XVIII
Faites Attention à ce que Vous Souhaitez
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> “TO EVERY ACTION, THERE IS ALWAYS OPPOSED AN EQUAL REACTION; OR, THE MUTUAL ACTIONS OF TWO BODIES UPON EACH OTHER ARE ALWAYS EQUAL, AND DIRECTED TO CONTRARY PARTS.”
—Azariah Villeneuve excerpt, Compiled Oxenfürt Lectures; On Principia, Volume I: Le Mouvement d’Corps.
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In the dead of night, with the weeping-moon as my witness, I drew the Iscariote from its scabbard of salt-glass with the keen whistle of a naked razor.
Where damascene was a holy sort of silver, this one was fell, through-and-through. Concave veins and half-born roots festered within the fuller, tapering to the fittingly-cruciform guard, winding around themselves to form the trunk of the haft. The pommel was a taproot with indentations that evoked the same feeling as seeing a fallow riverbed; it waited for the rains so that it might run with water. Five sigils—hiéroglyphes hailing from the black sands of Nazirét—adorned the eye of the pommel, arranged as a vertical script parallel to the centreline.
They were Yōd, Zæyîn, Dægöth, Qëth and Qāph; the Hand, the Scabbard, the Threshold, the Silkwürm and the Vulture. As idéographes, each symbol represented not only a phoneme but also a concept, layering a single name with manifold meanings and interpretations; words within words, so to speak.
‘Yōzæpheroth’ translated into Vulgar as ‘Death-Seal’ or, more literally, ‘the Maggot-Headed-Vulture-Bound-Within-the-Womb’. As with the sacred letters of the Land of Wreathes, the first syllable is omitted if it is part of the Tetragrammaton—the four divine and unspeakable names of God; Yōd, Shēm, Tau, and Tzephœth—so it was pronounced as ‘Zæpheroth’ if uttered aloud so as to avoid the taboo. This changed its meaning just enough that it read as ‘Sun-Eater’ rather than ‘Death-Seal’; the constituent idéographes were all associated with yonic, enveloping darkness of some sort though they could not be transliterated in the longform such as with the uncensored name.
Some names cannot leave the tongue upon which they are born.
The blade itself was a hand-width longer than that of Ashen, cast as a two-handed longsword proper rather than a hand-and-a-half bastard that could be used in conjunction with, say, a shield of some sort or even another type of side-arm altogether; this weapon was a selfish and fickle mistress that demanded all of your ten fingers and attention. It was difficult to unsheathe from the hip, owing to its size and lack of machinerie.
Double-edged and broad of fuller, the Judas-Kiss lacked a ricasso in contrast to Luæth, tapering into a rounded tip that suggested its use as an executioner’s blade. Made to cut through flesh and bone in fell swoops. Teeth erupted along the gums of the razor’s edge and closed eyes were present throughout the argent of the Iscariote; like damascene, there was a faint, shimmering peristalsis to the pattern weld that hinted at a living thing trapped within the form of the blade.
“Zepherot.” I called out into the ether, cutting open my palm with its starving edge.
The accursed artefact answered the call by rendering my blood mortal, if but for a moment, drinking deeply of the chalice of my heart. I did not stake an Apostle upon the blade for it already had a god with which to hold vigil to: me.
Ambaricité arced throughout Zepherot’s bones, my ichor flowing through the roots of the sword’s spine as the sorcerie ran its course. Those veins formed a circulatory system, feeding into the pommel so that it might awaken the curse within, the five sigils glowing with profane, porphyric light. All throughout its argent flesh, eyes opened and oriented themselves upon mine own.
As I held the Iscariote’s true-name, so too did I hold its soul in thrall.
It was a hound, slobbering to be let loose upon quarry but a hound all the same; leashed by my will and bound by my blood, Zepherot would do as it was bid. Nothing more, nothing less.
“You’ll get your fill of ichor, that I promise. But all in due time.”
Perhaps the sword-spirit had fully possessed me then because I spoke to it as if it understood my words.
Silence, the calm before the storm, the unease before the kill, settled upon my shoulders and I knew then that Zepherot did, in fact, understand every single word I said. The argent eyes closed, all at once, and the porphyric light died, the writhing of its argent flesh returning to peristalsis.
The d’yabel agreed to the terms of the contract.
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Now that I had a weapon, I could properly waylay Alexiaries—from him I needed information on my blood, That-Which-Remains, and the gauntlet that Lamaré had built along with general knowledge on Pierre’s and the Inquisition’s movements.
The Lord-Executioner lived within the Noble’s District or Northway, a gated section of Saint-Getaine that doesn’t allow vagrants through without the prerequisite papers. It was somewhat near the Solaire manor grounds but not therein entirely as the city’s resident torturer has many dues with the other bloodlines such as his own, Encre d’Sang. For this, Alexiaries was a walk away from the gallows; built in between the walls that separated Northway from the Merchant’s Promenade which served as the Cairn’s public square.
As I made my way atop the roofs of the Saint-o’-Sorrow, night-winds flowed along my limbs, cold and living such that they refreshed me no different than a well’s stillwater. I was sure footed, having imbibed in lifeblood, and so made like a wræth until I reached the Promenade.
There were no buildings in between here and Northway so as to protect the nobility from erstwhile thieves whilst the walls were warded with spells and curses of all sorts. Jespar had gotten through with the aid of his omen-curse, flying on Sathariel’s black wings; I would do much the same but had to get much closer as my compact was but a pale shadow before the Raven-God’s true inheritance.
It was a sabbath so no night-market graced the streets topside. Rather, I was greeted by a cadre of inquisitors, clad in black and red and gold, armed with ensorcelled blades of damascene—the holy silver sprouted from the tears of God. Ten men in the regalia of the Order Cephas, crusaders one and all, sworn to Christ and Kingdom, and marked with His blood.
I knew the leader by his bardiche and his pauldrons and his cripplehood; oricalc lacquered in tar and covered in seals of saint-skin. He wore a leather protector over the eye I had taken from him, the rúna Eikos, Bael and Jot—of Ash, Abstinence, and Sacrifice—inscribed upon it. With a grim portent about him, the inquisitor removed the protector whose contra had the rúna Eäd or Release. An obsidian eye was slotted in place of the one of flesh and blood, etched with a sigil I did not know of but could taste the influence of an apostle emanating from.
Sulphur and bitter iron entrenched itself within my tongue, burning something fierce as if I’d swallowed a mouthful of blackpowder and I knew then the name of the god upon which the inquisitor had staked his immortal soul: Abasdūran.
I’d escaped from a disciple of the Apostle of Hubris and now another had come to take me back, either alive or dead. Dead God on the Cross, it was the very same one that caught me the first time around. History did not merely rhyme, the damn thing sang in iambic pentameter to the tune of the D’yabel’s fiddle.
“Last time, when I said ‘au revoir’ you do know that I did not mean it in the literal sense, yes?”
The Luciferine blackcoat did not respond directly, ignoring the heretic before him as he chanted a prayer under his breath. I recognized it as the Apostates’ Creed; I charged onward so as to stop him before he finished the spell. Just as a sorcier’s incantation can call down fire from the ether, so too can an exorcist’s beseechment—best not to think the words empty for though God be dead, the vermin that feasted upon His corpse were well and truly alive.
“I believe in God, Lucifer Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth.”
The inquisitor whose hand I took two years ago stepped forth, a clockwork prosthesis sparking ambarique lightning from below his elbow. In his Byzantium brass fingers, he held a falchion and with it, he met my charge.
I’d been running in a partial wrath-guard, my sword resting atop my shoulder, and so I dug into the ground with the tips of my toes, letting the weight of Zepheroth roll on the tracks of my muscles like the blade of a guillotine.
Chopping down viciously and with all my might, scarlet current ran along my annealed bones, combusting blood to fuel inhuman might. The world drowned under the vampyre’s treacle, every movement slowed under the weight of my sight such that flashing steel was no faster than falling feather.
My blow fell upon an unstable guard, longsword deflected across falchion, actinic-blue sparks scraped from the oxidised steel. We danced; parry, backstep, contrapasso, underhand, riposte. The First flowed into the Third, the Fifth opened the Gates of Hel while the Seventh closed them; upstroke, sidestroke, thrust.
We fell into an abrazaré—a blade embrace, or bind if you’ve no patience for prose—half-swording our way into subduing the other. Zerephot’s teeth bite down, trapping the falchion just as I reared back and kicked the inquisitor in the chest, sending him sliding along the cobbles. By his breath, I knew him to have lost said ability, his diaphragm paralysed and two of his ribs broken while his sternum was cracked.
I esquived a bolt fired at me from afar, running once again in a partial wrath-guard and putting my foe in between me and the crossbowmen. The inquisitor attempted to put up a defence but it was for naught—he was not fully clad in plate as with Black-Eye, donning mail and brigandine with steel spaulders and a partial gorget.
Beneath the shadow of his helmet, a sallet with the visor closed, I saw the naked fear of a man that was not ready to die. Slowly, as if that moment was taffy to be stretched between the fingers of God, those terror-stricken eyes beyond the slot closed for they knew what was to come.
My strike blew past the man’s guard, breaking his poise and posture, cleaving into his chest with its gnashing silver teeth. The mail and the brigandine and the gorget did not resist my onslaught, the blood in my veins igniting like blackpowder in a show of explosive force.
Zepheroth sank diagonally from his clavicle down to his navel and with a twist of my wrist, I split his ribcage open so that I might remove my blade from the dead man’s body; guts spilled from the cavity, human viscera strewn about the cobbles like offal in a butcher’s shop. The Iscariote did not like to be taken from its feast, the mercurial flesh undulating with wroth, so I promised it, once again, that I’d let it have its blood. It just had to wait a little longer.
I’d been weakened in our last bout. Severely so. But now I was stronger, knowing better how to draw deep of the God-King’s curse since dancing with the skinless saints below the earth. This tiny little mortal had glyphed a Tel-Tzora charm and nothing more and so could not contend against strength that beggared even a mantigore.
Might as well have been a maggot before a—
An enchanted bolt pierced me through the lungs, its barbed tip breaking apart the mania that had befallen me as it entrenched itself within my viscera. There was a price to drinking of Narancan’s draught for it inflated the ego unduly.
I couldn’t waste a shadow-step to escape from the incoming bolts as it was my one and only manner of ingress into Northway. Instead, I unclasped my cloak and billowed it out as if a street-magicien’s cloth, extending its reach by elongating my shadow and, in so doing, provided cover from the next salvo of silver-tipped projectiles. The ones already shot, however, I needed to yet still dodge and there were more than I could account for.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Two more bolts pierced me through my right bicep and left forearm, respectively, as I ran towards cover. Once shielded by a closed-up market-stall, I made an oblique course towards the points of origin of the bolt which ran parallel to the chanting inquisitor.
In the time that I’d fought and killed a man to when I met the first crossbowman, the half-blind exorcist had chanted the following words: “And in Red Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Hallowed Virgin, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified upon Golgotha, died by Longinus’ spear but by Narancan’s hand, and was buried.”
Half of the Apostate’s Creed incantation had been uttered.
The crossbowman dropped said implement, the chain at its end binding the weapon to his hip; the links were square and turned by some mechanism or another, shortening until the crossbow was sheathed comfortably by his thigh.
In less than a blink, my foe drew steel but not of the sharp variety. Fire and brimstone propelled silver bullets into my flesh faster than I could perceive. The ungent within them—a derivative of rowan resin by smell—did not burn me.
Whatever I was, I was neither ærengeist or d’yabel, neither empyreal nor infernal, bound not to Heaven or to Hel for neither would take me.
I was not immune to mundane damage though as my heart-amber drew upon my blood to seal the wounds, trapping the metal within to be devoured by ensorcelled bones. The longer this went on, the weaker I’d become until I was well and truly mortal once again.
The inquisitor let go of his wheellock pistol and unsheathed an arming sword, sorcerie compelling the fire-arm to return to its holster as if by the hand of an invisible phantasm—a Geistmoon charm by the looks of it, modified to work by the ebb and pull of human blood rather than that of God.
We traded blows, the exchange favouring me due to my outrageous strength though I could recognize that the inquisitor was more skilled than Lamaré and me put together. His expertise, though, proved his downfall as he underestimated the cleverness of the d’Amice scion. Two heads were better than one for when I focused on the immediate, Ré planned for the future.
‘Hide a feint within a feint within a feint.’ My spectre said and I did as I was bid, relaxing my blade down to my side to put it into the first of the seven guards of the armizarét: the long-guard. Rearing back into the seventh guard—that of wrath—I made as if to strike the man’s jugular, feinting rather naïvely to lull my foe into thinking I was planning to reverse and counter-cut.
Instead, I bent my knees and thrusted over my head, threading the visor slot and boring through his eye, then his eye socket, and finally his skull. I had lobotomized his forebrain so the man did not die quickly, convulsing on the ground as I quested onwards, onto his still-chanting comrade.
I couldn’t give him the mercy of a quick death. Shame that it hadn’t been the inquisitor that had struck my heart-stone; would’ve been poetic.
The last two crossbowmen met me before I could slay Black-Eye; one stood back, preparing a grenada—grape-shot of some sort going by the shape—while the other engaged with his rapier. Speak of the D’yabel, and She shall appear, this crusader had been the one that had pierced me through the lungs two years ago.
My longsword had a longer reach—à propos, really—but his blade was a notch trickier to parry due to its inherent instability and prodigious bend.
I transitioned Zepherot into the Seventh Step, the door-guard setting the pommel nearly parallel to my centre of gravity while the tip was outward as if the long-guard. Once the rapier struck with a testing glance, I reversed my blade into the crown-guard, donning it on my temples and stepping forth; the thrust became a feint as I slashed then cut a horizontal, taking a hit to the chest in exchange for initiative.
The tip did not penetrate—yes, I ignored Lamaré and you should too, you filthy lech; get your mind out of the gutter—breaking upon the mass of pyrite solidified over my ribcage, my crystal heart at the centre of this geode. I could not construct it into proper armour, only able to secrete formations of iron-sulphide without much in the way of control.
With a sidestep to his contrapasso, I undercut and then pierced downwards, forcing the inquisitor to riposte and thus begin a bind; with my superior strength and grappling technique, I used my blade as if a stave, leveraging it against the rapier’s weaker spine and stabbing the man with the Iscariote’s crossguard. The sharpened point bypassed the mail, then the gambeson, and then the bone.
I had aimed for the heart.
“He descended into Hel; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Luciferine Church, the communion of the skinless saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.”
To underscore ‘life everlasting’ the inquisitor with the grapeshot let loose the grenada just as the rapier-wielder fell by my hand.
I had thought it strange to bring ordinance within a city not under siege. Now, I got my answer: it wasn’t an explosive. Well, in the traditional sense, that is.
A flash and then powder dispersed around me, shavings of sorrow-gold and silver so fine that they looked like flower. The sulphur and saltpetre clued me into the artefice’s function—a moondust bomb. Naenia had thrown this very same aerosolized mixture at me before I took her life. It had done nothing then.
Now, it dug into my lungs, burrowing through the thin and vulnerable alveolar tissue and taking root. I’d been ignorant of pain so far but this excruciation was so novel that it left me, if but for a moment, stupefied.
I got my wits back to me but by then, my foe had retreated, leaving an open path towards the chanting inquisitor. My feet pummelled the pavement like the hooves of a warhorse, metres flying under me in an instant.
One step away from Black-Eye, he spoke one final word that sealed my fate.
“Amen.”
From God’s Left Eye, a pillar of fire descended, striking me with the fury of ærengeists having come to Sodom and Gomorrah and discovered the depths of their depravity.
I’d needed a lightning-catch once; now, I was the lightning-catch itself.
My bones were the wires of an ambarique armature and my heart the amber at the centre of the contraption. My marrow drank deeply of God’s Left Eye, burning like white-hoat coal as my würm-blood awoke from slumber; lamprey mouths opened along my tub āq-red skin, leeches writhing along in tandem as copulating eels and slithering serpents ravaged themselves in autocannibalism.
To any that had the misfortune to witness me, they’d chance upon a d’yabel in the shape of Man. My clothes had been burned to cinders and left not even ash and so I wore my shadow to cover my nakedness.
Being smited by God Almighty gave me severe heartburn.
I did what came naturally to me and opened my mouth, the dragoon’s breath coalescing within my throat and releasing a gout of Hel-fire directly at the inquisitor. Before the conflagration, the man’s skin blistered but he did not succumb, baptised under Abasdūran and thus inoculated against flame. His clothes and armour were also unmarred by the lick of fire’s tongues, blessed as they were in holy tar and ungent soot.
Black-Eye arose from his supplicant kneel, his skin ashen like ancient clay fired within a kiln of black-alabaster. Looking down at his wrinkled hands, he clenched them into fists and said: “Ciboire; I am become a living saint. Shadrach cannot be burnt by Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace-mouth, night-spawn.”
With that said, he drew his bardiche from the circlet at his belt and settled into a stance that I recognized for we both danced the Pilgrim’s Danse. The Second Step with a variation of the window-guard, poised to chop down.
“Neither can Mezzach.” I mocked, the shavings of sorrow-gold and silver scouring my insides such that my voice echoed as if a thousand-thousand souls wailed within my gullet. It wasn’t enough to inhibit my sorcerie as the concentration was diffuse rather than, say, solid like the manacles fused to my wrist bones. The foreign metal would be assimilated soon enough.
As was fitting for one such as me, I brought myself into the Fifth Step, with the red-variant of the bicorne-guard, apt to impale a man from nave to liver like the Draqul Himself.
The pure exhilaration I felt then was incomparable to anything that I’d ever felt before. The energy that thrummed through my limbs was delivium incarnate, the power of a god; the right to enact retribution, to do as I wished for no one could stop me. Just as I had unleashed fire from my throat, I did so now through the pores of my nightmarish skin, donning self-immolation as one might a cloak.
Scarlet limned my form like a midnight sun and it felt oh so very right.
I charged as did Black-Eye, the obsidian stone within his socket smouldering no different than an ember. We met, blades interlocking within an abrazaré, holy damascene against fell akeldama.
Sliding my toothed-edged against the bardiche’s eponymous beard, I slotted the crossguard against the fulcrum of the tarred haft. With greater leverage, be it by mundane mechanics or by supernal might, I wrenched the axe from his ashen hands.
Well, better said that I attempted to do so. At my touch, the damascene burned my skin black as if by necrosis, snuffing out any Hel-fire that came too near. I recoiled, the pain beyond physical for it attacked my very soul, exacting the wages of my sins against Lucifer.
The inquisitor took advantage of my weakness and struck out, cleaving through half my left hand; empyreal argent cut not only flesh but spirit also, much less bone. My skeleton, woven with occult spellwork, was rendered moot.
Before the fingers could touch the cobbles, they burned away under subliminal, heatless fire, leaving behind not even ash.
I parried the next blow just barely, Zepherot my bulwark as even a single touch from damascene could ennervate. With aid from the echo of the strike’s passage, I spun a tight pirouette around the inquisitor. My speed was greater and so was my strength and reflex; I capitalised on these rather profitable qualities, beating back my opponent through brute force for I lacked the skill to do otherwise.
Binds were out of question and so was half-swording as both would place me in close proximity to the bardiche. I whittled away at his defences, bleeding the man like a stuck pig but also losing ichor just as fast to power my abilities.
Having not paid attention to the only other living inquisitor besides Black-Eye, a silver dagger coated in rowan-oil plunged into my back. Rage and fire bubbled my bones, erupting pyrite spikes from my spine and impaling my assailant through-and-through like a pagan upon a stake. I hadn’t even meant to do so but I would not look a gift-horse in the mouth.
In what I could only describe as absurdist black comedy, I ran away from the final inquisitor, sequestering myself into one of many dark corners within the closed stalls. I drained the man impaled on my back of his blood and returned to the fray, waylaying Black-Eye with a pistol shot.
The inquisitor that I killed accidentally had a really nice wheellock. Should I survive this night, I would keep it for myself, shameless thief that I now was.
Where was I? Oh, fighting to the death with a god-touched of Abasdūran. To see a living miracle bleed by your hand is rather swell. I fought against a living saint, contending against one blessed by an Empyreal before my eyes rather than canonised by the Church after shuffling off this mortal coil.
‘Mon ami, watch the ego.’ My resident spectre chided. ‘It is getting cramped in here and the only time I shall be pressed against you, amoré, is in the flesh not the spirit.’
How a man—’well, a spirit, actually’—could remain about his wits to jest whilst locked in mortal combat only All-Seeing God knew.
I parried but my blade’s forte weakened unexpectedly and I had to backstep with all my might to gain distance and reassess. Looking down, I saw that from my wound, white crept upwards, taking place of flesh like the wax-pox. The wording I had used to describe the fire conjured by the inquisitor’s prayer was apt for this was the fury of ærengeists having come to Sodom and Gomorrah and discovered the depths of their depravity. This was the punishment of Lot’s wife: to become a pillar of salt.
‘End Black-Eye, quickly.’ Lamaré commanded, his voice severe. ‘Curses like this are bound to the caster. Kill him and you kill the curse.’
I put my blade into the ox variant of the crown-guard and charged like a rushing bull, intent on ending this as quickly as possible.
We met at the middle, my onslaught like a sandstorm come to scour flesh from bone, my strikes feverish in their fervour for death was at my heels. Every inch that the salt consumed of me became numb and lost strength until I had to wield Zepherot one-handed; the longsword was not meant to be used in this manner, balanced for the leverage of two.
Black-Eye was in tatters, his skin sliced up like a flagellant penitent of Tzelaphon, but he held yet before me. Though I would fight on to my last breath, I saw my doom in his obsidian eye, inexorable.
When the white reached my heart, I knew that it was over as the last of my ability to move fell away from my grasp like salt within the cracks of my fingers. Darkness fell over me, a shroud upon my senses.
The last I saw before Azazel claimed me was the felling axe smashing through the hand held the Iscariote. Someone oh so very close and so far, far away, lamented the stanza to prayer I could not recall the name of.