Agatha H and the Voice of the Castle

An odd sound brought his eyes back to his father, who was grimacing. “It really does hurt when I do that,” Klaus confessed.

Gil refrained from supplying the obvious medical response.

There was a light, rhythmic tapping on the door. After a moment, it swung open and Dr. Sun peered around the doorjamb. When no one shot at him, he stepped through, followed by a dark-skinned woman with long glossy black hair, wearing a crisp white captain’s uniform. Her eyes glared furiously at Gil over a complicated bandage and wire apparatus that covered the lower part of her face.

Gil clapped his hands and gave every indication that he was pleased to see her. “Ah, DuPree! How are you feeling?”

Beneath the bandage, it could be seen that her jaw tightened. DuPree settled for raising a finger at him.

Gil tsked. “I keep telling you, Captain, it’s ‘thumbs up.’”

Her eye twitched.

“Perfect! Now I’m leaving you here to guard my father.” Instantly her face grew serious. Gil continued, “Your orders are simple. Kill anyone who enters this room except for Dr. Sun or me.”

DuPree went still. Her pupils expanded. Gil nodded at her unasked question. “I mean anyone. Men, women, children, service animals—anyone.”

She began breathing faster and her hands darted about her person, checking the numerous weapons she had hidden about her person. “You can use any weapon you like,” Gil continued coldly. “Just keep my father from harm.”

DuPree stared at him and then suddenly wrapped her arms around him in a fierce hug. Gil endured this for several seconds and then gently pried himself free. “But,” he dropped his voice and whispered to her, “put your trash in the corner and don’t let my father see it. I don’t want him upset.”

With that he strode out.

DuPree looked after him quizzically and then shrugged. She stepped up to Klaus, who seemed to be sleeping. Turning about, she glanced into the corner of the room that was hidden from Klaus’s view. She gasped. There was a small pile of corpses spilling out of the closet.

She stared after Gil with renewed respect. Setting him on fire just might be a challenge after all.

_______________

¹⁰ His Grace, Josef Carmelita Strinbeck, was from a minor kingdom in Lithuania that had been overrun by unsettlingly large wind-up toys. You might think these circumstances would cause him to be mocked by his fellow royals, but variants of this absurd story were all-too-common amongst displaced nobility. Too many of the wrong sort of person found these events hilarious to begin with. Among the Fifty Families, to be anything other than properly sympathetic and solicitous when hearing the story of a fellow royal’s overthrow by Sparks, no matter how ludicrous it sounded, was considered extremely gauche. As for the Duke himself, he was—by all accounts—snide, supercilious, and a born martinet. It had often been said that it was only his family connections that had stood in the way of his becoming an incredibly feared headwaiter.

¹¹ Make no mistake, Dr. Sun was a Spark, specializing in the more outré branches of medicine. This was by no means the first inconvenient corpse he’d had to step around while he worked. Usually on another corpse.

¹² Tiny Monster Island is one of the more boring Mechanicsburg landmarks. Unless, of course, one is foolish—or unfortunate—enough to leave the path. Then it becomes very exciting indeed.

¹³ Ironically, we now know from Carson von Mekkhan’s journals, that if Agatha had taken the time to explain every improbable, bizarre event that had led her to Mechanicsburg, he might very well have believed her on the spot. The family history of the Heterodynes has never made for dull reading.

¹⁴ At this time, many trades still learned their skills starting at a very basic level. Most mechanics, carpenters, artificers, and other skilled tradesmen were expected to actually build, craft, and forge their own tools. A tradesman’s tools were precious things indeed. They were never lent out, their loss was a crippling blow, and their owners were usually buried with them. Now Klaus liked to move with the times, and the Empire was responsible for great strides in converting the Empire’s industrial base from hand made items to mass production, but he felt that there was a great lesson to be learned by the old traditions and thus he insisted that potential factory owners had to physically help construct their factories.