XIII
Crypte Ghûl
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> Necrophaga Cryptessaim; the common ghûl or gravier, is a species of the order necrophaga that feasts on carrion and are oft found in the aftermath of battles where innards lay strewn or in graves where they may dig up cadavers or in sewers where they might infest.
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> Ghûls need not congregate in hives though may do so in the presence of a broodmother, also known as a grave hag or ghûlah. Mutants of this species of monster are known as al-ghûls; instead of ashen-gray skin, they take after the albino, and are spined with bony growths.
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> It is theorized that al-ghûls form after a common gravier is wounded mortally many times but does not die a true death; in doing so, their body’s supernatural healing capabilities are overwhelmed and instead of mending flesh, calcify it.
—Beastiarium Occultum, the Bestiary of Natural Philosopher and Physiologus Ashemol Errasutiz D’Avenon; Doctorate holder of the institute of Saint-Mahault, Alumni-Professor of the Collegium, page 67: the Common Ghûl & Its Subspecies Variants
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After a fitful night of sleep in the sewers, I returned to Gendry to take from him the newly-annealed Parhelion and then I went to the nearest constable’s office—it was a miniature stone fortress amidst the artisan’s quarter and had the sigil of the Proctor’s Guild emblazoned on its door. I was rather glad that this Proctor outpost was not conjoined to a church as most tended to be: the consecrated ground might reveal me as a vampyre.
Saint-Getaine was so big that it had to split the guard in two; the Proctors took to mundane matters of civil security and the like while the Guard proper, known as the Men-In-Tabards, took to more serious matters like organised crime and foreign threats.
The door opened and I greeted the Deputy Proctor Dufonte D’Armon with a firm handshake and a respectable demeanour. He wore mail head to toe, shirt to coif, with a yellow vest atop and a bascinet to cover his pate; then bound to his left breast was the Proctor’s heraldry of a nightingale of the colour of dandelions centred upon the black streak of a kite shield divided in three dyes horizontally.
He did not like me and did not try to hide it.
“I’m looking to cull the sewers of some of their ghûl-nests; the Church usually has its hands full every year when the drought comes in and allows the monsters to surface so, needing some coin, I’d like to take up the bounty. Take care of some of the coloniser nests so this year’s Culling Day is safer for the lads.”
The man chewed his tub āq in between his molars as he stared at me for an uncomfortable amount of time. I did not sweat only for the fact that I had that particular bodily response under heel. Instead I fidgeted with my hands and wrung my wrists as if a mother worried for her son at war.
“Bring the head of the broodmother—I’ll know how many lesser ghûls you’ll’ve killed by her size.”
With that, the man handed me a copy of the bounty and sent me back out into the street. I already knew what was written therein so I neatly folded the sheaf of paper into a pocket so I could use it later on.
Old habits and all that.
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Saint-Getaine’s catacombs were built upon a gargantuan mass-grave of some forlorn and forgone conflict; the sewers intersected with both and allowed necrophages like ghûls and foglings to feast on flesh both fresh and old. This monster-laden mess of ruins and filth were rather-fittingly called the Underbowels.
The bounty I had undertaken was a death sentence to any sane, uninked individual—you couldn’t bring torches or lamps or any sort of light source lest you combust pockets of flammable gas; you may end up suffocating in said gas and die or worse; the place crawled with death-eaters, both the literal kind and the metaphorical one in the form of resurrection-men and soap-makers.
The former took bodies to alquemists for them to experiment upon while the latter were the alquemists themselves that, in need of coin, hydrolyzed human flesh and fat into soap and other alquemiques such as nigrédo that can be used to make golemns among other homunculæ.
I made my way through the muck, Bellamie tucked inside my pockets after I was far enough from the surface. From here on out, I might stumble upon a nest. Parhelion left its sheath but Ashen stayed in the scabbard for now; ghûls can easily mend their hides of cuts from a steel-edged weapon but not one annealed with gold or silver.
The monsters were sensitive to the light like vampyres and what was gold but sunlight made solid? It was said that the Right Eye of God wept tears that grew into the mineral we called gold while the Left inseminated the womb of the earth with the seed for silver—spontaneous generation, the phenomenon was called; that principle applied to maggots as well as barnacles and the like.
Gendry’s family concoction of sun-varnish had absorbed a day’s worth of light so I’d have to conserve that secondary resource with a calculating eye; the Tir-Tau pairing allowed me to spark a current of ambaricité to activate simple effects such as this one but would not otherwise allow me to interact with more complex machinerie.
Clicks and trills bounced off the sewer walls, confusing my senses such that I thought I had been immediately beset by ghûls—but no, they were about a few paces after the next two bends. My sensitive ears were just as much a boon as a bane in these confined spaces as I wasn’t used to them.
I took great care to listen so that I might only pick-off stragglers; colony nests rather than a swarm proper lest I bite off more than I can chew.
My eyes had been closed ever since I had entered into the depths of the Underbowels and so my other senses had sharpened to compensate, excluding, of course, smell—after a while I could no longer smell a thing anymore and was glad for it. I hoped that it wasn’t a permanent effect though that wish would soon come back to bite me in the ass.
As I crept closer, the sounds coagulated into a readable image in my mind’s eye: three ghûls feasted over carrion that had washed up from the surface. It was then that my sense of smell came back, unfortunately—I knew that the necrophages were eating a human male of no more than forty; putrefaction had just begun to set in, a sickly-sweet scent wafting into my nostrils and making me salivate.
Vampyres have senses specialised for finding healthy prey among the general populace so my salivation had less to do with craving and more to do with disgust as saliva protects the teeth against the corrosive properties of bile when one vomits.
I breathed in and then out and then charged into the fray because I knew that I wouldn’t evade the necrophage’s sense of smell for long enough to get any closer under stealth. As I ran, I unsheathed Ashen from my back to use as a cattle-prod rather than an actual weapon.
One of the ghûls had been a tad slow and I buried Parhelion to the hilt in his throat, ripping out the weapon as I continued forth to deal with the other two monstrosities. His head rolled on the sludge-strewn sewer stones in a shower of brackish blood.
The next two ghûls were faster for my momentary distraction of killing one of their own; the leftmost one clawed at me, standing on his hind legs to assume the stance of a man and possess, in so doing, his reach. Three vicious excoriations took me by the right arm as I thrusted Parhelion into the beast’s heart, rendering him a thrashing mess of limbs and convulsions.
Just as I began to think of turning around, the third and final ghûl jumped on my back and bit me in the neck with his serrated fangs; vampyre blood, like that of a golgothan, is poisonous and turns black when exposed to air. Mine only darkened when not in contact with my body.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
The ghûl fell insensate to the ground, thrashing as my ichor sought to consume all of his viscera as if plague made flesh, mutating the monster further until he was an unmoving lump of soot and nigredo; vampyre blood was a highly sought-after alquemique for its ability to putrefy.
It was then that I opened my eyes to look at the two writhing ghûls—they were going to die as gold and silver both inhibited their regeneration. They looked like men made into dogs, hairless and grey-like of skin with their bones bent to resemble a four-legged creature but with heads that were unmistakably Adamic.
Ghûls, you see, were once humans. The ghûl curse afflicts people through the blood; if a broodmother’s blood touches your own, you undergo a metamorphosis not unlike that of the vampyre curse, slowly mutating until you are rendered a rabid, mad animal that hungers for dead flesh.
For their shared qualities to my own condition, one might think them a lesser sort of vampyre but no; ghûls were of the family of Necrophaga, death-eaters or vultures that sought carrion rather than breathing meat. Vampyres, both false and greater, are, by definition, parasites that attach onto human settlements whereas ghûls often live in swamps and the like without need for parasitism.
The lines blurred into one another as monsters are unnatural creatures that can procreate with one another regardless of species or kind, thus defying categorization. Beyond this, new abominations are born everyday, whether through curses or due to the blood-rains.
My group of ghûls only consisted of male drones spawned from the broodmother’s egg-sacs rather than turned humans so I took no trophies and instead went off into the dark once again, a monster hunting other monsters.
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I encountered three more groups of ghûls before I reached the nest proper and had expended all but one charge of Parhelion’s sun-varnish—the light had dimmed considerably from the first use thereof so Lamaré deduced that it was the last. Activating a charge required practically no voltaire whatsoever, only a blink of current; counting back my uses of the alquemique ability, Ré told me that Parhelion had seven-charges at maximum.
The nest was absolutely disgusting and rancid.
Ghûls had no salvia but instead only bile and used such to putrefy flesh and organic matter into nigredo; a black and clay-like substance that they used to build their hives—honey-comb structures crawled along the great basin of the conjunction of various sewers lines. The nigrédo it was built out of had long since set as if some perverse resin, ashen in colour so that the ghûls blended in.
It was in these dark tunnels that I learned of another ability that vampyres are given by birthright: heart-sight. Slowly, the heat of blood had overcome my senses such that I knew where each ghûl lay up to ten paces away. This did not need me to have open eyes though I still felt a strange sort of strain in them when I made use of the bloodline sorcerie. Like opening a third eye, I saw a world of black where there lay only the throbbing of ichor in concert to the drums of the chest—silhouettes of red as if spectres.
The more I was bled, be it by use of vampyric strength or by excoriation of the ghûl’s tooth and claw, the more bold my heart-sight became; by now it was nearly all-consuming. The beast within me was coming awake as it had with my fight with Mallory Fæ and it wanted violence and abaddon and the deepest hedonism of war imaginable.
I kept it shackled within my throat but I knew that this would not last.
There were about ten ghûls within the nest now that I had culled all the scouting drones. I could take them but I needed to do so in a manner that chokes their number into engaging me one on one and one by one.
The floodgates creaked open just a sliver, the beast within me hissing out the paralysing song of the vampyre; their spines stiffened and as did their hearts still before pounding like rabbits before the gryphen.
Then came the broodmother’s song, a helish cacophony the likes of which broke the spell of stupor I had laid upon the beasts.
My legs took me fast from the coming host of ghûls nipping at my heels; I reached a bend and then another, going into an alcove that had collapsed at the other end but would serve as a culling corridor.
The only way out was through as the monsters descended upon me with tooth and claw; I did not and could employ my bastard sword in such a confined space and so used Parhelion instead.
There were no forms or Steps to use but instead only animal fury as I hacked and slashed and thrusted until only the broodmother remained. She leered at me, twice as big as the other ghûls, and I faked weakness, falling to the ground. I needn’t have used much acting as I was well and truly exhausted, wounds covering every inch of me.
She came upon my body, corpulent and with multiple teets and tumours and teeming with egg-sacs, and vomited her brackish spawning-blood over me.
In an instant I thrust upwards with Parhelion and ignited the last charge; ambaricité sparked and released the sunlight trapped within the amber as a golden gout of fire rippled along my blade. The broodmother’s head was incinerated in its totality, consumed within an inferno that winked out just as fast as it had come into being.
The world was returned to darkness, from blindness of light to that of the eigengrau.
I could not hold back any longer and the beast within took control, devouring me into its base urge for sustenance; the ghûls were creatures of flesh and blood and bone, and I ate them until all that remained was me. Tearing and breaking and ripping and gnawing, my stomach became a bottomless pit as my bile wore away everything into black sludge.
After the fugue of hunger, I was left a shaking mess, mental confusion waylaying me and dulling my wits. I vomited out black blood onto the sewer’s cobbles and saw it eat through stone as if strong acid. As I returned to a semblance of humanity, Lamaré spoke, fascinated by the mutation I had just undergone.
The vampyre curse assimilated the caustic properties of ghûl bile—your stomach acid was already potent before but now I imagine that it can melt through steel. I’ve never heard of such a thing!
“Well, good and all that you’re happy as a fiddle but I am dirty and tired and am in need of a bath.”
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As I simmered in one of many pots of the Serein’s Song, Lamaré theorised and ruminate on my physiology: you aren’t special beyond not possessing the vampyre’s womb or thirst—so why haven’t I ever heard of a night-spawn subsuming the powers of other monsters? Sure, men do it all the time, taking in monstrous sorceries through the use of harsh alquemiques and heartblood temperings but this?
I had my head laid on the stone and my limbs sprawled in the broth of the stone-carved pool, muscles relaxing as the heat washed away the stress and strain.
“For the very same reason that the weaknesses and signs of vampyrism are so widely known: to identify a newborn night-spawn and kill it. The information about being able to subsume the sorcerie of monsters is kept under lock and key lest Azazel’s spawn grow bold. Elder vampyres might know of it but neophytes do not.”
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After I took my fill of the house of water, I said my au revoirs to the staff. Though, before I could go too far, Guillaume D’La Chance bid me to stop.
“Monsieur Raphaël, my Cécile told me she saw your cloak in tatters—”
“Sorry about that Guillaume—ghûl’s caught me with their claws; got a bounty to clear out some of the colony nests.”
“No, monsieur, I am not angry. Much the opposite: here, let me show you.”
Guillaume, cloths-man by trade and cunning man in the art of outfits by choice, unsheathed a dagger before I could protest or even think of doing so and sliced his own palm, dripping blood onto my cloak.
Had he been an assassin, I would most likely have died then and there with a blade to my heart.
Instead, I saw my cloak writhe as if a living thing, the holes scarring over somewhat.
“Alp-leather, if cured after it is formed into an article of clothing, can mend back any tear so long as most of the fabric is present. It only needs a bit of ichor and ambarique charge as a catalyst.”
I was impressed and grateful, shaking the gentleman’s hand with much gusto.
“Had I the silver to spare, Gui, I would pay you twice-over now.”
The man simply smiled in his reserved manner, said that one does not collect debts that do not exist and marched back to the Serein’s Song. If it weren’t for the kindness of others, I don't know where I’d’ve been but the grave—Mahhomed, Gendry, Guillaume, Pol, Calcifer; sure, I had compensated each and every one in some manner or another, but they’d reciprocated beyond my expectations.
As I returned to the sewers, my mood became dour, for I could no longer sleep in the luxurious inn I had rented for a span and would instead cohabitate with monsters. It was all Claude’s fault and that frustrated me to no end.
Like calls to like, a little voice said at the back of my head.
It wasn’t Lamaré’s.