Father of Monstrosity

Golden stairs led from the sewers and up through an opulent undercroft, from there they led into the ground floor of a massive hall. Jakob knew that Noble Quarter mansions were grand, but clearly the Demon Lord’s aura had turned this one into a reality-defying space that was larger on the inside. Treasures were piled high everywhere he looked and it was hard to walk across the floor without kicking golden tankards, stepping on polished coins, or disturbing the many statues, bejewelled weapons, and hastily-erected stands with shiny armour adorning them.

Kabel and Stelji were both utterly spellbound, which Jakob found degrading, though he could hardly fault them, as he was nearing the end of his own futile resistance to the pervasive thoughts of greed.

“Release us from your spell,” Jakob demanded of his host.

The Demon Lord laughed heartily, but then moments later the pressure vanished and Jakob felt that he could think clearly again. Kabel was midway-through showering himself with an armful of jewels when he came to, and Stelji turned away from the three-metre-tall silver mirror that she had been staring aimlessly into. The Huntsman seemed suddenly embarrassed, while the Wrought Servant returned her Master’s side as though nothing had happened. Strangely though, they both seemed depressed that the desires no longer controlled them, as though it had brought them tremendous joy. It was surprising that a Wrought Servant could even experience joy, but, then again, the power that made her Jakob’s thrall was one which the Demons themselves had sired.

Kabel watched, as the Demon and Skin Robe made peculiar vows to each other, while a ball of floating half-crimson-half-golden blood swirled between them. It was strange that he could comprehend the language they spoke, as it was clearly not Novarocian, and sounded more like poetic verse. He was unsure what exactly they were making promises about, but it did seem to involve blood, which was obviously a great sign.

“Did he really say he wants to be a dragon?” Kabel whispered to one of the Demon’s human slaves. She had brown hair that was clumped and tangled with buckets’ worth of dried blood and her bloodred eyes had a dangerous glint to them.

She lifted an arm covered in golden armour and pointed at Skin Robe. “He has the skill to remake flesh and bone. A dragon should not be a difficult feat for him to achieve,” she trailed off, turning her dangerous eyes to glare at him, “he will need a lot of subjects to create such a monstrosity however. Take care that you do not displease him. Jakob discards anyone and anything that he no longer has a use for.”

“You know him well?”

“Unfortunately, though my leash is now in the hands of the Greedy Lord, but perhaps it is an improvement.”

Always eager to save his own skin, Kabel leaned closer and whispered conspiratorially, “You don’t suppose you could put in a good word for me? I don’t quite fancy being rendered down to my constituent parts.”

“Lord Mammon seems an avid collector, so perhaps he already has an eye on you if he has seen a worth in keeping you. But I would advise that you escape when you can, neither he nor Jakob are masters you should willingly serve.”

“I’m afraid running is not in the cards for me, ‘less I somehow manage to escape this continent. The Crown has me marked, you see.”

“They’re the least of your worries,” she replied bluntly. “There are fates worse than death.”

Kabel was not a fan of her tone, which implied she first-hand knew of such a fate. Then he suddenly noticed that her armoured arm was hollow, as though everything below the elbow was gone. As she turned back to watch the contract between Demon Lord and Fleshcrafter, he also noticed that her body was riddled with wounds, many barely just healed as though she had been in a fierce battle only days prior. He shivered when he realised that he had greatly underestimated the mess he was in.

It was about midday when they went back through the sewer tunnels, heading to Skin Robe’s base of operations as far as Kabel could tell. The giant manservant seemed quite displeased having left behind the large steel scroll he had been guarding jealously since their flight from the Guild Hall.

Kabel was not sure that what he had seen was in fact real. After all, upon the completion of the Demon Lord’s contract, a massive orange slug-like beast had crawled from the gullet of the Demon and quickly absorbed the scroll within itself. A Living Hoard, it was apparently called. He was unsure how a demonbeast devouring treasure was meant to protect it or keep it undamaged, but then he also was not an expert in the absurdity that he had witnessed.

“I think I might be hallucinating,” he muttered to himself.

The giant grunted in response, as though finding his remark humorous.

After about twenty-or-so minutes, the Giant suddenly froze and sniffed the stagnant sewer air, as though anything apart from the cloying and warm scent of refuse was distinguishable to his senses.

“Loke.”

“You can smell him?”

A grunt came in reply, but, surprisingly, the young Summoner seemed to guess the words unsaid.

“Which way did he go?”

The Giant pointed down a tunnelway that veered from the path they were following, and also, more ominously, led deeper into the undercity. Kabel was not an expert on the matter, but even from his brief stay in the upper parts of Helmsgarten, he had gathered that the sewers were infamous for their treacherous labyrinthine halls and the nightmarish gutter-spawn that called it home.

“This is troubling,” Skin Robe muttered, mostly to himself.

“I’m lost,” Kabel replied.

A warning glare from the Manservant silenced him immediately, but then the Summoner looked him up-and-down, assessing him carefully for some reason. It made the hairs on the back of his neck stand, and turned his bowels to ice.

“Stelji.”

“MASTER…” the horrible voice of the Lightning Lady acknowledged.

“Take Kabel with you and locate Loke. Bring them both back to the mansion of Mammon. Alive, preferably.”

“MASTER…”

Immediately, she started off down the tunnel, following some unseen path.

“I’m supposed to help find your friend?”

“Yes.”

“How exactly? What does he look like.”

“Loke has eight legs and is slightly bigger than an adult male. He tends to leave behind silky residue, so he should be easy enough to find. But Stelji will no doubt locate him without the need for a trail.”

Kabel was so dumbfounded by the description of this ‘Loke’ that he struggled to formulate a reply, but then he just gave up and considered his new task more pragmatically.

“I don’t have a bow anymore.”

Jakob hummed to himself. “I suppose you will need a weapon.” After a moment of rummaging through some pocket underneath his off-putting skin robe, he withdrew two strange-looking gauntlets and handed them to Kabel.

As he put them on, he had a sudden realisation. “Are these made of bones?”

“Yes.”

“Bone boxing gloves…” he mused, finding even the absurdity of such weapons too much to laugh at.

“Please do not use them for punching,” the Summoner remarked. “They are for ranged manipulation of blood within a target.”

Kabel flexed his fingers within the gauntlets, suddenly uncomfortable with the power in his hands. “Isn’t that super powerful?”

“They are quite strong, yes. Please do not lose them.”

“I have one more question—,” he started, before being interrupted by the Giant.

“Go.”

Not needing to be told twice, Kabel hurried down the tunnel, following the echoes made from Stelji’s peculiar spike-legs.

“Unwise.”

“We will see,” Jakob replied. Clearly Heskel did not approve of giving the Huntsman such powerful weapons as the Hemolatry Gauntlets. Of course, they were devastating tools, as his one-time use of them against the Ratmen could attest, but with the Tome that the Guild Master had given him, he no longer had use of them. He had not had much time to study the Hemolatry Tome, but it was clear that it was sentient and could be used as a catalyst or focus of the many spells and rituals within it, shaving down on the time required to perform complex magic.

From a brief interrogation of the sentient being trapped in its pages, Jakob had gathered that a Covetous Daemon born of Envy and Greed had been summoned into the Tome. Daemons were the bastardised offspring of pairings between either conflicting or complementing demons, with the former being dangerous and unpredictable, and the latter being condensed amalgams of their two archetypes. Given that Hemolatry seemed to be a mix of the inherent magic exuded by Demons of Wrath, Envy, and Greed, it seemed quite an ingenious design to use such a Daemon as the core of the Spell Tome.

He had decided to name the Daemon, and by extension the Tome, ‘Tchinn’. It was a mix of the Demonic words ‘Tchiv’ and ‘Sechinn’: “Possess” and “Desire”. He thought it rather a poetic name, as it combined two words that best described the Daemon’s two halves, albeit in an unusual form of the language that he reckoned was not very grammatically correct, if Demons even observed such rules.

“Now, why did Loke leave his nest in the Apothecary?” Jakob wondered out loud.

Heskel grunted with a tone that implied it was obvious.

“I highly doubt the Apothecary lab has been found out.”

“Lesson learnt well,” he replied, parroting back the words Jakob had used to convince him of what trouble messing with the Crown and the Royal Guards was.

He laughed despite himself. “Thank you for the reminder. It of course seems quite likely, doesn’t it?”

Jakob pulled out Tchinn from within his flesh-stitched apron, where it was kept next to the Necromancy and Demonology tomes. As he lay his naked hand on its coiling and writhing surface, the blood-shaped tendrils grabbed onto his skin, tasting the blood beneath.

“Tchinn, reveal to me the heartbeats of those whose blood you covet.”

One of the unique elements of using the Daemon’s own soul as the catalyst for a spell, was that it allowed him to bypass the Blood Toll that rituals naturally required when invoked by mortals. Granted, Tchinn’s soul was tapped in place of Jakob’s blood, meaning that with too many rituals invoked with the Tome as the focus, it would be possible to exhaust the Daemon’s being in its entirety, leaving the Tome as nothing but a vacant husk.

If kept sufficiently fed with blood, this eventuality could be delayed, though it was bound to happen, given that nothing could return the bit of Tchinn’s soul that was sacrificed every time. The same principle applied to most forms of magic that Jakob knew of, which was why most unaugmented spellcasters lived relatively-short lives, despite their tremendous power. It was also why Jakob tried to always utilise a vessel or servant for spells whenever possible. After all, he had plans that required he lived a long life.

With a hiss of compliance, the tome made the sound of a powerful heartbeat, like colossal drums of war. The sound radiated outwards, and, to Jakob’s eyes, cast a crimson glow around the hearts of every living creature around.

In the distance, down the tunnel Stelji and Kabel had taken, he saw a single heart, which pounded quickly as it bobbed up-and-down, no doubt belonging to the Huntsman as he ran to catch up to the Wrought Servant, who appeared invisible to this strange sight, given her lack of a real heart.

When he looked down himself, he saw the outline of the steadily-beating heart in his chest. Curious, he looked to Heskel, where a strange seven-chambered and bulbous organ mimicked a human heart, but beat a slower staccato rhythm.

Then Jakob directed his eyes upwards, looking at the tunnel ceiling, above which lay the bustling Market North. Countless hearts showed the foot-traffic along the sides of the main thoroughfare, and a few larger organs no doubt belonging to horses and the other animals that were commonly used as beasts-of-burden.

As he was quite familiar with the layout of the tunnel they were following and where its terminus lay in relation to the Apothecary, it was easy enough for him to see the solitary heartbeat of who he could only assume was Hargraves. A little past his signature, both in the area above the courtyard stairs and down in the laboratorium, a collection of hearts showed a considerable group of humans.

“You were correct, it would seem. I count nine people: four within my laboratorium, and five in the courtyard.” Judging by their heartrates, they were on edge, but relaxed. It seemed they were waiting to ambush Jakob and his Lifeward whenever they returned.

“Tchinn. Take from the four below the blood in their veins. Their blood belongs now to you.”

A gleeful hiss erupted from all around them in the tunnel, and the four heartbeats within the lab suddenly stilled.

“We’ll go through the front, grab the tools we need, and then return to the mansion.”

Heskel grunted approvingly.

After emerging from the manhole in a back-alley near the Apothecary, the pair ventured carefully out into the foot-traffic of merchants and nobles, not managing to blend in, but also not drawing the attention of anyone who mattered.

A throbbing pain in his right temple had been steadily building after Tchinn had granted him the ability to see the heartbeats, and he needed Heskel to steady him on more than one occasion. The spell would not last for more than an hour, Jakob knew, but there was also no way to end it prematurely. Accompanying the glowing outlines around every person’s heart was the minute, but still distinct, double taps of the life-giving rhythms.

In hindsight, it seemed quite foolish to try out a new spell at such a critical moment, but Jakob persevered. After all, so much was at stake, and he would not let something as banal as a migraine set him back.

“They are still within the courtyard,” Jakob told his companion as they neared the Apothecary. After climbing the three steps to the door, Heskel pushed it open, revealing a modestly-crowded store. Hargraves stood by his counter, in the middle of prescribing the exact treatment a customer required, when he spotted them.

“Welcome back, Milord.”

He was about to leave the customer he was attending, but Jakob halted him with a gesture.

“As you were, Hargraves. We will be leaving again shortly.”

“Of course, Milord.”

They went down into the basement, Heskel leading the way, in case there was anyone down there that Jakob could not see with his Heartbeat Sight. After they went through the doorway and found the basement suitably void of life, they set to work collecting the tools they would need, the Wight carrying the majority of them.

Though risking exposure, this was the most efficient way of fulfilling Mammon’s wish, since the construction of so large a body as a dragon’s required most of the tools they had gathered and created during their two months’ stay in the Apothecary. Starting from scratch within Mammon’s demesne would be safer, but would also require a significant time-investment to rebuild every necessary item, and Jakob abhorred inefficiency. He was also in a hurry to wrap up his agreement with the Demon Lord so that he could set to work uncovering the truth of the Tungsten Scroll. What little he had glimpsed of its text and diagrams filled him with such an exhilarating sensation that it was all he could even think about.

They had only just finished gathering up the last of the tools when a commotion from the store above drew Jakob’s attention. From one moment to the next, a flood of people had entered the Apothecary; his sight showing him at least a dozen heartbeats that moved in a united column towards the basement staircase.

“We’ve been discovered!”

Heskel stowed the last tool away within his flesh apron and drew one of the crudely-curved chopping blades they used to sever hip joints, and other tenacious body parts, when dismantling subjects. In his hands it looked like a small easy-to-wield knife, but in reality it was half the length of Jakob’s body and weighed over five kilos.

“Tchinn, extinguish the hearts of the five in the courtyard!”

With another gleeful hiss, the five men in the courtyard fell still. Their bodies would become like the four around their feet, whose exsanguinated corpses were a testament to the devastating power of the Covetous Daemon.

Jakob cast his glance around the room, peering through the walls at the heartbeats in the streets and alleyways above. Reinforcements seemed to be making an orderly attempt of restricting them to the Apothecary, as six more men now ringed the walled-off courtyard and a group of equal number was making their way to the front door.

With a blast of compressed air, the door to the basement blew off its hinges, slamming into one of the disorganised worktables and scattering flasks and alembics.

Before the lead figure, a stout woman in silver armour, could attack them, Jakob flung a spear of bone from one of the dead guardsmen at his feet using one of the few offensive Necromantic spells he knew, with Tchinn as his spell focus. The Covetous Daemon seemed quite unhappy to be used as the catalyst for such spells, given their association with a Daemon he was naturally opposed to.

If a Covetous Daemon was one of the beings whose nature had created Hemolatry, then an Undying Daemon of Pride and Sloth was the progenitor of Necromancy. As Pride and Sloth were conflicting vices, such a Daemon was quite pernicious and its very nature prevented death from taking hold in its vicinity. If not for the immense peril it would put him in, Jakob would have considered creating a spell tome containing such a Daemon to enable him to advance in his study of Necromancy.

As the wind-wielder’s head exploded and the bone stake drove itself into the stone wall of the stairway behind her, two more figures pushed past her body callously, only to be immediately shorn in twain by Heskel’s blade.

Jakob looked through the walls again, spotting at least a dozen more heartbeats joining the six in the apothecary above, and he also noticed the six outside the courtyard had ventured inside and were preparing to enter from the back-entrance of the basement.

“We’re surrounded,” he alerted Heskel.

The Wight chopped another royal guard in half, before flames engulfed his head, pushing him back to take cover.

Bright incandescent fire lit up the dim basement, revealing the massive mess of Loke’s nest, which covered most of the ceiling and backwall. Jakob also noted, with some satisfaction, that his construct had killed several members of the guard unit before they had driven him out of the laboratorium, their bodies hanging in tangled cocoons among the rafters.

With smoke pouring off Heskel’s head, mask, and shoulders, Jakob moved to the fore, forming a claw with his hand on the spell tome, before drawing it downwards. The fire-breathing man in the doorway was torn asunder as invisible claws rent his body, the next in line screamed in terror as he was covered in his comrade’s blood. Seconds later, his body crunched together as though constricted by a coiling body when Jakob closed his hand into a fist atop the tome.

The doorway to the courtyard burst open and a man charged in with a wild look in his eyes, too fast for Jakob to react with another spell, but then the tail of his flesh robe freed itself to cave-in his skull with a single powerful slap.

Despite the decimation, more of the guards kept pouring down the stairs, and a sense of urgency took hold of Jakob.

“Heskel! Take the tools and run to the mansion! I will meet you there!”

Without turning, the Wight let out a discontented grunt, before slamming a guard into the wall and deflecting another’s blade with his own.

“Go!”

With a roar of displeasure, Heskel killed the two men he was struggling against, then broke free from the mob forming at the bottom of the stairwell and barrelled through the newcomers that had entered through the backdoor.

Jakob moved towards the backwall, running a naked finger over the spell tome as he set it down.

In Demonic he commanded the Covetous Daemon, “Protect me from them.”

With his back against the web-covered wall and Tchinn on the floor some metres ahead of him, the tome was the only barrier against the rapidly-filling crowd of angry and terrified Royal Guards.

Jakob took out a knife from within his robe and used his blood to quickly draw a summoning circle on the stone floor. It was small and shoddy, lacking any wards against retaliation from the Entity he was summoning, but, then again, the two of them had something of an agreement already.

Sensing his malicious intent, the closest guards charged forward to stop him, only to be met with serpent-like tendrils the girth of tree trunks, all emerging from the Spell Tome on the floor. It was like one of Grandfather’s hydras recreated in blood.

With his hasty summoning circle complete, and the attackers kept at bay for the moment, Jakob put his hands on the crimson lines and uttered the ritual.

“Lord Mammon, Sire of the Shining Hoard, respond to my call and heed me well. Come forth and—”

With a solid impact against his forehead, he was punched back against wall, cracking his skull against the stone and momentarily blacking out, saved from a fracture thanks only to his soft hood.

When he regained consciousness, two sorcerers were containing the tome in overlapping domes of pressurised air and scalding fire. He barely got to his feet, before four sets of hands pinned him down, slamming his face against the hard ground.

Someone got a vindictive kick in, and he felt one of his ribs crack painfully, while the weight on his back made it near-impossible to breathe.

“I will kill you all,” he snarled.

“You wish,” a voice replied confidently, and he was hauled to his feet, before a cloth was used to gag him and a sack was drawn over his head. He had only caught a glimpse, but it was clear that the person before him was an officer of some distinction, given her lavish amethyst-studded silver plate-armour.

“Bring him to the transport,” she instructed.

“Yes, ma’am!” the ones holding him upright obeyed loudly and he was quickly hauled across the basement and up the stairs.

Before he left the basement, he managed to overhear the officer and a subordinate.

“Major, why did we let him live?”

“There are fates worse than death.”