CHAPTER 6
The Tarnished Jade Flower
A woman sat inside an unassuming, yet exceedingly well-warded house on a street just off the city’s main arteries. The house, built in millennia past, would have seemed utterly normal, only lightly warded, to all eyes, for even this was part of its warding. Its magical protections, like walls a kilometer tall and wrought of solid steel, had the appearance of mundane stone, neither taller nor thicker than ordinary.
She sat, globs of scarlet ink orbiting her hand like planets around a sun, its ivory fingers and golden joints glistening in the faint light of the light-producing talisman she had affixed to the walls in lieu of using the inbuilt lighting. Like a painter, she mulled over her canvas: a single piece of yellow paper, held fixed in mid-air by the weakest of magics. She cautiously guided the flame in her gut into a roar, ever cautious, feeling like she was fostering a candle flame, yet also feeling that it might burst her open from the inside at any moment. In a few quick gestures and splashes of ink, a new talisman came to be. Meanwhile, her precious brush nestled in the midst of her chest, beneath a curtain of myriad necklaces, from beads to precious stones… unused. So pitifully unused. But it couldn’t be helped. In her current, sorry state, she was in no position to use that brush.
Suddenly, a would-be customer made herself known: someone who had either dug in the right places or caught the interest of the right people. Yao Fu pulls on the new metaphorical red string, expecting, truly, just another customer, someone to put in the queue for a simple exchange of goods and services.
But no.
This one demands her attention, her full, unbridled attention.
A woman, named Brunhilde Krahe, also known as “Blackhand,” currently located in the Lost Sun Society. The rest of the information was incomplete. No… tainted. Obscured by black smoke. Were it a book, its pages would be blackened and glued together by tar. The same tar that now held together Yao’s own Soul Furnace, which rightly should have been shattered, irreparable, leaving her forever crippled.
Yet, here she was. Reduced to the lowermost rungs of power, hiding at the other side of the world, sure—but not for long. Either she had just found the soul whose summoning had opened her window to communion with the Black God of the Labyrinth, or the heavens were playing a truly cruel trick indeed.
She would learn which it was soon enough; Brunhilde Krahe instantly shot up to the top of her priority list.
???
With not much to do for the moment but wait to be contacted by Mistress Yao, Krahe had taken to occasionally visiting the Society in intervening days. Due to the Tarnished Jade Flower Stamp’s tracking properties, she went out of her way to avoid any church safe houses, and the same went for going anywhere that might make it easy to deduce information. She went to the Temple of Records, but not to any restricted section. She avoided Garvesh, and only followed up on leads that led her to mundane places. Despite everything, the Society was well-hidden and secure enough, and the library had some texts she couldn’t find in the Temple of Records, and vice-versa. The wargames were also a nice diversion.
On an otherwise unassuming day, she walked through the Society’s second-floor corridor and found herself confronted with an equally familiar and unwelcome figure. She had to suppress a smirk; it was an honest surprise that it had taken this long for them to meet again, and she was sure that was no accident.
Sorayah. She was clad in more common attire compared to that stupid robe, but she wore far more jewelry than seemed reasonable, especially rings, several bedecking each of her gangly clawed fingers. Krahe felt magic from some of them, so for all she knew, it might have just been a way to disguise which were magical. Behind her, two others trailed, whom she had not interacted with but remembered as having stood near Sorayah.
She slowed and came to a halt at the sight of Krahe, a seething anger flaring behind her eyes.
“You,” she hissed.
Not responding, Krahe merely raised a questioning eyebrow to her.
“Levying false accusations against another member is grounds for expulsion, you know.”
“Reuben delivered my message, then? I’m not sure what exactly he said, but I’ve levied no accusations against you. Neither to other members nor to the Speaker. It was a mere word of caution. You needn’t fear any accusations from me. If I must repeat myself; I don’t intend to play petty politics with you or anyone else. What was your method, I wonder? A Jas’raban artifact, maybe? Oh, but that power can only be catalyzed by a humanoid soul. I wonder…”
“Tread carefully,” Sorayah’s right-hand companion growled, arcane-green power winding about him for a brief moment. Krahe figured he was stronger than her, at least in terms of raw statistics. The same went for Sorayah… but they didn’t know that. She had felt two appraisal attempts from Sorayah by now, both impotently smothered by Deathsmoke Blessing without sending back any information besides the visceral wrongness of Krahe’s appraisal immunity. Casus had made it abundantly clear in the past; the force obscuring Krahe from unwelcome appraisal was something obviously different from any normal anti-appraisal measures. It was this property that made Krahe decide to handle things as she did in this given situation. Merely blocking appraisal was one thing; it could be interpreted as guarding one’s weaknesses or lackluster powers. Deathsmoke Blessing made such bluffs infinitely less likely.
“Tread carefully? To avoid being bitten by the snake coiled in the grass?” she asked the right-hand man. Then, staring hard at Sorayah, she added: “If we’re speaking of caution, I ought to instead stomp on its head before it can even think to strike at me.”
???
Elaborate patterns in dark shades of purple flashes across Sorayah’s body, clearly displaying her rage as she hissed: “Who do you think I am, to be threatened by some nobody Anathemist? I’m a level thirty-five shaman, I have a fourth-order voidkey, I can—”
Before she could finish, the black-haired woman who had humiliated her in front of the whole Society vanished. In her place, a shape of billowing smoke, with green-burning dots for eyes and an alien rib cage burning in her chest with the color of a hot branding iron. The Green-eyed Demon rushed up to her with inhuman speed, alien whispers and sounds emanating from her form, a raven of the same ethereal countenance upon her shoulder.
Her heretofore loyal companions fled like beaten dogs.
While the mouthless form merely stared at her, tilting her head back and forth, the raven opened its beak, and a garbled, hissing, child-like voice came out. Behind it was a constant, grating sound, weird music from a screeching string instrument, and rapid singing in a language she didn’t know. In simple terms, it sounded exactly like a crow talking while alien music played in the background, which itself was then played back from a memslate through a shitty speaker.
“Do nothing. You. Can. Do. Nothing. I don’t know what led you to the… Mis-be-got-ten. De-lu-sion. That you could harm me. In a way. That matters. Jas’raba could not. Hashem could not. The Dead. Night. Tigers. Could not. Cease this… or become a stain. Last. Warning.”
With those words, she was gone. Sorayah slid down the wall, slowly deflating in a long exhalation.
Meanwhile, just outside, in the gap between this building and the next, Krahe plummeted three stories straight down. She only dared to perform that exit over simply walking away because she knew this back alley was here. Thus, she could safely emerge from her dive mid-air, fall most of the way, and then dive again to break her fall. The velocity reduction from the weakened effect of gravity was nice, but even the sudden deceleration of impact had as little effect as any physical attack; that is to say, none.
She made herself innocuous and turned her mind towards Barzai. The crow was still in the hallway, merely hidden, observing Sorayah. Krahe was perfectly fine with the possibility of the eidolon being detected; it would serve as a nice aftershock for her intimidation tactic.
In fact, once the lizard woman gathered her wits and got back up, Krahe had Barzai follow from a short distance behind. Then, just as she saw Sorayah shifting in a way that suggested she would look back, she willed the spirit to reveal itself, perched on one of the wall lights, staring at her. She stifled a slight laugh when the same woman who had tried to intimidate her ran away. This was Krahe’s chosen tactic for the simple reason that Sorayah wasn’t lying when she spoke of her own abilities; based on Krahe’s cursory investigation, she likely had the superior firepower between the two of them. Deception and terror were tactical powerhouses of human history; they became prime choices when it came to going against a superior force.
The knowledge of how abnormal her astral body appeared had not slipped by her awareness; it didn’t match any written description of how it ought to look while in a partial dive, and when she brought it up with Firminus during a checkup, he only confirmed it. With astro diving already being an obscure discipline, it made using her astral form as a tool of psychological warfare all the more appealing. There was the problem that she couldn’t speak while diving, but Barzai was under no such restriction, being a native of the Gulf and thus speaking through means other than the physical.
The raven returned at her beck and call, diving into her chest as she began ambling down the alleyway, making her way to a house in the same district of the city, which she had rented specifically to use while she was branded with Yao’s sign. Indeed, real estate wasn’t exactly hard to come by. Audunpoint was, after all, a young, growing city built atop the bones of an antediluvian megalopolis.
The place she’d rented was barebones to the extreme as a result, with no furniture and only basic amenities, but that wasn’t an issue since its sole purpose was the basement, which was large and deep enough to be an indoor firing range. It was in part thanks to the noise of a nearby market and a tram station. Apparently, according to the building’s Evoy owner, the whole Audunpoint underground was a vast sprawl of basements and catacombs, such that the tram system had busted through four different ancient crypts during its construction, and one of the stations was located in a repurposed subterranean cathedral. This building was actually the third option, as the previous two only had passive ventilation for the basement, while this one had been hooked right into the tram’s tunnel vents.
In the basement, she had set up some steel plates as targets on one end of the room, and on the other end, two fold out tables, a cushion, and a portable burner. Mercifully, the building had its own central water supply, but unlike the church safe houses, there was no central power supply.
As she sat, waiting for her talisman ink to stop bubbling and stabilize into a usable state, Krahe used the other half of the table to chop up vegetables into thin strips: carrot-like roots, peppers, and yellow cabbage. A pan, which she had hammered into the shape of a crude wok, sat atop the burner. Salt alone, rather, a fermented, strongly salty sauce, was more than enough flavoring for her stir-fry.
While the vegetables cooked, she took a mass of cold, leftover rice grain out of storage, leaving it in one chunk for now, followed by the meat component of her dish. It was dark red, almost purple, with veins of fat running between the muscle bundles. The quality was like high-grade beef with a much weaker smell and apparently came from a kind of land tortoise that was a common beast of burden.
She set aside a portion of the meat, mixing half into the vegetables and breaking up the rice into the stir-fry once it was done. Thereafter, having scooped her meal into a bowl, she used the leftover oil to fry individual pieces of meat, partly to enjoy them on their own and because, for some bizarre reason, Barzai incessantly demanded a share. Eidolons had no need for sustenance, and yet not only did Barzai manifest and demand meat, but he demonstrably recovered from exhaustion quicker when she fed him.
Just as he pecked for a piece of meat that she’d plucked out of the oil with a pair of construct-jade chopsticks, she yanked it out of reach, scolding the eidolon: “You won’t even do your job, and you have the gall to act like this? Eh?”
She had yet to test the Daemon Core, let alone put it to practical use. Creating the individual constructs that would compose it was well within her ability, that much she had made sure of, but… Barzai wouldn’t obey. No matter how many times she tried, though the crow would let her get as far as forming the anathemic core and partly enclosing it, he would refuse to go any further. The moment the core would reach criticality, Barzai always returned to his avian form and vanished, becoming unresponsive for two hours or so.
Barzai hopped up, his head splitting along the line of his beak as he snapped it up.
“You said you wanted to become a Daemon Core. What gives?” she questioned, expecting no answer.
Barzai sat there, tilting his head back and forth. No meat in the oil, no meat to snatch, and for some reason, he didn’t so much as spare a glance for the raw stuff or that which had been mixed in with the sauce. He glanced at the oil, then back at Krahe.
“Wah. Awawawawa.”
Despite lacking an efficient means of communicating with the spirit, Krahe could still feel his level of exhaustion through the system, and it seemed like he was near-topped up. Resigning to the temperamental not-bird’s demands, she fried another slice of meat and gave it to him, leaving her with only one more for herself in addition to her proper meal.
Once more, Barzai opened his beak. This time, a voice came out: a man speaking in a somber, slow manner rather than the typical sound of a crow’s mimicry.
“Yea, the Eye of Ruin, in its great and terrible glory, shall not first gaze upon dead stone and steel. It shall scorch the flesh of the wretched, or it shall remain blind.”
Raising an eyebrow, she undercut the eidolon’s proclamation. “You seemed pretty content to use those eyes of yours on dead wood, and that was the first time I ever made you attack anything.”
Going silent, the bird turned his head sideways, staring at Krahe with one eye. As she ate, the passing thought of invoking Chernobog’s Mystic Wisdom came to her—the Snare-sign of Blackest Pitch did, after all, carry the Outer God’s Touch tag. That thought alone, it seemed, was enough to set it off. A black pinhole appeared amidst the redness of Barzai’s eye, and soon encompassed it wholly. Flashes of knowledge flooded in, confirming one out of several theories that she had devised for this conundrum:Barzai couldn’t solidify his new form unless it was invoked in the situation for which it had been conceived. She had no choice but to trust that it would work as expected and use it in real combat for the first time.
She finished her meal and took to calligraphy. The ink, now stable, was not yet ready to be used. Beginning with water and an ink stick, she had blended it with the Unguent of Nug-soth, and now it was time to add the final component, a liquid ink that also acted at once as binder and thinner to determine the final viscosity. Finally, after a few minutes of stirring, it was liquid.
Hours passed.
In a meditative state, Krahe repeatedly drew forth her vitriolic hate and wrath, reveling in it, bathing in it, and spitting it onto the talisman paper like a cobra upon its prey.
It was hate not for individuals, not in truth.
Krahe had never been given the easy comfort of names and faces to foist her hate upon.
It was the idea of evil, of subversion, of insidious decay. Wandrei Faust sought its prey based not on simple single-minded malice but on a greater hatred born from outrage towards those who would stand in Krahe’s sacred path.
Wandrei Faust was a fist not for slaying random thugs or killing those who merely wronged her. It was wrought for smashing apart those who would forestall her from her ultimate goal.
Within her hand burned an anger altogether greater than that which could be felt by those content in the midst of their own lives. It was anger worthy of the heavens, the sort of anger that would drive one to consider burning a tyrant’s city and killing millions as a failure because it didn’t annihilate the very ideology for which the tyrant stood.
The hate within her had sprouted silently, and even now, it bubbled, coiling like a serpent, looking out for its rightful prey to strike out. It was the hatred of the righteous, ready and waiting for those who would undermine what is good. Unlike the Saxonian Wars of the early 2200s, there would be no generations-long buildup of vitriol, no century-long reawakening of long forgotten tendencies spurred on by the malice of corporate interest. No, no such thing. Clutching it closely, never once had the flame of righteous hatred within Krahe gone out or sputtered. Never once since that day. She had caught the flare of the bomb, and with plutonium’s caustic glow, she had lit a profound hate that not even a lifetime of peace could put out.
Were she to live out her new life searching for an ephemeral, greater evil, never finding it, Krahe would die content, but deep inside, she knew it would not come to pass. A human life could be long, and ever more so if technology’s wise hand forestalled the withering march of age. She had a knack for looking in the wrong, or perhaps right , places. An inborn skill for noticing patterns that the kinds of people she hated didn’t want her to notice. That was, after all, what made her an investigator; a nose that tended to stick itself into the vilest, most wretched cracks in society’s facade.
Stroke after stroke, the image of the wrathful, grasping hand was put to paper, time and again.
Barzai, ever curious, watched on.
The raven watched on, enraptured. A maelstrom of dark smoke swirled about the woman, vast quantities of thauma burnt and entropy purged, time and again. Her soul, her astral body, blazed alight, invisible to all but the eyes of the Raven of Ruinous Eyes.
One by one, Krahe prepared talismans.
She stopped not when she ran out of ink but when she was simply too exhausted to continue, when her arm physically gave out, trembling even under the minuscule weight of her brush, when the muscle no longer had even the energy to scream, but instead simply failed.
Hours had passed, and she hadn’t even realized it, so engrossed had she been with her task.
A stack of finished talismans sat off to the left side, and off to the right, failures were piled high. A thirty percent success rate.
With a sigh, she used her left arm alone, alongside a few tar-tendrils, to stow everything away and set up the erasing solution to recycle the lemons’ paper.
Two more days passed.
Somewhat disappointingly, Sorayah made no attempt to move against her, at least not in the open. Nothing Krahe could use as an excuse to satisfy herself with violent and wildly disproportionate retaliation.
Day by day, she spent her time. Finally, as she sat in her basement shooting range, frying slices of a kind of fish from the River Machine, she felt the Tarnished Jade Flower mark giving her a message. A simple thrum, and the concept of “outside.”
Immediately outside the door of the building, beneath the night’s pale moonlight, she found herself glancing left and right, looking out for a person or a talisman. She realized that the thrumming of her mark sped up or slowed down depending on her location. Hot and cold. A stupid game of hot and cold. It led her some distance away to a secluded spot in the back alleys, where she was met by a floating talisman just like those Zachariah had used to collect the votes. It simply appeared in mid-air when she reached the spot where the mark’s thrumming became continuous.
It ceased, and the talisman appeared with a shimmer entirely too similar to the one produced by the disengagement of active optic camouflage.
Meticulous, yet stilted writing in the Calbian alphabet read:
You may use this talisman as a compass to find me.
Bring Silberblut if you believe him to be trustworthy.
The moment Krahe finished reading, the glow faded and fell into her hand. Curious, she funneled some thauma into it and found that it came alive once more, glowing faintly and sending her a sense of direction—a mental compass, subtler than the floating pointer she had expected. Moreover, from the moment she had found the message talisman, the Tarnished Jade Flower Mark had begun rapidly fading from her thigh. She returned to her rented domicile, and by that point, the feeling of the mark’s presence had already vanished. When she checked, she found it to still be there, but it rubbed off with barely any effort.
After finishing her meal, she went right to the safe house and soon met up with Casus.
“Good news, I got in contact with the Talisman Mistress and I have a means of finding her. Mixed news, she wants me to bring you along, meaning that, at bare minimum, she has accurate intel on the Slaughterhouse 9 Incident.”
After a few moments of quiet thought, the Banisher said, “Alright. I will finish my coffee, and we can go. A few of my acquaintances have been curious about the Talisman Mistress, anyway.”
And just as he said, so it was. They went by foot, using hidden paths and back alleys as always, eventually reaching an out-of-the-way, yet not exceptionally obscure part of the city. Yao’s talisman directed them down an alleyway, unsurprisingly, and so, down the alleyway they went.
It was, to no surprise on either of their parts, that the doors and windows of the surrounding buildings swung open, and out came hostile men wielding weapons of various sorts, from swords to guns.
An ambush. But why? Surely, Mistress Yao wouldn’t try to use bottom-of-the-barrel goons like this to deal with the two of them.
Casus transformed in a flash and engaged three of the five, rapidly cutting them to bloody shreds.
Krahe blasted one with a short Cinder Strobe. He was dead on the spot, fried into the wall, flesh fused to melting stone. Another, charging right down the middle, met his end by way of Wandrei Faust.
Something felt a bit off. They didn’t raise barriers at all, and their wards didn’t unravel as much as they collapsed all at once. Not to mention the copious quantities of blood spilling across the ground from just two corpses.
Krahe didn’t mind. In fact, she eagerly flooded the alleyway with rancid, isotope-laden smoke. Under its cover she summoned Barzai and began forming the Daemon Core’s outer shell. The Wound-like Grin’s opening down the length of her chest turned a small tear from earlier into one which spanned most of it, and the raven erupted from the maw. Right away, he nestled himself in the quickly growing hemisphere of black tendrils that floated above her outstretched left hand. Then, he imploded, and as the hemisphere grew closer to fullness, Krahe strode out of the smoke, ready to fry any takers.
Seven more attackers had appeared, with Casus casually keeping four at bay. Yet again, something felt wrong. Krahe tried to set Barzai upon them, but just like the raven had done before, it refused, extricating itself from its nest and returning into her. Casus echoed her realization a moment later after decapitating three of their attackers at once: “Something is off. I can’t tell what, but I’m fairly certain these aren’t real people.”
“An understatement if I’ve ever heard one,” Krahe deadpanned. She couldn’t help but smirk at the absurd juxtaposition of Casus’ cautious, logical statement compared with the ridiculous scene he was in the middle of. Three corpses, still standing, their necks fountaining absurd amounts of blood, while their comrades just… performed idle animations. That was the only appropriate description. They were idling like goons in some shovelware capeshit tie-in game.
Slow clapping, accompanied by the clack of wooden shoes against stone—perfectly synched, in fact. The illusion fell away; clothing gave way to layers of yellow-red paper with pallid, dead flesh showing through the gaps. These weren’t living men, but… puppets? No. Corpses. Corpses mummified in layers of talismans, moved about like puppets and still gushing far more blood than any living human contained. They never had any wards at all, but a layer of protective talismans that was burned away in places where it had felt like their “wards” had collapsed. Nor did they have any real facial features
“I must admit, I’m impressed and disappointed at once!” came a husky, mature woman’s voice. The fallen began to move again, dragging themselves to their feet and, in the case of Krahe’s victims, peeling themselves off the walls. “I had hoped that it would take you until the fake graft-beast to uncover my little puppet show. Come, we have much to discuss. Don’t worry about them; they’ll clean up after themselves.”
She saw a wood-and-wire scaffold under the melted skin of the men she’d Cinder Strobed. Nothing inside but a great big bladder seeping with blood.
They only got a brief glimpse of the woman, but since neither of them felt hostile intent from her, they followed. They saw no fake graft-beast along the way, probably because it was hidden, and Casus saw fit to detransform. Nonetheless, with disgust at the corpse-puppets, he commented as they walked, “Depending on the methods, this is either borderline heretical, or highly fucking heretical.”
“Oh, they’re not real corpses. Far too much resentful energy, too difficult to work with. I cobbled those puppets together from a grafter’s waste solely for this little puppet show.”
“Merely objectionable, then,” Casus acquiesced.
Before long, she had led them into a two-story house that would’ve been utterly unremarkable, if not for the fact this place had an ephemeral sense of privacy that Krahe had not felt anywhere other than one of the Church’s sanctums or inner chambers.
Finally, for the first time, the woman turned around and faced them.
“I apologize for the crude screening, but I simply had to be sure that you were true killers rather than Zachariah’s ilk. That is, powerful, but only in theory. Now… shall we get to business?”