The Elixir

by George Willson

  “What happened tonight with the Mutation?” Voivode asked.

  “Well, the Tepish interrupted my chase,” David said. “I had trailed her through Hampstead Heath, and it turned out that Vladimir was also investigating that story. He was happy to let me take care of it for him. The other side of the wall where I lost her was Highgate Cemetery. I’ll check it out tomorrow evening to see what I can find there. If Karian has started turning people, we could find ourselves in a mess if I can’t track down where he’s hiding.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  In 1819, deep in the Carpathian Mountains, Vladimir had been the leader, otherwise known as the Elrod Malnak, of the Tepish Order who had built a large fortress to get away from human civilization and work out a plan to destroy them. His plan at the time was to build up a Mutation army which had been the plan since the Mutation’s initial creation, but the plan had quickly gone wrong and had only gotten worse with the coming of the Rastem.

  Vladimir had found himself facing off against Tiberius, the leader of the Rastem forces, in his own throne room. He had designed the room himself with protective glass to enable him to view the sunrise without worrying about dying from the sun’s rays. However, during the combat, a Mutation had climbed on the outside of the glass window and destroyed it along with half the room with an explosive device called a Körva throwing both him and Tiberius into the room and covering them in rubble.

  He had been the first to recover from the blast, and as he did not immediately see Tiberius, he decided he needed to assess the state of the battle. He ran to the lift shaft, climbed to the surface, and from there, he found his way to an exit away from the field of battle in the front.

  He trudged up a hill to look down on the legacy he had attempted to build, but what he found from the outside was a nightmare. The Rastem had killed or disarmed his entire army, and most had surrendered by the time he arrived. The Mutations were disappearing into the trees as clouds rolled in. He did not even have the option of retreat at this point.

  Beyond the hope of victory, Vladimir was left with no choice but to leave in order to reform the Tepish another day. The Rastem might accept the younger Tepish into their Order, but he knew that as the former leader, he would be sentenced to death. He was alone.

  He crossed the Carpathians to the north and entered Austria-Hungary where he stole whatever he needed to survive but avoided killing anyone so he would not draw any possible attention to his presence. He decided to head west to find out what he could about the new world he found himself in. He had to admit that for centuries, he had been either in the service of the Rastem Council or the Tepish, but the Fempiror as a people had remained fairly geographically centric mainly due to their susceptibility to sunlight.

  As he traveled, he found places to spend the day. He had been a Fempiror for almost four hundred fifty years, so he was more than aware of what it would take to survive, and without anyone tagging along behind him, he could move as quickly or slowly as the weather allowed. He became like a ghost, traveling from city to city, always moving west. At one point, he found he had briefly passed through Switzerland before finding himself in a country whose language was unfamiliar to him.

  Over the years, he had learned several of the languages of eastern Europe, and as with any skill, the more languages he learned, the easier they came to him, but this new language baffled him for some time. He made brief acquaintances in the country here and there for the sole purpose of deciphering the language, and little by little, he learned he was in the French Republic. It did not take long before he also learned that the French Republic was a treacherous place for anyone to live.

  Many of the people tried subverting the government over the years, and the idea of subversion intrigued Vladimir, setting his mind turning. He recalled some years ago when the Tepish were at their heights around 1780, and word had reached them of a revolution in the American colonies of Great Britain. They had sent some Tepish over to that country to try to create a foothold but quickly lost contact about the time the Rastem and Elewo were causing trouble for them. In this new place, he wondered what someone like him could do in such a place if he made the right connections. His first opportunity to try any level of subversion came not from the highest levels of government, but on a small scale among its people.

  He had witnessed a scene that he had seen many times over the course of his life: two men fighting for the affections of one woman. The men were Luc and Michel, and the young woman was Constance. It was all respectable in their little town with each doing what they could to woo her, and no one was crossing any boundaries of polite society. Vladimir, however, saw within this a chance to wreak a little havoc.

  He knew the men who desired Constance, and one evening, he followed her home to see that she had quite properly gone alone to her own father’s house. To set his plan in motion, he checked her window to find it unlocked, and so he opened it just a little. He met with Luc the next day, and told him that when the young lady had gone home that night, she stole away to be with Michel. He then went to Michel and told him the same story, but that she had stolen away with Luc. When he had come across Constance, he stated that he had seen Luc the previous evening with another woman entirely named Jeanne, but made sure that when he told her, he was within earshot of Jeanne’s husband. He proceeded to Constance’s father’s home to let him know that he had seen his daughter out walking the previous evening unaccompanied.

  With all of this misinformation in place, he paid close attention to the resulting chaos. Rumors ran like wildfire through the little town about Constance, her affair with both suitors, the illicit love affair between the third woman and Luc, and the ire of Constance’s father. Suddenly, people were coming forward to both and agree and disagree with the rumors, swearing to both sides, and it was not long before a fight broke out among the residents. The former socially upstanding and proper little town dissolved into madness.

  Luc was killed by Jeanne’s husband. Constance was forced to marry Michel. Jeanne was run out of town accused of adultery. It all happened so quickly that once it was all over, few people had any idea where it had started or how it got so far. Within all of this, Vladimir had found the new mission of the Tepish. Transmutation of the world was as impossible as genocide, but to create chaos where none existed was something he felt would be entirely within his means, and he would not need an army of Tepish or Mutations to accomplish it.

  Furthermore, the longer he stayed in France, the more he learned of its rocky history. Only thirty-two years earlier, the country had gone through a bloody revolution, and he figured if humans could do something that horrible on their own, he could certainly help to push them to those ends. Rather than expend his own resources on any kind of war, he would simply put the necessary pieces in place to make people want to declare war on each other.

  To that end, while he did not need an army, he did at least need another hand. In the city of Langres, Vladimir found a bitter young man named Jacques LeChambre who lost his woman to another man, lost his job, and generally hated everyone. He was a Tepish without the blood already, and rather than change him immediately, Vladimir decided to see how he would do as a human. To date, it seemed, many new Tepish were as disposable as humans, and it would be far easier to bury another human than a Fempiror.

  “Tell me something, Jacques,” Vladimir said upon their initial meeting, “what is it you want more than anything else in the world?”

  “What do you think?” Jacques asked. “I lost everything.”

  “Do you want it all back?” Vladimir asked.

  “What would be the point?” Jacques shot back. “What’s done is done. If anything, I would want them all to suffer the way they’ve made me suffer, but that’s not likely to happen, is it?”

  “There’s always a way, if you’re willing,” Vladimir encouraged.

  “How?”

  “You know them all better than I do,” Vladimir said. “People believe any lies that you tell them.
Businesses are undermined with a word. You want revenge on those who have wronged you, then I can help you do that. You want revenge on the world around you, well, I want the same. Tell me everything about these people, and we’ll destroy them with words alone.”

  Jacques spoke for hours about every aspect of his life, and while not all of it was relevant to his problem, Vladimir had the patience to listen endlessly to this man in order to win his allegiance. After all, he needed a true partner as opposed to another Tepish soldier, so trust was important in this exchange. Trust, he had found, was far more difficult to attain once one was changed if he were relying on the standard anger they tended to foster.

  Jacques’ first problem was simple enough: destroy the business that let him go. Jacques had worked in a factory that produced cloth, and the reason he was fired was a combination of his machine breaking down for a part of his shift resulting in lost productivity, and the relation of his second problem to the first in that the man who had taken his love was good friends to the owner of the factory.

  As jobs were getting scarcer in those days, Vladimir was easily able to pay some women to spend a lot of time at the owner’s house and around the factory and claim that they knew the owner intimately. He even had them sneak in a window of his house and then leave out the front door, on one occasion encountering the man’s wife.

  While this was in motion, Vladimir had learned from Jacques of the buyers of the textiles that the factory produced and introduced among them several complaints of slow output and poor workmanship. He had Jacques break into the factory during the night hours and sabotage the machines as only a worker would know how which caused a complete breakdown in the production for two days.

  With all of these factors working against the owner of the factory, not only was the factory closed down and subsequently sold to someone else, but the owner lost his wife through the rumors of infidelity, and no one trusted him again. Jacques was overjoyed, and destroying his former beloved’s new relationship was as easy as casually telling her new beau that Jacques was still seeing her on the side. No one believed anyone else, and that relationship was destroyed as the new partnership Vladimir had formed with the young man flourished.

  Together, they left the town a little worse than Vladimir had found it, and it further reinforced Vladimir’s idea that subversion of the people could be just as powerful as trying to overthrow them with an army. In fact, it takes far fewer resources to allow a people to destroy themselves than trying to do it with an invading force, and when invaded, a people tended to stand together stronger than they ever would on a normal basis. However, when given the right suggestions and trust is undermined, a people will willingly destroy themselves rather than listen to any voice of reason. It was perfect.

  “Tell me, Jacques,” Vladimir said when they were well out of town, “what will you do from here?”

  “I hadn’t given it any thought, actually,” Jacques said. “What are you going to do?”

  “To that, I had given considerable thought,” Vladimir replied. “I have been unfortunate enough to experience what you have here throughout my life, and to that end, I dislike the human race as a whole. I suspect you feel much the same way.”

  “Indeed,” Jacques confirmed, “people have done nothing but hurt me.”

  “I have a proposition for you,” Vladimir continued. “The benefits of joining me include an unnaturally long life along with supernatural strength and speed. A fair bonus for trying to destroy the world, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Jacques said.

  “Do you want to understand?” Vladimir asked, retrieving a simple syringe from his supply bag. It was not the classic dual-needled nilrof that his people preferred, but as he did not possess the manufacturing know-how to create such a thing, he had to be content with function over form.

  “What are you doing?” Jacques asked. Vladimir plunged the needle into his arm and drew a syringe full of blood.

  “I’m helping you to understand,” Vladimir said, and injected his blood into Jacques’ neck. “Welcome to the family.”

  Jacques embraced the Fempiror life openly, and bore no grudge against Vladimir for the suddenness of the change. He had expressed that he wanted to leave his former life behind entirely, and so Vladimir decided to call him Lorinkis after the Felletterusk word for “thunderstorm,” in the hopes that his new follower would help him to cover the land like a storm.

  Together, they had similar small victories across the French Republic, and they had remained in that country until 1834 when they heard of a fire in the British Parliament. While neither Vladimir nor Lorinkis were versed in the English language, they decided to go to England to see what sort of catastrophe would have caused the burning of their capital.

  They easily crossed the English Channel and made their way to London where the ruins of Parliament had been cleared. There, through a local Englishman who knew French, they learned that the burning of Parliament was little more than an accident caused by a clerk who worked in the building.

  However, this man also told them of the conditions in England and particularly London at the time, and Vladimir and Lorinkis agreed that this little island was ripe for their destruction. For the next thirty years, Vladimir and Lorinkis worked to undermine the authority of the British government, but found on several occasions that people would not always turn on each other. Many times, people would actually stop the violence on their own and try to rebuild their relationships and work together. Vladimir saw this as a major challenge and varied his tactics several times to try to bring these people to their knees. He figured that if he could conquer a people so close to each other, he would have no problem doing the same thing on a larger scale.

  One thing that Vladimir wanted to try to find out was what happened to the Tepish he had sent to what was now the United States of America, but he was not willing to make the journey himself or send Lorinkis due to the hazardous nature of the journey, despite advances made to the transatlantic travel. In order to send someone, they located a transient who was desperate for work named Gin Fringra and transmutated him with the promise of long life and financial security.

  It was six months after Gin’s departure that he sent word back to Vladimir that he had been unable to locate any of the original Tepish. Vladimir sent word back that he should find himself a good second in command and begin the new Tepish philosophy of subterfuge in the country.

  No longer would the Tepish fight battles themselves, but they would force humanity to fight against itself. He was certain that with enough work, the people would choose to have a Tepish rule over them though they would not know it. All it would take was the right idea from the right person at the right time, and the Tepish idea would rule the world and destroy it from the inside out. He was not certain that a Fempiror would ever hold a place in human rule, but a Fempiror could convince a human of their ways. From there, other humans would accept him as their ruler. The Tepish would cease to be a physiology, but become a philosophy instead.

  Vladimir still needed Fempiror to stand beside him, but for the first time, he also understood the best way to destroy humanity would be to recruit humans into the Tepish ideology. Through this combination of Fempiror and humans, he would slowly and quietly take over the world, and no one would ever see it coming.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Following the recruitment of Gin Fringra, Vladimir had decided to keep his Fempiror crew to just himself and Lorinkis while paying off humans to stir up trouble, but after a couple of decades, he kept his eyes open for the perfect recruits to stand by them as Fempiror. He did not wish to transmutate a random bystander, but find someone who really stood out from the crowd. Someone that caught his attention as Lorinkis had done. In 1863, he found someone.

  He and Lorinkis had stirred up a group of people who were actively mugging others in the darker parts of London, and they had been onhand to witness a mugging that had gone wrong. The way
it went wrong, however, was not what they expected. They had seen a young couple walking towards the muggers and waited to see how it played out. The idea behind all of the muggings was to undermine the authority of the police force and show how worthless they were. What they never anticipated was anyone fighting back.

  When the muggers attacked the couple, the man immediately fought back, which they occasionally expected when he had a female companion. What they never expected was that the woman would fight back as well. Their mugger was so taken off guard that the woman was able to wrestle the knife from his hands and kill him with it. The other mugger, seeing that his fellow had been killed by a woman, turned tail and ran. Vladimir and Lorinkis had to meet this couple.

  They approached the scene as if they had accidentally witnessed the incident. “Are you two all right?” Vladimir asked them as he and Lorinkis stopped in front of them. The man and woman stared at them for only a moment before they ran.

  “I suppose we should have expected that,” Vladimir said.

  “I’ll keep up with them,” Lorinkis said, and he followed them. Vladimir checked the mugger with the knife in his chest and confirmed he was, in fact, dead. He could not be sure if the two were actually dangerous or just got lucky. Nevertheless, he was interested.

  He walked to where Lorinkis had disappeared and waited patiently for his return. Moments later, he reappeared.

  “They popped into an inn about a block down the road here,” Lorinkis said, and he led the way there. He held the door for Vladimir and the two of them entered into the restaurant portion of the inn where the pair sat quietly in a dark corner of the room clearly trying not to be noticed.

  “I suspect they’ll try to run as soon as they see us,” Vladimir said quietly. “Be gentle, but don’t let them go.” Lorinkis nodded, and as soon as they got close to the couple, the woman stood confrontationally.