XVII
Grand Guignol
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> “Stars, hide your heart’s fires;
>
> Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
—Narancan’s Folly: the God-King’s Downfall; Act Five, Lines Six-Through-Seven (Like Father, Like Son) by playwright Gregorio D’Arcene.
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Like a horrorshow act from the Theater of the Grand Puppet, one man turned into another, flesh writhing as if under the marionette’s strings.
Pale hands darkened unto a cinnamon complexion; bones shifted, tendons snapped into place; muscles filled in the armature though they were merely for appearance’s sake, not enhancing strength in any tangible manner.
Vampyre strength does not come from muscle-fibre density alone but instead through an utterly complex rúnari array. I could have looked like the daintest lady this side of the Aller and I could still have crushed stone with my bare hands.
The eyes though, those stayed the same: vivid scarlet, the colour of God’s blood thrown within the crystal-clear stillwater of the Lazarus Pit.
“Sacra.” I growled out through clenched teeth.
A wave of pure animalistic aggression washed over me, dispelling any cogent thought with a compulsion for murder. Longinus’ spear strike me through the breast, how my fangs ached to sink into something and tear and rip and rend.
Lamaré warned me of the craving, the bloodlust, before handing the body’s reins to me. Even then it almost proved too overwhelming; the man had no more will left to bolster mine own and so I was left to fight against my base desires as he retreated into the darkness to lick his spiritual wounds, to settle his ragged wits and his scarred conscience.
I could feel the beast within rattling the cage as it sought to escape my skull. Though the cochlear parasite had become vestigial, had enmeshed itself entirely within the fabric of my being such that it was naught but water within waters, that did not mean that it was any less difficult to resist. It was part and parcel to my very soul, having awoken an atavistic aspect of the vampyre curse long forgotten.
Narancan was not simply a nightspawn, no. No, he was something else, something oh so very worse. I could not name what the God-King was but I knew, down to the accursed marrow of my bones, that he had trespassed upon divinity. He had reached a partial apotheosis not unlike a skinless saint though instead of Lucifer, Azazel was his muse. The gibbering third eye within my skull whispered as much, each word enlightening and maddening at once.
But that was all window-dressing—superfluous and for a time where I wasn’t beset by the damndest craving for human flesh.
I lacked any other recourse but a certain ink-blooded contractor; a purveyor of goods arcane and occult. And so, after clothing myself, my feet carried me to Calcifer’s enchantrie where I knocked on the door with no small amount of trepidation and desperation.
Each person I passed on the street smelled intoxicatingly sweet even though my tongue could no longer perceive saccharinity of any sort. Each brother-and-sister-in-Lucifer that walked upon the same avenue where I stood was one step away from a horrid, bloody and gruesome death.
As I waited, I picked out stray hairs and gnarled shards of bone from my alp-leather cloak. Bellamie was nowhere within its pockets and like bloodstains, he was nowhere to be seen. The vampyric fabric had devoured the remnants of my victims no different than vultures after the bear had taken its fill of the kill—picked-clean to the bone.
The glyphe-smith opened the door with bleary eyes and one good look at me told him all he needed to know. He looked down at the threshold and then at me once more.
“Come, you are invited to enter my home.”
I’d wondered how he knew that my curse had progressed but I got my answer soon enough: there was a mirror that when Calcifer turned on the lights did not trap my reflection within. I imagined that bodies of running water were now my greatest enemy just after sunlight, the clergy, and hecklers. The last two were grandfathered in from my Éderi pedigree.
Calcifer brought me to a glyphing room and told me to lay down on the examination table and to tell him everything; to leave nothing out because he was already oath-sworn to tell no secrets. The compound sigil appeared on his forehead as he groped my body to measure the flow of ichor and whatever else. I imagined he wasn’t the sort to fondle in a situation as dire as this.
I told him everything—well, most everything; I did not tell tale of Lamaré—as it's best not to leave out any details from either the barber-surgeon or the apothecary.
“Interesting: a partial curse development. It was only hypothesised by Vivaldi Don Telã but to see it in person is something else entirely.” Cogs turned within the Sang d’Encre’s mind, clicking and clacking away in silence as he pondered what was to him a most interesting equation to solve.
To me, it was a waking nightmare from which I could awake from. My only reprieve would be the long sleep of death before Lucifer’s Second Coming.
“Though such questions are dreadful to ask, I yet must: how much will your help cost me? If you’ve any recourse at all, that is.”
Calcifer laughed; it was that mad thing that a person ejaculates under disbelief.
“I’ve many potential ideas for a possible treatment plan but as to payment? You’ll need pay me nothing; animancie as a discipline could be revolutionised with the active participation of a vampyre. The sheer amount of knowledge that experiments could render is tantamount to a modern-day library of Alexandria before Narancan put it to the flame.”
Elated at not having to spill a silver and equally disturbed at the prospect of becoming a human laboratory-rat, I sighed out a good half of my bundled-tight nerves.
Calcifer ran me through a gamut of tests and evaluations—animetric devices of all kinds that measured ichor quality and ambarique pressure to live dissections to gauge rate of tissue regeneration. The chanter put me through my own personalised Hel-on-Earth.
In the end, my glyphe-smith took out a Midas-plagued skull from his shelves and put it in my palms. Corruscating growths of pyrite bloomed into jagged peaks, spiralling outwards as if tumorous horns that could not choose between the aspect of the ram, ox, stag, boar or the D’yabel Herself.
“Don’t fear; the occult-pox is inert having been exorcized by salt and mountain ash.”
Oh, I was fearing alright, though for another reason: I knew where this was going.
“You want to use a curse to fight against a curse.” It wasn’t a question.
“Correct—I thought of modifying the occult-pox to produce silver but that would be entirely too potent and would cripple you back into mortalhood. No, I intend on a mixture of amalgam of platinum instead; two parts silver, five parts gold, one part mercury and shavings of tombac for taste. The quicksilver will not seep into your bloodstream or otherwise cause any encephalopathies as it’ll be tightly bound to the curse’s armature, the bones.”
Armature—that word nagged at me and bade me to parse it until I untangled the mental knot into epiphany.
“You mean to make me a living Voltaire display. To trap lightning not within the bottle but instead the lodestone.”
There was a glint of hatter’s madness in his eyes as he spoke, enamoured with possibilities-to-be-made-eventualities and that there was finally another kindred spirit of occult science that could keep up with his genius—and there was no better word to describe Calcifer Encre d’Sang for only an epiphanic spirit of the Black Desert, a génie, could come up with such an idea.
“I mean to make you into so much more than that. I mean not to merely trap but to harness. By the end of a week’s time, you’ll have the reins of Narancan’s gift within your hands.”
A pause.
“Or you’ll have eaten me alive like the other sorry souls.”
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Seven days and seven nights passed as Calcifer did his preparations for the arcane procedure and I languished under his roof, stewing in turmoil that was equal parts physical as it was spiritual.
Lamaré had aroused from the depths by then, regaining a pale shadow of a semblance of composure. His sweet nothings were absent, an undercurrent of worthlessness sweeping through his self-esteem such that confidence died of hypothermia before it could ever surface from those cold, living waters.
Y’know, it’s been mighty lonely not being called ‘amoré’. Seems that after you’re used to something, it’s taken-for-granted presence becomes like unseen pillars. You’ve pulled the rug out from under me, Ré.
Rarely did I reciprocate his flirts and courting jests as I didn’t know much to this game—my conquests were taken to bed after drunken nights soaked in oblivion, be they man or woman and so I could not remember if I had won them over or they had won me. My tongue was not coated in silver like the d’Amice scion’s though my bones would be soon enough.
A tsk-tsk resounded in the back of my skull.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder…
Superficially the words sounded much the same as always—sultry, easily-rolled off the tongue, breathed out the lips like absinthe vapour. But there was a hollowness beneath their skein, as if they had been rendered from the héliographe of what should have been; a revenant that played at their previous life and role like an actor does on the stage rather than a genuine performance.
At last, he appears! For a moment, I thought you lost in the back of my mind. Hope the cobwebs did not imprison you for too long.
A smile split lips in the dark, phantom muscles contracting unbeknownst to their owner.
I swept them up whenever I found them, mon ami. Though there were a lot, none survived my vigorous rubbing. I mean scrubbing.
One does not ‘scrub’ gossamer but oh well; I wouldn’t bring up his utter lack of knowledge on the basics of domestic maintenance—it was seen as a womanly thing outside of the Éderi. Low and weary, my throat chuckled with a wisp of mirth, the air barely reaching my nostrils in their long and perilous journey.
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If we survive this, how about drinks and dinner at that place in the West District, the one near the docks?
Indignant, a scowl pulled skin tight against the nose like a wolf baring its teeth in a snarl.
When and not if we supersede this obstacle in our path, we’ll wine and dine; though I’ll be the one drinking the grapes as you’ve lost your ability to taste the finer things in life.
Though he fingered himself a charismatic troubadour and a courtier that fights with a sharp tongue as much as with naked steel, Lamaré was rather easy to manipulate—if you knew his soft spot, of course. His childhood was marked by taking up stray dogs and cats from the streets and nursing them back to health; he could not help but bring his will to bear when it meant another’s well-being though he’d never dedicate half as much effort to himself.
What was that place’s name anyhows? I asked, remembering the smell of salt from the sea and smoke from the stove. One thought sparked another in a cascading chain like a runaway alquemique reaction: I did not know where Bellamie, my pet ratling, had gone off to. I might’ve even eaten him and simply not remembered. The little one had enjoyed that eatery in particular.
Margarette’s Vinaigrette—those two words took me from speculating on my well-whiskered friend’s fate and returned my train of thought to something less dreadful; the establishment's name was a little on the nose but that was all well and good. The rhyme helped sell the eatery as humble but respectable, marking its claim upon the wharf’s middle-class in between sailor and merchant. Not ostentatious but neither affordable for a low seaman’s wages. Perfectly equanimous.
I’m chomping at the bit already, Ré.
As am I, mon ami.
We lapsed into comfortable conversation of a would-be future. Of relieving a certain mistreated feline’s master of their life, of walking along the wharf under the full moon and eventide, of building the coffers necessary to ink myself so that I might be rid of Getaine’s greedy vines and make my way to the Northern Cairn of Tremontaine.
I was jolted from my imbibing in the foolish draught of hope by Calcifer; it was to begin.
The procedure would be a trial just as much as a ritual of occult science for I would be put through the crucible, both metaphorically and alquemiquement speaking. Either I became pure albédo purified, or impure nigrédo putrefied—Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée; there was no middle course. The chanter had even prepared a stake of rowan ash beforehand should I fall to the clutches of Narancan’s curse.
He started by plucking out the silver from my flesh.
There could be no interference in the alquemie and grammarie that was to come; steamforged sorcerie was as much science as it was art and so the fewer variables to control, the easier it would be to reach a desirable and predictable outcome.
The contraption used was a mule spawned from the unholy union of an astrologer’s callipers and a midwife’s chamberlaine-forceps; the ends tapered into a beak-like tips perfected for extracting foreign bodies of war such as pistolet bullets or grenada shot. A smattering of other paraphernalia right at home in a torturer’s chamber lay strewn about the room.
Calcifer was all too happy for not needing to sterilise his tools in alcohol and I was as well for pure spirits burned like the Sixty-Seven Hels when poured on a wound. But better a little burning than a cut turning sour.
For the presence of a surgeon’s tools, one might have reckoned that barbiturates and soporifics were at hand—and they were but there was one little hiccup: they did not function on a vampyre. The doses required might induce true unconsciousness which neither me nor Calcifer would risk.
When I slept, the beast inside me came awake.
I knew as much in that nagging feeling just between my shoulder blades every time I threatened to doze off. Sure, the spawnling might no longer rest there physically but the scarred-over spirit does not so easily forget. The third eye within my basal ganglia shuddered and thrashed as if a compass needle to ambarique pressure, wreaking havoc upon my sanity as it sought to see into the World Thereunder.
What saved me was a vampyre’s extraordinary regenerative abilities and a five dozen people’s worth of blood. The animetric measuring devices had registered my ichor presence in the hundredths rather than thousandths; the chalkboards scratched with algèbraic equations tallied the count at sixty full-grown adults and a half.
Calcifer assured me that the discrepancy was due to ichor fluctuation in the general population as people inherited their parent’s elan vital upon death through sympathie.
I did not need the assurance; loath as Narancan’s line were, our senses were fine-tuned for only ripe fruit and so I most likely only cannibalised such. Small miracles and silver linings and all that.
Which, speaking of: silver clinked atop a metallic platter as I laid atop the surgical altar like a cross between a ressurectionist’s cadaver and a cultist’s sacrifice. At the very least, I was back to ten silvers out of thirty.
“There, last one. How’re you feeling?”
My mouth was watering at the proximity of lifeblood—I mean, Calcifer.
“I suggest we do not dally. I’d rather not add another man to the tally.”
Whether it was the grim rhyme or his imminent doom, the occultist hurried on, preparing his seringues and activating the various ambarique devices within the room. Steam hissed, cogs turned, lights and gauges came alive, and I felt the fœtal-vestige of the parasite writhe within my brain.
I began to understand the spawnling’s speech and wished that I didn’t. To say that it had nothing good to say was the understatement of the century.
A solution of quicksilver and argent and albédo was injected into my veins to suppress my vampyric regeneration and dull the beast within. Then, came the alquemist’s ambarique needle, sealing a færie circle in the crux of my breast that would serve as the lynchpin to the procedure.
After the inking, Calcifer brought out a skull covered in the pyrite growths endemic to the pox of Midas and settled it next to me upon the table. He had with him a scalpel that he used to peel back the layers of skin and muscle until he reached the bare bone.
He broke off a fragment of the skull and carved a hollow in my sternum to place it within. The occultist had to use a hammer and chisel as the sorcerie in my veins fought to reinforce my skeleton. The dull thuds and the sharp pain of bone being chipped away like marble was the second worse visceral experience after crossing the threshold of a church.
When Calcifer put the sinews of my pectoral muscles near their attachment points, I felt their fibres reach out and latch themselves back into their proper place as if they had a mind of their own. I shuddered in disgust and dull horror but did not protest for it was either this or the gallows and I would not be put before them until I met Pol once again.
Next, the occultist brought forth a Lucifer’s bezoar and cracked it in two with a single word of power—“Etja.”
The drops fell atop the færie-circle on my breast, sparking it awake as ambarique currents surged along my nerves, shocking my muscles into lockjaw convulsions and fraying my ligaments like shoddy copper wire before a short-circuit.
Rather than bolstering my own ichor reserves, the drop of pure, undiluted God-blood was used as fuel for the transmutation that was to come. In the substrate of my skeleton, the Midas-touched piece of alquemiquement-treated pyrite germinated, spreading its roots through my bones. Slowly—excruciatingly slowly—iron sulphide took place of calcium; bismuth-like crystal formations bloomed, piercing through my body to breach outwards in corruscating thorny-growths.
Time lost all meaning as my skeleton sought to escape the trappings of my flesh.
It was just the beginning.
The albédo in my veins served as a solute by which to plant the seed of the transmutation. Calcifer hooked the seringues that embedded into my veins like leeches to a contraption not dissimilar to an alembic or a condenser or whatever else it was that alquemists used to make good swill.
Were it not for the salted restraints of mare’s leather studded with silver, I would have killed a man for a drop of moonshine to dull my agony.
The occult-surgery altar was an adjustable armature of byzantium bronze, ambaricité-powered such that it spun on its swivel and gears to turn my back upon Calcifer. Needles were inserted in regular intervals into my spine, the flexible tubes that connected them to the contraptions wrought of câdavora’s bladder.
Lamaré recited the færie-circle’s glyphes to me so that I might better bear the pain. His voice was soft and whisper-thin and so bade me to truly pay attention: Tanoch al-Erd’od Parech al-Teh’adrax Ser’aich Gêdra Esh-Majed; ‘lightning sown, sprouts the pillar within the womb of bone; anchored by root, the heart-worm hungers for the shadow.’
Rúnari cipher lent itself to prose and allegory though either was far from my mind at this point in time.
Tanoch al-Erd’od was an omission of Eátan-Noch Erd-Aô whose literal translation corresponded to ‘lightning sown, sprouts the pillar’ which meant iron specifically but it could also mean metal of any kind; shortened as ‘tanoch’. While the Lucielãçais believed that all metals spontaneously generated under the influence of the Eyes of God, the Tirrish—which the modern rúnari alphabet is heavily influenced by—believed that metal formed wherever lightning struck.
Pyrite erupted along my gums, taking the place of dentin and shredding the inside of my mouth as if I had been chewing barbed-wire. My tongue was lacerated so badly that it had become naught but strips of quivering nerve and muscle impaled on serrated spikes of metal.
Parech was an omission of Paresh-Luch whose literal translation corresponded to ‘womb of bone’ which meant marrow in Vulgar.
My marrow crystalized and metastasized, breaking apart bone from the inside-out as it expanded.
Teh’ad was an omission of Teh-Adra whose literal translation corresponded to ‘root vessel’ or ‘taproot’ which meant ‘heart’ or ‘core’; or, in this case, brain-parasite that seeks to devour all of mankind. The addition of the -rax suffix transforms the meaning into heart-worm or ‘faminous tumour’.
Pressure grew in my ocular sockets as sulphur festered in my nasal cavity.
Ser’aich was an omission of Serim-Ain-Luch whose literal translation corresponded to ‘reflection of being (sown within) womb’ which meant ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’; the etymology of the word ‘soul’ shares roots with ‘ser’aich’, evidenced by their similar phonological traits. Ser’ain by itself devoid of luch means shadow. Eátan is implied by previous usage at the start of the færie-circle so it is not present within the contraction of Ser’aich.
Razor-sharp crystals coagulated in the darkness at the back of my eyes, scratching and itching something fierce.
Gêdra was an omission of Gê-Adra whose literal translation corresponded to ‘anchored by root’ which meant ‘to-bind’ or ‘seal’. There was nary a ward in Naranca that did not make use of the Gêdra glyphe, be it folk spells or Collegium sorcerie.
One eye popped out of its slot while the other was torn from the inside-out, spines running through and holding the organ still.
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’. All færie-circles ended with this clause, serving as the end-cap for a sentence in Færie-Speak.
Throughout it all, Lamaré was by my side.
When I cried tears of blood, he was there.
When I begged Calcifer to just be done with it and kill me for I could not bear it anymore, he was there.
When I thought that I was going to succumb to the beast within, he was there at the Gates to my Hel, guarding my soul from Azazel’s spawn.