XIX
Réactifs
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> All alquemique processes are reactionary by nature—a reagent is added to a prima materia, a base substance, so as to achieve another, higher form; id est, transmutation.
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> There are four distinct stages of alquemique refinement from transforming lead into gold known as the Magnum Opus or Great Work in the vernacular; each one produces an archetypical alquemique base known as a paragon, arranged in the following order of ascending sublimity: nigrédo, albédo, xanthédo, rubédo.
—Enantiodromia by Getârian Grandmaster-Alquemiste Karlon Göstaf Jaunas, pg.34 excerpt of folio translated into Vulgar Lucielãçais by Tenured Professor of the Université of the Libertine Arts of Saint-Getaine Franceis Allemon Encre d’Sang in the Year of Our Lord Lucifer 657; Fools Argue Over Gold.
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I swear by Longinus’ spear, cross my heart and hope to die if anything I uttered was a lie. Hels, I’ll even forswear sleeping with men, loathe as I’m to do so, as collateral should any of my words be falsehoods.
How Lamaré could go from fighting for his very soul to jesting in such a short span of time, I’d never know. Nevertheless, that little bit of humour was just what I needed, rekindling the joie de vivre I had lacked these past seven days.
We lapsed into idle banter, as we were wont to do. But, as with all good things, this too would come to an end.
“Where’s my sword?”
In the intervening insanity of the vampyre-curse’s progression, I had lost Ashen. The guilt that beset me and the impending doom had overwhelmed my ability to comprehend anything beyond the immediate.
Lamaré hadn’t brought up the topic as the sword was more mine than his and I had assumed he’d had it with him or that he’d known its whereabouts for he’d stowed it away somewhere or some such.
I did not fear for one simple reason: Luaith-Liath was anchored to my soul, an extension of my own flesh. I closed my eyes and let the world dissolve away into inchoate, all-encompassing silence, quietly waiting for the tugging sensation of the artefact to begin to pull at me.
It was subtle at first, as if an itch at the back of my mind, as if trying to remember a half-forgotten thought, as if the last dredges of a familiar smell that you can’t quite place. Then, I felt the vampyre’s eye nested within my brains begin to stir as if the needle of a sympathie compass, aligning itself rather like Calcifer’s byzantium-brass orreries around the gimbals of my skull to grasp at the conjunction of unseen stars.
Through whatever sorcerie that brought it into being, the eye was sensitive to ambarique current, to the force that moves the needle and binds all things.
I opened my eyes and knew where That-Which-Remains was with the surety of unhewn stone.
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Vampyres are excellent trackers, bloodhounds if you will.
We are single minded in the pursuit of things, be they the tangible such as with Ashen or the intangible such as power in general—the curse’s influence no doubt for my ego had grown fat and bold like a leech as it drank of Narancan’s gift. It wasn’t that such a power corrupts but that amplified all that a person was.
And people, they are flawed.
When given enough influence, mistakes that would normally only affect yourself can cascade into the lives of others. The only tenable difference between the me of now and my past self was the amount of power I had for my morals had not changed in the slightest.
You see, power does not corrupt, it only illuminates for there is no truest version of yourself than when no one else can stop you. The only thing that can stay your left hand is your right, the freedom so absolute that it can intoxicate even the most equanimous of individuals—Gods are fickle and capricious for this very reason, I reckoned.
Ashen was in the Underbowels of Saint-Getaine inside the sarcophagus of a pawnshop which was fitting for a sword named after the leftovers of the funeral pyre. The establishment was a repurposed cleft of a mausoleum within the labyrinthine intestines of the Cairn.
Fœti floated within glass jars, preserved in formaldehyde and other alquemiques so that they might be used to create homunculæ; heart-stones sourced from human blood hung suspended by salted rope of rowan bark lacquered in pitch of hollywort; swords and other weapons were bound in Luciferine seals so that the spirits and curses within them would not be let out and wreak panalgolmonium upon the shop.
A vampyre skull was placed atop a shelf, the prominent canines and segmented jaw the telltale morphology of Narancan’s spawn; from personal experience, I knew that the mandible could unhinge like that of a serpent’s. The true fangs were hidden from view as those were located within recesses of the hard palate—just underneath the roof of the mouth, essentially.
But out of all of these artefices and artefacts, one stood out in both body and soul: a sword cast purely of blood-silver known as a Judas-Kiss, without a lick of wood or leather or anything else but said constituent metal. It was malformed and striated and veined as if flesh alive frozen into a rictus, red seeping into the pattern-weld, fingers for the crossguard and metallic teeth erupting along the edge. Fittingly, the blade's many eyes were either closed or gouged-out such that it was left just as blind as God Himself.
These were a common heretical relique, numbering in the hundreds, forged from the verminous argent of Akeldama; the gallows where the Betrayer hanged himself under duress of the greatest guilt there ever was, his accursed price sown upon the earth and watered with his own blood.
Consequently, this living silver fed on blood and would never rust, becoming sharper for every life taken, inscribing in sacred Nazirese script—hiéroglyphes—the true-names of every soul felled under the shadow of its death. But, as with all hexes, such blades were doomed to one day take over the minds of their wielder’s so that they might slay those closest to them.
This particular Judas-Kiss was held within a salt-glass scabbard, clearly of alquemique make as a brackish liquid was suspended within—albédo most likely. Metal tracerie completed the mosaic, binding the blade’s hungry spirit until it was to be unleashed, unsheathed, to wreak havoc about friend and foe alike.
“You’ve something of mine.” I forwent any thieves’ cant or any sort of roguish parlance or code though not for lack of knowledge thereof. The Éder might know all such tongues but we do not sully our own with them for it is against the Kebān, the collective body of wisdom passed down orally through the generations via the black tongue of Kalé.
I might have been removed from the embrace of the Éder but the Éder was much harder to remove from me.
The pawnbroker was a man in his fifties, grey of pate and with beady eyes not accustomed to blinking. He wore simple clothes in the workman’s fashion and had the rough look of someone well-versed in violence, a falchion belted to his right hip and a pistol to his left. It was a wheelock which spoke to the broker’s wealth and connections—gun-smiths were much harder to come by than, say, a sword-smith or some such. Where Gendry’s sun-varnish was near alquemie, a wheelock fire-arm required investment of study in tinkerie and steam-forged sorcerie proper.
The man had been setting up an arquebus on a mount by the wall—matchlock, the second cheapest type of gun-lock. He turned to me, the silver hairs in his patchy beard intermingling with scar-flesh to make his mouth all the more severe. They were far too thin to not come by a rapier of some sort, so that spoke of the broker’s experience with duels of live steel.
“I know nothing of the sort, Monsieur.”
Lucielãçais was the only dialect in the world that could make a thug sound so high-blooded.
“My sword’s in the backroom at chest height, parallel to the horizon.”
I didn’t even need to close my eyes due to the proximity. The eye inside my brains chittered its gibbering tongue as it shook, saccades wracking my psyche like a lodestone repelling a lodestone.
“If I began to bow to every—”
Calcifer had told me something rather interesting before I left: my annealed bones had strengthened the Tir-Tau pairing within my left hand such that the Lucifer’s-bezoar’s range was heightened two-fold. It wasn’t enough to make my sword come flying into my hands but it was enough to make the sympathetic binding amenable to my efforts.
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I raised my hand towards the general location of Ashen and clenched my fingers, turning my wrist ever so slowly as the weight of the sorcerie fell upon my bones. Ambarique current surged through my eyes at the effort, highlighting the gold bands within the insides of my irises.
A rattling sound emanated from the other side of the wooden wall that had been erected in this little tomb. Interestingly, there were technically two corpses afflicted with the vampyre-curse inside the pawnshop that day but only one that still yet drew breath.
My temper was becoming fouler by the day and worse by the second.
When scarlet began to arc between my fingers, the man held up a hand and said: “Aye, that’s enough. Let me get it before you carve a hole through my wall. Wood don’t come cheap, y’know?”
That I did—Saint-Getaine was built of stone for the abundance of such beneath her feet and with the many quarries eating through the Blue Mountains. Firewood was not needed because of the use of ambaricité for heat and light either so imported lumber just didn’t have the demand needed for a price decrease. Beyond this, the supply was equally anæmic as the Cairn was situated in a steppe with bushes rather than woodland.
Only Lucifer knew why the Saintess decided to shuffle off this mortal coil here of all places. Interestingly, I would come to uncover said reason sooner rather than later but all things according to their time; there’s more to my story before I stumble upon the grave secret slumbering beneath our feet, most of us none the wiser that we trod upon the corpse of a fallen god.
The pawnbroker brought out Ashen, her brown scabbard now a deep and rich burgundy; I sure as Hel hadn’t changed the leather so that left only one more theory through deductive logic: the colour was a product of the blood of five dozen people. Which only left me with more questions as the distinctive copper tang was absent from the artefact.
The man put the sheathed blade atop the counter and slid it towards me, spinning round and round. I caught it by the shoulder and told him: “Raphaël. I won’t pay for something twice but you’ll still get some silver today. Tell me, who’s your plunderer?”
A grin cracked his stoney exterior, creating fault lines across cracked lips—the double-entendre was not lost on the pawnbroker.
“Demos. How’s about a favour for a favour? I tell you who pawned your blade and you do me a bounty.”
“Who?”
“Why, the woman in question. She told me that no one would come looking for that blade so I paid her half on top of the usual. Bring me her stilettos and I’ll even let you keep one.”
Now, generally, people don’t put a price on your head without greater reason than a single hiccup. No, there was more to this. And, knowing someone that fit the bill, I said: “By chance, is it Mallory Fæ? Does fights at Claude’s?”
Demos had a right surprised expression on his mug, lips puckered and brows up.
“Aye, that’ll be her.”
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t still mad at the woman’s attempt on my life but I’d also be lying if I agreed to lop-off her head just for that. A hand, sure, but a head? No, just didn’t seem right. I was snake-bitten on the whole bounty-hunter trade after adding three score to my measly tally of two souls some seven nights ago.
Made a show of weighing the value of the woman’s life.
“I’ll think about it. No promises.”
With that, I left the pawnshop and Demos behind, Ashen hung over my shoulder, her weight balancing that upon my soul through the fulcrum of a bloodstained strap. Strange how such an object could ground your wits like a whetstone to an edge, sharpening what was once dull.
By all rights, Ashen should have made the stones in my stomach all the worse but it was much the opposite. Perhaps it was because I knew, down to the marrow of my bones, that I hadn’t drawn steel. That it wasn’t me that had killed all those souls but instead the beast, the animal vampyre spirit.
Perhaps, it was just because it brought me some solace.
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Descending the well was always a tad precarious as I had to fall a good thrice my height and absorb all that momentum in my joints. My knees bent and I stood up from my crouch, unhurt and unencumbered in the slightest.
Though a curse, well and truly, vampyrism also had its blessings—bitter as the iron in blood and sweet as blood itself. Though that last part was the d’yabel in me talking. The thing was prone to mumming and muttering and chittering and all the other gerunds that evoke a sense of great discomfort of the soul.
Lamaré’s vocabulary had infected mine so thoroughly by now that words such as ‘gerund’ did not elicit surprise in me any longer. Sixty-Seven Hels, I hadn’t ever used the turn of phrase ‘elicit’ either. ‘Illicit’ most certainly but not its more boring etymological cousin, but I digress.
I gave the reins to the body to my resident spectre—the good one—and let my consciousness slip away into a trance somewhere between hypnagogia and hypnopompia, that unnameable limbo that isn’t quite waking or sleeping but rather undecided.
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“Héurēka!”
Of all the things I expected to wake to, I did not expect to wake to ancient Low Byzantium—a dialect so obscure, it is only found in academic circles such as within the walls of the Collegiums or under the stars of the Éder during a recitation of the Kebān.
The Saint-Skin Scrolls were recorded in Low Byzantium script and then High Narancan and finally Lucielãçais Vulgar while the Kebān is passed down in the Black Tongue of Kalé with pupils made to translate the recitation into Low Byzantium, Teutonic, all twenty-eight variations of Narancan Vulgar, Nazirese, Adraqian, Rethômic, Tirrish and Jartuese.
Once more I will tell you that ‘Éder’ means ‘Vessel’ in the Black Tongue of Kalé.
‘What’s got you in such an excited mood? Your humours are practically singing.’
“I did it! The configurable ambarique pressure chamber—it needed an anchor by which to set the frequencies to. And I thought: ‘why now use what’s right in front of you?’.”
There was a bracer on Ré’s left hand and forearm; base leather with a steel frame and brass machinerie within, ticking and turning and arcing scarlet. An orrery-like armature blossomed around a heart-stone and he turned the mechanism with a deft hand, calibrating some parameter or another.
I heard a faint trill and then a shiver went down my spine as I felt my bones pull. It was the strangest of feelings, as if your marrow had decided it knew true North and must follow said direction unto the ends of the earth.
Parhelion was in Lamaré’s right hand and it began to glow, dim and steady as if an ember stoked by the whisper of a breath.
‘Bravo!’ And then a low whistle of appreciation. ‘Well, I’ll be damned to the lowest circle of the Hels. Congratulations are in order, Ré; that’s some serious sorcerie.’
Extreme nonchalance fell like a veil over the man as he said: “It is nothing. Just some basic ambarique tinkerie.”
He would never admit it aloud but I knew that the compliment had struck a chord in Ré’s heartstrings—for the boy inside him ached for validation, having never received even a lick of esteem from those around him. I was all too happy to begin to repay that debt of pride that d’Amice was owed from his own blood.
I was a more brazen man than before and so I did not hesitate: ‘Nonsense. We need to savour our victories, each and every one, no matter how little they might seem.’
The man was still consternated at my antics, bemused at how such a small achievement could mean so much. “I do not understand your excitement, El. It’s just some light.”
‘Ré, you are holding in your hands a magique blade that you’ve played a good part in constructing. The base steel was supplied by Pol, the varnish by Gendry and now you’ve made an artefact capable of modulating the weapon’s sorcerie. This accomplishment is beyond anything most people will see in their lifetimes.
How many would be dumbstruck at a sword that glows as if the bleeding sun itself? You are comparing yourself to Collegium chanters but forget to compare yourself to the rest of the world. This seemingly mean feat would garner a place within any church’s reliquaire. You should be proud of yourself, Ré, as I am.’
A blush spread on his pale cheeks, a smile fighting for purchase on his lips. I may have laid it on thick but I was past caring for embarrassment if it meant seeing those pearly whites of his.
“Let’s go to Margarette’s Vinaigrette, then. We promised as much.”
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The wine-dark sea greeted us in a refulgent evening that carried with it the brisk undercurrent that burnished the green leaves red. Midsummer had come and gone, taking the solstice with it. Autumn was on the morrow, the herald of winter harkening the passersby to don cloaks lined with fur and scarves to ward off the chill of the coming night.
It was then that I realised that my birth-sun had passed me by, stolen from my grasp by the past month’s events. I now had twenty-two years of age under my belt, each one beyond the seventeenth having been a blur in my recollection. Everything after the exile—the Rite of Etjadūn in particular—was a downhill tumble of draught and drink and prize-fighting and waking up to strangers in my bed.
While my thoughts simmered in the cauldron of my skull, my eyes roved the docks.
Sailors brought ropes to anchors and tied whatever it was that needed knots and porters carried and scurried with cargo that were to go to Chaer to the North and imports from Kol’Taj that lay beyond the horizon, to the West. Shipments of Rethômic serpentinite, which could be rendered into either lodestone or asbestos, were inspected at the docks by the taxmen so that the levy could be imposed then and there. Exotic animals, most of them God-blooded, were kept within cages of iron and if those were found wanting, then the supernatural creatures were further bound with manacles of cold-iron; an etherial ferrum which falls upon the earth only during a full moon. Meteorites that descend from the ether beyond the moon under the gaze of the Right Eye of Lucifer become sorrow-gold instead which bolsters sorcerie rather than suppresses it.
So many lives beyond the scope of mine own that lived and toiled and died; no wonder that I had forgotten my birth-sun. You lose the forest for the trees and the trees for the forest because the human mind can only grasp so much.
“Enough loitering,” I told Lamaré, “let’s break our fast.”