17 - 3

[Fool]

Madman

The Soap-Maker - 3rd of Mead’s Tap, 1125 A.E.

The Unhallow stood still, waiting to be filled with mehna, with the stuff of tortured souls, suffering spirits and mortified flesh.

Greth removed his gloves, rubbing his callous and pox-ridden hands. He’d had the opportunity to fix some of his body of now, but did not take upon it; why work so hard on something that would be thrown down the Seifar’s Stew in a fortnight?

Teeth yellow and rotten, it mattered not.

His new vessel stood before him, a great machine not beholden to the White Mortine Knell and that resist even the Crow Himself, what with it standing taller than even the tallest Kedweni man.

For now and until Greth saddled upon the gohlemni proper, he sustained himself upon the mehna of the elements within—of the essences sanguine, melaine, phlegmatic, and xanthencholic—he had taken from the cattle within the Qyranian cages; no better ironwork to keep a cunning creature bound than that of Qyrazael stock.

The Eastmen were good at the slave-trade, their nine-braided whips things of art in inflicting maximum pain and minimum wound. The welts and lines left behind were clean and precise, not the ragged and jagged, fever-inducing rents produced by Keddish stock.

Greth had time to admire his tools as he picked out the test subject for the Unhallow. Greth wouldn’t put himself in there first, letting another brave the waters for cold or serpents or drowners; the death-eaters that infested swamp and pond and lake, apt to drag a man down to the depths and feed them to their broods at the lightless fathoms.

The fact that the Exiled, the forefathers of modern Aardweni Kingsmen, travesered the Ydden at all to settle down here in the Corners was astounding. There were man-eaters in those waters, afterall.

The warlock shuffled amongst the line of cages, hunched posture held as high as he could bare and whip unfurling unto its nine separate tails that dragged along the floor in little pitter-patters like rain. The smell of slaughterhouse blood—heavy with stress and left to fester—bit into the nose, nice and choking.

The warlock let the stretched and striated skin of his dwindling spirit blanket most of the cattle room. He quested for a particular stock.

You? No. Too sickly now, but some extra fortifiers in the feed and by next batch, it’ll be ready.

Her? Ye-no. Better not. Too valuable for first blush at the Unhallow.

Him? No. Too old. Incompatible.

Her?

Greth stopped, turning on his heels towards a cage on his right.

The grey-haired tunnel rat cowered back from the warlock’s shadow, a smaller lump behind him. The smaller one’s spirit smelled immature and without the musk that humors of adulthood brought about.

Greth did not like unripe fruit for his experiments. They tended to die far too quickly in situations he liked to drag on—the shrill, piercing voices did not help at all. But they were needed to perfect the interface between him and the Unhallow. Greth was too far gone to directly bind himself to the ruddy machine-god.

“Yes, you’ll do.”

The whip cracked with the report of thunder in dark sky; the greyen rat swore beggings to the Seven—Black, Red, and Wine in particular.

The prayer summoned no guardian spirit from On High. It did nothing but elicit dark anger from the only true god in the room that held sway. That held sway.

“Oriath, Dyeus, Mortus.” Spat Greth, hackles raised and sneer between his eyes at the disgust of having Their names on his tongue. “The Three Brothers are not here—the one who decides your fate is before you, in the flesh. I am Them, and you’ll pray to me, wretch.”

The whip cracked again, this time like marmon falling from the cliffs to smack against the sea. A much more imminent danger than approaching storm.

Much worse, too. Lightning at least was quick. Stone tended to crush slowly if it did not fully turn to mush something vital.

“Step back and let the one behind you come to me. Or you’ll get three lashings for every nail I’ve taken from you yet.”

The warlock unlocked the cage, slow-like and loud to let the fear smolder; the greyen rat did not back away, the fire in his guts evidently greater than the embers Greth had tried to light under his feet. Albeit that he shook like Dudael and Ikisat were clamoring for his name in particular, the old man spread his arms backwards to shield that which shrunk behind him.

“Let’s see. One, two… six, seven, eight… twelve nails total. That’s three dozen lashings. Three dozen more Qyranian lariats than you can handle.”

Greth counted each and every time he cracked the whip along the man’s wincing form. A dozen exactly—there were three tails and thus talons to the nine-braided whip—so that none could call him a liar or a cheat. He was, afterall, both a liar and a cheat; calling him either without the other would be selling himself short, a disservice to the black name of Eladre.

Quite literally ‘the thief’ or ‘blaggard’ in the Valencian tongue; the one that Greth lacked to this day, now that he remembered it. With a Victoryman’s tongue he could complete his omniglot charm, an artifice that would allow Greth—as was proper, before the gods sundered the Tower of Babel—to talk with any and all, indifferent to language and even species.

The warlock shook his head, dispelling the foggy and scattered stream of thoughts. Now was not the time for inventory of that kind, the dead kind.

The greyen rat still did not back away, face and shirtless chest sunken to the ribs marred by long, burning lines of inflamed skin. He did not as much as whimper, the lump behind the rat doing it for him.

The only sign of pain had been the welts, the wincing, and the soundless, shuddering breaths that wracked his form like a soaked cat left out in the cold.

Respect and disdain bubbled in the foul cauldron of Greth’s heart. Contempt for such a pathetic defiance and a grudging acknowledgement that the warlock would not fair the same treatment with as much gusto—a Floreni loan-word spoken by the highborn of the Kingsland.

A shame. All that backbone but no muscle to leverage upon it…

The warlock looked at the rat as a farmer did to a cow with fat, swollen teets that need be milked lest the stuff just waste away.

Hells take me as Their own, I’ll hav’ta wash this one down later with a cooling salt-water-and-sulfur mixture; he won’t survive the fever elsewise. The fibers from his rent muscles will clog his kidneys if I don’t let out some blood, either.

Can’t risk losing such sturdy stock; so much untapped suffering in those that think themselves defiant.

As Greth had promised three lashes for each nail, he had to change methods of pulling the stuck-in badgermole from his den. The idea of using mehna on such an endeavor did not sit right with Greth but it served more than one purpose.

The rest would obey.

New stock is always so riley. So rebellious. Gotta break ‘em in no different than a new shoe.

Befuddlement settled on Eladre Junior’s face. Strange that that expression is so common, he thought. Nobody’s got shoes down here.

Not even me.

With a hand held tight at the amulet of Father’s heart and clacking bone, blood in the form of fire wound its around the warlock’s fingers. Licking and baying with the screams of the dying and the dead, blood-fire—as was Greth’s name for the substance—made for a hellish visage.

“Step back or I’ll flay her alive myself while ye watch.”

The greyen rat did not back away.

Greth would have smiled at the thought of wreaking more pain… had a time limit not been imposed upon him; nigredo and mutable flesh of its ilk needed strict environmental conditions lest they succumb to infestations of spirit or fungus.

At most a single Wheelen week from now, seven days for seven damnable gods, and the Unhallow would bear life of a different sort from the warlock’s design.

That would not do.

The ruby scarlet of the wrathful flame nestled in the cradle of his hands smoldered and simmered with the barely constrained need for violence. To rip and savage apart, the essence of blood made into the shape of consuming fire was a precocious houndling.

Under his heel, it would obey. It would not do anything without his bidding.

The sigils carved upon Greth’s master-glyph, the symbol of vitriol surrounded by older and nigh-illegible alchemick script, burned with the vibrant red of humor sanguine; the slave-mark painted in scars upon the old rat’s temple, burned in tandem those stitched on the warlock’s left hand.

Wails of paralyzing, back-arching excruciation tore from the rat’s throat.

Ahhh, not even that backbone o’ yours is enough. Before the rending of your spirit apart into sinew, you are but another weakling. Another son of Father.

The greyen rat fell, limp and blind and dead to the world from the shock, the smaller lump behind him scurrying further into the darkened shadows of the Qyranian cage.

The old rat was still alive, mind. Only unconscious. Too precious to let die so quickly.

“Come.”

The girl, with little less than two cycles from her fortyear ceremony, stumbled forth unto the man clad in far too much garb for the Undercity; all rags and bandages and linen wrapped around a spindly form of protruding bone and sinewy muscle.

It looked like, to the brown-haired girl, that death had eaten him from the inside out, hollowin’ him to the spine.

She was not entirely wrong, Greth concurred. Blood-fire and whatever other magicks he had scavenged from the guilder he had killed were piecemeal. Their prices were steep and their interest rates worse than the eastern usurers of the Land of Sand and Flower.

Blood-fire required an anchor for it to feed upon, the mehna taken from others but oil to the wick of himself; no matter that the oleum of sanguine essence staved off the burning of flesh and spirit, a small amount of backlash was to be expected for no wick was eternal. Add in the shitty efficiency ratio of the sympathetic matrixes he had so shoddily carved into himself and others, and Greth appeared as he was now:

From the center of his black-hearted chest onwards, dark like the soot and char of a fire had spread in tendrils of encroaching, parasitic vine. Scarriefied glyphery shone like silver in between the spirit-burnt parts of himself.

His days had been numbered even before Eladre Junior had truly chanced upon the trade-most-foul. Before the Man had come to him in sweat-filled, feverish dream induced by far too much druggae and cheap pipe. And so, Greth had not and did not care overmuch about Mortus’ breath at the back of his nape; all born under Heaven and Earth were subject to Death’s mandate, that all things must come to an end.

“I will break this miserable chain. I will not bow.”

The rat that nipped at his heels ignored the rambling, her ilk already accustomed to hearing Greth’s monologues. Some, the last and newest batch, had even jeered the warlock.

‘I’ve heard better by worse troupers, ye doggerel Red Dragon. I could buy scarrier stock of a man from a Cyroshi pleasure ‘ouse. Them prissy ladymen, with face whiter than fine flour are tenfold the fright of a devil-fucker like ye, blighted buggerer.’

Greth had not killed the man but for the fact that he did not cower beneath the heel of the blood-fire channeled through his slave-mark. He made for pleasant enough company anyhows, not scared to crack a jest at the warlock’s expense.

A court fool full o’ wit, that one was in his last Turn o’ the Rotunda, Eladre thought as he strapped the girl to the marmon-dining-table-turned-altar, channels no longer stained ruddy. The smell of old and fear-ridden blood was but an undertone to the cutting astringency of harsh chemickals and alchemickals.

Mundane means for the earthly matter and magicking for the spiritstuff left behind. Mehna could not be left to stagnate and thus calcify, lest the flow of ambient etherohumors be compromised. An inquisitor would be sure to follow up on why a Gaeyan priest suddenly felt the earth’s spirit clog up like a fat-ridden artery.

Besides, it did no good to leave an altar dirty and without repair.

“W-when will I see papa again?”

The warlock looked down in confusion at the noise. Oh, forgot it was there.

Given that men left that altar like an offering to the gods left the tables of Sevenfold temples—sallow and burnt and but husks of their former selves, just like Greth—she was not going to see the greyen rat.

Huh. What will I do with that one? A mehna distillery is far too simple for such a grand tap…

A black smile spread through Eladre’s cracked lips and skull-sunken cheeks; he could use the man’s remnant will as a relay in the Unhallow. All that iron and steel would serve well to protect Greth from the psychic backlash of so many distorted and patchwork spirits working in dissionant concert.

“Don’t worry, you’ll see him very soon.

“A single moon at most. A week at least.”

Scattered Notes of the Guildam Alchemist Savarro Trendham

‘Humor sanguine, burnt with salt and tempered with mashed sage, infused with the blackness of essentia melaina and the caustic bite of yellow bile…

‘Neither salt nor mountain ash binds the blood in form of flame, for both are but its children. Unlike other spirit bodies, most peasant exorcisms fall short; swears hold no sway without proper Wellfontian tethers, bring meister with Guildam seal or even parish yoke in case of containment breach…

‘Requires a vessel of either twice-mooned sterling of silver or a sturdy rodent by which it may ride and embody upon Terra Mundus its likeness…

‘Do not let it touch saponified fats in any fashion. They are strangely combustible, being not biologically compatible in the slightest yet still…

‘To quench the scarlethean, water does neither do. Only dirt and rock upon it and lack of free-flowing air such as in an entirely enclosed space, may stop the scarlethean consumption…

‘Beware letting the envesseled rodent touch upon others of its kind or, worse still, a man. Scarlethean spreads by contact and aurates its essence at two span away from the aural source; no mediums for it to inhabit and most inorganic and biologically incompatible material, beyond syrups of lye, are sufficient for…

‘Though heavily dangerous, such as with the case of two magister-bearing towns—one in the Year of Our Lord 1105 A.E. and the other in 1112 A.E.—having fallen plague to and been entirely scoured of human and bestial life by, the scarlethean is not an unsanctioned magick…

‘Useful in the gathering of spiritual energies, and thus, in the minting of…

‘Maegort, I know you’ve found some harlot or another in that Seifourath’s hovel below. Please inoculate your lower member with baths of tenth-diluted oxygenated water, once-diluted quinine if there are canker sores (new batch from Valencia arrived just this morn), and strong, undiluted and pure spirit.

‘I don’t want a sending from the message-boy saying that you’ll stay home to recuperate. I need your help with testing the minting process of [illegible] with blood taken from badgermoles. Can’t wrangle the bastards myself. Did you know that they the only egg-laying mammals this side of the Ydden?

‘P.S. Knowing how scatter-brained you are, you’ll probably read this part only after taking the inoculation bath. The unadulterated spirit does nothing that the hydragum aeranata cannot do. It’s only there for the sting, you dolt.

‘Best that the lesson sticks: if you want to wet your prick, go to the Elariarelean Temple by the place where the Sublime and Artisan’s Quarter meet (just to the right of that Floreni shoewright, you know the one that’s been mounting that mare you call a mother).

‘Sure, a Purple Priestess costs a whole talent for even the quickest of dips, but at least they’re clean of venereal poxes. No chance of the Lothoringian Shepherd if you don’t sleep with the sheep and all that.’