XXX
Dégoût
----------------------------------------
> “All that glisters is not gold;
>
> Often have you heard that told:
>
> Many a man his life hath sold
>
> But my outside to behold:
>
> Gilded tombs do würms enfold.”
—Narancan’s Folly: the God-King’s Downfall; Prologue, Lines Thirty-through-Thirty-Five (The Merchant of Kal’Tash) by playwright Gregorio D’Arcene.
----------------------------------------
The rich trod upon the broken backs of the poor so that they might exalt in the light and those below languish in the dark. There is only so much power to go around and so to have any of worth, another must not—zero-sum.
This was the nature of the world, only broken ‘ere and there when someone comes along that has the strength but not the will to do harm. This night was not a story of the latter but of the former for though I was born Éderi, I had power thrust upon me that would beggar a king and render insane a priest.
I could not call down lightning but neither could it do the same to me. Immortality, within the palm of my hand and it tasted not sweet but bitter as ash and cold-iron shackled around the tongue.
The light of my life was extinguished, bereaving me within the depths of Black-Hel.
How easy would it be for you to stay? To forget and welcome oblivion so that the ache in your chest is gone with the rest of you? Dissolve away O regrets in the lethean waters of the Ether. Such was my the longing that I longed for death but She would not have me; Azazel would spit me out, having dug Her roots in me, peon that I’d become by pact and so by soul.
I emerged from the heavy, clinging womb of the all-nothing, my hands pulling me up over the lip of solid ground, feathers black as sin shedding from me like a serpent’s skin, trailers of wælmist in my wake. No eyes stared from beyond the veil but neither could I swim so soon for I no longer cast a shadow, having fashioned it into the wings of a wræth; it would take time to coalesce the strength of my soul and, in so doing, return to me the power of the Raven.
On the other side of the divide between the Many and the Few, I stalked after a hatred I could no longer recall for the winds of sorrow had extinguished it. I had truly become a revenant then for twas I but an empty shell, shadow o’ shadows, a reflection that paled in comparison to the man I’d once been.
----------------------------------------
I dreamt of the most handsome man I had ever seen. He had the strong, burly frame of a prize-fighter, ashen hair crawling up from his tub āq-red navel to caress a barrel-chest that could lift a hay bale and throw it twenty yards with ease.
He was doleful, those eyes of his, burning sulphur and shaped the cross between goat and serpent. Desolation raged against the pang of slow and dreadful hunger; I could not recall where I’d seen him before.
Beneath my feet, as if a reflection from a mirror, the man stood. We were separated by red amber, the crystalline substance oozing as if oil-dye atop water.
I looked down at the man and saw a wound in place of his heart, bleeding up at my feet. Tracking the flow I saw it crawl up into my own chest, a hollow within, a blackness that consumed and consumed but gave nothing back.
----------------------------------------
A sliver of my joie d’vivre returned to me for I stood upon the threshold of the man that had broken me not so long ago, in both body and spirit. I would kill him and I would maim him, to repay his great cruelness in kind, within the place he called home.
This was his lynchpin and his love and the precious haven therein which he feared no spectre and no monster and no man. Where he had sired and raised children; where he kissed his wife and bade her a good day; where he slept, soundly, after having had skinned other men alive.
Perhaps I’d make them watch—whether this meant the baying dead or the yet-still-alive, O shadow of mine, you shall soon find out.
The door was warded to Hel-and-back, wrought of steel and gilded with sorrow-gold so as to do away with any spell and to hex any pick. Neither strength no sorcerie would see me through and so I climbed for I had a d’yabel to drag back to whence it came, kicking and screaming and begging for mercy it would not get for it had not given.
----------------------------------------
Again, I saw the handsome and strange man.
This time we were oh so far away, the amber having grown thick and distant between us. The sight of him was that of fury and cold rage and humanity for only a human could hate so deeply so as to want to make you understand that you deserve what is to come.
He screamed with his mouth closed, mute and yet echoing.
The lifeblood that once flowed from my chest into his and his into mine was oh so very thin; naught but a strand—two souls, two bodies, bound by a link unseen.
Once I could no longer glimpse beyond the frozen amber, the waters of oblivion dissolved the salt of me into the vast Ether.
----------------------------------------
Truly, the good people of Saint-Getaine should begin to better lock their windows. I had taken a fair share of lives by entering through such breaches, easier as they were when compared to doors.
Safety breeds complacency and Alexiaries was safe as can be, protected by politics and what-have-you. None but me would be able to strike at the heart of him for none else would dare. None else had much the power either but they did not lack for motivation nor for will.
The Lord-Executioner, you see, had doled out no middling amount of punishment on behalf of his ‘noble’ masters. Cripples and eunuchs and orphans and widows and Asylum vegetables; these were the fates of those that lived to see through his vile ministrations. Graves and gallows and soap and the barber-surgeon’s table and the warlock’s fetish-pantry; these were the fates of those that did not.
By his hand, I had—in one form or another—tasted all of these fates. I had been crippled and castrated; I had been rendered insane by torture and experimented upon by alquemie; I had been flayed alive, buried alive, choked and then let to resuscitate by the sorcerie in my blood. My fat turned to soap and my bones hollowed of their marrow and my flesh stripped back, layer by agonising layer.
The child in me, that spark of innocence, had been snuffed out. The father in me, that faith in my fellow man, had been bled to death. The man in me was dead but for the form.
First I bent the iron bars that covered the window. Then I broke through the glass, shards littering my meat but I just could not bring myself to care. This was the second storey, where the majordomo’s quarters and the master bedroom lay and that of the children too.
I met my maker within the corridor.
----------------------------------------
From darkness into light, spirit repossessed forgotten bones.
Thrown within the ocean after having been stripped of its meat like a deer carcass come winter, my skeleton lay. Picked clean but for the tendons by the sea life at the bottom of the harbour, will bade it to animate. Barnacles had tethered themselves to me as had weeds and roots. The salt bound my soul, a prisoner within though I did not know it then for I had no mind to do so.
I clawed through the heavy water and jagged rock and cloying sand, weak as a newborn and dull as the dead, Hel-bent on that which called to me: my sire, I felt her seirein song, that pull at my heartstrings that were not. She bade me hither and I did as I was bid.
With the single-minded stubbornness that only the grim revenant can possess, I crawled forth from one womb to another.
----------------------------------------
“An audience with an ink-blood? My, oh my. What a pleasant surprise.”
My tongue had none of Lamaré’s sing-song aspect though I still held the shadow of his accumulated knowledge of rhetoric. Tonight I did not coat it in silver as he oft did but rather iron, cold and brutish. I had, afterall, sold that part of me to War Himself.
The Lord-Executioner looked at me as if a wræth had come to claim his soul which was an entirely correct assumption to make. I had found another clothesline to rob so I had not come indecent, only with indecent intentions.
“Unfortunately, my lamp has been burnt to smithereens so I cannot light the corridor as it were. Prithee, how do you navigate halls so dark as these?”
I could see just fine.
The Lord stammered a moment in the shock of it all and then he clutched at the golden cross in the crux of his breast. It was well-glyphed, enchanted by the Church rather than some arteficier, prayed over by holymen and blessed by vestal priestesses via sacrificial bloodletting. The symbols thereupon were not rúnari but a mongrel of it, mixed with the symbols of the Eleven True Apostates of Christ and the Empyreal Apostles of Lucifer.
“Deus vult ardeat.”
The purest of flames enveloped me, a whirlwind of white ashes clawing at my skin for purchase. Sigils of holy death, of a twice-armed cross erected upon a lévayathan folded over itself and eating its own tail, were branded upon the incantation’s fiery tongues.
I opened my mouth but did not speak a single word. The fires were syphoned into my maw, a whirlpool at my navel, the conflagration devoured into the marrow of my bones. The act was nearly instinctual but not near enough to be a power proper; I could not use it to douse my foes in fiery breath like a dragoon as I had earlier in the night.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
“You cannot kill that which is already dead.” I mocked, then, with an asp’s forked tongue, all venom and vitriol. “And you cannot banish death with death, either.” Staring at the lordling, I invoked the vampyre’s dread song. My eyes and his met, entrancing his will in the same manner that a serpent wraps around a fat and plump rat.
“Kindle. The. Lights.” I commanded, pulling him in my wake through the tie that bound us as I entered his bed chambers. In thrall of my compulsion, he did as he was bade, coming to me, his master, like a lamb to the slaughter though he was more black sheep than innocent bairn. I sat upon a comfortable upholstery, the cushions the finest of clouds and goosefeathers.
Ill-gotten goods, these, paid for by torture.
“Kneel.” By the time that Alexiaries’ wits returned to him, that the fog of sorcerie was lifted from his mind, the lordling found himself at my feet. I caressed his cheek with my hand, the nails growing into golden, harpie’s talons fit to disembowel a man in an instant.
I much preferred being the one holding the chains rather than the one held within them.
“Where is my sword, Alexiaries?”
When he attempted to make demands and to lie and to sneer and to threaten, I let loose the beast within my throat. He clutched at his head but it was his wife that cried out. Though my ears were sharp as those of a bat, my moral fibre was deficient and found wanting on this very evening.
I hooked the tip of one of my talons under his chin and forced him to look me in the eye lest the claw sink into the soft meat under his tongue and nick an artery. Sometimes, you do not need to say a word to communicate for a person can grasp at your intentions readily. Convenient, that.
Alexiaries looked at his wife, the fear in his eyes like the sweetest red wine—sauvignon sanguine—to mine own for my tongue could not taste saccharinity any longer. With a backhand slap, I reoriented him back towards me.
“Saint-Pol’s Cathedral—artisan’s district, southside. Within the reliquaire vault. I know not more of it.” His words were grounded-out like wheat before the mill-stone, rough and desperate before famine.
Nodding along I asked next: “Where is my gauntlet—artefact-make, heart-chip at the centre, filled with entirely too many moving parts.”
He winced and I hooked a claw once again just under his mental protuberance. Oh how delightful was the irony that he’d taught me the physicien’s name of said part of the mandible when he skinned me alive. There was a muscle just under the lips—the mentalis—that contracted then in fear, puckering up with gooseflesh to complement the goose-feathers I sat upon.
“I keep it in my office… for study.”
I was not impressed.
“Tonight’s goal is honesty, Alexiaries—’appeler un chat un chat’. Do well to remember it for you’ll not ingratiate yourself with falsehoods. So you took it as a trophy then; where exactly is it within your office? And have you broken it?”
With a grimness about him, the distaste of defeat, he told me: “I keep it on the study itself, mahogany-make. I did not break the device in my tinkering—it can extinguish ambarique lamplight, I found out. The mechanisms hinted at another function but I could not divine it.”
The tongue wags before its masters, readily, now. Alexiaries hadn’t been able to tame me so easily nor get a single answer out of me either when he held the proverbial—well, physical then—chains.
I was saddened that it would end oh so very soon. Too soon, in fact.
Still having the quivering underbelly of his chin upon my talons, I asked him the final question before I would end his life before his wife: “Where does Pierre keep my blood?”
Though a person could track another through familial lines, there were rituals to thwart such means. Lamaré’s father had drawn my blood during my interrogation and for that I knew of no remedy. Well, better said that Calcifer had not known when I asked him before my captivity. The same was true for the shadow of knowledge I held as a mémento from my Ré; blood bound me and the only manner in which to break the bond was to retake it.
With gritted teeth, Alexiaries gifted me with ten parting words: “Within the family mausoleum. Holds the seven keys himself—paranoid”
My ravenous smile promised the Lord-Executioner nothing good. I would take it slow, make a spectacle out of it like some horrorshow from the Grand Guignol. Every carving, every indignity, every wound and every mockery, I would repay them all in double.
Had I known long ago that I hid this stain of depravity within my shadow, I would’ve slain myself to keep the monster that I’d become from ever coming to be.
As it stood, I welcomed the lust of malice and understood then how René ‘Snake-Eyes’ Motley justified his atrocities: make the victim into something less than human and, in so doing, lose your own humanity. Ignore that little voice that screams that this is wrong and let it die for it had done nothing when the world had inflicted upon you the worst of pains. Kill them all. Your self-seeking prevails for all else is beneath you. Kill them all. They deserve it, so why feel guilt? Kill them all. Life is the quest for your own pleasure and the strong do as they want with the weak.
Kill. Them. All.
“Papa? Maman?”
A child of no more than perhaps ten years of age stood at the threshold. She was the opposite of Claude’s offspring; black of hair and spindly as skin and bone. Oh so very fragile. If only you could see Alexiaries face then, O shadow of mine, you would see the hint of a soul upon the d’yabel.
“Come, little raven.”
The girl, obedient, neared, wary as a bird.
“Hug your papa, little raven. He needs you, you know? Without love, a man forgets there is more beyond himself.” She did as she was bid, shaking all the while as if knowing that Death had come in the guise of a stranger.
“That is how a man mangez bien, as it were.” The orientation of them made it so that the little raven did not see it when I bared the pseudo-fangs just under my palate. But Alexiaries did and the last of the blood left him for he knew then a hint of the despair he had inflicted upon his victims.
Impunity was but the larval stage of vengeance, afterall.
I patted the little raven on her feathered head and then, with a sombre and wistful veil over my face, I left behind Alexiaries and his family, alive and unharmed, taking with me that which was stolen and thus owed and nothing more.
A part of me—that aspect that wants only to exact its pound of flesh—raged against my choice. How many souls would be left crippled in the Lord-Executioner’s wake? How many more wives and husbands would never again see their beloved by their side come morn’? How many would walk away from the torturer’s gaols without parts of their bodies or minds?
For those questions, I had no answers but for the scar-flesh that wracked my spirit. The guilt that weighed the leaden lump in my throat for I was too weak to stomach the price of retribution, paid in full; and too strong to abide the sight of atrocity, unstirred.
A single child would still have her father tonight. A wife would have her husband. Alexiaries would have them both; he cried tears of joyous relief, I could hear. I could not forgive much less forget what he’d done to me and neither would I do the same to him. Not for lack of ability nor for lack of will.
My tormentor lived because, unlike him, I would not forsake the innocent for my cause. The ends do not justify the means if you become that which you sought to fight in the first place. Heavy was my shadow with the deaths I’d already sown much less those that I would next reap.
You are what you become.
----------------------------------------
My siress was much the same as that night in which she’d done me the greatest cruelty: white as the purest snow, in flesh; and in soul, black as the filthiest pitch. My heart, a dull and cracked bezoar of ruddy amber, burned now in her presence.
“A sire cannot feel the presence of the sired. Only the spawn knows the North of the star that spawns them for the heart is the lodestone.”
She embraced me and when our abrazaré ended, she left flesh in her wake as if Lucifer moulding Adam from Lilith. I came to discover then that it was true: women did indeed possess less ribs than men, having lost them in Eden just the Forbidden Paradise was lost to Man.
Muscles clad my bones and veins grew like roots within their substrate. Blood now flowed through me as brains grew within my skull, turning me from spirit into man like God did by ensouling lifeless clay with His divine breath.
I fell before her in prostration, in supplication, in unconditional surrender.
“You are my deliverer and my maker and my goddess and my life.”
With a delicate hand that could turn stone into dust, she lifted me from my bow and hugged me once again.
“O child o’ the Elder Blood. Ye need not grovel before thine siress. We are but one for thy art flesh of my flesh.”
----------------------------------------
I had slain all but Alexiaries and Pierre next awaited me but before that, I approached the Church in which I’d onced fallen to the beast. Her threshold loomed over me and the bleeding dawn had come by then, the long night ended afore Lucifer’s sacrifice.
The doors, large and ornate wood-wrought slabs doused in sandalwood, opened. The ardent that had been tasked with their oversight spooked at mine. He was heavyset for a young’un given to the Church, their meals meagre for holymen practice asceticism and hoard silver.
I removed the hood of my cloak, the light of the Right Eye coalescing into a halo around my head. It was a fiery mane of scarlet tongues that did not burn my alp-leather cloak for it had been bound to me by blood.
“Summon your eldest and tell him to come alone.” My charlatan’s voice reverberated within his skull like God Himself had come a-knocking.
The boy, now awestruck by what he assumed was an ærengeist of Lucifer, ran back inside and I waited for his return. It couldn’t have been farther from the truth given that I had Azazel’s very eyes in place of mine.
----------------------------------------
“Báthory, why is it that we are here, in Northway?” I asked my sire, my heart still burning at her sight in what I could only describe as rapture. Her eyes were deeper than velvet and richer than the vermillion thread of würms that sorciers wore. With unblemished skin fair as rowan-bark and hair ashen-white, Bathsheba Báthory d’Ecsaed was an otherworldly beauty; a woman wrought of ice and sculpted from the purest marble, she looked more an ærengeist than flesh and blood.
“We’ve a funeral to attend.”
Even here, under the gaze of the bleeding-sun, Báthory needed to don a cloak lest she have to beat back suitors with a stick. That and the fact that she was a vampyre, deathly opposed to the Right Eye of God.
I wore a hood myself though I needed it not for the once-latent Solaire bloodline had awoken in my veins. Though my skin itched in contact with sunlight and broke out into hives with prolonged exposure, I could bear it without combusting into flames unlike my sire.
“Whose?”
Questions had become my fixation as of late. My last memory before my awakening at the bottom of the bay was that of her embrace and no matter how much I asked her of what had happened she would only tell me that I’d been stolen by another. That she had wrested me back from beyond the pale after my previous, false muse had discarded me like the filling’s of a chamberpot upon the gutters.
I wondered if the vampyre that had stolen me was that strange man I dreamt of. Though a vampyre requires little sleep, entering frequent bouts of torpor was common in neophytes such as I; something to do with acclimating the soul or the humours or somesuch though my sire refused to answer more.
“Why, darling, yours~”