12.7
Jewel had met many wizards in her life. She felt that she had a good basis for judging them.
The Court Wizard of High King Mathias managed to fit somewhere between Tsulogothulan and Jaksa.
He mostly lacked enough wizardly strangeness to mark him as being a full weird. But he actually bothered to arrive in a suitably sorcerous manner when they arrived in the room where Mathias said the rituals were performed.
A hot searing heat, the abrupt ring of metal upon metal. And then a flash of sparks sailing back from his form.
He wore what Jewel at first took as heavy leather over his chest which hung in a skirt across his legs. A loop hung it from his neck and it was tied around the back of his waist.
His legs were further covered in a shorter skirt of what again moved like leather, but as the scent of it settled off him Jewel corrected her original assumption regarding it. This was not anything of flesh or fabric. But a rich and solid iron.
Rust Red and brown clothing. His skin was equally flushed, his hair a mix of deep black and a silvery shine. Face completely bare of any hair but bushy silvered brows.
Every muscle seemed prominent and in many places along his arms were pits and scars. But instead of pale burnt flesh was the dull gray of metal. His eyes when he opened them lit the room with a deep red of smoldering embers.
His shoulders and arms were as wide and long as Jewel’s father had. But he stood hardly taller than Adelyne.
“My King, why have I been called?”
His voice rumbled, whistled sharply and creaked in his chest. There was fire and heat to his breath. His pockmarked fore arms flexing at his sides, as if wanting to grasp something. His hands fingering at the garment at his front. The left hand finally succumbs to the desire and pulls out a delicate little hammer.
He smelled like charcoal and sweat.
“The Countess of Viznove, Lady Jewel of Rochford desires an explanation of how my latest project was accomplished. She is performing the final evaluation on if we can afford to put them to use in the Realm.”
The eyes which glowed with the heat of a furnace looked up at Jewel before nodding. A breath that was hot and whistling passed his lips somehow distantly howling.
“Fizzbunches and his circle’s project? A delight to finally meet you Lady Jewel of Rochford.”
He offered her a hand that even as he extended it the skin burned and pulled back with a bubbling almost tumorous upwelling of lumpy orange metal beneath.
Jewel dubiously extended her own hand to grasp his forearm as one might a comrade. It felt a bit improper to accept that she considered him a brother in arms. But he had offered her the trust of it first and he sounded and smelled like a decent fellow.
Worse first impressions had been made by sorcerers to Jewel.
Two stand outs immediately come to mind.
She spoke with the care and decorum her mother taught her.
“Whether the circumstances call for joy or sadness remain to be seen. And your name Lord Sorcerer?”
His grip was firm, solid, like stone and metal. It felt proud but with no ill intent. Like a solid foundational stone bearing a great work. The heat of red hot iron pressing in and shaping to settle between her scales surprisingly soothing on Jewel’s forearm.
“Erhard Ironhand, Court Wizard of the High King Mathias' household.”
He turned his furnace lit eyes from Jewel to the thing that was not a woman. Then was in motion, turning his back to her, smooth and efficient. Not a waste to any step. The flushed red skin of his hands returned as the hot metal receded.
A finger reaching out to gently lift the chin of the thing that was once a woman.
He spoke while it said nothing.
“A challenge this was, To turn the spillage and slag of another’s work into proper form and art.”
He flicked the thing’s nose, which stared ahead impassively. A wave of heat, the only warning before every scrap of clothing on the hungry corpse’s body, ignited in a white hot flare then extinguished just as sharply into a fine powder of ash.
“More a work of carving away from a whole thing than a melting or shaping. Striking the metal of the flesh until it cleaves apart and leaves the final result is what he did.”
He circled the naked body, which stood, breathed, had a heart that beat and yet did not sweat despite the heat. Did not give up a single drop of water or air, only took in either and squeezed the life out of them.
“The original method was amateur work, Slow to reach the result, crude, trades a break in one for a weakening fault in another. First thing to do was to hone that, find how much it could be strengthened, how hard a blow it could be while not shattering the material completely.”
Jewel listened but so far was not liking anything she heard.
“Needed to call in assistance from the heavens for that part. Took a month or longer without them. But find the right god? Can do it all in a single night, met more trouble there though.”
For the first time since he’d stripped the thing that at least looked like a woman the forge lit eyes fixed to the face of the corpse. Spoke evenly and directly.
“Will you obey the order of the High King or myself in his stead?”
The thing that was not a woman spoke evenly and calm.
“Of course lord sorcerer.”
Jewel noticed that the High King had been slowly stepping back from both of them, making his way behind his guards.
Men in heavy armor who were already bracing behind heavy shields and arming themselves.
Erhard stared straight into the corpse’s face and commanded her.
“By the bindings made upon you, by the oath of the gods and the command of the High King Mathias and his power invested in me as his Court Wizard I order you to go to your son and tear his head fro-”
And like Jewel had seen before in what was now her feasting hall the thing moved almost faster than any sense should have allowed. What had appeared to be an ambulatory corpse of a woman flared with a wrenching sucking void and divine presence.
Both the terrible emptiness in its heart and the layered and enfolding lances of cutting divinity suddenly flaring in a whorl. But what was surprising is that in the time it took her to blink the Court Wizard had been struck so hard across the face he was thrown into the far wall. The sound of metal and flesh being wrenched and torn only fully settling after Jewel realized he had impacted.
Stone was broken and as Jewel prepared to muster her flame to destroy the obviously feral thing she was halted by its words.
The voice of a dead woman now living but a moment echoed from that throat. Drawn out with a most aching pain. But above all else a vibrant and inescapable truth of rage at the trespass, and in the settling cloud of an undeniably living fear and love.
“You will not touch him!”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Jewel stared, the thing settling back to a quietude, the hungering depths in its chest slowly closing up again. The divine working that laced and lashed through it stilling to near un-notable levels.
It turned to stare at Mathias, face ever so slightly twisted toward annoyance, the feral anger of before a vague blur of memory for how brief it had been.
“My High King Mathias, you do not truly command this do you?”
There was not a hint of danger, remorse, or concern.
Not even a single drop of feeling in the air, no scent released.
The High King from behind his guards asked with a wide smile, not even a hint of concern in his tone.
“What would you do if I said yes? Despite all the sorcery riddled through you? Supposedly made by your own living words to vow that you would serve me in exchange for the restoration of your son to full health?”
Her head tilted slightly, turning slowly to look at Jewel.
Then back at him, face slack.
“I would either perish in flame or leave you and all your men smote upon the walls of this room, your blood wetting my hunger, and then I would acquire my son and we would depart the realm and travel until we were beyond your kin’s reach. All who sought to stop us I would slay and then I would see that he grew to be a good man and found himself a wife and raised a family.”
The words were a disorienting mix of dead flat statements and violently emotional cries. A living woman briefly being smothered by her own corpse as she spoke in turns.
Mathias nodded and then spoke simply.
“You will never be ordered to do such again and I will swear to my stars I will give no such order to harm your son. This was a test for the benefit of the Lady Jewel to show the truth of your nature.”
And just like that all the subtle poise was gone, even the more overt hint of the divine workings or that endless hunger folding up and snuffing out.
The thing that was both alive and not simply sood there.
And then in another sudden strike of metal upon metal and a flash of sparks Erhard Ironhands was right in front of her again nodding.
“That’s the impurity to it all, and the biggest fault in the working itself.”
Jewel looked at the Wizard and then the corpse.
“Fault? What Fault!? Why did you order her to do something so horrible!?”
Erhard walked around the corpse, looking at her like a shaped tool, one that he seemed annoyed by.
“Jaksa the Red did not set out to make servants, and there is nothing in the working that could be used to make such. These products are not tools, they are the cast offs of tools.”
He prodded the chest of the thing as it breathed calmly in an imitation of life. There was a slightly more ravenous pace to it then had been before, a hunger to the paleness of the skin. A desperation to the way the nostrils were flaring slightly.
“Everything about it stems from violation, rebellion, refusal to give any more of what is taken, hunger to restore what can never be returned.”
He spoke of something monstrous, horrific and somehow even worse than what Jewel’s own senses had made of the things. It made her flame want to rise and slay the Countess Bathory and see her burn.
The feeling was not sated that she already had.
But the wizard continued, apparently ignoring her growing displeasure. Speaking with an even but fascinated tone.
“No chain of metal, sorcery or divinity could hold such a thing against its will without it tearing itself apart. We tried with beasts, criminals.”
He just kept talking, intimating so many horrors in simple passing.
“We tried a dozen gods and their auspices to make tighter chains. No good, it just destroys them.”
Jewel stared at the Wizard, then at the High King. Just how many of these things had he made in the years since he saw them and acquired the means?!
“Eventually we tried volunteers, and that gave the first hint of a way to finally shape this wasteful slag.”
Jewel hissed out in horror.
“Who would volunteer for this!?”
Before either Mathias or Erhard could answer, the thing spoke.
“My son was dead that night, the fever took him just like his father.”
The voice of a grieving woman who yet held her tone with a solidness of iron and determination Jewel had heard before in the voice of her own Father and Thurzó.
“They swore that he would live again for a price, They swore he would be safe and want for nothing even if I could no longer care for him.”
There was a tremble as the corpse’s hands gripped closed.
“They called down Asherah with my spilled blood and the dead body of my son.”
Jewel stared at the thing as its face twitched and tried to clench, at the eyes trying desperately to keep all of the world to themselves even as thick red welled at the corners and then began to slide down its cheeks in bloody tears.
She could feel the void trying to keep all of that to itself and yet the voice of a dead woman could force it free.
To make the dead cry.
“They took my health, my life, my love, they saved my son. He breathed, his heart beat, his life came back into him as mine went out.”
There was a shudder up and down it. A sound that creaked somewhat like a whimper.
“And then as my son opened his eyes Asherah spoke to me, she offered me a way to remain for him, to be his mother still. Even as I died. She offered it to me as a vow.”
Jewel found her words, the voice of the dead woman, the true words of her echoed in the room.
Not the dead empty thing but a resonant echo. Bound into her hungering flesh and empty heart like marks carved in stone.
“What did you swear?”
The thing turned to Jewel and spoke with the voice of a dead woman, smile momentarily forced into a radiance of joy, red tracks of her tears curling around her cheeks as her eyes practically seemed to struggle and strive to escape her sockets, bound by the divine markings etched deep into them.
“Asherah swore to me! She Swore that she would keep my dead flesh true to my heart or it would perish in my blood’s fire.”
And then the face’s animation fell away, the muscles going placid, the skin soaking up and devouring the red liquid that had drifted down its cheeks. Flushing briefly before secreting it away deeper within the hungry thing.
Erhard’s voice is just as stern as before, but he sounds incredibly pleased in spite of it.
“That master stroke was mine. How do you shape rebellion borne of violation? How do you bend righteous betrayal? It’s a gentle thing, not a forceful blow.”
Jewel just stared numbly at the Wizard.
He was proud of what he had performed here.
He’d taken a mother’s love and used it to make some kind of sorcerous chain to command her revenant flesh? As she thought that, she could almost see the chain links of fauxfire, ringing true as much more than metaphor.
“Of course, such a method can only do so much. We can’t force the nature of their vow. Tried that, even if they claim it is by their own will to give us their loyalty it never works. Is why she knocked me into a wall. She was the test to see if the countess' old failure with the mother that ate her own child was worked out.”
Jewel stared at the wizard.
“Did you fail with other women? Did one of them eat their child before this?!”
Erhard scoffed.
“Of course not.”
Jewel let her neck relax ever so slightly.
“All the ones that betrayed themselves like that burst into flames immediately, I do better work then that. Even when working with gods.”
Jewel could only stare at the wizard.
“Now if that answers the Lady Jewel’s interest in how the things were made, could she spare a moment to let me see some of her breath anathema? I’ve got some samples I’d love to see burnt in your fires.”
Jewel stared down at the man with furnaces for eyes.
Face stern and yet somehow childishly eager in the way the flames flickered in his sockets.