag him around in what seemed like a stupid, aimless pattern.
The captain and a squad of guards took Merlin back to Arthur's room and then all around the castle, out to the gates and the drawbridge, back to Arthur's room, outside again, to the great cart's station at the bottom of the hill, and again back to Arthur's room. Some of the men would be sent out to run somewhere else, others would return with reports. It all was a pointless waste of time, a giant, castle-wide flailing in panic disguised as security procedure.
Once they were in Arthur's room again, Merlin tried to calm down and think it through. There was no reason to jump to the worst conclusions - except there was. There was a cold twist in his stomach and something heavy sitting in his chest and he knew, he knew. But he could be wrong. He'd give anything to be wrong.
"He probably just went out," he said out loud: to himself and to the men who were rummaging around the room as if Arthur could be hiding behind the curtains or in the washing bowl. "Maybe he went to meet a secret lover and fell asleep in their bed. He'll be so angry at all the fuss. He'll kill me for spilling the food. He'll be so mad."
He stared at the door. It stood thrown open - it was never like that, because Arthur valued his privacy. He imagined Arthur walking in, stomping his boots, filling the room with his annoyed, radiant presence. If Merlin knew any spells, he'd make that happen, right in front of everybody. He'd gladly go into exile and never see Arthur again if only he walked through that door right now, alive and safe.
He went to the wardrobe and started rifling through the clothes, trying to see if anything was missing. Everything seemed to be there, but Arthur had so many clothes; he had five red velvet jackets alone. Something could be missing. Arthur could have gotten dressed and walked out on his own volition, and he could be back soon. Merlin wanted to bury his face in the fabric and breathe in Arthur's smell - it seemed the only way to be able to breathe right again, to purge that tightness from his chest.
Suddenly, the king was in the room, and his right hand was gripping Merlin's arm, squeezing painfully tight, shaking him. He was being asked questions again; he repeated everything he could remember from last night: their talk about round fields, the physician's visit. Everything seemed disjointed in his head, and it sounded like lies from too much repetition.
Then he was being led somewhere again. Only when the locks clicked shut and the guards walked away did he realise he was in the dungeon cell.
"Why am I here? I should be out there," he told the prison guard. "I should be looking for him."
"Everyone's looking for him," said the man. He looked just as lost as everyone else did this morning. "His Majesty wants you detained for questioning. Just sit tight. I'm sure His Highness would be back any minute now."
Merlin sat on the straw and tried not to think, just empty his head and let time pass. By the afternoon, he'd bitten his fingernails to the quick and took to rocking back and forth. That's how the girls found him when they came down to see him.
He rushed to the bars and clung to Gwen's arms.
"Something horrible is happening to him, I just feel it," he said. "We need to do something."
"We found an empty vial in his room. It's just like you said," Morgana told him. "We've analysed it - it held a potent sleeping draught. Gaius thinks it might have been imbued with magic."
Merlin moaned in frustrated rage at the thought of Arthur, drugged and helpless. Gwen's fingers were moving in his hair in soothing circles, but he didn't want to be comforted, not when Arthur had no one to comfort him right now.
"Just don't do anything stupid," said Morgause.
"Like what?"
"Like break out. Just wait."
They left, and he waited, slowly losing his mind. The sun went down, and he thought of sleeping, but every part of him was impossibly alert and tense. He couldn't even bear to lie down.
Eventually the door opened, and the guards led him up the stairs, back into the wing where the royal chambers were. They walked past Arthur's room; it still stood open, the terrible mess inside exposed for everyone to see. The breakfast was still all over the floor, bits of it trampled into the thick white rug by Arthur's bed.
He was shoved into the king's private audience chamber and pressed into a chair. The king leaned over him, his face dark and worn and his eyes utterly mad.
"I'm sorry," Merlin said, hiccuping from choked sobs.
"So you admit-" the king started, but Merlin couldn't listen, couldn't shut up.
"I'm so sorry," he babbled. "I should have protected him. I was supposed to protect him. That was the whole point of me being here. The one thing I had to do. I'm so sorry."
He might have cried then; later he wasn't sure. The king's left hand, the soft one, might have been stroking his hair at some point. That didn't seem at all likely on sober reflection.
Then he was let out, and he stumbled aimlessly around the hallways for some time. He tried to walk out of the castle and look for clues, but he was turned back by the guards. Soon he found himself in Gaius's laboratory. Dawn was breaking outside. Morgana was asleep in a chair, covered by Gaius's ratty blanket. Her hair was tangled and flat, without its usual lustre.
"How can she sleep?" Merlin said. "Gaius, we need to do something."
"Yes, yes, in a minute," Gaius said. "Drink this now."
He did, and it tasted sweet and vile at the same time, and then he slept.
The second day brought some news. The gamekeeper found tracks and traced them to the forest of Arador; specifically, to the sacred grove. Arthur had been taken through the magicians' portal.
"I'll go there," Merlin told Morgana. "I'll bargain with them. But I don't know where it is, so I need a map. Can you get me a map?"
"What do you have to bargain with, exactly?" she asked ruthlessly. "You think you can just talk it out with the people who kidnapped the heir to the throne?"
"But we need to do something."
"It's about ransom, it has to be. They won't harm him. We just have to wait for the ransom note."
He waited and waited. He cleaned Arthur's room, shined all his shoes and spent the rest of the time lying on top of the covers of Arthur's bed staring at the cracks on the ceiling.
"Where does the portal lead to?" he asked Morgause on the third day.
"Nobody knows. It could be a number of places. There could be dozens of portals, though I'm sure they only used the known one to make a point."
"Maybe we could find Arthur with our, you know. Gift. Maybe we can scry for him or something."
"Do you know how?"
"I thought maybe you did. I thought you might have had some training before it was forbidden. You look old enough."
"I forgive you because you're more insane than usual right now," she said. "And no, I don't know a single spell."
Somehow Merlin still ate every day, washed his face, changed his socks and puttered around Arthur's room looking for more chores to do. Gaius drugged him and Morgana for a few more days until they started to outright ask him for it at supper.
"I used to have such a crush on Arthur," Gwen told him on the sixth day. He was in the smithy - he'd had enough of the frozen emptiness of Arthur's room and the quiet despair hanging over the laboratory.
"Who hasn't," he sighed. "Tell you what. When he's back, I'll set you two up. I'm really good at it. I write the best love notes."
She smiled weakly and pulled him to his feet.
"We need to stop this, it's not helping anyone," she said. "We should keep working. Come on, join in."
He worked the bellows and tried swinging the sledge hammer for a while, but it didn't help settle his mind. Their work gave them purpose and solace, but his job was looking after Arthur, and he'd failed. He didn't have a job anymore.
A full week had passed like that, and then the ransom note arrived.
The guards posted at the forest of Arador found a bag in the grove. It held a sealed letter addressed to the king and a handful of golden hair.
The council and the king had already been talking about paying the ransom. They'd discussed how much gold they had in the treasury, how much more could be raised in a matter of days, how much could be squeezed out of the city's population and the nearby villages in lieu of next year's taxes. The numbers repeated in the kitchens were unbelievable, unimaginable. They could have been exaggerated, but it was, essentially, the whole kingdom's wealth, and it was all to be traded away for one man. The king wouldn't stop ordering the council to find more resources, and Merlin understood him perfectly - huge as the sums were, it just didn't seem like it would be enough. It couldn't possibly be worth as much as Arthur's life.
Now the council had gathered again, but the meeting didn't last a minute. The king opened the note and read it to himself. Then he ripped it to tiny shreds and left the room.
Merlin had charmed the cleaning maid, or more likely terrified her with his frantic begging and manic queasy smiles, and she surrendered the contents of the dust pan to him. He took bits of the note to Arthur's room and assembled them on the work desk with the help of Arthur's tweezers and magnifying glass. When he could read enough, he went to the alchemical laboratory.
"What's an Archmage's stone?" he demanded as soon as he was through the door. Gaius flinched and did something impossible with his eyebrows.
"I don't exactly know," he said. "It's best not to pry into that."
"How is it best? We need it to save Arthur!"
"If the stone ever fell into the hands of the magicians, this kingdom would be doomed," said Gaius. "That's as much as I know. Uther would strike a different bargain with the people who took Arthur; they know they've nothing to gain by killing the boy. Don't worry. Uther loves his son above all else. He'll come up with something."
Before an hour had passed, Uther called for the council to assemble again. This time Merlin was in the room in the place of one of the serving boys whom he'd bribed with the best pair of Arthur's socks. As he'd thought, everyone was too agitated to notice the difference. Not that court people normally paid much attention to the servants.
"I have dispatched a messenger with my answer to the ransom demand," said the king to the council. "I've offered to trade my life for my son's."
With a gesture he silenced a chorus of questions and protests and continued:
"I'm still waiting for the reply, but I'm certain my offer won't be declined. They want revenge, and they can have it. I'm an old man. Arthur was going to succeed me in a decade or two; it would only be a little earlier. He's of age, he's strong and capable, and he's ready. His whole life is before him, he'll achieve great things. But he's still very young, and he'll need your help."
Merlin barely heard a word of what was said for the rest of the meeting. Arthur would be returned, but it would crush him to learn the price. Maybe they could never tell him, just lie about that somehow - create a huge conspiracy and stick to it forever.
The answer didn't come that day or the next morning. More men were dispatched to the grove, and they found the guards slaughtered and the body of the messenger laid out at the edge of the stone circle. A note was pinned to it, unsealed, for everyone to see: "We've named our price. You have three days before we start sending your prince home in pieces."
Merlin was one of the first to hear the story because he'd been waiting at the gates almost constantly. He saw the note before the king did, and then he went to Gwen's smithy.
"So hypothetically," he said. "You could make a key to any lock in Camelot, couldn't you?"
She hushed him and led him by the hand to Morgana's quarters. Morgause was there, in bed with Morgana, holding her. They were both dressed, Merlin noticed, and then was disgusted at himself for thinking of that right now. Morgana's dark head rested on her sister's shoulder, and her eyes were rimmed in red so bright it almost seemed like they'd been bleeding.
"I remember now," said Morgause, barely acknowledging their presence. "I once overheard Father argue with the king about that. Father was saying that the Archmage's stone could be tamed and used. The king insisted that the engines were the only safe way."
Morgana let out a brittle laugh.
"Shows how much we can trust his judgement," she said. "Merlin. Oh, Merlin. Brave, loyal Merlin. You don't even have any doubts, do you?"
"Not really," he said. "Well, you know. Kingdom, doomed, that's bad, yeah. But that's - maybe in the future, in some way we can still prevent. Arthur's in danger right now."
"It must be in the treasury," said Morgause. "You should know what it is when you see it. It's well guarded, though. I'll send the guards some wine tonight. They won't think twice about it. Everybody knows I love a man in uniform."
"I'll add my special warming spice to it," Morgana nodded. "It won't even be odd if they wouldn't wake up for days. Arthur always told anyone willing to listen that alchemy wasn't a proper exact science."
Merlin turned to Gwen, but she was already handing the key to him.
"Don't you need a wax impression or something?" he asked.
"This key opens every lock in Camelot. I'll have it back, please, when you bring Arthur home."
Once Arthur got his hands on the machine he couldn't stop working. He reassembled the part they gave him, then he ate the food they brought him, absently spooning bland stew into his mouth while they tested the joints by sending jolts of magic down the pathways. He knew they'd be satisfied. He was already eyeing the next part, mentally plotting out the work to be done on that.
There wasn't anything to do but work or sleep, or be idle and miserable. When his hands were busy and his mind was on a problem he could solve with a few twists of a spanner, everything else fell away. He forgot all about the pain and the cold, and soon he was warm and sweating, nearly whistling to himself.
From the first glance at the drawings of the design he understood how he'd fight back. They brought him here because he was an excellent engineer: it was what made him their target, and it was going to be his weapon against them.
The machine wasn't going to work. It couldn't work the way it was designed. But on the off-chance that somehow it did - he understood its intended function well enough to know that it couldn't be allowed.
The design was streamlined for agility, with great attention paid to proper balance and weight distribution, and that was the main weakness. There were very few redundancies to the whole construction. If one joint was to fail, it would immediately put the adjacent ones under doubled stress. If those were weakened as well, failure would spread through the whole frame, spiralling and escalating.
He wouldn't do anything as obvious as leaving a screw loose - they checked for that. Besides, he was good enough to make it more subtle, more certain. He'd weigh down certain parts under the guise of reinforcing them, he'd put the gears ever so slightly out of sync, make the recoil just a touch more jarring, shift the brunt of it closer to more delicate connections. It wouldn't be anything they'd notice in the workshop during tests, but once the machine was up and running, shaking and heating up, it would only take minutes before the first cog slipped. Soon the whole thing would start tearing itself apart with every move.
Arthur ate when he was fed, worked until his head clouded and his hands started shaking, and then he curled up by the wall and slept. They let him sleep his fill, never dictating when it was time for rest and when it wasn't. Sometimes they'd just carry on reviewing and testing his work, and sometimes they'd leave him alone in the cave, presumably to go sleep somewhere less damp and smelly. He was glad for the privacy, but whenever they left they pushed the workbench out of his reach again. If he woke up before they came back he couldn't work. He had to wait for their return, pacing, stretching, twiddling his thumbs, wondering how it was possible that he still hadn't been found and what his odds were of living through this.
He suspected he was working sixteen hours a day, if not more, at a frantic pace. He thought to slow down, but it must have been at least five days, maybe over a week judging by the stubble on his face alone. The rescue still didn't come, and was looking less likely by the hour. He could stall, but he didn't know if it would be of any use. By depriving himself of work he'd only spend less time as an engineer and more time chained up in a cave like a dumb animal.
He dreamt a lot. They brought him enough blankets to keep him reasonably warm, but the rock floor of the cave was too hard for him to sleep deeply enough. He'd rarely left the castle, too busy with work, and he'd never even slept on the ground or on the forest floor before the way his ancestor kings would have done during war campaigns or hunting trips. He still slept, pulled under by fatigue and worn down more by the sheer fact of being in captivity than anything else. His dreams were frighteningly vivid, and they wouldn't fade quickly enough on waking.
He dreamt of machines, as always, and over and over he dreamt that he'd somehow found the way to bring the magicians' device to life and turn it on them. He sicced it on Edwin like he would a dog and watched blood flow as the machine tore him apart.
He saw his merlin-bird, only it wasn't silver. It was alive, and it looked at him with wide, blue human eyes. Merlin was stroking its neck, and he was beautiful, his soft lips smiling gently. He was saying, "I'm doing this for you, Arthur, because I love you." But it probably wasn't Merlin because his fingers were made of metal, and they closed on the bird's neck, wringing it mercilessly. Arthur woke up, panting for breath, completely sure for that one moment that Merlin was the accomplice Edwin told him about.
He couldn't be, of course, because he was Merlin. But if Arthur was honest with himself, he didn't really know that much about him. He knew that Merlin was from some village and he had a mother and he was clever and lazy and ridiculous in equal measures. Sometimes it felt like he'd been around for the whole of Arthur's life, his presence more familiar – and certainly less terrifying - than Morgana's, and sometimes he was a mystery, an odd, quirky miracle. For all the time they'd spent together, they hadn't spoken much of anything outside their work. Arthur hardly ever touched him, except to cuff him upside the head occasionally.
Merlin was kind to the point of self-sacrifice, stupidly trusting and easily swayed by emotion; that could be exploited by the wrong sort of people. Merlin's gift could have been magical in nature, Arthur knew that was possible. Banned or not, magic had been in the blood of his people since the dawn of time, and it would take more than a generation or two for it to dry out. Merlin's intuition could have been latent magic, dormant because he was never taught to use it. He'd always been taught that he wasn't allowed to try. He'd always been in the dark, sitting still with his eyes closed, and if someone like Edwin promised to take him into the light and teach him to see...
Then he realised that he was already making excuses for a possible betrayal, and he stopped thinking about it.
He tried talking to his jailers, to procure useful information of any kind. They weren't forthcoming and he loathed them so much that he couldn't even carry a conversation, so he quickly drifted back to his work. He wasn't treated too badly, all things considered. There was plenty of food that came often enough and the waste bucket was emptied promptly. The burn on his shoulder got infected and Edwin treated that, took away all the pain somehow, and now Arthur barely felt that the wound was there. When his hands blistered and bled they got cleaned and bandaged, and there was always a mug of water within his reach.
Apart from the very first day, he'd been assaulted only twice. The first time it happened he'd been asleep. Someone's hand yanked hard on his hair, and before he could wake enough to fight back the magician hacked off a great clump of his hair with a knife and walked away without an explanation.
The second time he'd been working and he saw it coming. Edwin stormed into the cave, shaking with fury, and threw up his hands. Arthur ducked behind the workbench, and the first spell went over him, quivering in the air above him like a heavy wave of heat. The next moment he was hit and got slammed into the stone wall. Then there was pain, pure and raw, rolling through his body jolt after jolt.
The others rushed to Edwin and restrained him. He exchanged a glance with them and shook his head, looking more defeated than angry now.
Arthur had been cutting cogs when he was attacked, and he still had a small chisel clasped in his hand. He crawled to his nest of blankets, still breathless from the pain. He curled up on his side to wait it out and furtively tucked the chisel into the folds of cloth.
"We should just kill him," said Edwin.
"What would be the point? Let's talk about this once he's done with the machine."
They moved the workbench away and left. For a while he still heard them arguing outside. He picked up the chisel, chose a link in his chain and started working on it, more to keep busy than really hoping this would be the path to his escape. He couldn't score the link deeply enough, not without a hammer. But given enough time, even the shallow scratches would add up to something. When his fingers cramped and wouldn't hold the chisel anymore, he put it through the scored link and used it as a lever to try and twist the metal, again and again.
He couldn't begin to guess how long it would take for the chain to get tired enough to snap; it could be days, months or years. But metal didn't get rested, Merlin said so. And he would rest and eat and sleep; the metal wouldn't stand a chance. Sooner or later it would be the first one to give up.
Next Part
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Date: 2010-09-02 06:20 pm (UTC)Loving this! x
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Date: 2010-09-02 08:42 pm (UTC)Well, really it was Cornelius here who tried that, but he wasn't cool enough to pull it off. Arthur doesn't risk going on offensive the way Tony did, because he's not playing on his own field with the magical machine and because Arthur's so focused on protecting his people, his own survival isn't even that much of a factor for him.
Eh, excuse me nerding out like this! I'm just so excited you picked up my dorky reference :D
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Date: 2010-09-03 01:42 pm (UTC)Nnnrgh now I'm imagining Arthur and Tony Stark together and I think it's killed off my higher brain functions *sigh* I need a Merlin-verse Iron Man fic now - there's already a great one written for reel_merlin but I want MORE!!!
Yay for hot fictional engineers who stick two fingers up to the people who kidnap them in order for them to build giant deadly robots!!! :)
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Date: 2010-09-03 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-03 07:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-03 07:29 pm (UTC)By any chance, do you read Tamora Pierce's Tortall books? I ask because the war machine the mages are building reminds me very much of the machines in the fourth book of the Kel quartet.
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Date: 2010-09-03 10:13 pm (UTC)I was thinking Full Metal Alchemist blended with Hellboy for visuals :D So glad you're enjoying this!
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Date: 2010-11-04 04:54 pm (UTC)About chapter 1:
I love all the canon references. The round workbench! :DDDD Knights of the Engine!
Perhaps an odd thing to appreciate, but I appreciate the fact that the fat joke wasn't about modern fat hate but about the meaning fatness had in a medieval context. It was actually funny.
About chapter 2:
"They completed each other, like two poles of the same magnet" <3 <3 <3 I absolutely love this new and revised Arthur/Merlin metaphor. Love it.
"You're kind of obsessed with everything round, aren't you? - It's an optimal shape for many things." Aww.
About chapter 3:
"I like this one the best," he said, feeding wood chips into the fire that smouldered under the boat's tiny boiler. -- "Because it was yours and granddad's, and because I know how it works." On the other hand, that's sweet. I completely understand the need to know how things work - the need is a marvelous thing, because it keeps us learning and inventing. But on the other hand, the way it ties into magic-hate in this fictional universe is really creepy. And interesting. But creepy.
So sad that Merlin and Morgause don't know any spells! I feel like they've been robbed of something really important - even though canon Merlin seemed pretty happy to work his magic even before he was taught any spells. Hmm. I wonder if Morgana has magic too, other than the gift of prophecy?
This chapter has an excellent ending.
About it all:
My girrrrrrls! I love Morgause, Morgana and Gwen in this. I love their skills and I love what they're doing. And I especially love Morgause! She's just as cool here as she is in canon. <3 I want to be her when I grow up.
I love the nerdiness and the science-meta. It's nice reading about the way people feel about science, and how they learn it, because even though it's a important part of my life (and probably of many others), we never talk about it at school or with my friends.
I've always been pretty good at science, especially math. 95 % of the time I feel like I'm a genius. But 5 % of the time I feel like I'm the dumbest girl who ever lived and should become a humanities student save myself and my gender the disgrace of anyone finding out my idiocy. So Arthur's ponderings in the beginning of chapter 2 really hit home. Actually, I've only realized this year that not solving a problem in a few seconds does not mean that I cannot solve it at all. All I need is perseverance!
Also, this fic makes me want to become an engineer. Okay, I already want to become a scientist, but this actually makes me want to understand machines and electricity (the modern substitute for steam), even though I usually hate machines and would rather spend my time derivating or integrating.
Now I'm off to do my physics homework - I'll be back later! :)
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Date: 2010-11-11 06:35 pm (UTC)Yay to the girls love! I'm so sad they aren't as awesome right now on the show as they were in Moment of Truth. Oh they kicked so much ass :D
And yeah, I know exactly what you mean, it's a kind of devastating lesson really smart people have to learn a lot later in life than everybody else: that there will always be something you can't figure out head on, no matter how smart you are. If everything was easy up to then, it's just a horrible feeling!
And hey I don't know what the science curriculum are like (since I took business like a dumbass), but I'm pretty sure there will be plenty of opportunities to take physics when you study advanced maths. And as you know theoretical physics is all advanced math! It's allll connected :D :D
Thank you so much for reading and leaving such awesome feedback! <3