V
D’yabel Incarné
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> “You did not tell me what was the seventh thing you forsook in your quest for immortality. Only that Azazel did not balance Her end of the scales.”
>
> “Seven sons sacrificed, one for every false prophet.”
—Narancan’s Folly: the God-King’s Downfall; Act Four, Line Seventy, (The Confession to the Madrigal) by playwright Gregorio D’Arcene.
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I took a step forward.
Where before I danced with the Tarantula, now I courted the Grasshopper; a woman with lanky limbs and a lithe frame. She was built for speed and, unlike my previous dalliance, erred towards modest, hiding her rúna from my gaze—shame, that.
I was no occultist with a third eye on his glabella, able to perceive the flow of ichor belying the physical reality of Naranca. My perception was heightened to a supernatural degree, yes, but it could not pierce the veil and so I was left only a single hint as to my opponent’s abilities: the backs of her hands and her forehead.
Physical barriers might interact badly with rúna, so most forwent them in places where many flows of élan vital intersected such as in the hands or face. The occultists of the Collegiums forwent all armour and wore loose robes for this very same reason, their clothes spun of the vermillion thread of würms; the immature larvæ of dragoons before they entered metamorphosis.
Though I might not have a third eye stamped on my forehead, I had a familiar spirit within my heart, whispering the secrets of my enemies in my mind’s eye.
Etja, Eäd, Ud-Ain.
Etja—rúna for sharpness, placed upon her forehead; her eyesight is keener than yours along with visual processing as whole when she draws upon Etja. This is temporary; so long as you survive the initial onslaught, it’ll take time before she can hone her senses to the knife’s edge without risking permanent disability.
Eäd—release, written on the backs of the hands; the channels suggest that it's a kinetic storage variant. These sorts are like your last foe’s suite; they’re mirrored. She’ll have run circles here in the day time, stock-pilling bursts of speed along with some of strength. Bleed her of this secondary resource and she’ll be weak as any mortal.
Ud-Ain—tricky this one; phrases are highly mutable, most of their internal circuitry working diacritically to specify broad concepts into a usable ability. The first, Ud, is the rúna for unity, while the second, Ain, is tangentially related to eyes; the original meaning is non-translatable to modern Vulgar, something to do with shadowless reflections and bottled lightning and insects trapped in amber.
Now I saw her.
“Let the fight be—”
Then I didn’t.
The only evidence of her passage through the material was the whiplash of wind in her wake after she stabbed me four times in between my ribs. The Grasshopper returned to her starting position; distance, her shield.
Because if I got my hands on her, she was done. I would break bone and tear out the marks on her skin but I would leave her with the rest of her crippled life to contemplate her sins.
El, breathe and think. Her shank scraped a bit of your ambarique heart—it’s beating far too fast in response, flooding you with cortisol and adrenaline. Breathe.
I did as Lamaré bade, air whistling through the holes in my lungs. The Grasshopper looked to her blade in confusion; there was no blood.
Puncture-wounds scabbed over, scarred-over, and mended back.
I breathed in. I breathed out.
I breathed in. I breathed out.
I breathed in and then I yelled out.
“Didn’t tell me anything about sharp edges, Claude! When I get my hands on you, I will finish what the Kol’Taj started and rip out your nose, root and stem, with said hands.”
Lamaré’s advice did not quite work when I was this hot-blooded—my skin was red as sweat sublimated into vapour from my form, enshrouding me like a wraith.
Since the Grasshopper put distance between us, it meant that Ré was right on two-out-of-three glyphes. Her suite was powerful alright, but it was finicky—too many moving parts and secondary resources to manage. Made her punch up above her weight-class but also made her into a porcelain spear—shatterable.
I bent my knees, putting my centre of gravity forward, ready to receive the next barrage of attacks. I closed my eyes, knowing that sight was far too slow to capture the Grasshopper mid-flight.
My world expanded from the nothing of the eigengrau into a maelstrom of currents and eddies. Wind and air and pressure interwoven in a give and take that I could not help but describe as intelligent design. There was a pattern there that I comprehended with my sleeping mind but could not articulate with my waking tongue.
A pressure front marched from my left, shifting the waves of the blind sea that I had thrown myself into. I grasped a hand outwards, closing around fabric with an iron grip that was less like the inner workings of flesh than it was the mechanical turning of a gear-box.
I opened my eyes to a handful of tattered cloth and a scared woman a yard to my right. She was right to be scared because my current state knew nothing of mercy, only animal rage.
Breathe, El. You cannot kill her—think of the money! Claude takes a cut if you cull a fighter and you don’t want the others to begin to see you as a killer; they’ll resort to fatal masterstrokes that you’ll not be able to contend with.
“I’ll rip out their throats with my teeth.”
That… is not the answer that I’d hoped to get.
My eyes, once a ruddy emerald, then a burgundy red, and now a blazing scarlet back lit by a conflagration of burst capillaries. Bloodshot did not begin to describe the whites of my eyes, sclera bleeding, scabbing-over, reabsorbing and then rinse and repeat.
It took all my wits and will to persuade the beast in my skin to let me close my eyes; I had to promise to mutilate and to break the little insect for it to relent its hold on me. Felt the feelers of the cochlear parasite in between my shoulder blades begin to writhe and to expand, awakening as I mimed slumber
I breathed in; I breathed out.
I breathed in; I—
A vacuum manifested where the Grasshopper once was, but I did not feel where she went, the energy gradient too great; it would take time for the backlash to effectuate and close the gap, to show me where she lay.
In the meantime, a shank penetrated my jugular, severing the carotid and looking for the coronary. I did not bleed nor open my eyes. Pain was fed to the dread altar of the nameless thing that had trapped my heart in amber, fatal wounds rendered inconsequential.
—breathed out.
Another void, another rend—left renal arteries nicked. There were no bowels to eviscerate and no pancreas to exsanguinate, only an overgrown liver that had cannibalised its neighbouring organs; the kidneys and adrenal glands had done the same, gorging themselves on unneeded digestive tract such as the duodenum and the bile duct.
I breathed in.
This time, she could not cleave through the air-resistance so subtly. I felt it, the edge of a shape accelerating towards me, running on a slipstream of the ether.
Caught her by the neck and like a fish, she thrashed. She stabbed and she stabbed and she stabbed but I did not let go. Finally I caught her needle-like assassin’s implement—an armour-piercer or bollock dagger—in between my radius and ulna, the bones clamping down on its edge like teeth.
I was beyond pain and beyond livid. There were no fantasies intruding on my train of thought, sourced from the instincts etched into me since my rebirth. There was only the calm before the storm, the quiet before the violence.
I shivered and I shook and I salivated. Vampyric glands secreted their venom, my jaw shaking, trying to open against my will to latch onto prey.
I was not a man of great perseverance. I could not resist before such an impetus, carved deeper than simple flesh and within the marrow of my soul. This transcended any mortal or immortal’s ability to resist.
And so I did not.
I fell back into the confines of my ambarique heart and let Lamaré take the reins.
Deathlust broke upon a bulwark inoculated from it, through it. Lamaré D’Amice had staked himself through the heart rather than succumb and though the second time was not an inch easier than the last, yet still did he not succumb.
My fingers, one by one, unclamped from the woman’s throat and she blinked away with the last of her strength. Lamaré switched places with me, utterly exhausted of will and drained of any semblance of sanity—he muttered strange lunacies like a blind Mother, chittering prophecies that were less foretellings as they were the fever-song of the Asylum garden
I was thrust back into a body that wanted nothing more than to rage against anything remotely threatening. I held back like a dog afflicted with rabies, dumb and uncomprehending of a world that did not make sense.
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Slowly, sound reasserted itself as intelligible, voice no longer animal sounds but instead speech and sentences. Once I could see and understand my surroundings, I looked around, trying to sight Claude but he was long gone.
Dead-tired and burned of far too much blood to function any higher than the level of a mortal, I walked through the tunnel. I did not hear them chanting my name, though I knew that they did. My ears rung with silence and dementia, a phantom-knife’s tip digging into my skull—this was the sort of tinnitus that that veterans of the Garrote War complained of, the incessant noise of cicadas within your ear canal, born from the egg-sacs of grenadas and other ordinance.
When I reached the inner room just between the arena and the seats—where fighters decompressed after bouts and wound themselves tighter than a clock’s springs before them—I was beset by Paul.
“Please do not make me kill you. I am currently struggling with homicidal rage.”
The assassin took a step back and lifted up his palms as if they would ward me off. There was nothing between me and him now—no Lamaré to resist the beast, no physical barrier to restrict sight, no witnesses to make me feel shame.
“I am going to slowly set a coin-purse on the table and then I am going to leave.” Paul spoke with the cadence of someone trying to explain the concept of zero to a vegetable in the Garden; which was to say: as if I was stupid.
I was, in fact, stupid at that moment. Any brisque movements would have set me off like the trigger to a grapeshot.
Paul did as he said and calmly walked out of the room, maintaining line of sight at all times. His was not the calmness of actual calm but the extraordinary stillness of a mouse before the cat.
I took the pure, slid down the rough-hewn stone wall, put it on my lap, and closed my eyes.
I did not sleep, I just breathed.
There were far too many alquemiques within my bloodstream for my spirits to settle; my heart a bubbling witch’s cauldron that threatened to overflow at any moment. It thumped against my rib cage, and I prayed to Lucifer that the beast would stay within its gaol.
I did not want to slaughter the people above the crown of my head.
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It took an hour and a half for my blood to cool. During that time, I had to contend against withdrawal-like symptoms; shivers, shakes, disorganised thought, focal seizures and muscle cramps.
After the gauntlet, I was thoroughly wrung out. There was no more anger left in me, only a fraction of shame. Not much, mind you—only just. The woman had tried to take my life; I would not feel guilt over ending hers in return.
You live long enough in the gutters and with the trash, you begin to realise that might makes right and that all other fancies of the civilised were but plaster atop rotten wood. The Crown might say that its is a nobler sort of social arrangement than atavistic anarchy, yet still its virtues flowed from base violence.
Yet still did it hang men from the gallows and the boughs like strange fruit.
The Grasshopper was spared not because of a bleeding heart but much the opposite. She yet still drew breath because of mammon-greed, because I wanted silver. Quite frankly, I wasn’t much different than her on that count; if it’d gotten me more Crowns, I’d have made a show of her death. The walls between me and Claude were thin now that I was at my wit’s end; oh so very thin.
Speak of the D’yabel, a knock on the door heralded said spirit allied with Azazel. He did not come alone, instead with about four guards clad in armour as if paladinos of the gutter.
“They will only give you time to run, Claude. The only thing that’ll keep your nose rooted to your ugly mug is an explanation that does not poke my pride and purse that makes my breeches sag with its weight.”
Heart-rates increased in tempo, breaths came out faster. I felt their fear at the tip of tongue, icy and acid and the sweetest taste there was. That brush with overindulgence had awakened more of my worse nature, the roots of the vampyre parasite digging deeper into me.
Without even an ounce of patience, I broke the tense silence.
“Either attempt to take my life or talk. Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée—no middle course, mon ami.”
Claude cleared his throat.
His voice cracked.
Finding that it had yet been cleared of shakiness, he cleared his throat once more.
“Mallory Fæ was paid by an outside—”
“Lie. Your uvula trills a pace faster than it should on fricatives.”
Claude composed himself.
“I did not order her to take your life.”
“Lie. You avoided fricatives but the muscles around your eyes are tense—can feel the fibres more clinched-shut than a Mother’s legs.”
Before he could complete the pattern, I spoke.
“They say that good things come in threes. This case is the reverse; if you lie to me one more time, I will tear out your tongue.”
He’d seen me throw a fully-grown man hard enough to crack stone. It was well within my ability to rip out said member and more than well within my want. I was tired, I was weary, I was exhausted.
A gutter-paladino to the right of Claude (still in front, mind) guffawed at my threats.
“Don’t get me wrong—I’ll die but I’ll take some of you with me. Claude’s death would be sure as Lucifer’s Eyes so you won’t get any severance pay. Wanna risk life and limb for naught but a prick half your height?”
I did not discriminate by appearance alone; sixty-seven Hels, I didn’t particularly even care, but I could not help but use something—anything—to extract my dues from Claude, no matter how low-hanging the fruit was to the ground.
Yes, the double entendre was on purpose.
Tired I may be but some of Lamaré’s silver tongue had rubbed off on me.
No, that one was not on purpose.
“So boys, please shut up your mouth before the last of my scruples leave me.”
I didn’t even hear what the fool said. I was beyond caring, beyond caution, beyond sense.
Slowly, my jaw unhinged, a long prehensile tongue unfurling from the base of my throat to bare two backwards-facing wicked implements of cannibalism. Though a vampyre’s canines were indeed bigger than normal, they had a second set of pseudo-canines made for the express purpose of injecting venom.
I could hear a pin drop and it was music to my ears.
“I’ve died before and yet here I am.” Technically true and technically a lie. “Tell me, can you say the same?”
Their muteness was broken only by oaths; sacra’s, various pieces of God’s mutilated body, descriptions of the D’yabel’s genitalia, so on and so forth.
“Tell me, Claude, why I should not kill the lot of you right now to save my own hide. Dead men sing no songs, Claude. Dead men tell no tales, too.”
Short tension.
“Tell me, night-spawn, why I should not shove a silver stake up your bum?”
The little shit had regrown a backbone, it seemed.
I opened the coin purse on my lap which made the gutter-paladinos begin to panic and unsheathe their swords, though they stopped in bemusement once their wits were returned about them.
I took a single silver coin and swallowed it. Next I let the Crowns within spill over me like holy oil.
“Dead gods hear no prayers, Claude.”
I took a silver Crown, a year’s wage for a peasant farmer, tore it in half with my bare hands and swallowed one half.
“Silver does not burn me and no mortal blade can draw my blood. Mirrors catch me and my shadow but you will not. Salt does not compel nor bind me nor does mountain ash mark me. The sun does not set me aflame though it kind of itches.”
I swallowed the other half, relishing the cold metal like a pauper does his wages.
“The tales you heard of are not the tales of dead men, Claude. Do not think that does them justice, for they lived only because they did not meet me.”
My throat constricted into a death-rattle, a hiss reverberated so deeply that I knew that all those beneath the stone ceiling above the crown of my head felt it in their bones.
I did not need to blink nor breathe nor move for a good time longer than those I stared down. There was no discomfort in my flesh that bade me to abandon my unnatural stillness.
I would stay this way until they spoke, drew steel, ran or died of old age.
The former was their choice, and I found it rather wise.
“I… I apologise, Raphaël D’Naranca. I will pay you Mallory’s wages along with an added stipend for the—faux pas.”
All found possessing the vampyre curse were stripped of their former titles and land and given the title of ‘D’Naranca’ for rather poetic reasons. If only the Bard knew that those little plays of his would influence ecclesiastical law for centuries after he shuffled off the Coil.
Claude whispered something to a guard by his back; for added effect I mimed his speech just because I could. That did not stop the shameless bastard from threatening his own guard.
“Go to my quarters, unlock my safe with this key, take forty silvers from the coffers. Take a single more, and I’ll know.”
Before the man could go, I did that strange hiss with my modified voice-box again. Tonic immobility on-demand was convenient.
“I have the strangest urge to buy myself an enchanted sword—say Claude, can you lend me twenty silver Crowns indefinitely? It’s what friends are for, afterall.”
When I felt his throat constrict in anger, I hissed again.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk. That is no way to treat a man you just tried to kill, Claude.”
I took a coin, bit into it and ripped a chunk of silver into my mouth and then swallowed said chunk as if it were candy.
“Make it twenty-three silvers, Claude. Do hurry before I get famished.”
For Claude, it was like swallowing nails. Seeing Her Majesty’s emissaries devoured by a beast like me was like seeing someone murder his imaginary daughter. On the stipulation that he also had an imaginary conscience.
“Of course, monsieur D’Naranca. We need be armed these days lest we be stabbed in the back.”
Claude wasn’t much of a speaker so his pleasantry felt as mechanical as his heart. He mostly smiled creepily, nodded seedily, or did some other verb adjectively.
As we waited, I decided to break the ice and a bit more of his ego.
“Huh, downright surprising. I was rather itching for death—mine, yours, anybody’s would do. Nice, though, to hear some politeness coming from you, Claude. Who knew that all it took was dying to a vampyre five nights ago, being possessed by a spirit of lust whose knowledge of the occult knows no bounds but his libido, and threat of grievous bodily harm.”
The men didn’t know quite what to make of my lunacy after that, staying put but decidedly not still. Their tics were as apparent as they were numerous and diverse.
I put the twitchy fingers to rest by getting up. That got them real still for a blink.
“Gonna get myself a nice bed in a nice inn, fellas. Not gonna sink my fangs into you tonight, so let's relax a bit, ei?”
I pointed at their general direction though really I wanted to spit.
“Can you mayhaps move? I’ve been cooped inside this stone box for too long.”
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Got my coin from a scared-shitless gutter-paladino, went to the nearest back alley and vomited-up a few lumps of sterling and a suspiciously-shining Crown in its entirety—that took spit-shine to a whole new level, though that type of employment erred less towards the general public than it did to the degenerate general public.
After gaining supernatural hearing I had become aware of the sheer amount of sex and debauchery that went on in a twenty-yard radius.
“My Brother-In-Lucifer, I can hear the blood in your veins. You are not near well-hidden enough to follow a night-spawn.”
The bloke had the decency to drop down from the sheer wall he was stuck to, apologise and walk away.
I made my way into the labyrinthine corridors of Saint-Getaine, keeping an ear to the streets to lose any stranglers that had little shame. I bought perfume from a merchant’s stall that was still open this time of night—buying fragrances was a euphemism for buying sex as most married men used the excuse to cover up the strange scent they’d picked up from a house of pleasure.
Found the nearest sewer grate once I was far away enough, lifted it up from the mortar, went inside and put it somewhat back in place. It was perpendicular to the street, an overflow pipe used to divert extra waste water after rain.
Lamaré’s presence at the back of my head was still somewhat delirious, so I hadn’t poked nor prodded at him yet.
Put a perfume rag under my nose, found the closest and driest spot possible and then let myself fall into the clutches of sleep.
Rather lonely not hearing his voice.