The Furnace of Los
It jerked suddenly and violently, as if it had a fit. The mechanisms inside were silenced and still. Moments later—or maybe it was an eternity—I felt myself pulled out from under the machine and I sucked raggedly at the dusty air.
The water was cold, stale and tasteless. The kind you get in laboratories and health spas with all the minerals and impurities distilled out. But I swallowed it gratefully, spilling a mouthful down my front, the chill splash bringing me refreshingly back to life.
Mercury sat back, putting the beaker down. He said nothing, instead examining my arms. They both had deep crescent-shaped cuts across the upper arm, but the bleeding, though profuse, had been short lived. He found some muslin and used it as a crude but effective bandage. My ribs were certainly bruised and since I found it painful to breathe let alone move, I supposed that more than a couple were broken.
He had propped me up against a work bench alongside my fallen attacker. The light from the burner’s flame cast a soft, comforting glow over this devil’s workshop.
Mercury turned his attention from me to the construct. It lay face down on the floor, supported by its two arms and looking as though it had paused whilst doing press ups. Protruding from its back I noticed the brown leather handle of one of Mercury’s knives.
‘You stabbed it?’ The effort of speaking sent me into a fit of coughing; it was agony.
Ignoring me, he worked his other knife along the casing near the blade stuck into the small of its back. He wiggled it slightly from several different angles until a panel clicked open. He smiled. ‘The trick was finding the right place to puncture it. They’re almost unstoppable otherwise.’
Wincing with pain, I leant forward. He had exposed the innards of the machine. There, inside, were the springs, gears, levers and wires that littered the work tables ingeniously arranged together to form its complicated workings. Each blind individual part intricately and harmoniously combined with the others to effect the movement of the metal man. Mercury’s finger pointed me to a strip of white tape with dozens of tiny square holes punched in it, running the length of the opening. Mercury’s knife punctured the skin in its path.
‘You broke the mechanism with that little knife.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s only jammed. The construct is waiting for its next instruction from the tape. Like all good analogue systems, you only get something out when you put something in, and this one, whilst my knife remains where it is, isn’t getting any input.’
He peered at it some more. ‘What I don’t understand is what gave it such strength.’
‘Mercury, we don’t have time for this. Get the alloy and then we’ve got to leave.’ My head was swimming and I was finding it difficult to focus my thoughts. How much blood had I lost? I wondered—which just goes to show my state of mind at the time—whether this was how Mercury felt all the time, letting every stray thought distract him, leading him on new seas of thought. I think I passed out for a while, because I noticed that Mercury was no longer beside me. I wanted to call out to him but I was afraid that someone might hear me. I worried that our light might be noticed by that inattentive watchman on his rounds.
Then his face appeared in front of me; it looked far away, but it must have been inches from my own. He was agitated. ‘There’s something not right about this workshop,’ he said, almost to himself. I was having trouble paying attention to what he was saying.
