XV
Caliban
----------------------------------------
> “Hel is empty;
>
> And all the d’yabels are here!”
—Narancan’s Folly: the God-King’s Downfall; Act One, Lines One-through-Two (The Isle of Caliban) by playwright Gregorio D’Arcene.
----------------------------------------
There was one more obstacle before I assassinated Pierre Picard D’Amice: rúna. Even all that we had achieved was not near enough to challenge a low-ranked noble whose house guards were inked to the moon and back. Even a vampyre, newborn that I was, could not contend with the wards and general security of the Blood-of-Sol’s grounds.
I had vastly over-extended my—I mean ‘our’—silver into enchanting Ashen, among other sundries, and now there wasn’t enough leftover to ink myself. I had culled the sewers of ghûl nests that were easy pickings and so Lamaré had ventured for me to pick up lesser bounties within Saint-Getaine itself; outlaws and witches and murderers and rapists and the like.
A handful of moons ago, I would have hesitated at taking a life.
Not for moral reasons, mind, but instead practicality—I was untrained in the ways of the sword and knew then only prize-fighting which is built for spectacle rather than slaughter.
You see, I cherished the thought of enacting just deserts upon those that did not deserve even the blackened lumps of coal that beat within their chests in place of a heart. This very urge had exiled me from my flesh and blood, had cast me out of the Éder’s embrace. Even before the vampyre curse, I was a monster in the truest sense of the word: monstrum meant ‘to remember’ in the tongue of Narancan.
Cautionary tale made flesh, I had killed my own blood—my brother by birth—and I held no regret for it in my soul.
He deserved it. He deserved worse. It was his fault.
Besides, why kill a man for free when you can get paid for it? Why not snuff out one more soul? My soul was already stained by one death, why not add another to the tally?
It was in these rationalisations that men lost scrupule and sanity and descended into depravity. Had I any piety left I would have prayed to Lucifer my soul to take; so that I would not fall into that bottomless pit where human lives weighed no more than a feather. But you see, the gambler has no one to blame but himself for jumping off the precipice into Hel.
----------------------------------------
The first bounty was that of Naenia Cartwright, a woman that had cast a hex on her sister Vera Cartwright so that her children were born still and dead and malformed; a mooncalf idol was found within Naenia’s belongings, carved from jasper that had seen three moonless nights and one full moon and had upon it blood of menses.
Dark sorcerie was foul indeed but my job wasn’t to judge but to capture, dead or alive and bring the bounty before the Church; or in my case: before Deputy Proctor Dufonte.
When it came to finding people, talk and rumour is best; I took to Naenia’s old haunts such as friends and family and the like. To say that her kith and kin were tired of being harassed by bounty-hunters was an understatement.
There were white lies and black ones too in their hearts; I could hear as much but did not push—I kept cordiality between us and paid each and every person I enquired with five coppers for their time. My following days were so occupied with my hunt as I stalked the Cairn in search of the witch.
Above, Saint-Getaine is a city, and it is mirrored so below. The Underbowels are a wretched hive of scum and villainy and what better place to find a grave hag than the grave itself?
During day, I took to the tunnels and catacombs and sewers while night had me walk the streets proper—there are no curfews for a city like Saint-Getaine so it was just as lively under the Witching Hour as it was during noon.
Apothecaries and alquemists, both sanctioned by the Church and not; chanters and glyphe-smiths, mostly the low kind that dabbled in dark sorcerie; general stores and pawn shops; I inquired with them all and told each that I’d pay a tenth of the bounty should they catch wind of Naenia.
I hoped that she did not know how to cast veils and charms of polymorphie or else I might have to resort to, quite literally, sniffing her out and wouldn’t know how to even begin to explain to the Church why I needed the mooncalf idol and what for.
----------------------------------------
When I was not occupied with my hunt, I absconded to my lair where Lamaré read and tinkered and planned; he was a man possessed, devouring every morsel of knowledge twice-over, reciting and memorising every bit of fact he could squeeze out of the eucalyptus-pressed pages.
In the table before him lay strewn cogs and gears taken from scrap yards and dross that littered about the byways; Ré had cobbled together a clockwork of some sort and was currently fitting a heart-amber into a slot he had repurposed from a device or another.
Sparks and a zap.
“Sacra!” He yowled, his fingers singed by another experiment with ambaricité. “The voltaires should not be high enough to ignite the charge; the ambarique pressure differential is off, somehow.”
Remind me again what exactly it is you are attempting to do?
Lamaré massaged his temples lest he snap at me; after he let go some pent-up frustration with an anæmic sigh, he told me: “I am attempting to create an ambarique pressure chamber that can calibrate its frequencies—nobles use these to communicate between themselves in short distances though they are notoriously finicky. I want to use it for remote detonation as neither of us know how to sympathetically bind a trigger to Parhelion.”
I put two and two together.
You want to poison them with sunlight—that I get. But why the trigger?
“Parhelion’s ability to discharge plasma is confined to short energetic bursts and must be in close proximity to your left hand. You won’t be able to get too close as all of Father’s guards are glyphed for their hearing and eyesight, so you’ll need a long-range method of activating the alquemique varnish; your strength should be enough to pierce through any weak points in armour with a good throw.”
Lamaré took a breath as he had said all that in nearly less than a breath.
“And you’ll be able to use it to innervate the guards when fighting proper breaks out; with a way to calibrate frequencies, you’ll be able to change from short bursts to sustained release of sunlight.”
So you want to make my sword into a lamp.
Lamaré was half-way through a tirade before he understood that I had merely jested and said: “Pardon, amoré, I am simply a tad overwhelmed. Frustration overtakes me far too easily sometimes, especially so because I can finally prove to Father that brains can and do indeed trump brawn.”
Oh, I’m now only brawn? Are you distilling me to only my barrel-chest and chiselled jawline? Truly Ré, I thought you better than this.
“Har, har. A taste of my own medicine.”
A moment of contemplative silence passed and then Lamaré smacked his lips.
”I taste rather delicious, if I do say so myself. Would you like a try, mon ami?”
How a person could ever say those words seriously I would never know, not even when we shared the same skull.
----------------------------------------
In the end, I did not have to resort to smelling a pebble of jasper sullied by moonblood. To say that I was grateful was an understatement for I sent a prayer to the Apostle of War and all my other guardian spirits, be they High or Low.
Lorelás, a clandestine apothecary that operated out of the Underbelly had recently heard tale of a hooded individual looking for a certain cryptocrystalline variant of chalcedony. Their voice was of the Lilithic persuasion and their height far too middling to be a man with the voice of a castrato.
The lead was fresh so I reckoned that if I wasn’t hot on her trail, then I was at least lukewarm; so I went over my known facts and intelligence with Lamaré to see if I missed anything obvious or where might I continue the investigation.
Naenia was still in Saint-Getaine; she frequented the clandestine market for occult reagents; she took a liking to jasper, in specific, for her spellcraft; she had not contacted any of her old ties, be they blood or friend; she wasn’t learned in the arts and hadn’t gone to any collegium yet knew just enough to hex her sister with a miscarriage.
Ask her acquaintances if she trafficked with her sister’s midwife, my familiar spirit told me.
“Why?”
Midwives possess knowledge over birth and how to keep a woman and her babe from Azazel’s scales; the opposite is also true for if one knows how to heal, they must also know how to kill.
As above, so below.
----------------------------------------
It had been a good long while since I’d walked under daylight; the bleeding sun burned and made me itch as it beat down upon me, especially so under an alp-leather cloak. I kept it on as the protection that the well-cured hide provided was better than nothing even if it did make me an eye sore.
I made my way through the grapevine, pruning dead leaves and rearranging branches; Naenia hadn’t been seen with any midwife but I knew where to start: that of Vera. I had gotten the directions to the healer’s house from the sisters’ mother Keira Cartwright—it led me to a humble apartment, one of the many tenement buildings of the commoner’s quarter.
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
I knocked on the door and listened: a woman and a man heard the knock but ignored me. She was currently boiling a concoction of one part water, one part lemon juice, eight parts alcohol; some type of condensate then as I could detect traces of salt and some other spices. Eponomously, particulates would condense underneath a fine cloth put over the cauldron that could then be collected as a powder or paste depending on the heat and substances used.
It wasn’t anything near the sort of alquemie a proper occultist could transmute but instead a common cunning woman’s draught—lemon cordial of ginger known colloquially as Bitter-Janice; used to ease the spirits and soothe guilt and mental maladies of all sorts.
While the woman took to the cauldron, the man lay on a cot, reeking of wound and sickness and gauze and medicinals.
Twice and then thrice I knocked and was ignored.
Lamaré’s silver tongue possessed me and spoke with a whisper that would reach her ears with the following words: “He knows you’re inside.”
Now, the trick wasn’t anywhere near true vampyric compulsion but it was disconcerting enough that it made a person second guess whether the thought had been their own or a conjuring of the mind—in reality, it was a focalized ray of sound that could target a single person, unheard by all others.
By the woman’s movements, I guessed that she had turned to look at the man that was attempting to return to fitful sleep. Again, Lamaré spoke: “He knows you’re inside.”
I felt her spine stiffen as she stayed oh so very still. She awoke the man and they whispered between themselves and yet they ignored me.
“Not all good things come in threes.”
Shuddering breaths passed before the woman scrounged-up some courage and answered the door, opening it but staying behind the threshold. The man looked at me as if I were the Reaper Herself—so I capitalised on that epiphanic thought and quoted Azazel from Narancan’s Folly.
“Urielle D’Jaran, you know why I am here; feed me your sins.”
Now, using a line from a play to intimidate was beyond cliché and should have been met with laughter and jeers; but when a man clad in black seemingly speaks into your head and stands unnaturally still and unmoving, awaiting your confessions, you tend to reassess that first reaction.
I heard her windpipe begin to tremble as she prepared a lie, a lesser sin.
Before she could speak, a finger was at her lips and a shush at mine.
“No—do not lie, Urielle D’Jaran. Falsehoods will be met with truths that you cannot swallow.”
She saw that my finger had crossed the threshold and that made her begin to shake. The midwife bared her heart then, confessing to everything, anything. The conundrum of torture, be it psychological or physical, is that a person will do anything to make the pain stop and so any answer will be colored not by veracity but by desperation.
Urielle told me she had concocted abortives for women whose husbands could not sustain any more children and for women whose husbands were not home; Urielle told me she had accidentally given a nursing mother arsenic to clear her of parasites and had forgotten about that she had a babe on the teat; Urielle told me she had lied that a child had been born a still and then given the child to the Church, following the orders of the grandparents.
A thousand other things she told me, none of them directly to do with Naenia. I knew that Vera hadn’t been dosed with anything alquemique according to the autopsy done by a resurrection-man; most likely, the link was tenuous and circuitous. A mere correlation, a deadend.
Ask her, El, whose child it was that she gave to the Church.
I did and my blood ran cold at her answer.
“Vera’s child. Vera Cartwright.”
The facts revolved around the axis of those four terrible words as if planets following the sun. Their conjunction formed a syzygy, a straight line of causality that linked everything together in a single, unified theory.
Miscarriages were common and so they should not warrant an investigation by the Church; except that a child was born omen-touched or monstrous—in such cases, curses and witchcraft may be involved.
An inquisitor had tracked then the sympathie that had made Vera’s child into whatever abomination that it had become and the tracks led back to Naenia’s mooncalf idol—effigies and mommets and fetishes and the like were oft used to bind two objects as one, transferring qualities between them.
Which begged the question: why put up a bounty at all? With the idol of jasper, the inquisitor should have been able to divine the witch’s location through the blood of menses that imbued the foul thing.
As an Éderi, I knew many things that the Church did not: Naenia had performed a hysterectomy upon herself and either was dead in a ditch somewhere and so the binding would not take or she had been successful and would skirt the sympathist’s needle.
The moonblood had been used as a reagent to afflict the concept of ‘stillbirth’ upon Vera through the binding—this I already knew beforehand. And now that the pieces had come together to expose the clockwork beneath: the grandparents, Keira and Leonard, were keeping secrets from me.
I flooded both the man and the woman with the vampyre’s dread song, dazing them such that they’d be functionally blind for a blink. When their eyes reopened, I was gone as if I never was.
----------------------------------------
Keira and Leonard did not live far from Vera’s empty house.
I knocked and Keira came to greet me at the threshold.
I had known that the couple had given up the other children up to the Church as their joints no longer allowed them to work and so had to depend upon help from the local community. Said support network was stretched thin as it was and could not bear to feed any more mouths and so the Church it was.
This bit of fact had occluded me of the truth hidden beneath the truth; the best lies, afterall, are woven upon pillars of honesty twisted ever so subtly. Omittances could tell a thousand words by simply conserving a single one—a principle also found within grammarie.
“I know that Vera’s babe was not stillborn; now tell me, what omen were they born to?”
There was shame on Keira’s face, the great shame of a matriarch who never dreamt of suffering such a blow to their reputation and family name. The great shame of one whose flesh and blood was born to: “Zorephet.”
Each Apostle, Infernal or Empyreal, had a corresponding starsign and omen. Abeloth’s night-portent was that of the Effigy of Blades while His earthly omen was that of the Idol of Bitter Loathing: war orphans whose fathers had fallen in battle or those that were alive and had slain a brother. Those born under the Apostle of War’s omen had extra joints in their webbed-together fingers along with an extra, fully articulable thumb altogether; this polysyndactyly allowed for better grip on a weapon and endowed a war-omen with dexterity of arm and eye.
Zorephet was Azazel’s Apostle of Pox whose starsign was the Effigy of Wounds and whose earthly omen was that of the Idol of Weft Scars: cripples whose fathers were cripples and those that survived a plague and were scarred for it. Those born under the Apostle of Pox were pock-marked from birth and were stricken with hæmophilia; though a pox-omen might never get sick themselves nor die of the plague, their blood incubated sickness and their lungs produced miasma.
I knew then how to find Naenia.
----------------------------------------
Sympathie is a double-edged sword that cuts not only forwards but also backwards—Naenia, having cursed the child to be born under Zorephet had also inflicted herself with sickness and cancres and ulcers and unmending, sour wounds that she would survive and not die from but would otherwise feel such in their entirety.
It couldn’t have happened to a better person.
I scoured all the infirmaries for sign of a woman with pockmarks and hæmophilia and infected sores of the eyes and mouth—I found her by smell, ironically enough; if you remember, I did not want to track the woman through such means by virtue of hygiene of body and mind.
Now, generally, a man watching a woman from afar has no good intentions in his heart but this time? Well, this time was no different.
Her aspect was much as they described her: a severe face beset by insomnia with high cheekbones and an aquiline nose stark enough to rival a hawk. The operative word of the penultimate sentence being ‘much’ as she did no longer have, and I quote: ‘eyes clean as spring-water’; instead, they were crusted over with rheum and blind with mucus.
Strange eye colours were usually linked to inborn talent for the arcane, so perhaps Naenia possessed sorcerous blood of one sort or another; it would fit with the fact that a lowborn city waif had cast such a hex.
I appeared before Naenia while she traversed a back alley to reach an outhouse, descending from the rooftops as was the cliché for my kind. She recoiled from me and rummaged around her knapsack for a pouch which she readily threw at my face.
It was a mixture of mountain ash, salt, cinnabon and sterling of silver that would materialise any spectre and slow it down so that an exorcist might strike it down or so that a cunning woman might run away.
Faster than her ability to comprehend, I stood in front of her once more, blocking her advance; Lamaré possessed my tongue and spoke in the most serious and melodramatic voice imaginable: “I am no ghost but rather flesh.”
She did not look impressed but instead like a grandmother disappointed in a youngling for their foolish ways. In this, and only this, the evil hag and I were in accord.
“Why’d you curse your sister, Naenia?”
She snarled at that and I felt the righteous anger boil in her veins. I knew that sort of black justice in my own heart—of vengeance and rancour and worse; eye for an eye and life for a life. I knew the depths of what that sort of vitriol did to a man’s mind and now I knew what it did to a woman’s.
“Oh, she had it coming, didn’t she?”
It was then that Naenia seemed to regain the knowledge that a man whose form she could not grasp was not a man to be trifled with. Much less so one that could read her heart as if it were a book.
“Aye, that she did.”
“Why?”
“Why not? The whore stole me husband; she poisoned maman and papa against me; she stole my inheritance.” Her voice shook with rage, pox-ridden spittle flying through the air; blood-ladden, rancid-wet coughs intersped every six breaths. “She lived my life and so I took it back from her.” There were no crow’s feet or ashen hair on Naenia so this was a somewhat recent happening; lowblood women do not marry past the age of thirty more often than not and so become ‘spinsters’ as the populace call them.
“If I can’t have it…” I began
“Then she can’t.” Naenia finished with a nod.
She stood there, waiting for her end. She would not run nor grovel nor beg; she would face the executioner’s blade head-on now that it was in front of her. I respected that part of her, though for the rest of that hag I held nothing but loathing. There were no regrets in that black heart of hers, only the grim satisfaction of someone that had burnt down the world and then danced upon the ashes.
“Last words?”
“May Azazel take my soul and weigh it so.”
I was faster than her speed of thought and so she did not know when she died. Her diseased head rolled on the cobbles and then her diseased body followed after. How strange it was, to take a life as if taking breath; how strange it was, to feel nothing thereafter; how strange it was to not regret a single thing. I understood then Naenia’s lack of remorse for the means to an end justify all atrocities in the eye of the beholder.
I imagined that one might be surprised why Lamaré hadn’t attempted to dissuade me from killing her; well, you see, the d’yabel is in the details: Naenia’s hexes had cost her sister’s life as Vera died during birth. Vera’s husband, in response, had bought enough milk-of-the-poppy to sleep until the Second Coming of Lucifer. Three orphaned children and not four because that one had been snuffed-out in the cradle by the parish priest; it was a mutated abomination through-and-through that would find no solace in life and so should be put to death as the scripture dictates. The grandparents, being far too old to take care of the remaining children, had given them up to the Church.
Naenia Cartwright was a sororicide that had let hatred and resentment consume her from the inside out; that had broken up her entire family and rendered what was left into people twice-shy that suspected every woman older than thirty and unmarried of witchcraft; that had condemned children to a life of indentured servitude without parents with which to love them.
But that was not why she was dead. No, Naenia was dead because she was weak. Because Death did not care if you were just or fair or kind; She only cared in so far as She could claim your soul.
And I claimed hers.
Ten silver Talents out of thirty.