Underland

Even as a crumbling ruin, Castle Verney looked foreboding.

The fortress’ dark walls hadn’t aged well. Marianne scarcely saw a roof without a hole, or a battlement without a breach in its stone. The Knights’ fires had consumed most of the wooden parts of the architecture, leaving only ashes and black stone. Most towers had collapsed, and the few that still stood looked like broken fingers.

The absence of vines or mushrooms also disturbed Marianne. The castle had been abandoned for nearly two decades, and yet nature hadn’t taken it over.

A place so evil even plants won’t enter it, Marianne thought as she looked at the archway entrance. A defaced stone gargoyle loomed over the rusted iron doors and the darkness beyond them.

“I smell rats inside the walls,” Bertrand said, eyes red as blood and fangs out. Ever since the rat attack, Marianne’s retainer had chosen to stay in his true form. “This is their nest.”

“I don’t sense any magical defenses,” Marianne said as she raised a lantern she had managed to salvage from the carriage. Its faint light illuminated the archway and showed a dark corridor leading inside the castle. “Makes sense. The Knights’ patrols would have noticed.”

“I could go in alone and scout ahead,” Bertrand suggested. “We are entering the enemy’s territory, and they know of our arrival.”

“We are more vulnerable while separated, and our foe can target us from afar.” Bertrand taught her the basics of his exorcism spell on the way to the castle, but lack of practice made it unreliable. Marianne was confident in her abilities, but she was no spellcasting genius. “We must force the sorcerer’s hand.”

Wielding her lantern with one hand and keeping the other on her sheathed rapier’s pommel, Marianne stepped inside the keep. Bertrand made no sound as he followed her, but she sensed his sharp gaze on her back.

After a short walk through a dusty corridor, the duo reached the castle’s crumbling great hall. Most of the ceiling had collapsed, and the Knights had defaced the bas-reliefs decorating its walls. The room smelled of dust, and a thin layer of ashes covered the ground. Nobody had visited this place in years.

Marianne relied as much on her psychic sight as her physical one. She often sensed the presence of rats hiding in the walls and the ceiling, lurking at the edge of her magical senses. The rodents scampered off whenever she moved in their direction, but she knew that they followed her. The sorcerer controlling them had learned their lesson, and refused to offer a direct battle.

A cursory search through the ruins proved fruitless. The stables were a desert of dust and rot; the towers’ stairways were for the most part broken and led nowhere; the library had no books, though Bertrand found a pile of ashes where the Knights gave them to the pyre.

Lord Verney probably slept here, Marianne thought as she examined the dusty remains of an opulent bedchamber. Rats and vermin had devoured the bed’s mattress, while the cushions had rotted. The remains of a small lab occupied a stone chamber to the bedroom’s left, with broken alembics and a shattered workbench covering the floor. Did he murder his victims here, I wonder?

The more she and Bertrand explored the keep, the more Marianne found the place’s silence oppressive. Even old tunnels felt more alive than this open tomb.

They found the first corpse in the castle’s bathrooms. Bertrand smelled something at the bottom of a pool of murky water, and fished out human bones. They found a larger collection of charred skeletons piled up in a dining hall, their legs shattered and their skulls split open by swords.

“They were sanctified after death,” Marianne said as she examined the remains with her lantern. “To make sure no ghost would rise from the ashes.”

Lord Penhew hadn’t lied. The inquisition had been very thorough in extinguishing the cult.

“Is Milady looking for something?” Bertrand asked, as he watched Marianne skim through the charred skeletons.

“Lord Penhew said he burnt Aleksander Verney at the stake,” she replied. “I wonder if his corpse is among these.”

“All men look the same in death,” Bertrand pointed out. “Milady might as well look for a needle in a haystack.”

“Maybe his remains smell the same as Valdemar.” Or a Qlippoth, Marianne thought.

Lord Och mentioned an abnormal quantity of Orgone in Valdemar’s blood, a telltale sign of summoned creatures. After visiting that village and the strange creatures inhabiting it, Marianne had immediately noticed the connection.

Is Valdemar even human? Marianne thought grimly. Blood scans should have identified his true nature if he were a shapeshifter.

Bertrand chuckled. “Milady, that is not how scents work. These bones smell the same.”

“What about the smell of rats? Can’t you follow them to their nest?”

“This castle is their nest. They are everywhere.”

“Then try to locate the stench you noticed in the village and around Valdemar,” Marianne ordered. “It might lead us to our culprit.”

The noblewoman sensed the rats growing agitated at the periphery of her psychic sight. I need to find the animancer before he deciphers my notes and goes after Valdemar, Marianne thought with determination. She refused to endanger a guest of Lord Och, even if indirectly. Valdemar’s family legacy had hurt him more than enough already.

Bertrand sniffed the air, inhaling ash and dust. It took him minutes and a lot of backtracking, but he eventually found a lead in the bathroom. “I sense a stench coming from below,” he said while staring at the murky pool. “It is faint. Almost unnoticeable. I don’t think a hunting hound would notice, unless it knew exactly what to look for.”

“The stench travels through the plumbing?” Marianne asked as she examined the pool. The water had festered, but the bathrooms remained connected to whatever well they drew the liquid from. “An underground cistern, perhaps?”

“Or a hidden cavern,” Bertrand suggested.

Marianne hardened her free hand with a layer of bone, and punched through the wall closest to the pool. She heard a rat screech as she smashed her way through the stone, her fingers closing on the rodent. Marianne squeezed the animal to death as it attempted to bite her, before tossing its corpse in the pool.

The hole she made revealed a complex array of bronze pipes going through the wall. “I think we found how the rats travel through the keep,” she muttered out loud. The pipes went down and down underneath the castle.

Marianne grabbed a stone pebble and tossed it into the hole. She didn’t hear it hit the bottom, though Bertrand’s sensitive ears proved more effective. “It echoed,” he warned his mistress after a few minutes. “The pipes lead to a larger cavern underneath.”

Marianne and her retainer took down the wall one brick at a time, revealing a narrow shaft barely large enough to accommodate one person through. They could use the pipes as improvised ropes to climb it down.

“I must warn Milady that it will be easier to go down than to climb up,” Bertrand said. “If the culprit awaits us at the bottom, it will be difficult to retreat.”

“The same will go for the sorcerer.” Unless their foe could use another secret passage. “If we wait too long, they might escape.”

“Then allow me to go in first.”

Marianne nodded in agreement, and her retainer transformed into a cloud of mist. The vampire flowed down the shaft, while his mistress grabbed a pipe with her free hand. It was difficult to climb all the way down while holding a lantern, but Marianne’s magically improved strength helped her a great deal.

She expected the rats to attack her during their descent, but though she heard the rodents crawling through the pipes and drains, they stayed out of Marianne’s reach. Were they gathering to attack her at the bottom, or preparing to close the way out? Or did Bertrand’s exorcism shake the animancer’s control over his swarm more than she thought?

Whatever the case, Marianne found Bertrand back in his vampire form when she reached the shaft’s bottom. After making a safe landing, the noblewoman raised her lantern to see through the thick darkness.

The duo had entered an old boiler room, a tangle of old machinery and rusted pipes. Marianne heard the sound of running water in the distance and suspected this area was connected to the Lightless Ocean outside. The devices once drained the water and treated it for the Verney’s plumbery, only to decay over the decades.

Twenty meters below the castle’s ground floor, maybe more, Marianne thought as she tried to calculate the shaft’s length. Close to water level. Maybe even below.

“Milady,” Bertrand said as he examined the boiler’s levers. “No dust.”

Marianne frowned as she observed the device. Indeed, the machinery looked rather well-preserved for something left to rust for twenty years. Some pipes and drains had fallen into disrepair, but others looked surprisingly polished. Marianne followed them as they dug into the rock walls, leading to a steel door with rusted hinges.

Its doorknob hadn’t gathered dust either. Marianne extended her psychic sight, and sensed multiple lifeforms on the other side.

“Trap,” Bertrand suggested while unsheathing his sword.

“Trap,” Marianne confirmed before grabbing her own rapier. “What do you smell?”

“Mr. Valdemar’s stench, formaldehyde, and blood.” Bertrand’s eyes squinted. “Blood most of all.”

The vampire transformed into a cloud of mist and traveled through the keyhole to scout ahead, while Marianne gathered her breath for the battle she knew would come soon. “Bertrand?” she called through the door.

“Milady may not wish to look,” her retainer replied on the other side with a hint of disgust.

Marianne responded by kicking the door open. The rusted hinges gave way and the noblewoman stepped inside a dark cavern. Her lantern’s light reflected on a glass vat, a set of dead human eyes looking at her on the other side.

Marianne held her breath, as she watched a woman’s corpse float inside a container filled with formaldehyde. Her lower half had turned into bloody red bones, and her upper body parts were white as milk. The corpse’s face was frozen in a hollow expression, like a mindless doll.

And yet, Marianne immediately recognized her from the Verney pictures.

“Sarah Dumont,” she whispered as she examined the vat. The container was old and cracked at one spot. It was a miracle none of the liquid inside had leaked through. “It’s… her.”

“It’s them,” Bertrand replied. The vampire was looking at a second container to his mistress’ left… and the thing inside moved.

Marianne flinched in horror.

Another Sarah Dumont was held prisoner in the second container, but she was missing more than her legs. Only her beautiful head floated in a vat of green liquid, alongside her spine, a beating black heart, and cancerous lungs. The creature’s gaze snapped between Bertrand and his mistress, but her eyes lacked any hint of intelligence.

Marianne’s thought process froze as she tried to process the sight before her. The noblewoman slowly raised her lantern to take a better look at the cavern around her.

Or rather, the lab.

Her lantern wasn’t bright enough to see everything, but what little it showed shook Marianne to the core. The two vats near the entrance were but the first of many, some broken, others relatively intact. One held a mutant human embryo with an oversized head; another a twisted mockery of Sarah Dumont with elongated arms and a fanged mouth. Both appeared alive to Marianne’s psychic sight, bronze pipes pumping their glass prisons with water and nutrients.

A metallic tang hung in the air, while small puddles of alchemical substances stained the stone ground. Marianne carefully walked past workbenches covered with dusty bloodstains, before noticing a hideous cup carved from a human skull on one of them. Someone had filled it with black hair and a pair of half-rotten grey eyeballs.

Marianne’s horror was replaced with fury, as she connected the dots. She moved on to the next table, finding a macabre assortment of butcher tools, vivisection treatises, and half-scribbled anatomy notes.

Someone was trying to recreate the Followers’ grail, and used clones of Sarah Dumont as raw material.

The grim laboratory seemed to stretch on forever. Whoever used it had cobbled it together by scavenging broken containers and second-hand instruments. Their work was gruesomely grotesque and unbefitting of any professional biomancer.

Whoever used this place was a novice. A deeply deranged novice, but a novice all the same.

But why Sarah Dumont of all people? Marianne wondered. The biomancer’s obsession with her was obvious, and this lab’s resources could have been used to do so much else. What made Sarah special? Was she the best material for the grail somehow?

And what did it mean for Valdemar?

Marianne glanced at Bertrand to ask him if he smelled anything, but the vampire put a finger on his lips before she could open her mouth. He then pointed at his ears, and his mistress immediately understood.

They weren’t alone.

Marianne silently scanned her surroundings, ready to strike at the first sign of danger. Her psychic sight sensed lifeforms in the room, but whenever she looked in their direction, she only found herself facing a deformed clone.

Bertrand pointed at his nose and then to an area of the lab shrouded in darkness. Though the lab was chaotic and haphazard with little organization to speak off, this part of the cavern lacked any form of equipment. A wide space more than twenty meters in diameter had been left untouched.

This part of the cavern was entirely unremarkable, save for a strange, circular pool at its center. An unknown substance bubbled in it, a vile tar as black as the purest darkness.

The sight of it filled Marianne with a mix of thirst and revulsion. She felt the primal call to drink this vile oil, to let it flow inside her. It would make her better. She would never grow old, and her skills would never rust. Her senses would be sharper than any beast, her skin as smooth and strong as steel. No one would match her strength, and no one would try to force her to wed again.

Marianne would be free.

Or she would die.

Marianne knew, on a primal level, that taking this oil might kill her. Her survival instinct screamed at her to run away, to avoid the temptation. It was the medium for something powerful, too strong to be contained. She would burn from the inside, a moth consumed by flames.

Life or death.

Marianne felt like a woman dying of thirst being offered a cup of poison as these two instincts pulled her in different directions. Her psychic sight went wild, as it struggled to grasp this substance’s true nature. It felt alive, incomprehensible yet familiar. Something that called to her flesh and soul, telling her to join this divine union.

The call was insidious, and by the time Marianne realized what was happening, she had already walked three steps towards the pool. No, she thought, using all her willpower to look away. She canceled her arcane sight, briefly blinding herself to magic, closing her eyes to the vile promise of that… that thing.

Bertrand fared no better. Her vampire retainer gazed at the pool with horrified fascination, licking his fangs while his body trembled with tension. Though he hadn’t walked forward, he struggled to hang on to his weapon’s pommel. His eyes were redder than ever, like a man possessed.

“Bertrand,” Marianne whispered. Although her retainer had told her to remain silent, she saw he was losing the fight. “Bertrand, look away. Bertrand—”

A black droplet fell into the pool from above.

Marianne instinctively looked up and raised her lantern at the ceiling.

An enormous symbol glowed faintly in the stone above, so faintly she could barely see it. Two curves joined within a cube, slashed by a vile organic rift. The lines making up this symbol closed and opened without rhyme or reason, festering with the black oil like a bloody wound on the world’s skin.

It was blood.

That black oil was the blood of something greater than any human, something that called to all living beings the same way a flame tempted moths to their doom. This was the divine nectar the grail was meant to contain; the primordial fluid that would grant either immortality or oblivion.

Marianne couldn’t look away from this bleeding eye of stone, and barely noticed the black-furred shape crawling on the ceil right above—

The swordswoman suddenly snapped back to reality. “Bertrand!” she shouted a warning far too late, as the rat dropped a shining flask on them. Her retainer didn’t move an inch, unable to look away from the black pool.

Without another alternative, Marianne tackled her vampire retainer. The blow broke Bertrand’s trance and the vampire transformed into a cloud of mist right as the flask hit the ground. The substance inside erupted in a bright flash of light.

Marianne instinctively covered her head with her arm, saving her eyes from blindness. The white light was strong enough to illuminate the cavern, but it did more than that. Bertrand screamed in pain, his cloudy body reforming into a humanoid shape and collapsing on the floor.

“Bertrand!” Marianne tried to rescue her friend, but though she avoided the worst of the flash, the sudden bright light had weakened her vision. She could barely distinguish the vampire’s shape near the pool.

Something landed to Marianne’s left with a loud thump before she could reach him.

Only years of training allowed the noblewoman to dodge the dagger aiming for her throat, and she still dropped her lantern in the motion. The container shattered against the ground, its flames erupting between Marianne and her attacker. She immediately used magic to heal her eyes.

Her foe didn’t let her recover from her shock and leaped over the broken lantern with lethal speed. Marianne quickly dashed forward with her rapier and surprised the creature, their blades clashing. And she gazed into the bloodshot red eyes of her foe, the noblewoman remembered one of the Qlippoths’ words at the hamlet with perfect clarity. What Baron Aleksander Verney had said about the strange, hideous rat that followed him everywhere.

It’s not a rat at all.

The monster before her was neither man nor rodent, but a gruesome intermediary step between the two. Rags and a layer of black fur covered the beast, except for its clawed hands, dirty face, and elongated tail. Its face had curved ears and long sharp fangs which snapped at her with bestial fury. His two daggers were crossed, barely stopping Marianne’s rapier from impaling him through the throat.

The Knights had mistaken this thing for a mutant rodent, instead of the infant form of something far, far more dangerous. Something intelligent, and deadly.

“You’re a cultist,” Marianne realized. Bertrand wriggled on the ground at the edge of her vision, with burns all over his skin. “The last Follower of the Grail.”

“Master Aleksander is dead,” the monster rasped with an all-too-human voice, before pushing Marianne back with inhuman strength. “But good Shelley never wavered in his devotion!”

Marianne attempted to gut the monster and finish him off here and there, but his tail lunged at her head from the side like a whip. She lowered her back to dodge, and the beast immediately attempted to stab her from another angle.

The swordswoman disarmed one of her foe's hands with a well-placed parry and dodged the other dagger. Moving with astonishing speed, the man-rat used his newly freed hand to grab her by the throat.

Marianne tried to stab the beast in the heart while gasping for air, but the rat dropped his other dagger and grabbed her wrist. Her rapier managed to cut his chest and draw blood anyway, but not deep enough to pierce the heart.

“And now,” the man-rat said while lifting Marianne above the ground with one hand and pushing her sword away with the other. “Shelley will feast!”

His fangs lunged at Marianne’s face, sharp and hungry.