XXVI
Akeldama
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> While Christ was still speaking, Judas came, one of the Twelve Apostates, and with him a great crowd with swords and spears, from the soldiers of Narancan to the elders of the Nazirese people.
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> Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying: “The one I shall kiss is the man; seize him.”
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> And he came up to Nameless Christ at once and said: “Hail, Master!” And kissed him.
—The Saint-Skin Scrolls, Evangelion d’Saint-Matieu (the Verse of the Betrayer’s Kiss) translated into Vulgar by Bishop Gascoine D’Tristime; New Standard Version printed by Argo & Sons.
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As a vampyre that wears a vampyre it was only fitting that I wore my severed shadow within the shadow of my cloak for I cast none of my own. This, rightly so, made me stand out during the day which was why I stuck to the Underbowels once the moon wept its last tear and the sun bled on the horizon.
The alp-leather served as a partial gateway into the Black-Hel of Sathariel, allowing me to use it as a point of ingress when no other large enough body of darkness was present. This proved paramount to my survival as when I turned a corner—always on the move as I was to elude any on my trail—I happened upon another cadre of inquisitors, a sympathie compass in their leader’s hand pointing directly to my heart.
There was something about the man that rang familiar though his eyepatch obscured half of his face. Had I seen him before?
A bolt shot from an enchanted crossbow penetrated the stone to the right of my skull, burying itself to the fletching. The charms of shabiri and muteness—eyes preserved within vials of formaldehyde and shrunken heads belted to their waists, respectively—had blinded my preternatural senses and dulled my wits.
I would not risk close combat with claw and fang alone with opponents capable of sorcerie so I bade my shadow to devour me as does a serpent its own tail. The world spiralling into oblivion, I held my breath as I dove into the all-nothing. Insensate disorientation fell over me as millenia-slumbering eyes came awake, looking to either to consume me or worse: hold me in thrall.
I desperately clawed my way back into existence, digging into the flesh of reality with golden talons; a mouth of darkness spat me out a good quarter-league away from the last cadre. There was a distinct feeling of dampness that clung to my skin, signalling that it was my last shadow-step for the day lest I drown in the ether below the earth.
A plume of raven-feathers were left in my wake, my point of ingress, sublimating like smoke and sand. WIth the Church’s wolves nipping at my heel, I quested after the pull of my own sympathie compass.
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As Ël had exhausted himself these past days, I took over the body, letting him rest. His cunning and instincts were transferred over to me as if my mind drew from the cold waters of his soul. Taking hold of the flesh was difficult after so much time confined to the eigengrau, like trying to put on a boot one size too small for my spirit had expanded beyond the shape of Man.
Muscle and sinew rippled to change the form into mine own, bones creaking as they rearranged and grew thinner but denser as I was taller than my Ël. My build was lithe and long whereas his was broad of chest and shoulder with a lower centre of gravity. The superficial mutations, be it due to our tombac skeleton or awoken würm-blood, remained in spite of the metamorphosis.
Once dusk devoured the Right Eye of God in raven’s feathers, I breached topside and began to stalk the streets of Saint-Getaine rather than her entrails; geist-quiet veins and night-markets that mimicked the build-up of plaque within an artery, these were the paths that I braved in search of that which was rightfully mine.
Following after a needle is not as easy as one might think; having gold or any sort of thick and dense noble metal in between you and your quarry interferes with the sorcerie and so you must reattune to the frequency of ambarique pressure. This takes time and calm, especially so with the alien organ nested within my skull.
The reliques that Ël had bound did not help either; sure, they harmonised with the latent signature of our being within the ether but they still interfered somewhat as I attempted to orient myself to the shard of Abeloth. The raven-idol in specific had been rather ornery, demanding my awareness as if a newborn babe if said newborn was helsbent upon wanton slaughter, gratuitous cruelty, and thieving anything remotely shiny and not nailed down.
Kleptomaniac compulsions were strange as it went for the curse-counterpart to a geàs though it wasn’t as crippling as it could have been. I was quick to preempt Ël as he stirred awake to correct me, pendant that he was about certain topics: Yes, I am aware that it isn’t the same. A geàs is conditional, like a Luciferine vow, whereas a star-pact is permanently binding for both good or ill; though geàsa are Tirrish, they both come from the same sorcerous root of Nazirét.
With the Land of Wreathes on my mind, I hurried after a certain old friend of Ël’s as I had a hunch that I hoped would prove wrong for my amoré had become rather unforgiving after our stint in Hel. Ruthlessness did not make for pleasant bedside manners as with our tête-à-tête with Claude-Marc Von Janus.
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Mahhomed’s Leather and Sundries, the plaque said.
I’d’ve preferred that the plane of wood had lied because I did not want to bear witness to Raphaël killing another parent before their child. But as want did not make reality, I knew better than to indulge in the gambler’s draught. I’d already lost the first bet and knew I’d lose the next.
As Ël had used a shadow-step once already, I could not use it again here lest I dive into the Black-Hels and never return. Being without much option, I crawled along the walls and rooftops, tasting the various wards with my mind’s eye; it’d become more sensitive, or rather, I’d become more adept at drawing from that ephemeral sense. The organ reminded me of a third eye stamped upon a sorcier’s forehead, hidden rather than on display.
A minute of concentration was needed to get more than a general outline of an ambarique aura; Mahhomed’s shop wasn’t as well-glyphed as that of Claude’s given that the latter had made many a powerful enemy whilst the former was, at most, in danger of getting egged. The Church did not take kindly to lynchings as it had a monopoly on those and protected its exclusive rights to public execution with litigious, and oftentimes even righteous, zeal. The stockades and the gallows and the stake are property of the Luciferines for only God may dole out punishment as His divine right or some such.
If only that had stopped Father from stringing up Jean-Luc on that damned apple tree.
It took me no more than half a bell to find a weak spot in the ward’s aura, namely a window. The spirit followed after the flesh and so it reckoned that points of ingress are so too vulnerable. I imagined that the very same principle applied somewhat to the threshold curse afflicted upon vampyres.
Dizziness fell upon me as I bent the wrought-iron bars that protected the window. The rúna suite was made to confound a would-be thief into falling to their death rather than alerting the house’s denizens such as in the previous case of the whoremonger; shrunken heads do not come cheap, much less so those of reprobate gossips whose tongues had not been cut-off by the Church.
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Having bent the bars enough for ingress, I barreled through the glass fixture by raw might and brutishness, causing a ruckus like no other. Heart-sight guided me towards Med as ambarique pull oriented me to his bedroom as well.
As this was Raphaël’s business, I gave him the reins, retreating back into the waters like a penitent geist that was to bear witness to his sinner. I did so with recalcitrant and grim acceptance for though there were two souls within this single body of ours, the same could not be said of moral fibre.
We were at our wits end, we were oh so very broken in all the wrong places such that what was left was the ugly quick of nails chewed down to the bone.
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It’s easy to kill once you develop the stomach for it. Humans are fragile; it does not take much to end a life though the price for resurrecting one from beyond the grave is too steep for any one person to pay.
As I was in a rather philosophical mood, I wondered then why something so precious as a human soul was so easy to snuff out, fire before the wind. Azazel had Her hand on the scales though Lucifer was so too to blame for both are but twins born from the womb of the all-nothing.
I planned on returning another soul tonight to the dust from whence it came.
Med had woken up by the sound of breaking glass, spooking at the sight of a stranger at the threshold of his quarters. He could not divine my identity beyond that of a mannish silhouette and so he drew a pistol from his bedside table, shooting without hesitation.
Lead, fire, and brimstone scraped my face from its bones, littering my flesh with pellets.
I struck alight my ambaricité-powered lamp, letting Med see my skin mend back whole and reveal my person to him. My skeleton absorbed the metal, taking it for itself to reinforce my bones. Alexiares had done a number on them, having scraped some of the glyphs raw in his many experiments; thankfully the rúnari matrix piggy-backed off my heart-stone and could reseed if given the material to do so, allowing me to reconstitute the amalgam of tombac.
“Good shot, Med. Would’ve killed me had I been a mortal. I recommend bullets of silver dipped in ungent; the Church sells them though they’re rather expensive.”
My tub āq-red skin, ruby-and-gold eyes, and the fact that I cast no shadow lent my visage an aspect of strange dread that proved ineffable when first seen. Bolésians have somewhat ginger hides though not nearly to my degree; sacrūna and nobles and omen-touched mooncalf might possess queer eyes like mine; but it was the lack of a shadow that brought all the features together into a terror-inducing whole.
Only soulless monsters, be they cannibal or Night-God worshipper, did not cast shadows.
“Where are my gloves, Med? Where’s my satchel?”
I reckoned, and hoped for the sake of many lives, that my Éderi bladeshard was still within the satchel. Else I would give into my rage, drink even deeper of it, and bathe the streets of Saint-Getaine in the blood of the clergy.
It took some time for Med to regain his voice and longer still for it to become legible beyond the shakey bleat of a cornered prey animal.
“I didn’t have any choice; they threatened Aîs; I had to tell them everything I knew about you; the stuff—your stuff—they gave me were just scraps they had no use for; kept them for you.”
Lies, all of it. It had been Mahhomed that’d approached the Church after a few months had passed since he’d last seen hide or hair of me. It had been Mahhomed that had chosen to spill any scrap of information about me so he’d get some silvers. It had been Mahhomed that identified the satchel and gloves as he’d made them.
I had removed the maker’s mark so as to protect his identity should I be captured and he had spat upon my kindness and repaid it with greed. I’d drunk with the man, had fought for him, and had taken him as a friend. All the words I’d given him to protect, he’d thrown to the wolves.
Words to the Éder are inviolate and to profane them by baring their meaning to another is the greatest sin one might commit against the Old Ways. Even had I not been cast out, I would have killed Med for his secret-spilling alone.
Mahhomed retrieved my satchel—I could feel the bladeshard stitched into it humming in my mind’s eye as it neared—and gloves, handing them to me as if I were God and he, Kaïn come to offer holocaust.
This was it. Now that I had what was owed to me, I could snuff out the beast’s miserable little life. Afterall, I recognized the look of a beaten animal; Mahhomed had done this before by the look of complete subservience. He’d told during our cavorting that his mother had been a priestess of Uriel and so a pagan to Lucifer.
He’d sold out his own mother for bloody lucre.
And in this manner, he was worse than Claude because though the whoremonger had been a vile waste of blood, he hadn’t been a conniving kinslayer so far as I knew.
I heard the creaking of floorboards so I was cognizant that Aîs was watching us from the threshold. The satchel and gloves lay atop Mahhomed’s palms as his death lay before him. I would kill another parent before their child tonight, wouldn’t I?
‘You are what you become.’ A little voice in the back of my head told me, neither mine nor Lamaré’s.
I took the satchel and I took the gloves but I did not take his life.
Saying nothing to Mahhomed for I did not trust him with words any longer, a hollow in the pit of my stomach, off I went into the night once more. All that was left was my sword and Ré’s steam-forged gauntlet but before that, I needed to sell another piece of my soul and take two more lives.
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The Grave-Robber was a pawnshop run by Demos Ash-Hand. He’d gotten that kenning by having taken the ashes of some sorcier or another burnt at the stake, using it to glyphe his right hand and become tasteless to tongues of fire and curse both. Useful that, allowing him to handle fell objects without fear of possession, obsession or madness.
Irony, fickle mistress that she were, had seen me come back to the man who’d stolen my blade the first time so that I’d steal back my sword from another thief altogether. Honestly, it was a tad complicated so I ignored any word-play, tired as I was.
The Judas-Kiss still hung on the back-wall, sheathed within a salt-glass scabbard and covered in Luciferine seals of binding.
I removed my alp-leather hood and Demos, astute as he was, recognized me even after my many mutations, after all these years.
“The Man-in-Black himself. Or should I call you the Holy-Vampyre?”
Names are funny things and tend to develop through word of mouth. Winning prize-fights, collecting bounties, and sparing the innocent and culling the guilty; it all added up. People talk and they gossip and fact becomes fiction because truth is never as appealing as a well-told lie.
“Déjà vu—call me Raphaël. I won’t pay for something twice though this time around, though I’ll be the one to get some silver tonight.”
The pawnbroker had a hand on his belt, near enough to draw his matchlock. This one gave me pause as the man had the coin to pay for bullets of cold-iron coated in salt-glass. I knew as much given he ran a successful racket in a place teeming with monsters and warlocks.
“Not here to rob you, Demos. You’d’ve been twice-dead already had that been the case. No, I’m here to strike a deal as it were.”
The man looked me up and down and let me tell you what he saw: the D’yabel come to bargain. Either I left with his soul or his life, but I would not leave empty-handed. Though he might banish me back to Hel, he’d doom himself in doing so.
“You still want Mallory Fæ on the other side of the pale?”
“Aye, I’d like that. What is it to you?”
“Two years gone by and you’ve yet to move that cursed blade—burning a hole in your pocket, I know, what with the Church beginning to purge the Saintess’ Underbowels.
“I kill Mallory and you give me that Iscariote.”
The man looked at me with apprehension and then looked at the sword hung on the wall with utter disgust. No doubt, the Judas-Kiss had whispered into his ear a few times already, fomenting paranoia so as to tempt him to draw it. Make a man fear his neighbour and he’ll take up any weapon, no matter how fell.
Deals with the D’yabel and all that.
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I let Ré steer the wagon, so to speak, as I chewed over the chud of my sins.
Beneath the anger was disappointment and betrayal but what had truly held me back from murdering another parent before their child was that I liked Med. That’s it. That’s what made me not kill him then and there. Unlike this Nazirese fellow, Claude had been nothing but a pain in the arse. I could forgive sleights done against me to a degree but I could not absolve the misery that the whoremonger had wrought.
Were I to tell you, O shadow of mine, how Von Janus had treated his girls, you’d’ve killed him yourself with your bare hands, nice and slow. Even the kindest, most gentle of souls would be overcome with black rage upon knowing the abuse that Claude had doled out. The only reason he hadn’t warranted a bounty was that he was influential and knew how to dispose of evidence, be they living, breathing people or dead and broken bodies mangled beyond recognition. While René had been a rabid animal, Claude was a cunning predator that picked his prey clean to the bones and then some.
At least, this was what I told myself.