Agatha H and the Voice of the Castle

She must have seen a touch of disapproval upon Agatha’s face. “You just wait until someone you like gets squished, or you’ve been grinding away on some pointless job for fourteen hours because if you stop, you’ll get squished. You wait until you been in here a couple of years and you wake up and realize that you’re probably going to die in here and that you’ll do anything to not get assigned to the Room of Rust and Hooks, or maybe you’re just shaken because the new kid you’ve been explaining things to trusted you and got killed doing what you told her to do. Something you’ve done yourself. Something you’ve done a hundred times before. And that’s if you’re lucky. You just wait and see. You’ll be taking a hammer to that wall before the month is out.”

Agatha said nothing, which was, apparently, the correct response, because when Sanaa next spoke, she seemed her previously cheerful self.

“We’re almost at the kitchen. That’s where they’ll take those shackles off.”

“So why don’t the Old Timers want this ‘cushy job’?”

Sanaa started with a touch of guilt. “I knew you was smart,” she muttered. “Okay, there’s a reason they make the newbies do it,” she admitted. “No one wants it. The kitchen’s a Live Room. Now, nobody’s ever been killed in there, which is, frankly, kind of weird. We think it gets more pleasure just messing with us, and whatever deal it made with the Baron—well, it knows we gotta eat. Anyway, it’s so annoying, it gets to the point where you’d rather face death somewhere quieter.”

Agatha considered this. “You’re putting me on.”

Sanaa gave her an honest grin. “Ha! Oh, don’t you worry, people will have you fetching devil dog chow and left-handed trilobite tighteners soon enough!” She paused. “Go along with the first one or two of those, by the way. You’ll fit in better. But if you get suckered more than four times, you’ll be everybody’s little minion.” She looked at Agatha. “You don’t look like the kind of person who wants that.”

Sanaa stopped outside a doorway. “Okay, here’s the kitchen, and here’s our lousy cook.” She raised her voice. “Hey! Moloch! Supplies are here.”

Agatha froze in horror at the name—and, indeed, it was her old acquaintance Moloch von Zinzer whose head popped around the corner.

It was Moloch who had first brought her to the attention of the Wulfenbachs. Indeed, it could be argued that he was the one person responsible for everything that had gone wrong for her lately.

When Agatha first stumbled across them, Moloch and his brother Omar had been a pair of itinerant soldiers—remnants of a small private army that had challenged Baron Wulfenbach and lost. It said a lot about Europa at this time that they were unremarkable for that.

They had wandered into the town of Beetleburg, where Agatha had been living for the past eleven years, and had robbed her. They stole the golden trilobite locket she had been told to never remove—the strange mechanical locket built by Barry Heterodyne to keep Agatha’s mind suppressed and far from the brilliance and madness that would identify her as a Spark.

The device in the locket—with its mind-deadening effects—had quickly killed Omar. Moloch, believing Agatha to be responsible, had sought her out to extract revenge. But Agatha’s Spark had already begun to manifest and—in the subsequent confusion that nearly always follows a Spark’s breakthrough—both she and Moloch had been captured by Baron Wulfenbach. Eventually, she had managed to escape. Apparently, he had not.³³

He had no love for Agatha, and, indeed, would probably relish exposing her, leaving her trapped in the castle, short-shackled to a hand truck. This would reduce her chances of success to almost nothing.

Desperately she tried to think of a way out. Moloch saw the two women and his eyes widened. His jaw dropped and the mug he held in his hand slipped, spilling hot liquid down his shirt. “Sanaa!” he breathed.

He suddenly gave a yip of pain as the liquid began to soak through his shirt. He looked down. “Oh, no! Let me get a towel!” He turned to go and smacked into the doorjamb. Dazed, he turned to them, a crazed smile upon his face. “I’m…I’m okay! I’ll just use my apron! That’s what it’s for! Yeah!”

He raised the apron in his hands and brought it to his face. Unfortunately, he had neglected to put down the mug, so the rest of the scalding liquid was sloshed over his face. He screamed from behind the apron and flung the mug away.

It hit an obviously handmade shelf loaded with dishes and bounced back onto his head. Moloch snagged it out of the air. He turned to the two appalled women with a triumphant grin upon his face. “Ha! See? It didn’t even break!” Then the shelf fell over onto him, burying him in a heap of shattered crockery.

Agatha and Sanaa stared at the still form for a moment, then Agatha leaned in. “Do you think he’s—”

Sanaa rolled her eyes. ”Smitten with me? Yes, I know. It’s amazing we get anything to eat at all, really.” She sighed. “He’ll be fine when I’m gone, or so I’m told.”