by Dylan Doose
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 Or over in the foreign historical documents?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 curses 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.
* * *
This may be the most potent version of the oil I have developed thus far. Fredrick, the subject, has put on one stone of pure muscle in the past two weeks alone. His speed has increased; his endurance verges on remarkable, even for a mule of his fine breeding. His capacity of burden has increased by one hundred and twenty-five percent, and although I would not write it in a medical journal, just as personal note, I daresay I’ve noticed an increase in Fredrick’s confidence.
I will be administering the oil to myself through intra-muscular injection twice every ten-day cycle, at one-eighth of Fredrick’s dose.
Day 10: It is taking effect already. I decided to use a high-loading dose, and as a result I walked for the first time in my adult life about my apartments and down to the fountain in the center square without the use of my cane. But now, as I write this journal, I feel a sensation in my heart, not pain but more a weight on each beat.
Day 45: The dose is stable now. My body has increased its muscle tissue, including those muscles of my crippled leg. The sensation of a weight on my heart has not returned.
Day 70: Today I was capable—without the use of any other stimulants such as sanguinum—of running, even if at a slow pace, thrice round the entirety of the Fountain District. I do admit to some small embarrassment as city folk glowered at me distastefully as I passed, as if running and smiling were both crimes. Perhaps next time I will do the same but with my mask on and scalpels in my hands.
Day 322: Today that sensation of a small weight tugging down on my heart returned. This time it was accompanied by pain, treacherous pain.
~Gaige’s Journal
* * *
Chapter Two
The Doctor
Lumire was long dead now. He died before Gaige had the chance to prove him wrong, before he could say, “I did it. I brought them back. Ghoulism is not death. Lycanthropy is not death. Even to be cursed as Rata Plaga is not death, and death is not the only remedy.” That was not all that Gaige wished he could have told the old
professor, a man who for a decade had been his only friend, even after that night in the library.
Real death took Lumire, not a curse, not ghoulism, not Lycanthropy, just a deep black cancer in the gut. In his last weeks he even turned to witchcraft for help. It hadn’t worked.
Gaige sometimes thought of that night at the university. He brought to mind who he had been at that stage long past, that passionate young man, dead and buried under hard gravel in the cemetery of his mind, the tombstone hard to see, so thick were the fogs of time.
Two decades will bog a man down.
The wheels of the old but sturdy cart, its wood etched with the nicks and carvings of adventure, squeaked over the wet cobbles of Villemisère. A long puddle ran like a river down the side of the road. The sewers must have clogged again. The water was putrid in smell and bilious in color. Gaige stared over the side of the cart; his reflection stared back at him. The lamp that dangled in the front of the cart illuminated Gaige’s reflection and his long, wet red hair that fell wildly from the back of his doctor’s mask like the feathers of a crimson bird. The back of the mask was not closed, but for a leather strap and a clasp that kept it fastened.
He looked away from the puddle and back ahead into the fog. His business was in the lower city, south, away from the Castle Misère and the university, away from his small apartments in the Fountain District, where he could cherish his loneliness with a hot cup of tea, a hot pipe, and a good book.
It had been raining an hour before, but it had stopped now and only a murkiness remained, hovering silently through the empty marketplace. The lanterns in the streets mingled with the fog, and together they cast glowing and mischievous forms upon the streets, while shadows danced on the walls of unlit houses. They were looming houses, tall, with thin, corridor-like apartments, and each one had a pointed roof and an ugly chimney that coughed up black smog. The roofs were like the silhouette of the jagged teeth of a lower jaw.
“Turn right,” Gaige said to Randal, his driver, and they headed west down Krewl Street. The cool moisture worked its way under his coat and into the legs of his trousers, its chill biting at his aching, crippled leg. The leg was stronger than it had been; his chemistry experiments had seen to that. What had been tormented flesh and bone had developed muscle—an impressive amount of it—but the joints and bone beneath the alchemically attained muscle still ached horribly.
They passed the Chapel of His Burning Light, where a blue-clad seeker holding a lantern talked idly with a priest in black robes as they walked down the front steps. And at the sight of the two men, the pain in Gaige’s leg seemed to rage a bit more.
“Doctor!” called the seeker, his accent from Brynth, not Fracia. The priest nodded his head down a few degrees as well. Doctors and priests hardly got along, and Gaige even less so than most, especially after his work began curing the cursed. No exorcism necessary; just spilt blood and a formidable amount of alchemical concoctions. There was not much that couldn’t be solved with science. Neither the priests nor the seekers liked that very much.
Gaige nodded back at them. He was scowling beneath his mask.
“Hold, hold if you would,” called the seeker from the steps.
“Keep going,” Gaige said to Randal.
“I don’t think I should,” Randal whispered as he pulled on the reins and slowed the cart. The seeker was taking his time coming down the steps.
“Why do I pay you, Randal?” Gaige asked as he grabbed the back of Randal’s neck with a viselike grip and pulled him close. “Eh, Randal? I should just drive my own donkey cart from now on.”
“I just think it is better not to be confrontational, is all,” Randal said, putting his hands up in a demonstration of apology.
“Exactly. So you should have kept going. He is on foot.”
“And we are in a donkey cart.”
“May we have a word, doctor?” came the voice of the seeker from Gaige’s right.
Gaige let go of the back of Randal’s neck.
“About what?” Gaige said, turning around. Their jobs in some ways were similar; they both stood against the evils that all too often spawned from the dark things that only magic was responsible for. The difference between Gaige and the seeker was that Gaige fought the evils of magic by saving lives, curing curses, acquiring information on his patients through tracking, planning, reading, and talking as much as he could with those who could provide him with any insight into the cases on which he worked. Being saved, being cured, it always came at a price of blood and pain, but life was always the goal, and science always the means.
The seekers, on the other hand… they acquired information through torture; they cured curses with decapitations; they fought magic by kicking down doors of country girls’ homes and burning them for witchcraft. They chased down pagan families in the woodlands with dogs and muskets, shooting some and leaving them to rot where they fell, and taking the rest to hang them from the city walls so that everyone could see Brynth was here, Brynth and God, the one true God, the Luminescent.
The choice was given to those of Fracia, to those who lived in Villemisère, just as many nations had been offered the choice before: kneel to the Luminescent, kneel to his vessel, his Imperial Majesty of Brynth, or hang from the gallows.
Since the coming of the lord regent, the seekers had not plied their vile deeds in Villemisère, but the lord regent did not govern all of Fracia or Brynth. Though he did not tolerate such deeds here, they happened elsewhere, and he could not change the deeds of the past.
“I would like to check that all your papers are in order, your documents concerning the substances you have with you for your practice,” said the seeker.
“I only have one.” Gaige peered out through his bird mask and locked on the glowing blue orbs in the seeker’s square skull.
“One what?” the seeker asked, meeting his gaze.
“One paper,” Gaige said, and took no action.
“For everything that you have with you?” The seeker almost looked pleased, certain that he had Gaige in some sort of trouble. “Well, I’d like to see that special paper.” He smirked. “But doctor, you seem to have a good deal of… trinkets, and vials and whatnot back there. And, I must say, I have never seen such a mule. He is more muscular than any horse.”
“Yes, Fredrick is quite the specimen. He is of royal stock all the way from Kallibar,” Gaige lied.
The seeker moved closer to the chemically enhanced mule.
Then, feeling like pushing the man a bit further, because in the end, the seeker was still just a man, Gaige asked, “What do you care about my mule, anyway? You think he is a carrier or something? You think he has some sort of illegal, magical entity? Are you going to burn my mule on a pyre? Your kind is known for your fires.”
“Hmm, I never knew the royalty of Kallibar was known for their fine mules,” the seeker said. “And you know, doctor, your contemporaries, others who wear the mask… they don’t have the cleanest hands, either. What was it they did in 1512 in Azria? They quarantined a whole village, then they cleansed it with fire.” The seeker’s eyes narrowed and his smile finally faded. “Your papers, doctor.”
Gaige reached into the inside of his coat. The seeker struggled to appear relaxed, but he put a hand to the single-shot pistol on his belt. Gaige pulled out a small envelope and from within he removed a folded note. It was a writ of passage to move freely through Villemisère, whether on call or not. And it had the stamp of the lord regent.
“I only have one,” he said again as he handed the seeker the letter.
The blue-hatted man opened it and his eyes went wide as he realized his mistake.
“My most sincere apologies, doctor, I had no idea—”
“Now you do,” Gaige said as he snapped the note back and quickly folded it back up and into the envelope with dexterous fingers. Then he turned to Randal. “Please, Randal, do continue. We have time constraints.”
Randal looked apologetically at the seeker, because Randal was
a sap, and then he cracked the reins.
Gaige thought of the task ahead. He opened his coat and looked inside, though he knew everything was there—he had checked twice since they set out—but still it was calming to confirm yet again that he was prepared. Four glass syringes fortified with iron cages, and an iron pump; they were holstered in leather bands stitched to the inside of the coat. Two shots of sanguinum and two shots of adrenallys. The sanguinum was an intra-muscular shot that Gaige would inject into his thigh just before he got to work. The adrenallys was not for him, but for the patient. It would be needed to get her heart pumping after the surgery was complete.
They passed a crooked sign of rotting wood, the edges jagged and broken, the word “graveyard” carved in the center. The wheels creaked as they rolled down the wet cobbles of Villemisère, toward the bridge and the slums.
The slums were divided into two parts. There was low town, or, as the inhabitants called it, the Wastes, for the city’s filth was brought there, both of the inanimate and the animate kind. The lepers, and the dung carts, the homeless vagrants and the corpses of all manner of dead things. The human bodies got taken past the Wastes and up past Enfer’s Hill, where they would be brought past the graves to the feeding piles. These were mounds—sometimes hills—of human corpses, stocked with all of the city’s fresh bodies to keep the cursed creatures, the spawns of sorcery, fed and away from the healthy. Only the wealthy were afforded the final luxury of a deep burial in a cast iron casket.
There were not always enough fresh corpses, not enough disease and murder at times to keep the monsters fed. When this was the case, certain individuals made a profit in the meat trade. Because when the beasts came wandering from the fringes, when they were chased by fire and sword, by gun and pitchfork out and away from the villages, they wandered to the city where people forgot the meaning of co-operation, and the sacred animal was the vulture.
