Chapter IX
With the violet-cherry blush of the sun’s imminence striking past the embankment of dwindling clouds, Dr Halloway returned to the manor’s interior. No groans from slumbering servants greeted him. Although freed of the hex by that warlock’s departure they did not wake. Perhaps more of the leech’s debris lingered on, yet he docked the rest of his concern on the matter of the Duskmont heir.
Lucilla’s gaze stabbed forward, harboring an arctic film to drown all evident thought in hoarfrost. As Valdred entered and cautiously approached her eyes remaining fixed on darting molecules in the air. “He is dead.” The flat bed of her tone dressed no mourning. If a thread of that curtain of her whisper was needled with turmoil it was wound seamlessly in the fabric.
Valdred nodded, set his half-emptied draught on the board, then appraised her condition. Her pulse: withering, yet faintly present. Tortured contortions fettered the rhythm of her vitality. Leagues within a minute drew on without the sounding of her drum. Rime from her breath brushed his cheek, and when he turned to observe her stare he saw a crack in her iris, separating color. Her light splintered and forked, yearning to leap from color into an encroaching abyss.
“Doctor?” Pallor crystallized over Lucilla’s mien. Though her tone was naked of grief, her eye professed a cognizance of the soul’s winter creeping neath her marrow. “His blood is in me… the ills he brought with him are visited upon me. You know the nature of it?”
“No greater hazard will come from you guessing at what he was. Our myths of primeval horrors bear too many shades into reality.” Valdred renounced his tinted bifocals, revealing somber eyes of silver. “The fiend’s blood will not sate you long. He shared his pestilence, and the need for fresh red will find you. I cannot ask forgiveness for my failure. I should not have offered you sleep – or at least not left this vigil - when the shadow sought prey.”
“Death is finer company than he ever was.” Lucilla hauled herself up from a cadaver’s pose, tearing away the ligatures that the profaner’s accord wrought upon her. “How did this come to be? What wraith of pestilence possessed him that now feeds off me?”
Valdred glanced out into the dying night slinking through the aperture, half expecting Harrow’s reinventor to be glaring back through the ether. “I suspect Harrow indulged many visits to his night-spouse before she became his patroness. He was pledged to her, his siren, before his burial whether he knew it or not. It was not this night alone that you were bled by his betrayal.” Mangled compassion traced its way back to her. “He forced the illness upon you, without practiced tenure. The change will come sooner for you and with more terrible sway.”
“You knew what he was. So, you have dealt with his kin before?”
“Aye. I contended with one other.” There’d been another, of course, but Valdred could not count her name among the damned. It had just been the one fiend, the arch terror, he told himself. Not his Ciarra. “I learned their ruinous proportion firsthand. Thought I’d bested it, only to meet that same devil again until the means to destroy them arrived. Failure finds me lacking, in being unable to divine the plague-bearer who brought this curse into our circle… Vying against the other carrion-creatures their kind so oft employ has not mended my own frailty, it seems.”
“Soon to be my kind. I will not shy from it.” Lucilla’s stare, aloof yet piercing, shuttered no deceit in the cold worry crossing into Valdred’s windows. “Is there a cure?”
She read the answer in his wounded eyes before his baritone affirmed it. “Nay, no cure. Not one you could live to know.” Hurt lay in his look; dismay contorted his feature; years of fruitless attempts to have found a better answer were written into the scarred creases of his gray.
Lucilla’s next inquiry felt achingly hollow even to speak. “Is there no faith that can offer a miracle? Any sun to shield this devil’s breath?”
“Not one I know or possess. The soul is sapped, the wyrm burrows through the seal.” Valdred expelled a morose cloud that hung in his airs. “Humor an old fool, dear Duskmont: did you abide in any real fervor of faith before? Did you repeat your daily prayers to the god of our Queen’s church? Have you held communion with your parents’ lord or their forefathers’ gods?”
Lucilla’s sigh sank her back into the bed. Mummified in the red spattered sheets, she hailed the grave with her tongue. “I should tear all icons of tired faith from these walls. This world poisoned my heart before the fangs ever neared my throat… No sanctum in our city ever brought me to the divine, only by the customs of the court did I humor the ceremonies.”
“You lose no virtue for not following one state-steeple’s savior or any for that matter. Our city so loves to block the glow of the supernal.” As the doctor pressed on, his scourged patient pondered if he spoke more to distract from a critical matter in his mind than to illume her condition as it was. Even so, a part of her that shriveled at his diagnosis bid her to listen, not to rush her pale fate. “Many cling to faith for comfort. Our need is organic, but no less tarnished for pouring from our hearts. Most pleas ring hollow. We’ve not kept the faith; forgotten all dawns for our umbras; the stars of our forebears are immured. Even idols may have power. But few are left among us who can say they know divinity; few who can summon a flame in their breast for a prayer beyond preserving their muscle and retaining some pleasure while it lasts.”
“This country casts a Lethean haze in the draught we breathe here.” Lucilla scorned the stars. “Our history converges with mist, threaded by spurious memory. Tis no wonder we should falter in seeking ardency against the… against what has come upon me from stygian sorcery.”
“I am inclined to share that fearful notion.” Valdred’s eyes wandered a moment, all paeans in his argent soul churning with laments and denial of the world’s ambrosia. “Hels, the reigning powers believe themselves to have ruled over aeons despite the crests & consortiums here being infants compared this lost realm they levied with their claims. Though I suppose that is not so different from the royals of the old world.”
“And so, we have forgotten our hope? Thus, we are waylaid onto the dawnless tide, never to know what sins & withered glories sailed us here.” Lucilla groaned derision, cursing herself for a moment of frailty that cost her immortal hope. Contortions of a harried soul writhed beneath her changeling flesh. Where threads were clawed to ribbons, though hastily redressed, she bared wan beauty bound to torturous ripples (transforming skin to pulpy scale) through her course.
“Do not asper yourself all guilt.” Wizard-white strands stole the silver shading the man’s beard, already pushing past its trimming to twirl a few years’ stress into the twine of the hour. “I did not honor you nor the order of my mother & father’s faith. Nor did I act on my suspicions soon enough to illume Harrow in fire.”
“But you banished him! The shade is gone… I no longer feel his call tuning my strings.” Lucilla’s insistence forged the first fire from her lungs since the cold first bit her. Valdred’s eye lingering urged her to confess further, for she twitched with revulsion at the vermin’s kiss furrowing through her. “Though corrosion is there. This wyrm of rot.”
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“By science, coiled fortune, and the fiend’s own faults did I exile him from this veil. There are elements in this plane which the father of phantoms was unaware. Weapons in nature and alchemy that he did not grant his aegis for; alien to them.” There was no triumph in his sound, no trumpet. Instead, he bore the rumble of misery’s chord, a minor tone, deep as a cathedral organ with funereal resonance in its bass. “Yet no wonder of art, science, or belief can I offer you now.”
What was alight in Lucilla just as swiftly froze over. A bleak gust spelled her resignation from the world, carrying off with her mauled spirit. “Then I shall. It is decided for me. Let it be so… I must tear these veins to be rid of the poison. If you would deny me that rite, let me fade. I will reject the siren’s call so it shall eat only me. I will waste away and drag this tumor alone.”
A brutalist construct of a frown altered the architecture of the doctor’s face. Dark folds stripped his iron grey to barren angles, seeming a man sculpted of marble, hinting sorrow with his shrunken curl. “I fear I cannot allow that, fair lady.” He planted his hat back atop his hair, now mangier a mane than the scavenger he’d slain, then stepped up for a pace. The brim of his cap kept all but his nose and some stray locks under a thin shroud, but the glint of hurt quaked to burn past the small shadow. “No matter your character, the iron of your will, the demon will speak through newfound instinct. You will thirst for mortal life. You will not know one wellspring from another in the desperation you’d try to see through. Could we stomach chaining you to the bed and praying you simply wither in utmost famine?”
Gaunt as she was, an unseen gale lifted Lucilla, standing up effortlessly to face the doctor. A few wayward nose hairs of his brushed her eyes, blazing rimy stars from depths past those her skin could carry. “What sourced the fiends? From whence did our pilfering, perjuring Harrow find this ‘gift’ he visited upon me? What legion now moves upon me, recruiting a killer from this corpse? Let me know this much at least.”
“I only know so much, more their symptoms and effects than their true history. Mere fragments of legend that bear some truth in their bane. But I have my weird whims and suspicions.” Valdred reached back for his glass of spirits on the headboard. He swirled postulations and lore with his deep sip. Sifting in a moment’s haze to contemplate an adjacent aspect to the lurking harvester on the road ahead. “For one, there is an ancient fable. The goddess, Ishtar, in her means of demanding the bull of heaven once more, threatened to tear the gates between. To bring up the dead to whelm the living for their feast. Perhaps her gesture went further, a few geists of the gulf did leach away. As only some strays escaped, their hosts are yet to outnumber us.”
“Before these restless spirits and their fellows came from the netherworld to be blooded on our earth, they made a friend and father in the void. A sanguine daimon discovered the fugitives of the realm below and fostered their nature to its liking. An aspect of Abis, a demon, lured more souls to his pact. They struck a covenant to retain dominion over their demimonde spheres and still stalk as shades on our planet. They fell into the bones of the buried, thirsting for richer embodiment in the vitae of our grove’s fallen children.” Halloway’s drink swirled with the shared twinkle of his stare; a translucent beam of melted silver, forging a river through their tunneling flumes. “This curse trespasses matter & spirit; it will mold you to the sunless wings of an undying worm. With one tap to quench it, you will not know yourself. You will be gone to corruption. To know no will but the avarice of the abyss.”
A long break from their somber instruments befell. The wind played coy, restraining its whimpers from the passing of the storm. “What shall we do now? What is left to us next?”
“I can offer only this cross.” Valdred, though claiming no faith, clasped his breath to a stifling prayer as he gazed long into Lucilla’s twilight bonfires. “As uncouth as this might sound, good lady, I must ask: how do you wish to die?”
The lady took no offense. Lucilla delegated half her mind to serious estimations and threw the rest to a humor stretched for the gallows. “On an isle far from here. Surrounded by salt and summer skies where I can forget the stone & smog of this retching purgatory. On ground earned by mine own merit and not my line’s.” She stifled a stream inside that broached effervescence with viscous baubles in her arteries. “But paradise is too exotic, beyond my lot. I suppose that window is not open to me, is it?”
“No.” Said Valdred. “Not unless you can summon a ship and chart those waters before sunrise.” The dour man savored the burn of his smoke in the throes of extinguishment, before tossing the corpse of it out the window. “I must ask again: how would you like to die?”
“In the sun… without nauseous factories or plague fumes. Just the open sky. Away from this dusk for once.”
“It will be beyond pain. You will decay from within for every ray that brushes your face. To soak will scorch you. Even then you will need my assistance to fully fly on wings of ash. Lest you be a gorgon statue of innermost rot.”
“Then let me face the scorch of a final dawn. Let it be my choosing, my own place. One hour away from this farce before the perennial gloom. If heaven should seek me, I will answer. But I’ll insist on nothing save for recanting the revenant shadow. If only to claim some shape to this soul before it is lifted from me.”
Eviscerations of empathy wracked Halloway’s eye. The curious doctor twined awe & anguish in his study of the proud noblewoman. A windfall of bubbling ridges sprouted under his sleeve, hailing chilled mounds of flesh along his arms like cairns across the barrows.
“You will suffer the pains of hell and I would be remiss to promise you the boon of heaven.”
“I shall still seek heaven in the heart of hell. Let me burn in that star’s vigil until the air singes wings to rush me beyond this curse.” Defiance sprang from Lucilla’s cords, speaking with confidence so far unfounded in one whose house underwent charnel reformation.
“Would you like another shot of something? A sedative, or anything else, to quell mortal nerves and impulse while it is still yours?”
“No. I will face the end sober. As pure as I still may be.”
“That is more than I could manage, were I in your place.” Valdred pondered his dwindling spirits, sloshing the glass about and eying the splash with shameful lust. From a latch on his belt, he pulled out a shimmering vial. Some uncanny solution danced within the glass. An amateur’s try at a grim jest steered his proposal. “Since an old physic’s leeching will not do… you may want to drink this at least.”
“This?” Suspicions of cruel mercy jostled Lucilla’s brow. “Surely, this is not something to ease the pain. Since I have refused that term.”
“Quite the antithesis. To the contrary of sweeping pain away, this will assure it for infernal proportion.” The doctor scratched the brim of his bridge as he “This flask captures an element to burn the worm inside you. Sunrise will wield the reins to drive it. But the parasite will not flee to exile softly before it can make a thrall of you. Immolation of the infecti-”
“Good.” Lucilla’s burgeoning smile blistered the gloom around her. She gazed past Valdred, snatching the concoction, letting her expression be painted by the vista brushed over the horizon. Purplish clouds melded their nebulous tendrils with orange fire from above their shorn rims. “I will share empathy with the sun, then. Burn by my own star, before ever being kin to that beast. If it’s only dark beyond there, at least I shall be warm.”
She glid across the floor, a familiar phantom in her own house. Tilting her back to study this scholar of the damned while the incendiary element in the vial assailed her gullet. Liquid wrath seared her innards. For a sharp beat, Lucilla sealed her eyes; observing the dragon’s river spread through tissue and inlet. Swallowing fire, she grasped what molten steel she could to steady her speech. “What shall you do next?”
Valdred answered with a forlorn sigh. He could not claim to know what should become of her soul, nor his own even. The crux weighed heavy, and he was anchored to yet more gruesome labors before the city would be done with him. His wound still called to be redressed, soaked with saline, but the fiery brume from Lucilla’s essential broth grasping for air through her shell demanded he whet his focus. Admiration made it no less Augean to ensure her end.
Then she looked away and marched forward. Chthonic spouts roused spasms she fought to suppress, rattling her with every step. Lucilla vowed to redeem some grace in herself when her wraith peeled vessels and burst with dread vapors. Soon, the agony would demand her yield of tears and frightful tremors, simmering as her form felt the denial of its rebirth.
A shred of sorrow spilt from Valdred’s eye, dripping into the glass to be gulped in the same flash. Knocking back the last of his draught, diluted by a tear, he bathed in the briny aftertaste. Then he followed his host through the threshold to the garden courtyard, into the dawn and what it delivered.