Could we get back to the point? Were there any extant writings by alchemists of the period?
There were. The particular emperor of that period was a proponent of Tibetan alchemists and had filled his court with useless soothsayers and shamans from Tibet instead of spending the money on the poor and downtrodden people of…
GAH! Not ancient Tibetan!
Ancient Tibetan is the worst ancient language ever. Except maybe Coptic. In both cases all the words are suppositional, meaning they are dependent upon other information in the text and outside of the text, and the Tibetans for religious reasons absolutely opposed direct description of anything abhorrent or unclean. They wouldn’t even directly describe poisons.
To explain, when it came to anything “bad” or “unwholesome,” the ancient Tibetans were more politically correct than a Harvard academic. They were so into euphemisms it was insane.
Example: The Tibetans wrote many books about medicine. Say that they are describing the symptoms of cyanide poisoning. They would describe the symptoms—bluing of the lips, fingertips and tongue—but when they got to the cause…
“The cause of this malady is that which is of the Fire of Deva, that which is of the Dust of Shetal, that which is of the Path of the Heron.”
You would have to then go try to find something that explained what that meant. Problem being that it was invariably word of mouth and very closed even then. A junior doctor might look up the text and find that the malady was described but would have to go to a more senior lama or shaman to ask what the hell “that which is of the Fire of Deva” was. Because you didn’t get to learn about poisons until you were a trusted fourth dong or something. And even then it was hierarchical. Sort of like MCB come to think of it. Everything unclean was classified.
Since most of the senior lamas and shamans (who knew what all the classified euphemisms meant) had been killed by the Chinese Communists in the takeover of Tibet, for being, you know, lamas and shamans and thus unclean in the eyes of Communists, most of the really hard information a Hunter needed had been lost.
Also, the way the writing is laid out has always made my brain ache. And I’m good with cuneiform and Sanskrit. Ancient Tibetan? Hate it.
I should probably add an explanation. As noted above, every time the Chinese went through a major civil war, which was frequent in their history, the winners would try to get rid of history and were in many cases very thorough about it. This isn’t a purely Chinese thing. The Mayans and Byzantines did much the same thing. Try to find specific details about Jeshua, a carpenter of Nazareth, sometime. You’ll find references to references; you can find his name in indexes of tax records, for example, but all the original references are missing. Why? Byzantines collected them all up and either hid or destroyed them.
The Tibetans never really had a civil war so their written knowledge had been preserved for thousands of years continuously. It was nearly impossible to decipher, but it had been preserved. That was until the fucking ChiComs came along and destroyed it. Fuckers. I might hate ancient Tibetan but I hate book-burners more.
I reminded myself that at least it wasn’t Coptic and dug into the texts that were available from the period.
Oddly enough, most of those were in the regular Tibetan section. I’d used those libraries extensively when studying Yeti so they were familiar stomping grounds. It was well known that the supernatural didn’t exist and all these references to demons, yeti and walking dead were just superstitious nonsense. And since the Tibetans were so oblique in everything they wrote it was nearly impossible to glean actual incantations, spells, demonic names, et cetera. All those details were handed down by word of mouth and unless the Dalai Lama knew them, they were lost to time. So the writings, unlike that of medieval alchemists, Islamic sufis, and Hindi yogis, were harmless enough. You had to really know your stuff to get anything out of them.
The other problem is that Tibetans had all sorts of references to call it “what lies beneath.” In their mystical pantheon, Hell isn’t that far down in the ground. Miners and farmers are tightly bound to the Wheel by the fact that both dig in the ground which is, in and of itself, unclean. And they firmly believed that there are monsters absolutely riddling the crust of the earth. Drop a shovel and you’re going to hit some demon or other eldritch thing. They were especially scared shitless of some buried sleeping monster called “unbinder of the path and unmaker of all things.”
So finding a reference to one particular monster in underground Mongolia was tough. They also had very little concept of geography outside of Tibet. The Chinese may be described as insular but it’s nothing compared to classic Tibetans. If it wasn’t in Tibet, it didn’t really exist. And if it was in Tibet its location was described the same way a small-town resident would describe a location. “Up the valley where Tom used to live, take a left where his house used to be. Walk nineteen paces of the length of the Most Illustrious Lotus. Dig down about as tall as Adam who lives over in the next valley and you’ll find the Eater of Air.”
Never try to follow a Tibetan treasure map.
I finally found a third- or fourthhand story that seemed to match the data.
A major lama of great alchemical knowledge had been engaged by a “King of the Lower Lands” (to the Chinese “the Son of Heaven,” to the Tibetans of the period nearly as important as a rich farmer) to accompany an expedition to fight a great evil. This evil, like most evils in Tibetan hoodoo, was found to exist at a great depth. The user thereof was a sorcerer of “lands to the West beyond the enlightenment of the Buddha,” which could mean anything from the Persian Empire westward.
There were some problems getting to the location of the beast, battles didn’t really matter to the Tibetans. But the lama had used the power of “the peace of Buddha” to put most of those to rest. Then he cast the “rune of Onesh” to determine the location of the “foul one.” After it was positively located, “ones who plumb the depths for riches at loss to their soul upon the Wheel,” miners in other words, were summoned to dig down to the depths and find this foul beast.
This took more than ten cycles of the moon, during which time the lama was also said to have cured many illnesses including most notably blindness, brought people fully back from the dead and summoned a great chariot of fire from the sky to ride about doing good deeds.
Given my job, I wasn’t sure which bits were entirely made up and which bits were pure history.
The mava was described in detail. I mean, really extreme detail. Went on for a page and a half. Problem being, it was all in nearly impenetrable euphemisms. The body was “of the crown/head/sun/light/helmet of the Most Enlightened.” There were many “of that which is of the high/airy/well-loved/most holy places.” However, the horror of the sight of the thing came through even with all the euphemisms and the ancient Tibetan.
Once the foul body of the beast was exposed, pathetic and useless alchemists of the Low Lands—Chinese in other words—tried various forms of their alchemy and magic to attack the beast to no avail. Many were lost in battling it. The lama was persuaded to take a hand and laid unguents upon it and certain rare alchemical materials.
This caused the beast great harm and it, in turn, reacted by summoning “its servants” from the “unclean earth.” What the servants were was unclear. It was assumed you’d know what the servants of the beast were! So what were they? The kifo worm pseudopods? Shoggoths? Grinders? Homunculi? There were many of the “servants” described, but without that word-of-mouth knowledge you really got bupkes. Exact description was forbidden!
Damn ancient Tibetans!
The lama again brought “the peace of Buddha” to many of them but it was insufficient. The beast was pushing back and even the power of Buddha has limits. Many of the rest of the expedition fell and even became servants/sacrifices/monsters to/of the great beast. But in time they were defeated as was the foul beast. The lama perished in battle along with many lesser souls, you know those “bound upon the Wheel” lowlanders,
i.e. Chinese, but the story was brought back by his apprentice and thus it is written. I shall bow to the four winds.
So…
You find this Great Worm Mother using the rune of Onesh. Dig down to it. We could probably drill these days. Lots of oil drilling in Louisiana. Hit it with some sort of mystic unguents. That may not kill it right away. Then it brings its “servants” to attack you. The servants were probably the kifo worms. Fire for those, bring flamethrowers. It looked as if the Chinese expedition had lost about five thousand people fighting this thing. They didn’t have flamethrowers and good explosives, so I was pretty sure we could keep the casualties under five thousand.
The “rune of Onesh” was surprisingly easy to find. It had been written about any number of times. The rune was inscribed on a jade pendant which was then enchanted and it basically pointed towards certain types of evil—primarily undead, but it sounded like basically anything with the stink of the Old Ones on it. I hadn’t been aware of the rune but it sounded useful as hell as long as it worked for someone other than a Buddhist lama. And if they were the only ones who could use it, I knew where to find dozens of lamas in the US. Some of them might even be able to translate the rare unguents and alchemical stuff.
On a tip from Rigby, I ran down to London and some of the alleyways behind Portobello Road and picked up an authentic rune of Onesh pretty quickly and surprisingly cheap. It appeared fairly old and I suspected it might have fallen into the shopkeeper’s hands after falling out of the back of a truck. Given that whoever the previous owner was they probably had no clue of its use or its value, I could live with that.
I didn’t bother to go to Chinatown to see what I could dig up about alchemical materials. The Chinese ones hadn’t worked anyway and they’d ended up using fire. If this thing was as big as the PUFF adjuster suggested, we’d probably need quite a bit of thermite. Maybe magnesium would do it? Then the servants would attack and we’d defeat them, hopefully with fewer than five thousand casualties, then defeat the mava paṇauvaā and live happily ever after.
Sure. It was going to be eeeasy. But at least it was the beginning of a plan.
I had no clue what the PUFF was going to be on an entity that was supposed to be over a hundred meters long, but it was sure to be pretty decent. Depending on how many servants and what kind, I suspected we were all going to be able to retire.
Assuming we didn’t take five thousand casualties when we only had a handful of people.
This was going to get interesting.
* * *
When I returned to the library, the guards politely but sternly barred me from entrance. It turned out that when the MCB had realized I’d left the country, they’d asked their British counterparts to monitor my activity. Even though the MCB had a working relationship with MI4, it wasn’t like secretive government bureaucracies communicated efficiently, so when MI4 eventually got around to processing their request weeks later, and it was discovered that an suspected cult member had been hanging out in the world’s best collection of occult tomes delving into ancient mysteries, MI4 had shit a brick.
Having caused an international incident, it was time to go home.
CHAPTER 6
When I got to the offices after my trip, Milo, Ray and Earl were all there. I’d called and told them I’d found some information so they were waiting for the report.
“So,” Earl growled. “You found something. Took you long enough.”
“We lost Evans while you were gone,” Ray said. “Bit by a shambler.”
“Evans?” I asked.
“Tall guy?” Milo said. “Blond? Used to be with Miami?”
“Does not ring a bell…Oh, Colt Python guy?”
“Probably,” Earl said. “They starting to blend?”
“Little bit.” I laid out my notes. “You want some clue about how much fun I had finding all this stuff? Should I talk about my love of ancient Tibetan? And let me be clear that love is used in the most sarcastic of senses? Or how much fun it is trying to figure out which particular meaning of a pictogram is intended in Jin Dynastic Chinese? I’d say ‘Mandarin’ or ‘Cantonese’ but those are both the equivalent of modern English versus, say, Latin. Or that there are no modern extant copies of anything about this thing? That everything was on old scrolls so worm-eaten and faded, copied and recopied by hand that I was spending half my time just figuring out what the next letter might mean?”
“We get it,” Earl said. “You’re smart and it was tough. Nobody cares.”
“The thing is definitely an entity created by the Great Old Ones, and it empowers necromancy.”
“We already were pretty sure of that,” Ray said.
“There are only three of them ever known to exist. As the PUFF adjuster mentioned. Africa, Indonesia and Mongolia. There’s no record of the one in Africa being destroyed. Possible it was moved over here at some point. Or there might be a seed that came from there. Worth noting there may be another still there. The Indonesian one was killed by a Dutch expedition. Presumably. Very little extant information. Just a couple of survivors and I was unable to find the original report.”
“Just a couple of survivors?” Earl said. “Out of how many?”
“Looks like a couple of companies of Dutch East India Marines and about a regiment of local sepoys.”
“Jesus,” Ray said. “What got them?”
“Again, very little information.” I pushed the papers his way. Ray didn’t have my gift for languages, but he was smart as I was. Using the translated notes he might come up with something I missed. “But here’s everything I found.”
“So, undead,” Earl said, shrugging. “Which we already had. What else is going to try and murder us?”
“So I went looking for something in Mongolia. A Chinese expedition was sent up into the Hun lands to quote ‘fight a great evil.’ The expedition’s size was the equivalent of two legions. About ten thousand troops. They got back with about three thousand.”
“Okay, that’s not good,” Ray said.
“You think?” I said.
“What period,” Ray asked. “Oh, Jin. Eastern or Western?”
“Eastern. Xiaowu period.”
“Those were good troops,” Ray said. “Highly disciplined, experienced and trained. Pretty serious warriors.”
“Yep,” I said. “The loss of most of the expedition I think contributed to the Xiaowu turning over power and the demise of the Eastern Jin. But I digress. The main source of information was a thirdhand story from the POV of an apprentice to a powerful Tibetan lama who accompanied the expedition.”
“Fascinating,” Ray said. Milo looked confused. Earl was annoyed.
“The expedition had to, again, fight local supporters and a wizard from somewhere to the West. Could have been from anywhere West. Tibetans weren’t all up on geography. The lama found the body of the thing using the rune of Onesh when the supporters were cleared off. They got miners to dig down to it. The Chinese alchemists tried to burn it with fire but weren’t able to do much damage. Sounds like they were using gunpowder. The lama hit it with some sort of mystic unguents and that apparently pissed it off. Unguents unclear. Then it raised its ‘servants.’ Servants also unclear. I’m thinking that’s probably the kifo worm pseudopods. Basically it wasn’t ‘servants’ but the worm itself apparently attacking through those. They can stretch out, obviously, for miles. But I could be wrong. It was the second battle that killed most of the expedition. The lama managed to kill it but he was killed as well. That part of the scroll was degraded badly. An apprentice survived and brought the story back to Tibet. And be aware, all of this is not nearly as clear in the writings. This is mostly interpretation and guesses. But that seems to be what happened.”
“Holy shit. Enough already.” Earl sighed, obviously impatient. “Did you get anything solid?”
“Earl, there is nothing solid about any of this ancient tomes shit, okay?” I snapped angrily. “And I’m getting to it! I worked on this shit for a solid month.
Smoke another fucking cigarette and wait!”
Earl scowled. Ray and Milo exchanged a nervous glance.
“Chad…” Earl stubbed out the end of his cigarette in an ashtray, then set his hands flat on the desk, took a breath, and addressed me in a very calm manner. “I’m gonna state this in a way you can wrap your big old brain around. I know it’s real important for you to feel like the smartest asshole in the room, but I’ve got work to do. So actionable intel now, history minutia trivia fun time later…Get to the fucking point already.”
“They had to deal with the local tribe, fierce cannibals, and the necromancers who were using the entity for power. So what caused what casualties is unclear, but when we attack the body, all hell is going to break loose.”
“Got it,” Earl said, lighting another cigarette. Guy was a freaking chimney. “So find it, drill down, then hit the monster with some mystic crap we don’t know, then fight its servants we don’t know, but which were badass enough to wipe out an army. Anything else?”
“There’s a large contingent of Tibetans out in Colorado. I could go see their shamans with my notes and see if they know what unguents to use.”
“Do it. You may annoy the hell out of me sometimes, but you’re good at that kind of thing.”
“We’re going to collect the PUFF on a hundred-plus-meter Old One–category entity that has been making it easy to raise the dead and attracting monsters to New Orleans for centuries,” I said. “I’m thinking we’re going to make bank on this. Assuming anyone survives.”
“Assuming MCB doesn’t say it’s out of our league and take over from us,” Ray said.
“Then we just don’t tell them,” I said. “Let them go sort through ancient scrolls.”
“Speaking of MCB, you’re still not in the clear, there.”
“I got some thoughts on that in England. I’m going to go see a voodoo woman and try to replicate what MCB did to determine I was a suspect.”
Monster Hunter Memoir: Saints Page 8