This choice: Infiltrate the Strausslers' -- and more! • Go Back...Chapter #70Essential Combinations by: Seuzz   It's a little after five, and you and Jonathan are sitting in Blackwell's library. The November sun—Thanksgiving is a week away—is slanting through the French doors, and it bathes the room in an uncharacteristic, honeyed glow. On the table in front of you are ten bottles filled with a turquoise essence: Aparjita's.
"You know what this means," Jonathan says. "It means we can finally take over my house. All of it."
"Eventually," you reply. "But I got something else to show you."
He prowls after you into the living room, where thirty similar bottles—all of different sizes and shapes, for you had Blackwell run out and buy you a new stock when you exhausted the supply you stole from Cuthbert. Ten are filled with a fiery, cherry-colored light; ten glow orange; the remaining are filled with what looks like radioactive grape jelly.
"Malacandra," you tell Jonathan, indicating the red bottles. "Glundandra and Eldibria," you add indicating the others.
"So, Rick's essentia, and Rosalie's," Jonathan says. "Well, what's left of it"
"Right. Now look at this." You start moving bottles around, pairing them up. "Glundandra and Malacandra. Glundandra and Eldibria. Malacandra and Eldibria."
"The last one was Rick's combination," Jonathan says. His eyes get very hard, but he says nothing as you continue to sort the bottles until you have five sets of each pair.
"Which Stellae has this set?" you ask, indicating the Glundandra-Malacandra pair.
"No one. Dad is Glundandra-Arbol. Fyodor is Glundandra-Kenandandra. Malaika is Glundandra-Perelandra."
"You mean no one has this combination? Or this one?" You pick up a Glundandra-Eldibria pair.
"No. You can only have only four Glundandrans at a time, and they had their quota." He perches on the arm of the sofa. "And when I say there can only be four at a time," he continues, "that means at most. Stellae typically have two Glundandrans in play at once. Then the new Glundandrans are born, and there's an overlap for awhile, and then the old ones die."
That's an unpleasant surprise, though maybe not an insurmountable one, but it's enough that you decide to shift the topic slightly. "Is there a Stellae out there with an Arbol-Malacandra mix?" you ask.
"Sure," he says. "Dr. Hu. He's one of the Sages." That would be the Chinese counterpart to the Stellae.
"Suppose we wanted to add his essentia to our arsenal," you say with a grin, "but we didn't want to go through the trouble of flying to China and catching the guy?"
Jonathan stares at you. Then he goes bug-eyed, and looks wildly between the bottles containing Rick Bredon's split-up essentia.
"Oh my God!" He exclaims, and points. "You mean—?"
"Yeah! We copy out some of you and Frank's essentia, split it, recombine part of it. Your Arbol and his Malacandra. Also," you add with a grin, "Viritrilbia and Malacandra, Viritrilbia and Lurga, Arbol and—"
"I get it!"
"Not all of it. We do the same with Rick's, and with mine and everyone's. We have all the ousiarchs on hand. By copying them, we can make up all the possible combinations."
Jonathan clutches his head. "You're talking about making a complete set of Stellae!"
His expression is haggard as he looks up at you.
"The world has never had more than one of each combination in play before," he says. "It might be very unstable if we doubled everyone up by making a lot of 'evil twins'. Besides," he adds, "would you be able to split your anima—our anima—that many ways?"
"Only five ways," you admit. "After I found out we could split our essentia up ten ways I tried it on Rick's anima. I figured we wouldn't be doing anything with his. But the metal bands melted after the sixth division."
"Well, there it is," he says. "We couldn't make our own complete set of Stellae anyway. We could bring Rick and Rosalie back, though. Or—" He swallows as he hefts up the bottles of Glundandra and Malacandra. "We could bring this guy into play, or the other one. Although—" He hesitates. "I'm not sure we really want that."
"Why not?"
"Glundandrans like to have their own way. It's usually the best way—they're supposed to be in charge—but we kind of like it the way we've been running it now, right? More like a democracy? Adding a Glundandran to our collective—" He hefts the bottles again. "He'd be more like a Pharaoh."
His warning gives you pause, and when he again suggests that you might make a move on taking over the Straussler household, you more or less give up on the ideas you'd been playing with. You join him in the library and talk about it while continuing to catalog and pack away the books in some spare book boxes you found in Blackwell's workroom.
* * * * *
Joe has given you a lot to think about, and you spend a restless night thinking about it. (And maybe your spirit has affected the gwarcheidwad, for it spends a noisy night prowling the house.) The clock reads 1:47 the last time you look at it, and it's still a long time after that before you feel sleep stealing over you.
You thought you had seen a way to magnify your power and give yourself a project. With ten divisions of essentia between you, you and your two colleagues could have thirty golems to control. With two more anima inserts you could have had fifty. And by spreading around and recombining the essentia splits you could have raised and trained a whole army of your own Stellae, each controlling a small troop of golems. True, they would not be under your direct control, but with time you could have guided and shaped them to your own vision.
Whatever vision that happened to be.
But now Joe has identified a problem: What if you can't have an army of your own because the world can't contain it? Are you going to have to do more research to find out if his fears are justified?
Your last thought, before you drift off, is If only I could amplify essentia to get more golems. Or give myself more of it ...
The thought should have woken you up, but instead it drags you into a very deep and dreamful sleep.
* * * * *
"You ever hear of the Calice de Tenebros?" Jonathan asks the next afternoon. You are occupying yourself by working on the catalog again while he studies the notes you'd worked up. You are fairly confident of them. But after the way he knocked you back yesterday you worry about unexpected hitches.
"It's another one of those infernal devices the Stellae are supposed to keep hoarded away," he continues after you shake your head. "Not as bad as the Libra, as I think you've demonstrated. But bad enough."
"What does it do?"
"It steals your essence."
You flip through the book in your hand and wonder with idle irritation why Blackwell had a book on wine presses in his library. "And the relevance of this is?"
"Well, what you're showing me is another machine for stealing essentia. But the Calice bettered the trick by letting you combine them."
That gets your attention. "Really? You have schematics for it?"
"No. And you don't want them, except to figure out what not to do. It doesn't work."
You almost throw a book at his head. "Then what the fuck are you—?"
"You just want to be sure you haven't reinvented a square wheel," Jonathan says, and he drops your notebook to the table with a frown. "I don't think you have, but—"
"So what's the problem with the Calice?"
Instead of answering he leaps up and charges out the door. You hear his little silver sports car rev up and speed away. He must not be in a hurry to get back, for it's nearly an hour before he shows up again, by which point you've cleared most of another shelf.
"Kali left some notes for me," he says when he saunters back in, as though he'd just stepped into the kitchen. "They really don't say much, and there's no technical information. But one of our guys got ahold of it when he went retrograde, and he tried doing what you're proposing. He used it to suck the essentia out of one of Kali's students and add it to his own. It killed him." He thrusts the papers at you.
It doesn't take you long to read them—they take the form of a short story—and you drop them again with an irritated sigh.
"This really doesn't help me, Joe. It doesn't say anything about how this Calice things works, what the theory was, how the essentia were supposed to mix. I mean, you're right, the thing really does sound like a design for a broken wheel. And what I've got—" You stab the specs you drew up over the course of the day, after the dreams you had last night. "Those aren't just theory, they're blueprints!"
"And I don't seen any flaws," he admits. "But do you really want to test them out on us?"
The idea you drew up is so simple that either it must work or it must fail catastrophically. It's a variation on the "skin" that you invented to let you and your friends switch faces without wearing masks. But instead of attaching imago to the sigils that are woven into the skin, this design attaches essentia to those sigils. In theory, this would let you switch from one set of essentia to another.
This would give you more golems to control, for you would have additional sets of essentia, each capable of controlling a small troop of slaves. It would also let you wield the essentia of more than one Stellae—just not at the same time.
You are itching to try it out, and Joe's vague worries and cautions actually anger you.  You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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