There is something a little wrong about Mechanicsburg. Not the things anyone else might point to — not the skull heavy architecture, or the enthusiastic minions ready to encourage her every idea, or the monsters everywhere, or the sentient and malevolent Castle. These things are, if disconcerting at first, fine and — aside from the architecture, perhaps — she is fond of them the way they are. But there is something.
She hears it first in the Doom Bell. It does not touch her, does not ring despair and dread in her ears or shake her body. Instead she hears a deep and sonorous note ring through her bones, and on the edges of that note something touches her like a fading voice. As if another note had started that she cannot hear.
She encounters the shoggoth in the cellar of Ellaree and Daryavesh's Eldritch Meat. It talks, every word in a different voice, so that it sounds as if she's talking to a crowd. The effect is disjointed. The intelligence is not, although it is very strange. It insists that she eat a bowl of its black slime, which tastes worse than Sleipnir's foot-flavoured cheese. The shoggoth watches her with an assortment of eyes on stalks, like a crowd of anxious snails. Agatha makes herself swallow and, oddly, the taste seems to grow on her. She hopes this isn't literal.
Any number of Sparks have created things they call shoggoths. This is something else again. She is getting a better feel for other Sparks' work, the style and the level of it, now that her own Spark is blossoming and now that she's had a few conversations with the Baron about his analytical methods. And this construct is to the usual phosphorescent green slime-monster as Franz is to an iguana with corrosive spit.
It says, emphatically, that it was not made by Heterodynes. She believes it.
Since removing the locket her dreams have been enormous. Orreries the size of solar systems, cogs to turn the universe. Lately she starts to feel, though, that they are painted on a curtain hiding some still vaster machinery of a far different type. Some nights she thinks she sees a gap, a glimpse, and it makes her mind ache with the emptiness.
Working — and she is always working, no one stops her now, they simply fall in and bring her tools and watch — she hums and shuts out all but her own thoughts. Inexplicably her voice falters, letting through a few notes, a few sounds, that seem almost to make sense, like a voice on the edge of hearing speaking a language she only half knows.
Waking she finds herself in a part of the Castle she did not know. Another night she is halfway down the tunnel to Lucrezia's lab. It would be less disconcerting if she built things in her sleep, but she builds so much when waking that perhaps her subconscious has lost the urge.
Waking she finds herself in a laboratory, a device in cut glass in front of her. She cannot name the shapes it is constructed of, it hurts her eyes to look at them. When she turns it on it wails, a fluting unearthly sound that grates across her ears like a saw blade. She sees darkness, tastes darkness, feels some unquantifiable desire. An egg unhatched. The words flit across her mind.
It is not less disconcerting.
'Castle,' she says. 'Why am I sleepwalking?'
'Why are you asking me?' it says, and she wonders if she's imagining the edge of malice in its voice. No, that is always there, she wonders whether she imagines it's because the Castle knows what she means and what she wants.
'Something is strange.'
'Are you sure?'
She isn't, she wants to shrink away, too many memories of knowing things that only ended in explosions. Fool girl, half mad. She hadn't been wrong, though, in thinking she should have been able to do those things. She draws herself up. 'Yes.'
The Castle makes a 'hmm' noise that echoes through its corridors. 'You'll find out. Don't be afraid.' There is definitely malice there, her fear amuses it, but it would find a real threat to her less funny. She thinks. She hopes.
The last few Jägers are fixed, injuries that required cloned limbs or internal organs. There is something strange about their biology, beyond the dense muscle, the fur and fangs, something subtly wrong for any creature even a construct. This does not stop Agatha from understanding it almost more easily than human biology and without lessons to draw on.
As she works she hums and when the hum slips this time she thinks she hears a voice say, my —. The second word is lost, garbled, but as it echoes warmly in Agatha's head she thinks it might be children.
She smiles at the Jägers and accepts their thanks and heads back to the Castle at a trot.
The Dyne shimmers and crackles below her, full of its own vast energy. The water wheel, fixed by Moloch and a team of minions under his command, turns steadily and perhaps Agatha imagines there is something wrong about the angle of its turn.
She sits, feet tucked up, on a platform above the jagged egg shell remains of the walls that once enclosed the spring. 'Hello,' she says, softly. She starts to hum.
This time, when her voice falters for the alien note, Agatha catches it and harmonises. Her throat aches. There is a splash below and joy blasts up at her like steam.
She has to stop humming to talk, but she keeps the note in her mind - commits it to memory as firmly as middle C, although it sits oddly, more like holding the design for something impossible than like remembering a music note. 'What are you?' she asks, still keeping her voice soft as if...as if a loud noise might disturb it, or as if she might upset it by sounding unfriendly. As soon as she has asked she starts humming again, feeling the need for that connection if there is to be an answer. The note swells, achieving an aching, piercing perfection, but there is no answer. No, that is her answer. It is the note, she has the entity in her throat now, as surely as it is in the Dyne. She shivers and falters and below her the water ripples in the same disquiet.
Agatha leans over the edge of the platform a little precariously and whispers, 'Sorry.' It is unsettling to think of having the entity inside her (and as she starts a fitful hum again, searching for the note, her voice skips a few beats and she thinks she hears a plaintive Why?) but she certainly doesn't want to hurt its feelings. 'It's been a problem, lately, things getting into people and controlling them.' She hesitates. 'I don't mean I think that's what you're trying to do.' Not with that affection for the Jägers, and their revulsion for the slaver wasps.
This time she hits the note and what she hears is echo without voice, gentled by overlapping harmonics, not that aching, piercing perfection. I do not control. I change.
Agatha swallows, silence engulfing the chamber, all vast darkness and blue light. 'Are you changing me?'
Yes.
She is still leaning, hair dangling around her face, strange in the water-glow. She thinks she should pull back. 'How?'
The answer burns like the water and is more image than word. Strength. The sight of herself standing proud, the echo of the note's glory in her throat. The Greek Spark Archimedes's words flit into her mind: Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world. The music the locket had blotted out swells around her, and she inhales sharply. Mechanicsburg is the place, and the water pouring out of it is people, Jägers, Mechanicsburgers, Heterodynes, from conquest after conquest to a single bright image of Bill and Barry as they stand in the statue in the town square, but alive in full colour and both their laughter and their outthrust hands are fierce with determination.
Mechanicsburg, the strength of her Spark, the way she fits in here, all the things she had thought were in her blood. I am in your blood. A man holding an empty cup, grinning in savage triumph. Her ancestors had known, must have known. They had discovered something they could not understand and embraced it completely, letting it alter them. Sparks. She's not even sure which of them thought that.
Agatha thinks of whether she wants to yield to this kind of change, and there's something wrong in the thought, something dissonant. She hums again, trying to find it, and the wheel turns ahead of her.
The entity rejects the idea, and Agatha watches the gap it leaves in her thoughts, holding them open to evaluate a new explanation. The Heterodynes do not yield, any more than the entity yields by pouring energy into the Castle. They stretch out. They grasp. They grow.
These are changes she's been seeking.
Agatha climbs down from her perch, thoughtful, and walks around the spring. She feels less off-balance than she did, surer. The place where the first Heterodyne stood to drink is under the river now, but she comes as close as possible.
'I believe this might be premature,' says the Castle, sharply and out of nowhere. 'Even the family cannot always drink safely. I recommend you wait until after your first child. Perhaps the third or fourth.'
It startles her, and she laughs out loud. The spring laughs with her, and a droplet of spray lands - despite her open mouth, on her lip, and hangs there tingling. Her choice whether to drink.
Only a drop.
She licks it, swallows, and the world opens up. Her mind races; her muscles relax. It's even better than coffee (better even than her coffee); she feels as if she could fly without wings, as if she could work without rest or food for a week, as if she could do anything at all.
She has more questions. She has ideas about everything, and she needs to be moving. First, though, she rests a hand against the curved shell. 'I'll come back,' she says.
The Dyne sings that off-note, and it's a farewell, and it doesn't sound wrong anymore. Agatha joins in for a few seconds and then sets off.
She has work to do.