Vergun gasped for air. Didn’t seem to be finding enough of it.
Osyrus mumbled something about lungs, then produced a needle and injected it downward through Vergun’s collarbone, into his chest. He flipped a valve on the needle, which released a hiss of air and left a putrid smell in the laboratory.
“Try again, Commander.”
“Silas … Bershad.”
“Blaming your failure on an external source is not acceptable.”
“This was a pretty powerful external source,” Castor said.
He told Osyrus Ward about the things they had seen Bershad do. The wounds he’d taken, and healed almost immediately. Ward did not seem surprised by any of the information.
“It sounds as if Silas Bershad has learned to make the most of his abilities. Good for him.”
“What is he?” Castor asked.
“He has a rare blood disorder that makes him vital to the reproduction cycle of dragons, as well as resilient to tissue and bone damage.”
“I shot him with a ballista before we left,” Castor said.
“That is unlikely to have killed him,” Ward said.
“Fix me,” Vergun rasped.
“That would be a waste of resources that could be better allocated elsewhere. Silas Bershad has proven himself to be far more powerful than you are. If I repair these injuries, you will simply go out and get more of them.”
Castor felt a swell of relief and excitement at the possibility of Vergun dying on this table. He could take the gold he’d been paid so far and get out of this city. Out of this fucking war. He didn’t have enough to buy a whole island, but renting a small fishing shack in the middle of nowhere was sounding more appealing to him with each passing day.
“The more productive action would be to improve you, rather than simply repair you,” Ward continued.
“Won’t … become … gray … slave.”
“That’s fine. The acolyte project has largely run its course anyway. But I have finally gathered enough materials to move to the next phase of trials, which require an alpha test subject.”
“What will it do to him?” Castor asked.
“Answering that question is the point of the test. But if successful, the process will make you far stronger and more … durable. It will give you the edge against Silas Bershad that you need.”
Vergun’s eyes were hungry. He nodded slowly. “Do it.”
Ward smiled. Castor’s heart sank.
“Let us alight to the upper reaches of my tower.”
* * *
Osyrus Ward led them to the highest chamber of the King’s Tower. For months, Ward had been funneling the bulk of his precious resources to this room. Castor had to admit he was curious what it was all being used for.
When Castor saw what Osyrus had built, his pulse completely escaped his control.
One side of the room had seventeen impaled men against it. Well, impaled wasn’t exactly right—they were strung up to the wall by steel beams and clear wires. And neither was the word men. They had human forms, but seemed to have been carved from trees rather than built from meat and bone. Branches with black leaves sprouted from their backs. Their legs had been shorn off and plopped into vats of green liquid. Their mouths were bolted shut with strips of metal, but they were definitely alive. Their eyes were open and full of fear.
The other side of the room had two tables. One had a Red Skull’s severed head on it. The other, two claws.
Despite these horrors, the machine in the middle was the most disturbing thing in the room.
It was about the size of a merchant wagon, and comprised of hundreds of sacks that looked kind of like half-filled wine bags. Each sack was stitched together from a horrific amalgamation of flesh and bone, and they were connected to each other by those rubber gaskets and tubes that Ward was always bitching about. Fluids burbled back and forth between different parts of the machine, causing the bags to shake and shudder, and causing Castor to feel very much like he was going to puke on the floor.
“I call it the loom,” Osyrus said.
“Why the fuck would you call it that?”
“I’ll show you.”
Ward stepped toward the middle of the machine, where there was a particularly large sack that was a few shades darker than the rest, and festooned with bones. He grabbed one of the bones and gave it a pull, which brought a whole framework of bones extending outward with a sticky shudder.
Castor hadn’t seen a loom in a long time, so it took him a moment, but the framework was a pretty close representation of the sewer’s tool.
“Don’t see any thread,” said Castor.
Ward snapped his fingers at the acolyte who had carried Vergun’s stretcher up the tower. “Place him in front of the loom, and mulch the Red Skull.”
The acolyte deposited Vergun, who was having trouble breathing again and seemed like he was quite close to death. Then he picked up the Red Skull’s head with two meaty hands and fed it into the right side of the machine, where there was a much larger gasket that looked a lot like a massive cow’s asshole.
The Red Skull was sucked into the machine. The sound of crunching, digesting bones that followed was a noise that Castor knew would haunt him for the rest of his life.
“Should I mulch the claws as well, master?” the acolyte rasped.
“No,” Osyrus said, moving over to the wall of tree people. “Until we obtain a more powerful energy source, we must rely on the dragon oil reserves for fuel. There is no reason to process more than necessary.”
The vats beneath the tree people were all connected by copper pipes that ran into the side of the loom. Osyrus bent down near one of them, cranked a lever back and forth a bunch of times, then pressed a button on the side of the pipe.
Castor couldn’t tell exactly what the button did, but it appeared to cause the tree people an enormous amount of pain. They shook and shuddered, dropping leaves all over the floor and attempting to wail, but the steel bands over their mouths muffled their cries.
A black fluid spread through the different sacks, and several moments later, a series of wet, black threads were pushed from the sacks and guided into the bony frame of the loom.
Osyrus ran a finger along one thread, then wiped it against a machine in the corner of the room. A bunch of dials sputtered and turned.
“Purity levels at sixty-two-point-three percent,” he muttered.
“Is that good?” Castor asked.
“Good enough.”
“So, they’re some kind of special stitches?” Castor asked.
“That is an adequate comparison. Stitches bind disparate elements together. And we are going to bind Commander Vergun to an entirely new set of elements.” He glanced at Castor. “You may leave, if you’d like. The process is … messy.”
Castor swallowed. He had seen and done his share of horrible things in his life. Only thing worse than doing them was being too soft to look at the results head-on.
“I’ll stay.”
Osyrus went to work.
Castor knew this would be unpleasant, but figured it couldn’t be much worse than a field amputation on a dying man after a battle, and he’d seen dozens of those.
He was wrong. The things that Osyrus Ward did to Vergun were a thousand times worse.
PART III
69
ACOLYTE 799
Location Unknown
Acolyte 799 woke up in the dark again. It was cold.
“The bindings along his nervous system are frayed,” came a familiar voice. His master’s voice.
“Damaged in his last combat sortie?” asked the man with the nasally voice.
“No. There is no evidence of exterior damage. Hm.”
Acolyte 799 felt an extreme amount of pressure around his right temple. For a moment, it felt like his entire brain was going to pop. Then it released.
“I see. An old pathway was retriggered.”
“That’s possible? How?”
“Coincidence, most lik
ely. I can patch the error, but it will always be weaker now, and prone to further error. Too risky to redeploy the unit into combat situations.”
“Do we scrap it?”
“No. After Vergun’s trial, we’re far too short on resources to waste him. Reassign him to a pacification ship stationed in a remote location, where the odds of a confrontation are low. All he needs to do is intimidate the crew enough so they don’t mutiny. One job he can still perform.”
“I’ll see to the details.”
70
VERA
Frutal-Kush Valley, Caellan’s Cabin
Vera woke up with a desperate gasp.
She wasn’t restrained, and she went for her weapons before she fully got her bearings.
“I took those,” came Caellan’s voice. She was sitting at a table across the room. A mug in front of her. “Wouldn’t want my mercy to bite me in the ass so soon after doling it out. I am sure that you know a thousand ways to kill me without your blades, of course, but trust me when I say those attempts would not end well for you. Not in my home.”
Vera looked around the hut. The walls and ceiling were made from a smooth and uniform lattice material. There were dozens of glass orbs hanging from the low ceiling. Each orb seemed to contain a miniature world of its own. One held a sandy landscape with a lone, black scorpion sunning itself under a heated orb the size of a marble. A field of headless grasshoppers were littered around its hairy claws. Another orb contained a lush rainforest full of moss and tiny ferns. Two brightly colored frogs hid amongst the leaves. And another still was nothing but dark green water and churning black snakes.
“I should note that my mercy is decidedly temporary. Back in the woods, I filled your bloodstream with a paralyzing agent. I gave you an antidote once I hauled you back here, but only the first in a sequence. If I do not administer another dose in twenty minutes, the paralyzing agent will take effect again, and you will die.”
“Why show me mercy at all?” Vera asked. “Temporary or otherwise.”
“Curiosity. I would like to know how a Papyrian widow wound up serving Osyrus Ward.”
“I was in the process of explaining that when you poisoned me.”
“I felt our conversation would be more fruitful without that claw at my throat. The results of contact with that specific toxin are extremely unpleasant. Turns your entire bowel to jelly.”
“You’re the one who made it.”
“Yes, I am. Along with so many other monstrosities. Now tell me, how did you become Osyrus Ward’s dog?”
“That’s not who I am.”
“Then who are you?”
“I am the last Papyrian widow. And I came here to get help for Kira.”
“That person is just a name to me. For all I know she could be worse than Osyrus.”
“No. She was trying to bring peace to Terra. Fill starving bellies. End useless wars. But the world is black and cruel and full of sharp teeth that chewed her apart. She was betrayed by her husband. Betrayed by her aunt, Empress Okinu. Betrayed by everyone.”
“She seems to have attracted a rather diverse amount of ire. That does not typically happen to magnanimous rulers full of kindness. Perhaps Kira simply overextended herself before she had the chance to grow black teeth of her own. Perhaps your teeth were not sharp enough to protect her. The rulers of this world will always disappoint you.”
Vera narrowed her eyes. She recognized those words. “Osyrus Ward said that to me once, back in Balaria.”
“The man is insane. That does not make him wrong. At least not about everything.”
Vera knew she wasn’t going to get anywhere by starting a philosophical argument with this woman, so she tried a different approach.
“Maybe Kira will turn rotten,” she whispered. “Maybe I already have, trying to protect her. But I am not going to let her remain in a fucking coma because I’m afraid of who she might become. I love her. I have for a long time, I think. But when the time came to tell her, I was afraid…”
Caellan took a sip from her cup. “Spare me the emotional plea, yeah? That might have convinced the softhearted alchemists back in Nisena to help you—it’s always effective to see the sensitive side of a fearsome warrior—but a decade of isolation and heavy drinking has hardened my heart a bit. I don’t give a shit who you love, and I don’t give a shit who Kira might help or not help if she’s healed. Do you think I came out here to the middle of nowhere because I was interested in drumming up new business from intrepid strangers? I want to be left alone.”
“Why did you leave that map behind, then?”
“Ah, right. That fucking map.” Caellan drank more. Refilled her cup from an earthenware jug. “I told myself that it was to allow a properly trained alchemist to find me, if they truly desired, so I might pass on my knowledge to someone worthy. I figured it would be a young disciple who’d figure out the map’s secret. Someone who hadn’t been tainted by the order and their precious protocols.” She let out a breath. “But I suppose the truth is that I always wanted someone to show up at my doorstep and make me pay for helping Osyrus Ward. I didn’t care who it was—one of his agents, or someone who’d found out what I had done. I just wanted them to earn it.”
Vera motioned to the Caellan’s cloak. “I’ve been around Osyrus Ward long enough to recognize his work. He made that for you, didn’t he?”
She nodded. “He called it his most elegant prototype, but like all of Ward’s creations, whatever exterior beauty they possess is belied by a skeleton of poison and pain.”
“What did you do to earn such a gift?”
Caellan stared into the corner for a long time, then shifted her gaze back to Vera and spoke in a cold monotone. “I broke the alchemist protocols that prohibit experimentation on Seeds. I discovered a way to suppress a Seed’s natural response to trauma, which allows them to endure in their human state for an unnaturally long period of time. Seeds appear resilient, but they are actually quite delicate, in their own way. I taught the method to Osyrus Ward. He gave me the cloak as a reward.”
She went to drink from her cup but found it empty. Instead of refilling it, she set it down on the table again, and continued to talk.
“I soon learned what he was planning to do with the knowledge I had given him. He doesn’t want to give Seeds normal lives. He wants to be able to torture them in perpetuity. When I discovered this, I tried to kill him. Failed. Then I ran. First, back to Pargos, where I asked the alchemist order for help. They told me that I had brought the guilt that I felt upon myself by breaking protocol, but offered no other insight or aid. So I left. Came to this valley.”
There was so much information within those words from Caellan—and so much of it impacted Kira—that Vera had a difficult time keeping her emotions under control. All this time, Kira had been tortured by Osyrus Ward, and she’d allowed it to happen under her very nose. But there was nothing she could do about that now except move forward.
“I know what it’s like to be abandoned by an order you’ve given your life to in service,” Vera said. “And I know what it’s like to be weighed down with guilt. But I will help you, Caellan.”
“How is that?”
“Once Kira is safe, there will be nothing stopping me from killing Osyrus Ward. And I want him dead just as much as you do.”
Caellan studied Vera for a long time. Eventually, she went to a different earthenware jug and poured a mug of liquid that smelled like a mixture of piss and vinegar. Brought it to her.
“Drink that.”
Vera sipped the drink. Coughed at the bitter taste. Then gagged. She put the mug down.
“Oh, I’d finish the balance if I were you,” Caellan said. “As in so many other aspects of life, half measures aren’t effective when it comes to antivenom.”
Vera did as she was told. Choking down the entire contents. She didn’t feel any different, other than wishing her tongue didn’t register the rotten taste, but that was probably a good thing.
“Does this m
ean that you’ll help me?”
“It means that you aren’t going to become paralyzed and die in the next ten minutes.”
Caellan poured herself a fresh mug of liquor. Vera could smell the potency of it from across the room.
“Now, I need you to tell me every single detail that you can about Kira’s condition, starting from the moment of her injury until the last time you saw her.”
Vera did as Caellan asked. She described the machines that surrounded Kira, down to the color of every last vat. She described the lung apparatus that Kira was attached to. All their efforts to get her off the machine. And the temporary effect of the Gods Moss.
“You’re rather resourceful for a bodyguard,” Caellan said when she was done. “The Gods Moss is one of the alchemist order’s most closely guarded secrets. How did you acquire it?”
“I got wind of a merchant who was transporting a small amount by caravan.”
“If the merchant knew the value, it must have been very expensive to acquire.”
“It was.”
Vera blinked. The merchant had had four bodyguards traveling with him. Vera had killed them all.
“And for all it cost me, the effects were only temporary. We only had a few minutes to speak. From what I had been told, it should have been enough to heal her completely.”
“Under normal circumstances, it would have,” said Caellan. “But Ward has most likely been feeding her the suppression tonic intravenously since the initial injury. After so much time, it will not be simple or easy to reverse his work, but it is possible. I have the materials.”
“How long will that take?”
Caellan sucked on her teeth. “Thirteen days.”
“When can you start?”
“Right away.” Caellan glanced at the door. Sighed. “Unfortunately, the first step is the most unpleasant. The Yellow Greezel’s venom is the only substance powerful enough to stimulate the reaction that we need from Kira’s body, and we need a rather large amount of it.” She stood. “Follow me.”
Fury of a Demon Page 37
