XXVII
Ménage à Trois
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> “And now farewell to kindness, humanity and gratitude.
>
> Farewell to all the feelings that expand the heart.
>
> I have been Heaven's substitute to recompense the good;
>
> May the God of Vengeance now yield me Her place to punish the wicked.”
—Narancan’s Folly: the God-King’s Downfall; Act Two, Lines Fifty-through-Fifty-Four (How a Man Becomes a Monster) by playwright Gregorio D’Arcene.
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Mallory Fæ had found my Ël’s Luæth after the beast within possessed his body.
I was curious as to how.
Stumbling upon the massacre would’ve been pure luck and I did not believe in serendipity any more than I believed in færie god-mothers—phantasmagoriæ err towards parasitism at best and predation at worst. Even spridjans, though benevolent, are quick to anger and slow to forget and incapable of forgiveness; hobs of any sort are bound to the sin that anchors them to humanity and are so influenced therefrom.
There’s something that I’m missing; no such thing as coincidence.
The woman was a sacrūna but none of her magiques could explain her being in the right place at the right time. Elsewise, she’d’ve died with the rest of them.
Etja, Eäd, Ud-Ain.
There were other rúna besides those, especially so to manage storage of a secondary resource, but they’d been hidden under cloth and leather.
No epiphany struck me as I mulled over the possible avenues of investigation. I deducted each and every improbable scenario until only the most likely survived: Mallory had a resonance artefact that could sense auras produced by turbulent ambarique pressure. Witch-finder medallions are always in low supply given the intricacy involved in their construction; they vibrate when in proximity to a magique object, animate or inanimate.
Steam-forged sorcerie is easier to detect with a witch-finder than, say, the older magiques of star-pacts and whatnot. This makes the use of such an artefact tenuous when within an industrial city such as Getaine’s Cairn. It’d have to be modified, made to ignore any high frequencies, tuned very precisely within a range no bigger than a sesame seed.
Ashen’s various seals restrained its aura until it was nearly like that of a common sword; to be able to sense it was, supposedly, impossible without a blood-oath.
What if I’ve been going about this all wrong? What if Mallory hadn’t stumbled upon the sword but rather us and had waited until we’d moved on from the slaughter.
That would better explain the coincidence than a sophisticated artefice that would beggar the Middle-Kingdoms this side of the Aller. Resonance devices attuned to bloodshed are easy finds given their ease of fabrication as they only require a heart-chip the size of a finger-nail, a dowsing rod taken from a cerim tree, and a salt of some sort bathed in the élan vital of a sacrificial goat.
Death is used in many a ritual as a means to summon a wræth or to coalesce ichor due to its propensity for causing appreciable turbulence in the ether and porosity in the veil that parts the flesh from the spirit.
Ease of construction, ease of use—what better way to find something to pawn off than in a dead man’s hands? He can’t fight back.
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Insomnia is the curse of a fear-wrought mind, of a mind that fears itself and what nightmares might eat it alive from within for from without the tally of sins have grown too heavy to bear and so the psyche buckles under its own weight.
I could not sleep much for pain of death as the inquisitors did not let up in their chase. Even needing only an hour and some change to gather some respite was too much; sympathie compasses work best on still objects. Something to do with calculating the relative angles of three bodies within the ether.
Honestly, I could scarcely comprehend Lamaré’s rambling tangents on the occult sciences, much less get the gist of them. My current thoughts were lashed to but one track, cleaving to the faraway light of my vengeance.
My flesh was intact but my spirit was scarred-over, my heart of hearts a lump of hardened hatred. This rancour had fueled me throughout my torture and now so too did it provide the wind to my sails because I walked but by sheer and helbent will.
Always on the move, never still, I repeated seven words unending and unfaltering, mumming and muttering and mumbling under my deathless breath a prayer to the Host of Hosts, fourfold.
“A jealous and vengeful God is Lucifer;
The Lord is retribution incarnate, justice inexorable.
He reserveth His wrath for the sinners,
So that those that remain know terror.”
There was no corner of my soul that I would not turn over to see my enemies in ruin. And that meant trafficking even with ærengeists, much less d’yabels. Since learning the truth of the skinless saints, of the éscorce, I only confirmed that which I’d already known.
God and the D’yabel are but one and the same; the all is one.
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Days upon days and nights upon nights; dark and light converged into one.
My sanity was beginning to slip once again as I quested after Mallory; she’d caught wind but there was nothing for it. A head-hunter talks by necessity because there is no better way to find someone than to ask around. As the woman was also of the mercenary disposition, her social web had alerted her to me, another spider that had come upon her territory.
I used this against her in turn—she’ll go to ground and, in doing so, will need to resurface topside at some point. Coin opens legs much less lips but I had none so I resorted to the vampyre’s dread song for the latter as the former did not entice me. With my Ré’s help, I turned that power from a simple tool used to stun into a downright precise instrument.
To say that the cultivation of said skill was morally questionable at best was an understatement. It was no different than lacing a drink in narcotics, seeding a mind with illusions no more substantial than smoke and mirrors—the penultimate form of lying..
I’d already mastered how to direct sound so that but a single person hears my voice and how to discombobulate the inner ear, but now I’d developed a few new tricks which I used to devastating effect.
Exempli gratia, I’d been coincidentally walking through a particularly-dangerous alleyway and a thief had waylaid me. This entirely by chance because only a man with the hearing of a bat could have pin-pointed that exact alley on that exact night with that exact highwayman; strange wording for a bandit within a city but you’ll grasp the double entendre quick enough.
The man dropped from the shear wall a good five metres above me, all quiet-like as if a wræth from the Host of Hel. He brandished a blade, naked steel red against the moonlight as if a portent. I imagined that this act had sparked no small amount of panic within the thief’s many victims.
“Drop the purse! Your coin or your—”
“Bonsoir, mon ami.”
The man’s face slacked as he struggled to focus on me, his balance awash no different than a green-horn in his first time in high and stormy sea. A mixture of low-and-high frequency noise can make a man lose his equilibrium of mind, weakening his will and confounding him and, in so doing, make him susceptible to manipulation.
“Long time no see, my Brother-in-Lucifer. Say, I’ve fallen on hard times lately, could you lend me, say, a Talent?”
His eyes had begun to clear so I turned to more direct compulsion. A trill rattled from the throat as I sharpened the dread song into a spear, focusing such that it became a carpenter’s drill boring into the man’s glabella.
“Mine.”
I pointed at the pouch by his belt, and he looked at it, the enrapturement having broken through. The longer this went on, the more resistant to the song he’d become. This is instigated by the mind becoming aware of the wrongness that has descended upon it and so it rages against the fetters like a bull against the matadoré; illogical and all-consuming intoxicant anger befalls the subject thereon as a defence mechanism.
With a dumb and pacified expression, the man gave me his coin and I repaid him with a single word.
“Run.”
The world bent around him as his inner ear lost its ability to reach equilibrium and his skull vibrated with my voice, the command wrapping around his consciousness and seeping in. Suggestion was a powerful thing, even when not enhanced by sorcerie.
Heart-sight showed me the flow of the man’s many blood vessels and I focused specifically on the ones in his gut, whispering a low and dread song so that cold claws would rake his bowels. His spine turned rigid, vertebræ locking against vertebræ.
Fear, all-consuming terror, descended upon him from within; he scrambled away, falling into a dead sprint without looking back for, in his panicked brain, I was Death incarnate come to reap his soul.
I whistled a tune as I counted out Her Majesty’s silver—a Talent and five Crowns.
The man was a killer-for-hire like Pol, having kitted himself with attraction rúna so that he could thief and murder by falling atop his prey. In a cruel twist of fate, he had the moniker of the ‘Vampyre’ for his modus operandi.
He’d been the one I had called out two years ago when I had left the Mangy Feline after my fight with Mallory.
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In the intervening time, waiting as I was for a hint of Mallory Fæ’s whereabouts, I went after Lord-Executioner Alexiaries’ cronies; the alquemists that had experimented upon me, the black-hearts that had treated me worse than a rattling of the laboratory.
Though their names were unknown to me, the putrid odour of their souls was not. I asked after the various shops, lowly apothecaries and high-brow embrocation salons twain, and scented after my prey, one by one.
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If Claude’s death had been savage, then theirs was worse. I ravaged them with my talons and my teeth, leaving mangled corpses in my wake in back alleys and byways, human bodies desecrated as naught more than trash; they’d treated me as an object, ignored my humanity, and so I paid them in kind with no kindness to speak of.
May they rot in the Hel that they’d thrown me in for their souls were not on my conscience for they’d ripped such out of me in the name of occult science.
I had used my bones to bind the beast within, once. Now, I used them to unleash that base, cruel cunning that dwelled in my throat.
My thirst, my lust, for blood was slaked only once I found the gilded stake given to me by Calcifer. Upon seeing it, I was reminded of the promise I’d made with myself and the nameless innocent I had slaughtered: that I would not become an animal for I’d live as a man.
I belted the stake’s chains around my waist, the implement laid against my thigh with just enough rope so that I might put myself to rest should I fall too deeply into depravity.
As it stood, I might’ve gone too far into the bottomless pit and could not see it for lack of light.
Lorelás was my unwitting accomplice in my revenge, learned as she was in the physicker’s circles; for every name she gave me that turned up with an obituary in the local papers, her suspicions grew until she could not help but ask: “When you kill the last alquemist, will you do away with me as you have with them?”
I smiled, my grin at ease.
“Nay, you’ve no reason to fear death by my hand. I am a friend, Lorelás, you’ve just not recognized me after all these years.”
At her confusion, I lifted my hood.
“Raphaël Son-of-the-Éder.” Her eyes scoured my form, tallying the mutations against the man she once knew and the myth that she’d heard of. Satisfied that I was neither, she, against her better judgement, asked: “What happened to you, boy? Where’ve you been? Why’re you killing learned men and women, left and right?”
“To answer the first: Hel. The second is the same as the first. The third is that I’m not killing men but d’yabels for they kept me as a rattling, a test subject to their vile experiments. My countenance is not by choice but by the alquemie that was thrust upon me.”
I whispered the next phrase, so very quietly that only Bellamie would’ve heard it, had he been here with me and not either lost or dead.
“I’ve become more monster than man.”
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Within one of the many, and I mean many, houses of pleasure, I paid for an hour of Gervais’ time—one Talent which was roughly a generation of peasant’s wealth; just to bed someone in a poorly ventilated room. Known as the Man-Eater, Gervais wasn’t a lowbrow night-lad that peddled his flesh out on the streets like a pauper fishmonger but rather a courtesan proper, learned in the subtle arts of pain and pleasure.
Funny how a few words can change turning tricks into a highbrow trade of artistry and beauty. When the poor do it, it’s uncouth harlotry and degeneracy but when the rich do it, it’s still the same thing just with a whole lot more masks and whips and bindings.
I could not appreciate nor even truly comprehend the appeal of restraints after what I’d been through. In contrast and by his many comments, Lamaré was a glutton for this sort of thing. I did not ruin his fun, letting the sleeping dogs in my soul lie.
My train of thought ended when I opened the filigree-laden door, dovetailing nicely as if by purpose of some all-knowing orchestrator.
The room was sparsely lit as the mind finds allure in the shadows, filling in what it does not see with what it would like to. A bed, large enough for a ménage à cinq, sat by the leftmost corner, drowning under pillars soaked with perfumes and soap of eucalyptus—high-end bordellos such as this one, the Sixty-Ninth Hel, have strict codes of cleanliness as the clientele are rather fussy even after having put their tongues in places God did not intend them to be.
The Man-Eater lay sprawled with feline grace and unrepentance upon the silk sheets, his body oiled and his parchment-pale skin Babylon-scarlet against the candles of lévayathan ambergris. He was masked with the aspect of the mantigore, a mane of vermillion-dyed fur hiding away the Man-Eater’s hair—the word-play was clever if a tad obvious.
I will use no more words to describe him for it is best to leave some things unsaid. My unnatural sight pierced through the darkness but description would shatter the je ne sais quoi, as it were. The ineffable transcendance in what the mind conjures up and in so doing exposes its desires.
If anyone asks, that last sentence was Lamaré’s.
“Come so that I may know you.” The Man-Eater purred, sending shivers down my spine and hot blood down my loins. Vampyres are usually cold-blooded so any change in body temperature is magnified tenfold within our perception—felt as if it were summer rather than autumn within the room.
Can’t we have some fun? Com’on, he’s all oiled up and everything! Gods, I haven’t seen an arse like that since they strung Christ on the Cross.
I ignored the lecherous d’yabel on my shoulder as he devolved into wordless drooling and wolf whistles; all bark and no bite, Ré was not one to mix business with pleasure especially so with the tool we were planning to employ tonight. The humour was his way to cope, to resist the ever-growing seirein song of l’appel du vide.
“Gervais—”
“No names, love. It ruins the masquerade.”
I sighed, contemplating how to start the path by which I already knew the end. I had gotten whispers that Gervais was something of Mallory’s favourite plaything and had come here to pressure him into revealing her residence—a prostitute of his calibre also did in-home visits. There was nothing for it, so I leaned into the character I was already old-hand at playing; that of the mysterious stranger adept at cutthroat diplomacy.
“A little birdie told me that a certain færie likes to spend her nights with the mantigore.”
By my heightened senses I knew that my tongue wormed its way into his heart, caressing at his nape like a familiar love, stoking that warm feeling of safety in the intimate embrace of someone who cares.
“Ah, yes, Mallie.” Gervais smiled dumbly like an innocent lamb brought to the slaughter. “You a friend of hers?”
I hated every damn second of playing the man like a fiddle. It was wrong, it was coercive, it was deplorable—this was how René had enticed his many victims, using narcotic draughts to hamstring prey so that they could not run, so that they were at his nonexistent mercy. But there was no corner of my soul I would not turn over to see my enemies in ruins and so I kept at my fell ways; ashamed, yes, but not near ashamed enough not to walk them in the first place.
‘You’re destined for Hel so why worry about another grave sin?’ My guilty conscience mocked. I’d already promised René ‘Snake-Eyes’ Motley that I’d find him in the Infernal Host yet a part of me just could not reconcile itself with what I’d become by mine own hand.
I spoke and with my tongue I sealed my fate.
“Why, we are rather intimate.” If intimate meant her having stabbed me in the kidneys multiple times, then yes, we were but one sole flesh in that regard.
“That’s good. Mallie’s a lone wolf sort of gal. She’s slow to trust and quick to suspect.”
The leash I had on the man’s heart was loosening, the compulsion breaking, and I had already forced through twice. I had one last try and if he slips from my beguiling gaze, he would become inoculated to any further attempts.
“Say, where could I find her for a little vis-à-vis?”
I waited with bated breath as I held eye-contact—it was needed to enrapture a soul and breaking it would, in turn, break the spell.
Gervais’ clouded irises were clearing as his sleeping mind began to catch on to the waking dream I’d woven around him. His gluttonous, all-devouring pupils shrinked just a lash. His lips quivered, his throat beginning to lock up as he struggled to resist the gold allure of my eyes, to see that they were naught but pyrite, but false promise, but drink laced with narcotics.
“She lives in one of the tenement buildings between Jacques and Marlené—wait, ugh, my head.”
The man clutched at his skull as a headache enveloped him like a serpent, the song’s true-nature, and thus mine, revealed.
By the time that the Man-Eater had wrapped himself in his sheets in fear, gazing out into the shadows of the room, the other man-eater was long gone, sequestered into the night through the insensate oceans of Black-Hel.
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I had become a vampyre, a bedfellow to Azazel the Night-God, upon this very street.
I had died here, had given away my life for that of another.
And no one but me and him knew so, the world having gone by without knowing what had taken place between Jacques and Marlené. There was a melancholy here, a strange reverse nostalgia that was equal parts longing ache and abject revulsion.
The fence upon which I’d staked the seat of my soul was gone, having been replaced by wrought-iron, the mud-slick ground now paved some time in the past two years I’d been gone from Saint-Getaine.
Where the house of chance upon which I had bet ten-four on red once was, now a tenement building stood, just another slum where a robber-baron lorded over its denizens with a black heart that served Mammon.
Mallory Fæ lived in the shadow of my death.
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I could tell when Lamaré was gripped by the black bile of melancholy; it was silence that betrayed him for only the slow dread of pain to come could bind the man’s tongue. He, much like me, did not take easily to opening up; rather bottling up his emotions like ambaricité within the bottle, like too much oil within the gasquet.
“Tell me Ré: should I do as you did that night long ago or continue down a path that’s paved with the trodden-upon corpse of my soul?”
The question was not pointed, it was not sharp for my voice was soft and my whisper shrill and slow. Wind howled through the otherwise geist-quiet streets of Saint Getaine’s Tomb, empty and listless and mourning.
“Is it better to die pure or to live impure?”
The weeping moon was near full but not yet, a crescent sickle suspended in the tar of night. I could not see the stars, the Alephen, because of the man-made lights of the Cairn. There was no God in a place made to keep out nature and whose very foundations are wrought for human comfort alone.
“In my naïveté—”a shuddering sigh that was really a sob in disguise”—spared a life once and now look where it’s got me.”
My hands trembled as my lungs failed to find root in my flesh, sickly and feeble before the miasma of what I’d wrought. There was a lump in my throat I could not swallow.
“Won’t survive if I run away. The soul-pact will sever and, in so doing, spell a fate worse than death upon me. Should I even survive, a Blind-Mother could simply pray over my compacted sword and curse me therefrom.”
There was a pit in my stomach that I just quite couldn’t ignore.
“The sun-bloods have kept this skeleton in the sepulchre for but the fact that it hasn’t escaped the cemetery. I’ll be hunted down like a dog until the end of my days, crippled through sorcerie or exorcism.”
The world grew oh so very still then, my body cold as the grave from whence it belonged.
“Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée.”
There could be no middle-course.
The tenement building seemed far away then, as if it was a holy place and I, a penitent pilgrim in need of redemption. As if Heaven above Hel, mocking the sinner for having failed to reach the Host of Hosts as they are tortured by Azazel’s infernal legions.
“I need to retrieve Ashen and to do that I first need a weapon by which to waylay Alexiaries. He has information about Pierre and where he keeps our blood. Wouldn’t trust it with the Church proper; the compasses the inquisitors used are bound to a phylactère within House Solaire, no two ways about it.”
A long and drawn out absence passed before Lamaré spoke. It was a wound on my heart, that lack of response, that slow dread, that tension of air that could be cut by a knife as if a tangible thread.
His words might as well have been razors for how deeply they drew the blood of my remnant carcass of a soul.
“Death to Pierre…”
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When I returned to Demos Ash-Hand and his pawnshop, the Grave-Robber, I did so with an unbloodied stiletto and a witch-finder medallion; it was a mass of cogs and gears and unnameable machinerie, Byzantium brass configured to resemble a clockwork heart.
“So this was why you wanted her gutted: she ran away with your artefact.”
The scar-crossed man with a hand on his belt and a wolfish glint in his eyes said a single thing in response to me insinuating I had killed a living, breathing human being in his stead: “Aye.”
I handed the broker the stiletto but kept the resonance artefact. The meat in between his brows knit into a lump of wroth and his fingers itched closer to his wheellock.
“This trinket wasn’t part of the deal.” I nudged my chin towards the vampyric skull that lay on the shelves amidst grimoires and treatises of the darker side of the occult sciences. “Give me back my kin and I will give you the means to make more of them.”
At my words, the man’s suspicions loosened as I handed him the witch-finder and he handed me the skull inside a roughspun sack.
“Don’t unsheathe it here. Take it outside—happy to finally be rid of it.”
I gave the man a nod and made my way towards the sword, lifting it from the wall with care and reverence. It had a belt of human leather, evidenced by the subtle smell of terror given off by a man that knows he’s going to die. Vampyres are fine-tuned to know such things and I would bet my non-existent silver that a night-spawn had crafted this blade as a reservoir of ichor to stave off the hunger.
Binding the belt’s cold-iron buckle to my hip, I felt a chill run down my spine as the spirit within the sword reached out to me. It said five words though Lamaré would later insist it had been six in actuality because of the grammatical reform of 674 After God’s Death.
‘The moon’s eyes are starving.’