XI
Faire la Paire
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> “The change of motion of an object is proportional to the force impressed; and is made in the direction of the straight line in which the force is impressed.”
—Azariah Villeneuve excerpt, Compiled Oxenfürt Lectures; On Principia, Volume I: Le Mouvement d’Corps.
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The clock struck noon by the time we reached the enchantrie, beating down on my new-fangled cloak as if incensed that we would wear a creature of the night during day. Under the influence of the baleful swelter, my body switched to an exothermic modus operandi, no longer producing any heat but still retaining the ability to sweat profusely.
I hoped, fool’s gold that hope was, that I would not smell of wet dog.
The bell chimed and I greeted Calcifer before he took me to the back to show me what he was working on. A facsimile of Ashen stood on a work-bench, grimoires and other occult paraphernalia covering every conceivable surface of the station.
I saw skulls, manly and beastly and monstrously; black and polished like obsidian; white and bleached as if b’hémoth bones in the Black Desert; trapped within ruby amber not unlike bottled ships; teeming with the golden-growths of the Midas plague that transmuted calcium into pyrite. I saw orreries of byzantium brass crackling with ambaricité so that an occultist might see the stars even during day and underneath roof. I saw candles whose wax was lévayathan-ambergris form a circle around the copper-shadow of That-Which-Remains.
The ink-blood had measured my sword’s exact dimensions and reproduced it with knoll-wood, cast it in plaster and then poured molten copper into the gypsum mould that was well-glyphed to withstand heat. The first and second was for form and proportion while the third and fourth were to set ichor channels within the simulacra so that Calcifer might practise his spells beforehand,
“As you can see, the only visible rúna is the master-glyph—Tir; yoke. With it, you’ll have great ability with moulding spells that come in contact with the blade. Might even be able to parry a bolt of phlogiston with it or cut through a ward as if it were a physical thing.”
The sympathie-vein diagrams and grammarie schématiques were far above either mine or Lamaré’s ability to understand and so we asked Calcifer what they’d do; purpose and design omitted through severe contraction.
“Unfortunately I cannot divulge those secrets of the craft—oathsworn to my Uncle. Though I’ve done considerable modifications to the base template, it’s his make.”
I nodded, conceding to a lesser explanation of the rúnari circuit. I did not fear the proliferation of such knowledge as Calcifer would swear an oath of secrecy upon his heart after completing my commission; standard fair for chanters, binding and sealing and whatnot.
“I’ve already enlightened you as to the Luch-P’Esh charm for the pommel and the Tir-Tau pair for the hand, so let me explain the main circuit of the hilt, crossguard and blade; most of it is infrastructure besides the Tir glyphe just above the chappe, so it won’t take long.”
Calcifer handed me the copper-shadow of Ashen and we went behind the shop to where the chanter kept a dummy of straw ensorcelled so that, when the moon is out, the straws would return within and the scarecrow’s roughspun skin would reknit—Geistmoon charms were common enough in such cases.
With the strength of a mortal man, I cut through the dummy’s steel bones with no resistance whatsoever. I felt no vibrations echo through the metal of my blade and knew only that I had struck true when the ‘head’ rolled on the cobbles; there was an uncanny resemblance to Claude’s d’yabelish mug that I could not help but appreciate.
Next, Calcifer chanted the word of power ‘Zä’ which was ‘fire’ in the Tongue of Tongues, combusting an orb of phlogiston to hover above his palm. I had felt the sudden ambarique vacuum as had the sympathie lamps that hung from the wrought-iron fencing, their lights winking out before returning.
“Steel yourself,” he told me before he threw a bolt of spellfire at me.
I parted the arrow of phlogiston in two with an upstroke of the sword from the tail-guard; and so expelled most of the spell’s energy before it imploded and then exploded in my face, sending me to the ground in a sprawl of limbs and singed eyebrows.
Got up from my bum, brushed off the dust and said: “I’ll take her.”
We went over the more niche functions of each compound glyphe, though we did not delve too deeply into their constituent sub-glyphs. The trade-marked charms were as so: Zegylch or Cleave-to-Lucifer to bind steel to steel so that no one but the master may dismantle the sword; Eädun or Hagfish-Spiritskin so that no curse finds purchase within the enchantment’s heart; Severen or Sever-Sharp to make keen the blade so that it might cut even stone should the arm behind it have the strength; and, finally, Abhartach or Sleeping-Revenant so that, when sheathed, the magiques within are so too sealed.
The charms were arrayed in the order in which I described them and I saw Calcifer inscribe them, one by one, upon Ashen back inside the chanter’s workshop proper. I oversaw his steps so that he might not trick me—I held his heart in thrall of my ears and would know any cheating.
Zegylch dwelled along the tang of the blade, conjoining all parts of the sword as one. This served to add durability to the artefact as it would disperse force evenly throughout the object’s mass as if it were a single, contiguous body of matter rather than disparate pieces.
Eädun was branded on the outside of the spridjan grip with an alquemique known as sublimate of ice and would later on be covered by charm-written ghūl leather to further ward against hexes and fell sorcerie.
Severen crawled beneath the rainguard as if a bear into its cave, ready to rend and to claw any foolish enough to challenge. I would still continue to hone the sword myself when the charm was not active as Sever-Sharp worked multiplicatively rather than additively; most nobles did not bear the effort but those that were intimate with the Escalier.
Abhartach slept in my scabbard, etched along metal and gilded with tombac and shavings of sterling of silver and cold-iron so that any that attempt to draw the sword without my mark are so cursed with anæmia and other thinnings of the blood.
Calcifer cast spells and chanted the positions of sun and moon and star in accordance with his orreries, binding with sympathie each and every rúna; to know a glyphe is not enough to make it a reality. Only a castmagique can do as the name implies—I could scrawl the letters of the rúnari, day and night, and would not seal even a spark of the occult within. The arts esoteric were out of my grasp.
For now.
And so, from the phylactère of tombac—of Jartoshi gold-copper—the raven-haired man took out a single lodestone and sealed it once again. Calcifer Encre D’Sang uttered the word of power ‘Etja’ which was ‘sever’ in the Tongue of Tongues, commanding the piece of ambarique calcite to split in half over Ashen, baptising the sword in a single drop of pure, God-blooded ichor.
One half of the lodestone was put within the pommel of the sword, placed inside a hollowed-out cavity so that the calcite shone on the end-cap as if it were a gemstone. ‘Luch-P’Esh’ was etched on the calcite, the white upper-layer peeled back to show the vibrant ruby of divine amber.
The other half was inserted into my flesh with a surgical instrument not unlike a seringue; instantaneously, the device had embedded the lodestone at the conjunction of my median nerves and volarch arch with precision that astounded and concerned me in equal measure. Calcifer inked my skin then with an ambarique needler, binding the lodestone above and below with a Tir-Tau pairing.
I chose my left, my sinistre, for that was Lamaré’s dominant hand and I would not be a swordsman if not for him—he’d reared and cultivated the skill throughout years and I would not spit on that gift but instead give it its proper respects and cherish it.
The chanter finished the enchantment by speaking in tongues my sword’s true-name. His voice was resonant, reverberating from everywhere and nowhere at all as if he spoke not with his mouth but with his soul, each breath thunderous in my head and yet quiet in my ears.
“Cä-Eikotház,” which meant Luæth-liath in Tirrish or That-Which-Remains in Vulgar.
He sheathed the sword in its scabbard and then went and retrieved a phoenician quill so that he might bind Ashen’s secrets across his heart and swear to die; the glyphes he inscribed on his sternum were ones I was familiar with, omittances themselves omitted. Was rather impressed seeing Calcifer write without looking at his handiwork.
“Gê’ikos, al-Cä-Tau-Eátja al-Teh’ad, al-Nocha’r Esh-Majed,” was writ in rúnari cipher. Lamaré spoke the meaning of the phrase into my mind’s eye so that I might understand.
Gê’ikos was an omission of Gê-Eikos whose literal translation corresponded to ‘hold ash’ which meant to ‘keep secret’.
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Cä-Tau-Eátja was an omission of Cä-Tau-Eátan-Etja whose literal translation corresponded ‘to sow, bind; to reap, sever’ which meant to ‘observe covenant’.
Teh’ad was an omission of Teh-Adra whose literal translation corresponded to ‘root vessel’ or ‘taproot’ which meant ‘heart’ or ‘core’.
Nochä’r was an omission of Noch-Chaer whose literal translation corresponded to ‘reap lightning from the sky’ which meant ‘to receive castigation’.
Esh-Majed was an omission of Esh-Maj-Gaed whose literal translation corresponded to ‘weft of balance and thread’ which meant the ‘tying-off of loose ends’.
The scriptwork that bound rúna was called Færie-Speak; sentences were wreathes of rúnari called ‘færie-rings’. Which came first, the fungal arrangement or the grammatical one, Lamaré did not know; scholars till this day argued for and against with fervour that rivalled that of zealots and dying warriors.
“Bite your thumb and draw blood; press it in the hollow of the circle.”
I did as I was bade.
Ambaricité sparked between us, connecting our heartsblood if only for but a moment. I salivated before all that ichor, all that sweet, sweet nectar. Lucifer’s gouged-out eyes, I need have only pulled and I would have drained the castmagique dry of his power.
Lamaré held me back, a leash around my metaphysical neck as the grammarie enacted its commandments upon us. Should I fail to pay Calcifer his forty-five silver Crowns, I was to be struck with consumption by the blood-oath.
“Ainsi soit-il.”
“So it be.” I echoed, and so it was.
The færie-ring vanished into Calcifer’s skin, one of a myriad of countless others.
Chanters did not lose power in sealing their tongues; much the opposite happened as the more færie-rings an occultist held within their heart, the stronger their enchantments became. The process was not dissimilar to how sorciers compacted with familiar spirits to augment their spells or how warriors drank the alquemiquement-treated blood of monsters, among other sources of ichor, to hone their physical might and vigour.
Some, I imagined, might’ve done all three or practised another method altogether. There were as many paths to power as there were stars affixed in the night sky.
The leftover simulacra was melted in a miniature crucible no larger than a child’s head that let off no heat that I could detect and yet transformed an entire sword into molten slag. As for the liquid metal, it was used to produce an alloy of brass of byzantium; it rusted on contact with air into a verdigris patina that was harder than steel and twice as light but would disintegrate if exposed to water. Thankfully it could be re-oxidized after wiping away the liquid and then oiled to ward-off any further humidity.
Calcifer poured half of the byzantium into a ambarique spinning wheel to fabricate wiring and the other half he set into moulds to shape plates and cogs and all other sorts of machinerie so that he might fit into the scabbard to give it the mechanical ability to unsheathe the blade by itself, to employ sword-resins and other additives, and to enhance Ashen’s charms for a short period of time after being drawn.
Furthermore, the scabbard was fitted with the three ounce heart-stone I’d gotten from Gendrie. The amber was engraved with a Luch-P’Esh or womb-vessel rúna; it would absorb ichor when sheathed that the Sleeping-Revenant of Abhartach might use to maintain the sword’s enchantments and clean its blade of debris and dirt of any kind.
There was nothing left for it; I removed forty Talents from my purse, along with five silver Crowns and put the small stack atop Calcifer’s table. More than half of my wealth, gone with the wind. We’d talked back and forth on whether to use the best engraving materials, on the rúna arrangement and quality and so on; since I had the money, I had paid for the best that Calcifer offered.
Sheathed and put on my shoulder, the chanter looked content as a fiddle at Ashen.
“When you return with more capital, I shall have more advanced charms myself.” Raven-hair told me. His eyes black as sin were aburst with broken capillaries, endowing his visage with a d’yabolic aspect that made me feel as if before a helmsman of Azazel’s Infernal Host.
“Aye, so long as you’ve got your wits about you, you’re my chanter from now until the second coming of Lucifer.”
I bid the man au revoir and left, feeling his ensorcelled eyes boring into my heart; he knew what I was. If not before, on that first day that Calcifer looked at my palm, now, for certain, the chanter was of a mind that he dealt with night-spawn.
To swear an oath of blood is no simple thing.
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I had drunk with my would-be assassin in the morning and in the evening, I drank with a friend that would not stab me in the back.
Med and I met at the Cockarel’s Tail, a middle-class establishment that sold spirits and high spirits, offered bets and sordid trysts, where you could turn every trick and trick every turn. My kind of place, really. I was well-accustomed to the cacophony of men that knew nothing but the gambler’s draught of hope and now I heard the serein song of men that had yet to become the empty husks of themselves.
It was the shape of things to come; that slippery slope that might take your footing and drag you into the bottomless abyss of vice and depravity. That danger only made the thrill of it all the more enticing.
I told my leather-worker friend of my fights and showed him both Ashen and Parhelion, my black cloak and even blacker feet. He told me of his daughter’s studies at the Universitié of Saint-Getaine; she sought to become a tinkerer, the sort of chanter that makes occult machinerie such as arrow-catches and time-keepers and that maintained the ambaricité of the Western Cairn.
“No matter how much I try to drink you under the table, you look sober as the hair off a dog’s back!”
I patted the man’s shoulder and told him to give up on his fool’s errand though the Nazirese would have none of it. We drank and we drank and we drank ourselves stupid until I asked a question that would later seal the man’s very fate though neither of us would know it until the time came.
“Why’d the Church burn your mother? Lynchings aren’t done with fire and those are mostly in small towns, not bigs one like this.”
His face grew guilty and morose, as if he’d set the stake alight himself, but Mahhomed’s well-loosened tongue said seven very important words all the same.
“Mamá was a priestess to Uriel. Mullaq.”
That was all I needed to know so I let the sleeping dog lie.
The sober moment was broken up by, of all things, the brashness of a drunkard.
A proper dimwit called my friend a qarûn after he bumped into Mahhomed, spilling drink upon the both of us. Portmanteau of maqal al-garûn; a qarûn is a desert lizard native to the Black Sands of Nazirét, used by the Lucielãçais as a caste-slur for the Nazirese. Other epithets included: Christ-killers and mules; the former is due to Golgotha residing within Nazirét’s borders while the latter is a corruption for the name of Nazirese priestly scholars, the Mullaq.
The arrogance of calling the people from which Christ, of Lucifer’s one and only son, was reared as His killers was demented; Narancan had ordered God’s death and seen to it himself with the spear of Longinus. What the Nazirese had to do with the whole ordeal beyond mere association was anyone’s best guess; but then again, when was casteism of any kind logical?
And, stupefied then that I was, I too was beyond logic and reason and so pushed the dimwit back with a little bit too much force, throwing him to the filthy bar-room ground.
He got up, having not learned his lesson, took one look at me and called me a ‘mud-blood’. He drew steel as people gave the three of us a wide berth, chanting ‘fight, fight, fight!’.
Humanity was well and truly doomed, weren’t we?
I abstained from unsheathing Ashen as that meant I would be sworn to the death of either of us then; the Éder do not draw steel without need nor without death.
There were no Steps of the Escalier as the slur-prone fool was a civilian; a commoner like us, unsurprisingly. I took from him his long dagger as if he were a child and slapped him upside the head.
I stood over him and quoted Lucifer: “To give mercy means to look down upon a weaker party.” Gave him my hand and stood him up, brushed the dust and filth from his long-sleeved jaquet, sheathed his steel and gave him a pat on the back; he quickly left as if he’d forgotten his stove alit.
Afterwards, we got somehow even more inebriated and began to sing with the patrons of the Cockarel’s Tail ribalds and sailor-songs and bordello shanties until the wee hours of the night. Even had a woman throw her garland—the strip of cloth that held down her skirts to her thighs so that wind might not expose her—at me. I did not much appreciate it as my nose was far too delicate of a constitution to suffer the fishmonger’s stank.
At least the alcohol dampens the smell of sweaty stones, Lamaré jested. Else I would bid you to stake yourself upon the nearest fence.
By the end of our celebrations, I had to carry Med back home to a none-too-happy Aîs.
“Azrael preserve my soul, you’ll be the death of him, stranger.”
I handed off the dead-drunk man and said: “I tried to tell him to not imbibe so much but he insisted on drinking play-for-play.”
Aîs gestured me to come along and closed the door behind us as Med collapsed into a chair, mumbling of his sweet daughter; that she was Uriel’s Nine-Thousand blessings incarnate and that she did not deserve a drunkard of a father.
“I’ll set up a cot for you in the back.”
Like her sire, Aîs was more stubborn than a tröll held up under its bridge. She would not let a man, and I quote: ‘more inebriated than a ghūl in a wine barrel’. And so I slept there, amidst the clink and clank of machinerie, atop a straw cot and with multiple pillows and a blanket.
Like father, like daughter, I suppose, Lamaré told me as I drifted-off into the waiting arms of the little death of sleep. I had earned a bit of rest after the absurd week I’d had, I reckoned.
From becoming a vampyre to mastering swordsmanship; from earning enough of Her Majesty’s silver to buy myself a proper house to coming to possess a magique’d sword; from compacting with a familiar spirit to fighting at a level above even superhuman.
So much had happened in so little time that I was left gobsmacked in the wake of the past days.
The extraordinary, now my ordinary.