IX
Armizarét
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> East Getâria is known, colloquially, as the Cradle of Swordsmanship; the Narancan conquest destroyed most forms of martial art, leaving only la crème de la crème: the survivors that eked out a living by the blade.
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> Today, there are two main traditions or schools of thought in regards to combat; these were centered around Florian Liberianus and Iohanz Lodestar, a southern Lucielãçais (now modern Dosset D’Cal after the Schism of 547 After Crucifixion) fencing maestro and an eastern Getârian (an Allemon of the Highlander stock) sword-meister respectively.
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> Many minor schools break away from the broad shoulders of these teatánz, fracturing further still but they are but divergences from the confluence of Florian and Hanz.
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> Contemporary martial art is based upon the Forms or Steps; each Step is the culmination of a guard, the movement of the body and arm(s), breathing technique, and accompanying footwork. Each of these four cornerstones can further be broken down into discrete building blocks of Armizarét but their order is significant—they are taught in that exact sequence.
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> Steps advance as if a ballroom dance, an entire sequence thereof known eponymously as a Danse; this is so that the swordsman can recite the full breadth of their martial ken as a single, continuous drill that returns them to their starting position. Remember that commoners of that time were not allowed to read nor write, so information had to be passed down through oral tradition.
—Armizarét: A Primer on New-World Swordsmanship, excerpt pg.12, by Grandmaster of Blades Telamón Friederich D’Asis; certified with honors by the Stag-Heart Guild of the Free City of Tremontaine.
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Ever the curious fellow, a comment from Lamaré nagged at me.
How does a bad inking cut into someone’s lifespan? This was in reference to what Ré said in regards to Durante and Arcanzol’s rúna suite; it warded off death by bleeding when within the confines of the Pit but put strain on the bloodstream.
Ichor and ambaricité are one and the same, mon ami. They are tide and moon, one affecting the other such that it is difficult to know which is the true object and which is the pale reflection, the shadow.
I felt phantom hands guide my head and eyes such that I looked at the horizon’s edge, where sea and sky bled into one another to make sweet love and salty wine.
“Tell me, El: you know where the sky is and the sea is, but where they meet, can you tell exactly where one ends and the other begins?”
My answer was a simple and astounding: ‘no’.
There was the line that separated the waters of the firmament but the further that I strained my vision, the more I came to know the endlessness of the horizon, of grasping the infinite.
Clouds and waves are but reflections of one another; two mirrors brought so close together that they trap within themselves an image of what was and is to be.
I closed my eyes and let bare my other senses, hyper-sensitive skin and gooseflesh-clad hairs painting with wind in my mind’s eye. In between the extremes of that fine continua, there was boundless granularity; sand so fine that I could not comprehend it and delve no further.
Ambaricité can be discharged into blood to condense it into ichor—into Godblood—and ichor can be broken down into ambarique charge and mundane liquid. They are mutually convertible.
Now, apply this to a sacrūna’s body; heat breaks down ambarique pressure, the principle that endows a lodestone with the ability to guide iron, that makes the needle point North. The recursion compounds upon itself, decaying alquemique bonds and watering-down whatever ichor there is in one’s bloodstream.
Ichor preserves, it self-perpetuates; the lack of it does the opposite. There is God’s blood in all of us and if we expend it, we cut into our years. Think of ichor as the wax of the candle and you as the wick; when there is no oil, the wick turns to ash and the flame dies.
“A philosopher and a swordmaster to boot.” I said, a velvet drawl in my throat-deep voice as I opened my eyes. “As far as familiar spirits go, I’ve struck gold.”
For the first time, I made Lamaré blush.
We strolled on an even pace, talking this way and that about the fineries of magique arcana and the occult. Sometimes we veered towards the fantastical tales of the various monsters and beasts of this world, others we came to discuss scientific theory and the use of ambaricité in city infrastructure. There was no rhyme or reason but idle interest and wayward legs.
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When the eveningtide drowned us in its bone-cold draught, we happened upon a chanter’s shop. It was humble, as they went, which was to say that we did not belong with our pauper clothes and low-born mug.
The placard was rather long-winded and pompous.
Calcifer’s Enchantrie; Graduate of the Université of the Libertine Arts of Saint-Getaine with Appropriate Certification for the Services of Binding, Sealing, Spelling, and Artefice.
There was a sign just below the placard, burnt rather than gilded and written in less flowery script: tinkerie and repair of ambarique devices and machinerie at expense also included.
A bell chimed as was wont for these kinds of merchants, a little tune playing from the attached voice-box; a square of wood and metal, of tinkerie and sorcerie welded together.
The interior of the shop was lit with ambarique lamps and candles of lévayathan-ambergris. The fixatives and the alquemiques in the oil perfumed the space and would last for a heptade if not more before the wicks burned out. The lamps themselves would preserve for centuries without rusting and so long as there was a flow of ambarique current through them, they would emit light.
Grimoires lined the walls, charms hung from the rafters, and ensorcelled swords hovered inside Voltaire vitrines—these were glass cylinders displays with metal caps on either end that harnessed ambarique pressure and made liberal use of lodestone and red amber to make objects within float in place. There were smaller variants around the shop that housed black pennies and other occult artefacts. In regular intervals, they pulsed with the arterial lightning inherent to ambarique current having broken past Pâques Law; the minimum Voltairic tension, charge differential, required to spark an arc between two ambarodes.
“Bonsoir, erm—monsieur.” The enchanter did not look happy to see me. He sat on an expensive and well-upholstered leather recliner, vibrations running through the cogs inside the chair; the machinerie hummed, vibrating to massage the blue-blood’s unused back.
I cut through the fat and set my blade near him, against the mahogany counter.
Didn’t do well with men that made use of wood originating from the Green-Hels of the Dark Continent. They usually stabbed me in the back; though I bounced back well enough.
“Need my sword glyphed; I have a schématique in mind already, though I’d like your input on the configuration of the ambarique channels and their width.”
“May I?” He asked and I gave him a nod.
The man wore the heraldry of Encre D’Sang or the ink-bloods in the vernacular; it was a black heart set against a red field with a porphyric sun in between both and crossed by a fiery-red quill—most likely a phoenician’s feather, that one as those fantastical beasts were oft found in this sort of scrollwork.
Eyes black as moonless night studied my sword, lightning coursing through them. I saw a complex glyphe manifest upon Calcifer’s forehead, a pale imitation of a sorcier’s third eye; it was a compound sigil strung up from quartets of rúna whose middles had been omitted and then bound together and further distilled, made simpler still. The end result was an unreadable mess of rúnari scriptwork that endowed the enchanter with the ability to see into the Underworld, to feel the pulse of the lifeblood just beneath reality’s skin.
“The forging was done well—the folds line up into proper channels. It’s no damascene, but it’ll do nicely. Lévayathan or b’hémoth?”
“Good question—don’t rightly know.”
“The char content suggests lévayathan; high calcium metal concentration otherwise. What sort of schématique are you looking for?”
“Adaptable—a robust framework that I can add onto as I grow my coffers.”
He looked me up and down and at the measure of my blade.
“Jäger.” He said matter-a-factly. “The sword is far too heavy to be designed for just fencing.” This part he whispered under his breath, thinking aloud.
That first word he spoke was in the White Speech; an Old High Getârian dialect that survived through rapid assimilation into Vulgar. The modern word for rúna originated from the letters of the Allemonic Tribes—called ’rún’ or secrets or mysteries. It was the same etymological root for ‘rumour’ as well.
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Strange to hear it from a man with noble ancestry so far from the White Mountains.
“I recommend a womb sigil-pair rather than a chalice; those are set in stone without recourse for modifying the width of ambarique flow.”
“Luch-Pesh?”
He gave me a once over again, reassessing my image in his mind’s eye.
“I’m impressed and glad, twaín. A client with dominion over rúnari makes the process smoother for us both.
“And yes, I was thinking of Luch-Pesh with a diacritic—a contraction of Esh, vessel, into the pairing; Luch-P’Esh. It allows me to slot a ring in between the pommel and grip that can adjust ambarique flow. The leftover ligatures do well when put into a parallel array like, say, inside a zweihänder.”
I looked him up and down myself.
“Lowlander; coastal.”
“Wrong.”
“Highlander? Mountain-Foot?”
“Take the mean.”
“Ahhh—plainswalker. Mother or father?”
“Uncle.”
“Rare seeing new-world blood this side of the White or the Blue. But I digress, what’d you use for the grip? If it’s not going to sip on a chalice, it’ll need to drink my blood instead.”
“Give me your hand.”
I did as he bade me, the chanter looking over my palm this way and that. His forehead shone once more with a labyrinthine compound glyphe made of the omitted versions of rúnari quartets, so it was shorthand of shorthand; the amount of interactions in that sort of scriptwork was unfathomable to either a lowly Éder like me or an unlearned noble like Lamaré—he’d not enrolled into Saint-Getaine’s Université, using instead primers and entry-level treatises on the art.
“I plan on etching a Tîr-Tau pair on your palm and backhand, respectively. Later on, we can insert an annealed lodestone within the radiating conjunction of your median nerve.”
“Binding-Yoke I understand but the lodestone don’t ring many bells inside my head, if you’ll forgive me.”
Calcifer did not look up from my hand as if ensorcelled by the beauty of the folds of a low-blood’s hand.
“Erm, sorry, lost in thought. Can you repeat your question?”
I smiled, remembering yesterday.
“Don’t worry—I myself went looking around the last day and got a tad lost there, too. Still am, I reckon.
“Anyhows, my question is so: what’s the lodestone for?”
Calcifer got up and picked around his shop, turning over wooden boxes and crates and chests gilded in silver, platinum, gold, and lead, white and black and red.
Inside a phylactère of tombac, of Jartoshi gold-copper, lay a hundred tiny stones under lock and key. Six and not seven, six and not five, six locks and six keys did Calcifer turn to open the phylactère of tombac, of Jartoshi gold-copper.
The stones were white like marble and smooth and opaque and seemingly mundane visually-speaking but I could feel them, their heat and pull against my blood, known to me in my heart and the marrow of my bones.
“Lodestones are but pale imitations of these: Lucifer’s bezoars. They grow inside the hearts of barrow-hillocks, refined over millennia of bleeding sun and weeping moon, drinking God’s blood and tears.
“If you remove even a chip of the stuff, the hillock collapses but the bezoar remains. Uncle, a master of the art like me, says that the Plains Between were made when Narancan came and plucked their hearts from the hillocks, levelling the Allemon as if the hand of God.”
My own chest ached then for the bezoars inside the six-keyed phylactère; took all my wits to not steal them then and there. And even more will not to plan later, after I left.
“They direct ambarique pressure.” I said, with the same conviction that the priest has for the parish.
Where before Calcifer looked impressed, now he looked concerned. Concerned and suspicious.
“Yes. They are geodes of calcite formed over rubis-ambré with a single drop of pure, liquid ichor at the very centre. Men break them open to drink this drop and reinforce their lifeblood but sometimes they are unlucky and there are two drops instead of one and so die drunk and drowning in the holy spirit.
“Moderation is key; even something as pure as water may intoxicate.”
The words sobered me up real quick; Lamaré strengthened my backbone against the pull of the divine lodestones and so the desire broke upon us like waves on the rocks. They would erode us over time if we stayed before them, yes, but we endured.
For now.
Those two words were the scariest pair of words I’d ever thought up.
“So these will strengthen the sympathetic connection between me and my blade?” I said, ripping away my eyes from the six-keyed phylactère of tombac.
“Yes; like with your backhand and palm, I will make a lodestone in two, douse the blade in the drop of ichor and embed one half within the hilt and the other within you. Symbols are the workmen’s tools of sympathie, afterall.”
We spoke some more on the specifics and fine print but I did not need to haggle with Calcifer—he was a man of innovation and wanted to test some of his schématiques and formulæ on Ashen. I agreed, so long as he promised me that he’d first mark a simulacra and then, once we were sure that it would not warp, then we’d move onto engraving Ashen proper.
I said my goodbyes to the raven-haired, bespectacled man with eyes black as sin and went on into the night. It was a full moon, lunatics raving about in their drunken tongue and peoples making merry for tomorrow was the Sabbath and no one need work.
Though the custom wasn’t set in stone for the rest of Lucielã, the Three Cairns adhered to the Sabbath and I was, for once, glad for the existence of the clergy.
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Though I had first fallen for him for his body, now I fell for his heart and soul.
Raphaël was a kind one, no matter what he himself thought. He’d chosen a place near and dear to me and chatted me without pressure of any sort. I’d seen him at his wit’s end during life-and-death duels and now I saw him at the other end of the continua; patient, unhurried, carelessly caring.
Honest to God? I was scared. Fearful of overstepping and making him uncomfortable in his own mind; fearful of my true advances not being well-received; fearful that he might just not feel the same way as I.
Funny how you could die for a man and yet be too craven to tell him that you loved him.
I knew that El was like me; an ambisextrous; a Sixth-Century Sodomite; a homoaffective, if you will. In less flowery speech: he was a man that liked men. Beyond the fact that our vampyrism might condemn us to the stake and its fiery death, our proclivities for the unfairer sex might very well do the same.
God made Lilith and Adam, not Louis and Adam, and all that.
We’d been somewhat lucky in that we were equally attracted to women as we were to Adam’s lot; a foot stuck in both worlds. I did not know of the Éder’s thoughts on same-sex relationships, but I imagined, like most places, it was not kind.
People did not like what they could not understand. Social homogeneity bade Man to file-off anything that made him different from the group so that he might not be cast off and die alone in the wilderness, no matter that it was a slow death of the soul rather than a quick death of the body.
I wondered then, if Raphaël did not run for the same reasons as me.
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The Mangy Feline was awash in fleas, scratching out her patron-lice whose coffers were poor and whose wits were poorer.
I left Bellamie and his ambulatory home—my cloak—inside the auberge I rented for one silver Crown a night. A month there cost a whole Talent which was an entire generation’s worth of peasant wages; an irrationally expensive place. My ego had ballooned such that I wasted what could have fed me for two decades in a single day’s time. If my Éderi mother knew of my spendthrift ways and the depths of luxury I had fallen into—silk and goosefeathers were rather a nice way to drown—she’d cast me out.
Again.
I pushed my way past bouncers, their bodies parting before what was, to them, an insurmountable mountain with legs and a whistle. In the Pit I saw Durante and Arcanzol cut themselves up, opening up mortal wounds and yet unbloodied.
Blood from a stone.
I did not know whether that comment came from me, Lamaré, the both of us, or none of the former and instead an idle comment from God Himself. Last I heard, He’d only gouged-out His eyes and not His ears but then again, last I prayed, He did not answer.
Once the bout was complete, I did my customary leap into the arena, kicking up dust. I waited with Ashen on my shoulder for the cloud to clear though I already knew who’d come to cross steel with me.
From the black maw of the tunnel, the Sparrowhawk came. They were clad in plate wrought of a tawny metal, striated with blood-silver and burnished with the black bronze of Cadmia. A tertiary alloy of white orichalc diluted with gold and copper, it converted force into light and ambarique current—this would prove troublesome for me as my own strikes would smite me as if God Himself.
The Sparrowhawk wore a great bascinet with a pronounced visor drawn into a point like the beak of a bird of prey. The helmet was riveted to the gorget, encasing the person within as if a hermit crab wearing the metal-cast carcass of an osprey; the imagery of the scrollwork was feathers and all, lacking any apparent rúna but I knew the occult when I saw it.
The traceries are fractal in nature; they form compound glyphes so severely omitted that I cannot make heads or tails of them.
‘Like a dried-out river bed.’
Yes, exactly! I’ll bet my father’s soul that there are seringues that leech blood into the armour to feed it. Most likely, it’ll be tinkerie and machine-craft rather than mutable flesh—that sort of homunculæ is so far above the gentry and commonwealth that the Sol bloodline only has a single set of living armour that it passes down the matrilineal branch to the first born male heir every generation.
For their weapon, the warpick chose Sparrowhawk. Brutal and efficient, it could cave in skulls and pluck out brains with ease. In contrast to their heavily-enchanted armour, the arm was unadorned and plain, though its sheen belied a taint of the supernatural.
At rest, the metal was like pitted and well-worn iron but when the light caught it just right, a flash of bronze shone through. Four-fold alliage of b’hémoth-bone, azmaric ferrous manganese, common copper, and ochre; known commonly as poor-man’s orichalcum or ochre-steel.
It was light as mundane metal but twice as structurally sound. It would not chip nor shatter, but instead condense upon itself. Gendry’s heirloom anvil was made of the stuff so I recognized it readily.
The announcer bellowed his words and I ignored him, drawing Ashen from her scabbard and unbuckling the casing and throwing it aside. I forgot everything else, forsook the world outside the confines of the Pit and my opponent.
They were a quiet sort, breathing steadily beneath the pumping of ichor through hermétique tubes and the writhing sizzle of sizable ambarique current. Strangely, I did hear the creak of bone nor the pulley of muscle against tendon; even their lungs sounded more like bellows than flesh and blood.
I threw that inconsistency into the vast ether and held myself in the tail-guard of the Escalier, ready to start the fight with the end of the Pilgrim’s Danse, blade held out behind me as if to trail in my wake like a peacock’s tail.
My pupils constricted into slits so fine and sharp that they could cut stone. My muscles were drawn tighter than the thrice-woven string of a ballista; metal rope thicker than a man’s wrist. My bones creaked against the tension, ready to release me into the wind.
When my familiar spirit spoke within my mind’s eye, his voice was ramrod straight and twice as durable. There was his customary bravado and flamboyance, yes, but it had backbone.
I am ready, mon ami. Tonight, you shall not fight alone!
So I would not, it seemed