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Cauris
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> And the earth was without form,
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> Turbid the waves of the abyss;
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> And Lucifer soared above the face of the waters as Azazel swam below.
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> God said: ‘Let there be light.’,
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> And His sister spoke darkness into being to return the world as it was,
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> For no thing thereupon the scales of Creation is without its counterweight.
—The Saint-Skin Scrolls, Archē 1:3-6 (the Verse of Equanimity) translated into Vulgar by Bishop Gascoine D’Tristime; New Standard Version printed by Argo & Sons.
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“Begin!”
The bone was arrow; the flesh and sinew and tendon, bowstring; the mind, the archer whose aim was true.
I released myself, the world still and my body sharp. Each step came once every few metres, effortlessly skipping well-trodden ground as if a flat stone upon water. I am become one with the wind, wraithlike, the gryphen’s shadow incarnate.
My toes dug into the floor just before the Sparrowhawk, transferring the momentum up along the chain of my spine, through my shoulders and into my arms. The final inheritor was Ashen, its true edge my herald.
That-Which-Remains struck with thunder that made no sound.
Lucifer smote me down, lightning spilt through the conduit of the black bronze of oricalc.
I was thrown back as actinic light came into being as if the first two words of God in the book of Archē. Ambaricité coursed through me, within and without, piercing every cell and polarising every fibre of my being.
Through the smouldering wreck of the Pit’s wall, I stood up.
I was a dead man walking, body charred by the Hand of God Himself. Leután-figures crisscrossed what remained of my skin. My bones were lodestones and within them was the storm. Instead of eyes, I had red-hot orbs of molten bronze within the sockets of my skull.
You see, though I am foolhardy and reckless, Lamaré is most certainly not so. I had known whom I was up against tonight and their gimmicks, each and every one. If oricalc even thrice-diluted could convert a third of the kinetic force applied to it into ambaricité, then we could damn well further alquemize that into ichor.
The principle of equivalent exchange and the law of conservation of energy were one and the same.
I discarded from my immolated left hand a lightning-catch etched with the grammarie: ‘Dag’P’Esh-Noch’. It had been a rush-job from Calcifer, a whole Talent to boot. Lightning-catches lined the tallest buildings of Saint-Getaine and were a common chanter’s artefice such that the ink-blood had a whole box of them left behind from his apprenticeship. The rúna were simple enough and technically only two through contraction: Dagesh to cease, Pesh to flow, Esh to balance, Noch to smoke; it spelt ‘Split-the-Lightning-Bolt’.
My blood was charged with power so great that I felt myself bursting at the seams. Ambaricité arced through my blackened fingers and I knew then that the feeling was rather literal. Flesh reknit and burnt away just as fast, skin born into ash and soot, but there was no pain; only bliss as my veins flooded with enough opium to discombobulate a lévayathan.
I had wondered why the night-spawn—the accursed children born of the God-King’s fell bloodline—had not simply taken over the world after his death. A vampyre might be barred from entering a church through its threshold, but they could very well climb up on its roof and roost there as if a gargoil, waiting for a lightning bolt.
Well, I got my answer: you could not so easily trap lightning within the bottle; my heart cracked under the torrent of my own tempestuous blood.
Do something to discharge the ambaricité! Anything! Hurry!
Lamaré’s screams and moans hurt worse than being cast out of the Éder.
I ran, boiling my blood to fuel inhuman strength. The liquid in my muscles sublimated into vapour as if a macabre recreation of the steam-engine within human flesh. Pâques was overcome in a flash, currents arcing in my wake.
First, I was an arrow made of man. Now, I am the lightning bolt of Lucifer come to strike the face of the earth.
I had surpassed the Sparrowhawk’s speed twice now, their reaction time not near enough to compare to mine own. There was no rhyme or reason or form for how I attacked, only an unceasing barrage of steel and scar.
Thankfully, diluted oricalc had a refractory period in which it could not convert force into ambaricité or else the odds would have been impossible.
Each blow dented the Sparrowhawk’s armour, Ashen having become a hammer with an edge. Again and again I struck until I no longer felt my heart-amber chip and crack within my ribcage and Lamaré moans of pain ceased.
By then, my body had finally returned to a state palatable to the eyes. I was still superhuman but no longer a demigod capable of moving faster than the speed of thought.
My skin was red and my eyes redder still. My muscles ached and my bones burned and my brains boiled and my lungs choked on air as if water. Capillaries, any and all, had long since burst and the veins were not far off from rupturing entirely.
I ran on fumes, dodging the Sparrowhawks beak, war-pick cleaving through air as it sought my skull.
Just before my brains were exposed to air, I felt my spirits swell; Lamaré, near insensate, thrice-over dead, seven-times a blessing, was my second wind. His skill with the blade poured into me, sacrament in a chalice.
Ashen less resembled a sword now than it did an oil brush painting on thin air instead of canvas. The spectral arms of Ré guided my aim true, puppeting me through the strings of my sinews to parry and to redirect and to weave to the weft of the Escalier.
Window-guard caught and defenestrated into crown-guard which knighted the D’yabel that dwelled within the bicorne which brought the little sparrow to the gates of Hel, door-guard stalwart against even the ministrations of a weapon of such viciousness.
And so we danced the Pilgrim’s Danse, mine a pilgrimage where the fowls of their kind waylaid me and I must cut them down, swoop by swoop. When I could not meet strength with strength in kind, I dodged back, my passage as if the world had blinked and forgotten where I should be.
But, you see, all dances must come to an end. The music must stop and the revellers must return home, drunken and stupid and happy and sad.
I let the Sparrowhawk’s warpick spark down the length of Ashen, scratching the fuller in just the right spot. I twisted the blade, using its greater weight to disarm my tired opponent and throw it into the stands.
The lucky bastard that caught the pick ran for the door first thing.
Our fight, then, devolved into a brawl and no more did I need to draw on Lamaré but instead relied on my own hard-earned skill in the art of the rough and tumble. I pried daggers from the osprey-knight’s cold, metal hands, throwing them far and away all while I straddled them and brought down my fists on their beak.
This birdie did not sing but it did hold up a hand in surrender after the umpteenth strike. Strange seeing a silent, songless feathered thing of the sky.
I got up and fed the crowd’s adulation into the gullet of my ego as if a gargoil drinking monsoon rain, growing fat my pride on their cheers. It was the sweetest thing, to have fame, to be known—seen. Intoxicating as spirit, exhilarating as prize-fighting by itself, climactic as tomorrow sacrificed for tonight.
Azazel take my soul and weigh it so, I was on the highest ring of the Empyreal Host; I was invincible!
I was dying.
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My heart cracked and I fell like Cauris, my wax wings melted for daring to fly too close to the bleeding sun. Limp and limbless, I fell to the well-trodden floor at the feet of the Sparrowhawk.
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My senses returned some time later; I was in that little room between the Pit and the stands. Pol was there, too and he smiled at me, a heavy purse in his right hand—I had, seemingly, won. I imagined that Claude would have ruled in the Sparrowhawk’s favour had the crowd not gone wild at my victory, thus cementing it into place.
Reality was determined by the whole.
Pol threw my winnings to me and I caught them.
“That was a Hel of a fight, El.”
“Well, it Hel of hurt; that’s for sure.” I said, cracking my neck. The pop of nitrogen gas forming within synovial fluid and being expelled from my joints was the same as that of a fat, castrated pig put on the spit; equal parts pleasurable and discomforting. “Won’t be doing that again any time soon.”
Pol took the misshapen, melted lightning-catch from the wooden table to his right and inspected it.
“You used an actual bloody lightning-catch to catch lightning.” It wasn’t a question.
Pol put a hand behind his back and I tensed, ready to rip out his throat with my bare teeth.
“Simmer down there, El. It’s a blade, sure, but I won’t plunge it into your back.”
Pol removed a cinqueda from the sheath on his lower back and flipped it, holding it by the blade and handing me the hilt.
It was somewhere in that awkward placement between short sword and long dagger; at the square-angled, upwards-rounded guard, the blade was five-fingers in width, tapering into a somewhat rounded tip at the weak. Four fullers ran along the bottom-half of the strong, then three at the mid-blade, and finally two at the place where strong met weak while the tip was full metal with a discernible central ridge. The blade itself was not well-ornamented but instead simple in its make.
The pommel and grip were joined as one sole hilt made for a single hand; the handle thickened at where the cinqueda was to be held in the palm and thinned in between guard and pommel.
“I wanted to stick to the theme.” Pol said, grinning at me as if a long lost kindred spirit. “Of gifting you daggers. That fight? Never seen anything like it.” He unbuckled the weapon’s sheath while he spoke. “This is me paying my respects and expressin’ gratitude for the sight. I keep the lightning-catch; you get the blade.”
I grinned back at the man, unashamed and unabashed as he handed me the scabbard in his right hand. Caught the blade in his left with my bare teeth and ripped it out from his hands.
“Sorry, y’know how it is.”
The smile did not leave my face.
“No worries, Pol. Wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”
I buckled the cinqueda to my lower back without fear—there were no poisons or contraptions or magiques within; otherwise, I would have heard them or felt the disturbance of weight or the mechanical vibration or the ambarique pull of the occult. It was simply an unenchanted but well-smithed and well-kept dagger.
“She got a name?”
He shook his head.
“We’ll name her by the morn’. Assassin’s first?”
“Aye. Assassin’s first else my fingers’ll get twitchy and stab you in the back. Rather not die.”
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We drank and made merry in that stretch of hour that the sun winks its eye open just a crack but isn’t fully awake. Through the Blue Mountains that flanked the Cairn’s east, I could see Lucifer’s right eye—false-crescent suns flanked it at twenty-two degrees as if to make the true sun into an iris and to give it eyelashes.
The parhelions formed from the sempiternal cirrostratus clouds known as the Blue Mountain’s Beard; light was broken and bent through the naturally-occuring prism of ice crystals to bathe the Cairn in rainbows and other optical ephemera. It was said that Saint-Getaine chose this spot as His tomb because of the phenomenon—a natural miracle, it was called.
“Parhelion.” I said to a heavily-embriagated Pol. “Its name will be Parhelion; the blade of the sun-dogs that ever chase after the sun but never catch it.”
His empty expression sobered-up in an instant as he nodded; there was power in names. Power to be respected. I handed him the blade with which he attempted to take my life with and told him thus:
“Melt it and the lightning-catch together and make yourself a weapon with a name. Give it a soul and it’ll preserve you as its sire.”
With that, I left.
When next I encountered Pol, it would be when the both of us were to be hanged for crimes against God and Kingdom, Church and Crown. Only then would I know the name of Azure the Blade of Blue Mountain; the Kingkiller and the Assassin-of-Assassins and the Lightning-Catch.
I had crossed the path of a legend in the making I hadn’t even known then.
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In the coming day I did no extraneous activity—my heart mended back oh so very slowly and any strain on it might cause more damage; besides, it well and truly hurt.
It was strange, being thrown back into the limits of a mortal. Sure, my senses weren’t so heavily dulled but my physical capabilities were very much neutered from their previous apogee. The malaise certainly did not help but my mood could not be so easily slain.
I was bloody rich! Rich, I tell you!
Specifically, I had sixty silver Talents to my name; one-thousand-two-hundred Crowns was more than enough to buy a decent house in the merchant’s district. I could have gone for eight gold Sovereigns and a Half-Sovereign instead but I felt that such a large denomination would only draw undue attention.
Coin-purse was downright leaden, nearly bursting at the seams, just begging for me to spend it. More than enough to pay for enchantments for Ashen and Parhelion; I carried That-Which-Remains on my shoulder by a strap while the Sun-Dog was sheathed on my lower back.
When the second bell rang to signal the merchants to open up shop, I made for the nearest bath-house. I hadn’t brought a second change of clothes so as to not give away anything in my fight with the Sparrowhawk. And I needed them badly as I now wore one of the many sets that the Pit lended out to those that were left improper after a bout—suffice it to say: vampyric skin was extra-sensitive to lice.
It was high time I got a new pair anyhows—Ré was scandalised to find out that I took baths only once every three day’s time and had only the clothes on my back to wear; the blueblood hadn’t paid much attention but the unclean masses were not so because they wanted to be.
Hot-spring water soothed my aching muscles and warmed up my cold blood—downright miraculous, I almost believed that it could raise a man from the dead. What stopped me from buying into that swill was the pungent odour of sulphur that came with; this was not an ambarically-heated bath but instead an entirely natural one that cost a whole lotta copper. Thirty pennies for entry alone; the scented idols of soap cost twenty a piece.
Perhaps the waters did indeed raise the dead for they stunk of Hel’s rotten mouth.
There was a tailor adjoining the Serein’s Call and I made great use of him; I did not go for a doublet as Lamaré wanted but instead a simple-if-well-fitted linen shirt and leather trousers and sleeveless jaquet. Rolled up the sleeves to bare my well-muscled (Lamaré’s words, not mine) arms.
“Monsieur Raphaël is a swordsman, no?” Guillaume D’La Chance, cloths-man by trade and cunning man in the art of outfits by choice, asked me as he spied around his shop for boots.
“Aye—need a pair that won’t trip me so no riding heels or dandy stilts.”
After some back and forth, deliberation and trepidation, I decided on a pair of alp-leather boots and a cloak that came with; a set, seemingly. They were black as night for if the skin of an alp is cured within the brackish water of a mara’s womb, it becomes moonless and cannot be seen under but the light of day and cannot be heard but atop snow or when treading running water.
There were no remnant rúna but the boots were already practically enchanted anyhows as they were silent and produced no sound, not even that of the joints of the foot. The cloak did much the same as me once exposed to shadow, submerging itself into the vast ether of the eigengrau and dulled the sound of my scabbards.
Besides the utility, there was something poetic about a vampyre clad in black.
‘A vampyre wearing a vampyre,’ I jested but Lamaré would have none of it, explaining to me that vampyrism, as a curse, is nothing alike and nothing to do with said class of monster.
Alps, you see, are lesser vampyres—false vampyres with no relation to yours-truly—that fed on the blood and breath of the dreaming whereas maras were dream spirits proper; the word ‘nightmare’ comes from such. The image of the former is that of a long-eared dog, pale and hairless and ghoulish, whilst the latter is a tangle of marelocks; a jumble of hair that is born from an unkempt and maltreated mare, animated by a drop of ichor rained down during a full, weeping moon.
One might think that using the body parts of such dreadful creatures would be sin but it was much the opposite—the Church was altogether too invested to renege on its bounties of monsters and the unnatural; so long as the ensorcelled objects were used to put down the enemies of Lucifer, then the Poppess did not care.
A necessary evil, if you will. Unless, of course, there was a political use for a good ole witch-hunt; then, the stake is erected and the pyre is lit and the inquisitors are set upon the populace for harbouring pagans and warlocks and blasphemers and heretics and sinners and all manner of the Witch-God’s compatriots.
“Merci beaucoup. Monsieur D’La Chance!” I exclaimed as I looked at myself in the mirror. “You’ve made me from pauper to courtier!”
My, my, El. You were already dashing before the clothes but now you are downright ravishing.
‘Ravished indeed I am, Ré. Why don’t we break our fast?’
Do not give me ideas, amoré; else, I might snack on you.
I mentally swatted-away the rogue and physically paid the tailor. I had entered the Seiren’s Call a ragged and haggard fellow and now I left it positively a new man, reborn by its waters and clothed by its patron spirit.
Got a bite to eat with Lamaré at the same place as last though I’d rather he’d chosen another eatery. I had to repossess my body to kindly let down the girl that asked me out for drinks. Didn’t feel good rejecting someone’s advances, much less being rejected yourself but she—Larissia Dal Monte—took it on her chin.
“You needn’t have declined for my sake, El.”
His voice was even and his posture no different but I knew, down to the marrow of bones knew, that Lamaré was rather pleased that I had said ‘no’. He also felt oh so very guilty at the same time.
He wasn’t half as subtle as he thought he was.
‘I am no longer just a man, Ré,’ I said, in spirit form. ‘I feel ill at ease bedding a fragile mortal. This isn’t baseless superiority or leftover machismo but a very real fear of accidentally hurting someone. You know how men lose control of their faculties during climax—what happens when my muscles are not under my sway then? No, for now I’ll abstain.’
We left it at that and made our way towards Calcifer to see what he had charmed-up. I was nearly frothing at the mouth in anticipation as I’d only ever held unenchanted and untinkered virgin steel.