Fire and Sword
Page 30
Two forms sat hunched forward over a scarred wooden table. They were alone in the library at this late hour and their conversation was deep, carrying their minds to a different place, and so they cared not for the fury that came down from beyond. They did not notice the wind.
“What you are proposing, Gaige… What it is that you are proposing…” Professor Lumire began, his words reverberating in his swaying, saggy cheeks. “It is not science. It is not medicine.” Lumire paused again and lit his long wooden pipe, the light from the match painting shadows above the old doctor’s wrinkles as he frowned, deep in thought. “Gaige,” he said sternly. “You have just this last year finished your schooling, and already you would reject its teachings?”
Gaige scowled at this remark and swiveled uncomfortably in his chair across from Lumire, wondering if his teacher and mentor knew him at all.
“I reject nothing. I wish only to expand my knowledge, to expand all knowledge.” Gaige kept his voice calm, but his heart was pounding. He had waited two full years before revealing his thoughts and research to Lumire, and this was not the reaction he had hoped for.
“Expand knowledge, you say?” Lumire leaned across the table, his eyes so wide Gaige thought they might just pop from the old man’s skull. “In… in bloody sorcery?” Lumire whispered the last word, and he turned his head to the doors of the library to make sure no one was there.
“Not sorcery. I am a mortal man. My powers will always be that of a mortal man. How far those powers can go, I am not sure. Science will be the answer.” Science was his religion, his faith, his occultism. Science was the hope of mankind. “Science is beyond sorcery. What I will come to learn will not even the battlefield between us and those with arcane blood… it will dominate it,” Gaige said, his face hovering close to Lumire’s above the library table.
He could see every nuance of his mentor’s expression, but Lumire could not see his. Gaige always wore his iron-beaked doctor’s mask, for that was the identity he preferred over that of a sickly addict. The mask was the face he showed the world and the veil that hid him from view.
Lumire stared at him and Gaige looked away first, offering his mentor that small token of respect. He sat back and took out his steel pipe, then reached a hand to his beaked mask and tampered with a mechanism, opening a slot in the right side. There he inserted the pipe, then closed the two nostrils with a flick of another very small lever. He drew a match, lit it by running it across the side of the iron beak, put the flame to the bowl, and inhaled. His mask was airtight now, so the moon’s widow packed into the pipe burned at a rapid pace. Gaige listened to the shush of the cinders as he took in the smoke. He opened the nostrils of his beak, removed the pipe, and held the smoke deep in his lungs.
He exhaled. The smoke of the moon’s widow, a plant so potent that even the inhalation of its ground petals’ aroma could produce soothing effects, burst from the mask’s nostrils.
Lumire’s frown dragged the corners of his mouth lower and deepened the wrinkles that ran down toward his jaw. “We’ve discussed this—”
“And we are not discussing it again.” Gaige shrugged. “I am sick.”
Gaige had always been sick. He was born with a leg that was hardly a twisted strip of bone, with cords of stringy muscle that refused to function on all but the most rudimentary level. It was a weak excuse for a limb. Despite this, Gaige was not weak. He now viewed the agonizing limb as an excellent source for experimentation. Through the study of science and medicine and its applications upon himself, Gaige was fighting, and he was winning against the cruelty of his own design, training the leg to be stronger at a cost of ever-increasing pain. Of course there were other side effects, those of the manner of mental phenomena, those of the physical body, and those of a social nature. They were effects he documented but they did not stop his research.
As to the pain… Pain or not, he refused to cut the leg off. He kept it as a reminder of his humanity.
“The populace will see your science as sorcery,” Lumire said. “They will see it as playing God. Worse yet, the seekers will put an end to any research. The lord regent will come down with all his wrath upon the university just for association with your name if you continue in this dreadful dabbling!”
Gaige was shattered by disappointment. He had been wrong to come to Lumire, the one person he thought would understand. “Maybe,” he said, keeping his tone even, betraying none of his bitter emotion. “Maybe a time will come where the idea is welcomed.”
Lumire slammed his hand down hard on the table; the teacups rattled and the warm liquid sloshed over the sides. “My most favored student, you are at times blinded by your own desire to discover! It pushes you into the direction of black space.”
With those words, even Gaige’s disappointment snuffed like a dying match, and in its place came the certainty that Lumire had never been the true man of science Gaige had believed him to be. He saw before him now only an old, broken man, bowing to convention. And he had no one to blame but himself, for he had seen something that had never been there. “That is a foolish thing to say, professor. For how can a man ever be blinded by a desire for discovery? A man with such a heart can only ever increase his sight.”
“No… It is not our right, not our right as men.” The professor bowed his head, sadness crawling into his thoughtful frown.
“I have no expectation of your help. I have no expectation that you will work by my side. Only tell me if you have any books in this great library of yours on the curing of curses.” Gaige leaned forward, the tip of his beak almost offensively close to his professor’s nose. But Gaige wanted to look into his teacher’s eyes; he wanted to see in them the lie when Lumire claimed there were no such books.
Gaige extended his arms and panned them around the library. Floor to ceiling, the walls were covered with tight shelves of books. Dim oil lamps hung from outward poles built into the shelves. To reach the highest shelves, a ladder was needed, and a fall that could kill was risked. It was said to be the world’s second largest library. The largest belonged to the Imperial City of Brynth, and it held certain archives allowed entry only to his Holy Majesty.
Lumire lifted his tea, the cup in one hand, the saucer in the other, the two rattling together as he trembled.
Gaige stood and turned around. He was dizzy from the moon’s widow, and the shelves around him reached up and up into the unknown darkness.
“What about on the highest shelf back there? Or over in the foreign historical documents? Or the untranslated rune writings from Ygdrasst? All I ask for is your guidance. I came to you like a son to his father. Do not tell me that in this vast catacomb of knowledge there is nothing to aid my quest.” He turned back to face the professor.
“You are yet to tell me your thoughts on the last book I gave you, Gaige,” Lumire said, clearly trying to direct the topic to safer ground. “You are lucky to have the opportunity to read such a book. Three centuries ago almost every copy was burned, along with the author. The lord regent himself gave that book to the university.”
“Professor, I have no interest in reading the philosophical musings of some ancient Brynthian, Arthur Weaver. You know the direction my interest lies.”
“Now it is you who sound foolish, Gaige. You are hardly more than twenty years and you believe you know everything. Three centuries ago is not ancient. It is but a blink in the cosmic cycle of time. And the man’s name was Darcy Weaver, not Arthur.” Again Lumire shook his head. Gaige tried to speak, but the professor raised his hand. “Enough, Gaige. That will be enough.
“Let me tell you from all my years of experience and of teaching,” Lumire continued, “a curse is a curse and cannot be lifted or altered. When one is taken by the plight of ghoulism, they are dead. Lycanthropy… they are dead. Vampirism… dead. Think of your history lessons. Think of Brynth and the Rata Plaga. For certain these plights of sorcery have no cure. Once changed, there is no return.” Lumire scowled. “There is no bringing such a soul back. Such cur
ses are final. That is scientific fact, and I must say your aggressive interest in the matter frightens me.”
“I did not expect you to react like this,” Gaige said as he limped away from the table into the vast, silent brilliance of the library. No one was there to see them, but he was glad the mask concealed his tears all the same.
He had always hated his birth parents’ conservative idealism, and now he realized that the father he had chosen, the mentor he had trusted, was just the same. He bought all that the fearmonger sold and he cowered from the devil’s domain—and in doing so, bowed down to its dark majesty.
Gaige had never felt so alone. Not even when the parents he had loved, though he hated their ideas, had succumbed to sickness within days of each other. Gaige and his crippled limb had survived, and buried deep in his box of regrets was the fact that he had never told them he loved them, he had only shown them his disdain.
His disappointment in Lumire changed nothing. He would still follow the path he chose, with no support; with the odds against him he would enter the beyond. He would unlock all the secrets he wanted to know. That was his purpose, the one he chose for himself. But his determination did not lessen the pain of his altered perception of his longtime mentor.
When he reached the doors, he looked above them at the tall painting of the lord regent. The frame was old and heavy, the gold marked with the green patina of age. The lord regent stood, long black hair sweeping his shoulders, dark eyes directed such that Gaige felt they were looking straight at him. The fire in those eyes looked like it could set the whole world ablaze. He wore a fine red coat with black epaulets and a glossy black trim on the high collar. Black threads wove an intricate design across the chest and down the abdomen, wolves on one side, ravens on the other, fur and feathers designed to give the impression of licking flames. At the bottom of the canvas were written the words “Insight be my Sword.”
As Gaige pushed open the doors, his crippled left leg ached more than usual, and with every step it screamed all the more. He passed by dark, empty lecture halls. The dim, lonely atmosphere almost swallowed him up.
The clicking of his cane on the marble echoed through the vast space like the ticking of a distant clock.
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Read Catacombs of Time now!
Also by Dylan Doose
Sword and Sorcery Series:
Fire and Sword (Volume 1)
Catacombs of Time (Volume 2)
I Remember My First Time (A Sword and Sorcery short story; can be read at any point in the series)
The Pyres (Volume 3)
Ice and Stone (Volume 4)
As They Burn (Volume 5)
Black Sun Moon (Volume 6)
Embers on the Wind (Volume 7)
Red Harvest Series:
Crow Mountain (Volume 1)
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For info, excerpts, contests and more, join Dylan’s Reader Group!
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Website: www.DylanDooseAuthor.com
About the Author
Dylan Doose is the author of the ongoing Dark Fantasy saga, Sword & Sorcery.
Dylan also pens the new Dark Fantasy/Western Horror series, Red Harvest.
Fire and Sword was chosen as a Shelf Unbound Notable 100 for 2015 and received an honorable mention from Library Journal.
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For info, excerpts, contests and more, join Dylan’s Reader Group! www.DylanDooseAuthor.com
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photo credit: Shanon Fujioka
For more information:
www.dylandooseauthor.com