by Steve Thomas
Now it was Streshim’s turn to think. “You can’t do it from scratch?”
Erenkirk for once stood tall and met the guardsman’s eye. “No.”
Commander Streshim shrugged with a jingle of mail. “Then see it done. This is too important to the Holy Duke for half-measures. I’ll post a guard on this building until you return.” He turned on his heel and stalked out onto the street, but not before grabbing a spirit-lamp from the shelf. “And let your apprentice outside now and then. I’ve seen snow with more color. It’s disconcerting.”
Erenkirk followed Streshim to the door and slammed it shut. “A damn guard in my shop. I’d rather take my chances with the thieves.” He shook his head. “Did you extract that pig?” Darvik nodded. “Good. Take it to the butcher and trade it for some smoked pork for the road. Then come straight home. Don’t go sneaking off to that brothel like you always do. We leave at noon.” He clapped Darvik on the side of the head. “Why did you let him in? Hmm?”
Darvik spent the rest of the morning in a haze. Sangrook Manor. That evil place had been abandoned for decades, and for good reason. The Sangrooks had ruled this country through their dark magic, necromancy and worse, leveling curses upon their enemies and capturing peasants as slaves, sacrifices, and experiments to satisfy their lust for forbidden knowledge. Erenkirk must be truly desperate if he had resolved to go there, and the Holy Duke mad to authorize an expedition. What information could be so valuable? Did some crisis loom over the city of Windmire, or was this just the progression of the Holy Duke’s zeal for rooting out heretics and traitors?
Darvik knew better than to ask such questions. Erenkirk would only answer with his belt.
***
Sangrook Manor loomed before the blood-red sunset, all glowering gargoyles and grimy windows and crumbling brick. The grounds were a hazy memory of once-great splendor. Here and there, a rosebush gleamed through the waist-high grass. Scattered topiaries grasped at their ancient forms like water-logged corpses, bloated and deformed. From atop a cracked stone pedestal, a statue of the old heretic Maldaeron Sangrook, who first dined with devils, watched over it all, while black-red vines clawed at his feet like a demon of the earth trying to drag him down.
“This is an evil place,” said Darvik. “We should leave now and tell Streshim we couldn’t find anything useful here.”
Erenkirk shook his head. “And then what? He’ll just tell us to forget about the Holy Duke’s artifact and send us on our way? The Holy Duke is a paranoid zealot who sees treason and heresy everywhere he looks. You know full well what artifacts are waiting in his dungeon. Apparently, they work so well he needs a new one to help him torture the corpses.” Erenkirk gritted his teeth and shoved his finger in Darvik’s face. “So don’t tell me about failing the Holy Duke. I missed my one chance to refuse an order from him when I was your age. There won’t be another.”
“And why am I bound by your mistakes? Why am I also a slave to the Holy Duke, helping him root out heretics we both know don’t exist?”
Erenkirk’s open palm lashed out and landed on Darvik’s ear. “I took you in when your parents left you swaddled and screaming on the streets. I raised you as my son and my apprentice. My burdens are yours, and you will not question me.” He balanced the first blow with another to the opposite ear. Darvik didn’t flinch. From Erenkirk, a slap to the face may as well have been a frown. “Now get this door open before the wolves take us. Son.”
Darvik stepped up to the faded oak door, trying not to think about the special orders the Holy Duke had commissioned over the years. The artifact that burrowed itself into a man’s spine and slowly climbed to his brain, paralyzing him inch by inch over the course of weeks. The goggles that showed images of the victim’s deepest fears. A harness that converted blood to acid. He could think of a dozen ways Streshim might torture him to death or insanity, and that was neglecting the conventional methods like hot irons and pliers.
The great doors of the estate were adorned with a relief of swirling, sinister lines. Beneath a raven’s wing frieze, the wood was bare in spots where the deep gray paint had peeled away. The knocker was fashioned after a child’s face and forged of brass, spotty and green with corrosion, as if the child were suffering some disfiguring disease. Darvik wondered if he even needed to unlock the door. Perhaps some thief had already broken in and left the manor unlocked. It had been empty for generations, after all.
Darvik reached out and pushed. The door was solid as a wall. A mild inconvenience, but not a surprise. Every child heard stories of what lurked in this evil place. Some said that the immortal Crisaelva Sangrook still roamed the halls, or that the manor had been overrun by demons summoned by some catastrophic spell, or that anyone who entered would fall to the same madness as the Sangrooks. Darvik had heard a hundred tales about the mysteries of the Sangrooks.
He rummaged through his sack of equipment until he found the lock pick. This was no ordinary lock pick, for what artificer would carry a common tool? No, this artifact was a disk of brass, a crude artifact barely more complicated than a spirit lamp. While a spirit lamp converted essence into light, the lock pick converted it to heat.
He braced the lock picking artifact against the keyhole and waited for it to do its work. The familiar purple-black aura of spent essence wisped out from the device, and the door cracked open. It was destructive and crude, but still easier than smashing his way through.
Erenkirk stepped past him and held out a pair of goggles. The old master was already wearing his own. “Dark vision lenses,” said Erenkirk.
Darvik slipped them on. These were imbued with the essence of a cat. The essence contained not just magical energies, but all aspects of the creature it was taken from. Any essence could be used as generic energy, but the key to advanced artifice was in matching the correct essence with the desired effect. In this case, the goggles invoked a cat’s night vision. “Not spirit-lamps?”
Erenkirk slapped him in the back of the head, upsetting the goggles. “Use your head, boy. We can’t be blasting magical light all over this place. The less we touch, by any means, the safer we are.” He placed a hand on the door and pushed. It creaked and groaned as Erenkirk pushed through the years of grime, corrosion, and decay binding the threshold and hinges.
Darvik wiped his shoes on the threadbare, rat-chewed doormat and stepped into the darkness of Sangrook Manor’s parlor. The thick layer of dust and rat droppings put the lie to any claims that anyone had set foot in this mansion since its owners had fled. Moldy mahogany chairs adorned with skulls flanked every door, linked to candelabras by a labyrinth of spider-webs. The curtains were faded and frayed. A book shelf stood in the corner, the black-stained tomes exuding must.
Erenkirk stopped to gaze at a wall of portraits. He tapped one depicting a gaunt, pale-faced man with long raven black hair, a wiry beard, and soulless eyes, standing behind a table cluttered with vials, flasks, and scraps of metal. In one hand, he held an upside-down human skull with his finger highlighting a hole in the forehead. In the other…
Darvik’s stomach turned when he recognized it. Such a device was beyond illegal, beyond unholy, beyond insane. How could any man admit to owning such a thing, let alone immortalize it and its evil result in a portrait? Pigs were one thing, but this… “An extractor designed for humans. Is that why we’re here?”
“Among other reasons,” said Erenkirk. He pulled a flask from his coat pocket, then raised it to the portrait in a toast. “Habrien Sangrook, the family artificer. We owe a great debt to him and his research.”
Darvik turned away. “You have a copy of his book on the applications of animal essences. In the afterward, he claimed he had re-discovered how to fabricate new extractors.” The creation of extractors was a lost art, one of the many casualties of the War of the Gods. Erenkirk was the steward of a small collection of the devices that had been seized or unearthed by the Convergence and assigned to the Holy Duke of Windmire.
“And he didn’t stop at pigs, I can as
sure you,” said Erenkirk with a wry chuckle. “Nor did he share the procedure, which probably means blood magic is involved. That’s dangerous stuff, in more ways that one…” His grin faded for a moment, but he shook it off and tapped a wiry finger against the portrait. “Looks a bit like you. You haven’t been hiding Sangrook blood have you?”
Darvik suppressed his anger at being compared to a Sangrook. His odd appearance had brought him nothing but ribbing and bullying his whole life, always with the undercurrent of a threat. People were still executed for looking like a Sangrook, and only his usefulness to Erenkirk shielded Darvik from the Holy Duke’s wrath. He despised how close his own work was to that of a Sangrook monster, how much of his livelihood was rooted in that family’s fell experiments. How much of his future would be dominated by them? He needed an escape. “I want you to test me. I need to be named journeyman so I can earn the money to walk away from Windmire and the Holy Duke while I still have some humanity left.”
Erenkirk, to Darvik’s surprise, considered the demand. “Convince me you have the knowledge. Why do we need the human extractor?”
That was barely a question. “Essence holds every aspect of the creature. If we extract a man’s essence before he dies, we have his memories. That makes it possible to build an artifact to read them.”
“Good, and if the subject is already dead?”
Darvik had tested dead pigs as part of his calibration process. He had hoped that he could extract the essence without suffering the screams. “Essence escapes quickly after death, but you can still collect some. You only get a fraction, but it could be enough.”
Erenkirk tilted his head and nodded. “That didn’t take long at all. Maybe you really are ready.”
“Even if the human extractor is here and we can find it, we still need a way to access the memories.”
“Oh, do we?” asked Erenkirk. He adjusted his dark vision lenses for effect, then opened the nearest door. This one led into a dining room. By the looks of it, the servants had never cleaned up after the Sangrooks’ last meal. Plates were covered in bones, cups lay on their sides on the stained tablecloth, the chairs were pushed back, and a mound of wax lay beneath every candle-stick.
“You’re hoping Habrien already solved that problem, too,” said Darvik.
Another door. Another ruin of a room. This time it was the kitchen, where the fireplace reeked of bat guano and insects buzzed over a water-barrel. The previous rooms had reeked of mold and death already, but the added stench of bat shit and a rotten pantry was too much. Both artificers held their breath and pushed through the next door.
They stood in hallway lined with doors, thankfully bereft of anything but cobwebs. “We have two objectives,” said Erenkirk. “We need to find Habrien’s laboratory and his journals. His tools, such as the extractor, will be in the lab. The journals will either be in the family library or his bedroom, if it wasn’t re-purposed. Failing that, we’ll have to start sifting through storage rooms.”
Darvik pointed toward the end of the hall. “There are a lot of doors in this mansion. Twenty in this hallway alone. It will take more than all night to find what we’re after.”
Erenkirk kicked open the nearest door, revealing a small chamber with a bed. “Servants’ quarters. We’ll spend the night here, then split up in the morning. You’ll check every floor below this one, and I’ll check the ones above. Then we’ll talk more about whether you deserve a promotion.”
The old man slipped into the bedroom and slammed the door behind him, leaving Darvik alone in the dusty hallway, where floorboards rattled and rafters groaned. He opened another bedroom door and examined the dilapidated chamber. A mound of dead flies lay below the dust-dark windowsill. The bed was tightly made, and upon pulling back the blanket, Darvik found a clean set of sheets, more comfort than he had expected. A plain armoire stood in the corner. Darvik cracked it open to find a set of hose, a wool jacket, a few coins, and various brushes. The young artificer helped himself to a brush and set to work dusting off the bed and clearing cobwebs, wishing he had found a broom as well.
He sat down on the bed and set his goggles on the nightstand. How could Erenkirk expect him to sleep here? His answer came in the form of a muffled clatter through the wall. His master was rummaging through his pack for a bottle. Erenkirk never fell asleep sober, so the surroundings hardly mattered to him.
Darvik had no such crutch. He bundled himself in the blanket, hoping it would filter out the malodorous breath seeping from every inch of the mansion. He tried to sleep, but unease enveloped him. He heard the rats squeaking and scratching. He imagined spiders vaulting from surface to surface, trailing their webs over his head. He felt the chill wind drifting through loose window-panes. Even the sounds from the outdoors disturbed him. The crickets chirped a little too low, sounding like saws cutting through bone. Vermin shrieked from within the clutches of owls, and the wolves had found no more sleep than Darvik.
Sleep was impossible. There was no choice but to leave the room, and there was no point in waiting for Erenkirk to wake up before he started the search. Darvik gathered up his belongings and wandered the halls amid the eldritch chorus of the outdoors. He opened each door he passed and followed every downward flight of stairs. Down he climbed, down and down and deeper than the mansion was tall. The deeper he descended, the quieter and better preserved the mansion became.
In the dungeons, he came across the corpse of some mangled and tortured prisoner, or perhaps a mangled and tortured victim of dark experiments. Despite their gruesome reputation, the Sangrooks had fancied themselves cultured aristocrats, too genteel to practice their evil magic on the upper floors where a stray visitor might see something not meant for mortal eyes. Darvik knew he was getting closer to where the extractor might have been hidden away, and where it would have been used.
He peered inside each cell as his walked past. Most were empty. Some held corpses sprawled on the stone floor. At the end of the hall was a cell with an open door. A dead woman leaned against the wall, and Darvik recoiled at the sight of her. She wore no clothing, and her skin was still soft and white, with no signs that the rats had fed upon her. From her appearance, she could have died that morning. Deep gashes bit her sides and breasts, as if she had been savaged by some gargantuan cat. As he stared, Darvik’s weary mind saw blood still dripping. She had but one finger still attached to her hand, and a manacle held it in the air, pointing at a discolored brick. Was she pointing to some hidden door? Was this a not-so-subtle clue meant to entrap interlopers? Or was Darvik asleep in the dusty, musty bed seven floors above and suffering this mansion’s nightmares?
If this were a dream, he would follow where it led. If it were not, well, he was here to explore this mansion’s secrets. There was no choice. He stepped into the cell, half expecting the iron door to swing shut and the corpse to spring to life and lunge at him. Neither came to pass. He was alone in the silence with nothing but a mutilated dead woman for company. He wasn’t sure if that was any relief.
He spared no time in examining the brick. He brushed his finger against the mortar, only to find that it was not mortar at all. When he tapped at it, a chunk broke away to reveal wood beneath. This was just a frame, which meant this brick was loose.
He could still find his way upstairs, reunite with his master, and tell him about these lower chambers. They could return in the morning, rested and prepared to excavate the dungeon and what lay beyond. Surely Habrien Sangrook’s secret laboratory was in the vicinity. They could find it together. But he knew all too well how that would play out. Erenkirk would unbuckle his belt and use it to mark his apprentice as lazy, disobedient, cowardly, and foolish. Then Darvik would spend the night tending to his scabs and return here in the morning. He’d still be alone, but also sore and bloody. No, he had disobeyed his master by leaving his bedroom. His only hope was to find the artifacts before morning.
He pushed at the loose brick and was rewarded by a click as some underlying mechanism unlatched. The wa
ll slid away to reveal narrow tunnel and let free the surging rush of an underground river. He braced his arms against the outer rim of the tunnel and leaned for a better look.
A chain rattled.
Darvik spun just in time to see the prisoner, the pitiful denizen of this cell, lurch forward at him. Her every joint was floppy, her jaw hung open, and her dead eyes were locked upon his face. The fingerless hand swiped at him as she tumbled to the ground.
Darvik startled and stumbled back. His footing failed him and he tumbled into the secret passage. For a brief moment, he slid down a smooth cement chute. He stretched out his arms, hoping to find some purchase and stop his descent, but his fingers slipped along the slick walls. His head slammed against the floor and his goggles cracked and fell away.
Now surrounded by darkness, he tumbled out the end of the chute and fell through the air. In a moment, he landed with a splash. A current grabbed him, forcing him along a narrow riverbed. The water was shallow, but the current was strong. His pant-legs snagged and tore on something, and his pack ripped free of his shoulders. He cascaded downward, blind and helpless, struggling to breathe, bouncing between the rocks as the river pushed him in all directions.
Another drop. The riverbed fell away and Darvik spilled down a waterfall. He sucked in a deep breath, catching almost as much salty spray as air, then plunged into a lake. For a moment he was submerged, floundering in icy black water, salt stinging his eyes. A current pulled him away from the waterfall, but it was weaker now. He was too sore and bruised from his fall to swim, and yet swim he did. There was no choice. With every stroke of his arm, he knocked against some floating object churning in the lake. Something grabbed at his leg, but he kicked it off with little effort. He forced himself upward and forward until he found purchase, then hauled himself onto a rocky shore.
Darvik vomited water and heard his dinner trickle back into the lake along with it. His lungs filled with air again, and he rolled to his back.