Chapter #56Some Disassembly Required by: Seuzz   "If I did that, you wouldn't be 'Rick Bredon' anymore," you say. "You'd lose your essentia."
"But you'd still have it," he says, and jerks his chin at the jars that still sit in the corner of the basement. "In bottled form."
"Lotta good that does me until I figure out how to get it back into you guys," you retort.
He squats beside the bottles. "That was you pulling the kid's strings out in the car, wasn't it?"
"Yeah. What tipped you-- What tipped off Rick that there was something wrong with him?"
"Just instinct," he shrugs. "Gut feeling that something was missing from them."
"Their essentia?"
"I dunno. Rick Bredon's not one for theory." He kneads his temple with a hard knuckle, and looks up fearfully at The Still again. "Shit. I really don't like being here. I see things."
"Like what?"
"You don't want to know," he says, but you press him. "Things. Vines, tendrils, tentacles. The magic stuff that makes the machinery do its stuff." There's a haunted, hollow shadow to his countenance as his eyes trace unseen connections among the pipes and tubes and chambers. "Can't give you the theory, obviously, but I can draw you up a schematic. There's parts of this thing that are busted, but the magical piping is still there, just waiting for mechanical parts to fill them in."
"It already works at pulling stuff out of people," you say. "What more could it do?"
"Maybe put it back in 'em," Rick says. "Like the Calice de Tenebres."
"What's that?"
He shuts his eyes tight and rubs them. "A dingus. Like this thing, but a lot smaller. It sucks the essentia of people, but then you can drink from it and get the essentia for yourself." He picks up one of the bottles and examines it. "The stuff in this form doesn't look especially potable."
Drinkable essentia? "You mean if I'd used this Calice thing on Joe or Frank, and then drunk it--"
"Yeah, you'd get their essentia, to go with your own. Probably kind of dangerous, though. People aren't supposed to have more than two ousiarchs, and piling thirds and fourths on top--" He chews his lip. "One of the Stellae went retrograde not too long ago, got hold of the Calice, and used it on a colleague. He didn't survive."
You look at the bottles, and you look over at the Durras brothers. "Still, if we got their essentia back into Frank and Joe--"
"You'd have some real good counterfeits," Rick finishes for you. "Not perfect, mind you, since they still wouldn't have their anima--"
"But I wouldn't want them to have their anima." You look at him sharply. "I want them like they are now."
"And you want Rick the same way," he says dryly. "But they should have some anima inside them, so there aren't any holes, for people like Rick to pick up on." He looks back up at The Still. "Yeah, there might be ways of doing that, using this thing. A set of instructions would be useful, though."
Joe pipes up: "There's that hymnal up in the organ loft."
You all look at each other. "Then that's the place to start," you announce. "I'll check out the hymnal. You start diagramming this thing down here."
* * * * *
"Rick" cautions that you've probably only got a week to get it figured out: "After that, I'll have to call the boss man and give him a story." You affect not to be worried, for surely a week will be enough time.
But that's before you get a look at the hymnal.
At least half of it is a standard hymnal--and the thought of those very proper and old-timey hymns sitting in a damned and blasted place like the Cuthbert church feels blasphemous--but the back half is hand-written. Since Joe is the one with musical talent, you switch into his form and huddled with golem-Joe up in Grandmother's old bedroom. You discover that, musically, the melodies and harmonies are garbage: crashing discords and blind, jagged tunes. But after a few hours of study you begin to notice some patterns. You scribble out and argue with golem-Joe over some possible sigilistic interpretations of them, but only get more garbage.
Nor do you get help when Rick shambles in shortly after supper with diagrams of The Still. As a stranger in town, he gets some startled looks from the house staff, but you quickly shut them up with the simple expedient of treating the newcomer like a trusted confederate. "Here's that diagram of the stuff in the basement," he says as he unrolls the makeshift blueprints. "I need a serious drink now. Something that hasn't got any lullaby juice in it. Aw, hell, I would take some of that, after--"
"Where does this bit lead?" you ask, pointing to a trailing tendril that leads off the page.
"Up to the organ. There's gonna be a mess in that thing, and we'll probably have to take it apart for me to get a look at it. You get anything from the hymnal?"
"Joe and I couldn't make anything of it. If it goes with the organ, we're definitely going to have to take it apart."
"Fuck me, then. I'm going to a bar."
* * * * *
It's the work of nearly three days to disassemble and diagram the organ, even with the help of Frank and Joe; and you're often interrupted by town business. There are no real crises to deal with--no more escaped monsters--but you have to keep your fingers in all the pies so no one gets any ideas about acting uppity.
Four days after capturing Rick your quartet huddles over the sketches and the hymnal. You and Joe compare the notes in the hymnal to the diagram of the keys they would depress and the magical connections they would activate. But after two hours of work you've made hardly any headway, and that ends in a blank wall. "It definitely controls what goes on inside The Still," Joe says, rubbing his forehead like he's got a headache equal to the one you are nursing. "But it's just issuing instructions. The actual work-- You know, we haven't seen a trace of a sigil in any of the workings."
That's bothered you too. "It's a different kind of mechanism. Maybe it doesn't use sigils?"
"Bullshit. Only the most basic kinds of spells don't use sigils. Something this complicated needs them to operate."
"But where are they? Are they invisible?" You look at Rick.
He pulls at his nose. "Not invisible, not the way you're thinking," he says. "But maybe they're someplace we can't see them."
"But we've take the organ apart." You nod at the wreckage of the pipe organ. "And all the pieces and parts of The Still are out where they can be seen."
"Not all of them," he says. "The needle and pipes pull stuff out of people. But the separation and storage, that goes on inside those big steel tanks."
Joe raises his head. "You think maybe--"
Frank gets to his feet. "I'll go get some metal-working tools."
And two hours later you have the three tanks opened up on the basement floor. Their interiors are a swirl of sigils, all gleaming as brightly as though they'd been cut into the metal surfaces only yesterday.
Then things progress very quickly after you've got them copied down into a more standard form. They are very familiar, being variations on some of the sigils contained in the Libra. You shake your head ruefully after you've made the comparisons. "I'm such an idiot," you mutter. "I knew I was missing something when I was looking through the book. It's all right there, in the stuff we already had. You just have to know how to pull out the right bits."
Joe cranes his head. "I'd take your word for it, but I'd rather you explained it."
You flip between the various pages. "Start with this one here. You and Frank thought it just turned people into golems," you say, pointing to the sigil that strips people of everything but their substantia. "But it's actually three different sigils, all interlocked. One for removing imago." You flip back to the start of the book, to the sigil that makes a mask for copying bodies. "This one here. It's in that complicated spell, woven through with the sigil for removing anima. This one, I mean." You flip to the sigil that makes anima bands.
You return to the spell that seems to turn people into golems. "So that's two sigils inside this one. I bet anything there's a third sigil, one specially constructed to remove essentia. That's how come it only leaves substantia behind, a thing like a golem. It doesn't just grab stuff up and erase it. It erases each little bit, singly."
You point to one of the steel tanks. "There's four sigils in that tank. Two are for removing anima and imago--I'd have to look more carefully to be sure, but that's what they look like. The third has got to be for removing substantia--which is where the bottled golems come from--and the other is for removing essentia. And I'll bet more than anything that we'll find one of those sigils inside the Libra here, inside some of its spells." Again, you tap the golem-making spell. "That'd confirm it.
"But that's not all." You feel your excitement mounting. "The four sigils in that tank over there are reversals of the sigils that remove the metaphysical elements. Those are the sigils that will put essentia and everything else back inside people." You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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