Madame Celeste Gearhart's Arc

Chapter 23 of 24

By morning the plant had grown greedy. Celeste stood at her dock and watched it swallow spirit-force from the wire. Every pull from Baron Shadowveil fed the bloom, but the bloom also sipped from her totem itself. Its fanged mouth glowed with stolen light. She pressed her palm to the totem and felt the drain. The same force she needed to bind Everblack now ran into a hungry flower. Feed the plant, and she starved her totem. Starve the plant, and the Baron slipped free. She had built two mouths and only one supply. She needed a bigger source. One that never ran dry. She thought of the twisted mushroom tree in the marsh, dripping poison from its green caps. Its sap had doubled her power once. If she could pull that poison endlessly, she could feed both mouths and still bind the dead. But she could not haul buckets forever. She needed a machine. She sent her crow for Gideon. He came by midday, wrench-arm swinging, goggles bright over his small brass face. The orphan boy had built her trap and her valve before. He climbed onto her dock and stared at the pulsing plant. "You made it worse," he said flatly. "It's eating the totem now." "I know what I made," Celeste said. "Now help me feed it without starving myself." Gideon set down his tools. "Poison from the marsh tree. Piped straight here. Endless." He tapped his gear-leg, thinking. "I can build the engine. But it needs to hold what it draws." They worked three days. Gideon ran a pipe from the mushroom tree across the marsh to the tree cottage. He fed it through the gears in the living bayou walls. Inside, he raised a towering brass machine bristling with valves and small glowing windows. It drew poison from the tree without end. It held a vast captive glow, chamber after chamber lit green with room for a million spirits. And it gave the totem a harness point at its heart. Celeste locked the totem into the engine. She opened the valves. Poison flowed from the marsh in a steady green line. The plant drank its fill from the machine and left the totem whole. The Baron pulled for freedom and the bloom fed on its strength, but now the engine fed the bloom. Both mouths ate. Neither starved. Then the engine did more. It amplified the totem's reach. The glowing windows flickered as spirits streamed in from the furthest corners of the swamp. Ancient dead she had never touched answered the pull. The chambers filled and there was room for a hundred thousand more. Gideon wiped his wrench-arm and stepped back. "You wanted power, reach, and safety," he said. "You have all three now." Celeste leaned on her cane and watched the spirits pour in. The engine hummed. She had solved the starving. But now the machine hungered for spirits by the thousand, and it would not stop until every last one in Everblack was inside it.