Pillar

Chapter Eleven

Horace Elkhorn.

That was the name of the man that Vivian was now elbow deep in, rooting about his organs with Buspi, looking over her shoulder while making notes about the various organs and their functions in her journal. Horace had a thick layer of blubber that seemed to melt out like molten cheese when his front was given a Y incision, folding back his pectoral muscles to be held by iron calipers.

Vivian was sweating, despite the cool environment of the morgue, and the advanced state of decay within dear Horace wasn’t helping her stomach any. His heart was fully corrupted, Astral poisoning having aged the organ several years in minutes. She could tell from the way the heart was in a relaxed state that it hadn’t been the source of Horace’s death, something Buspi confirmed for her.

“A victim of a heart attack usually has blocked arteries, and an organ stuck in mid pump, forever locked as it was flexing against the blockage,” the Brother had noted, adding the quote to the added information about human hearts upon Vivian’s request. “though we can note his heart was enlarged, an early sign of too much stress on the organ.”

“Noted,” Vivian had agreed, setting the heart back into the split rib cage.

Now she was cutting up into the throat, examining the trauma to the esophagus and the lungs, which held samples of a clear, electrically charged goo that Vivian had moved to three small bowls (one for the substance found in the throat, one for the lungs, and one for the stomach). Scraping another few grams of the substance off the bruised tissue of the esophagus, she tapped the bowl a few times with her scalpel.

Hopping down from her stool, she walked over to a filled cistern to wash off the coagulated blood and related gore. “So,” Vivian began, “we have the poison which is drawing ambient magical energy from the atmosphere into the host, to where it could be lethal of the subject was alive, and a substance that is charged with electricity like a ceramic battery.”

“Yes, two things I’ve never found in a body I’ve dissected before,” Buspi added. “I’d like to think we’ll find the same substances within the other two, if you were to perform the extraction spell you did earlier?”

Vivian shook her head. “You may call me wizard, but I’m one only in name. I’m still learning and don’t have an appropriate tool to perform the act again. My staff, once completed, would serve as a wonderful agent of extracting fluids from organisms. Sadly, it won’t be complete for nearly a decade.”

“Why ever not?” Buspi asked, waving his legs back and forth as he stared at Vivian’s back. She turned and looked around her loose plait, hastily redone after the amberum test, to smile.

“Say I had the Anam Shard right now, a solid Tear of Selene. I don’t know the runes to carve into it, to access the energy held within it. Nor would I have the control necessary to coax the energy out to connect to my staff like a spider spinning a web. Finally, I wouldn’t possess the knowledge to do the final ritual that bound that Anam Shard to my staff. Should I mess up the ritual, I could merely destroy the Shard, or destroy both it and my staff. Stories abound of truly abysmal wizards trying to skip the years of study and rushing off to create his staff, only to cause an exceptional failure that resulted in the death of him, with many more in the blazes wake.”

“Gracious! Wizards really have to know how to do all that?” Buspi exclaimed, covering his mouth as if he were swallowing back a harsh swear. “How can you be certain you’re ready?”

“There are two paths an apprentice wizard can follow their first eight years of serving as a skilled wizard’s lapdog,” Vivian turned and leaned back against the cistern, elbows up on the stone. “Some choose to go on a journey, like me, where they gather Anam crystals and learn the Ritual of Union to have them merge into a Shard when they feel they have enough. This leads to more varied wizards with wider ranges of knowledge.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing!” Buspi laughed.

Vivian shrugged, pushing away from the cistern. “Some actually do. Some want true masters of one or two fields of study. Someone who dedicated an additional ten years in libraries and court rooms, serving as barristers and scholars. These are the ones that many people envision when they think of as wizard; a wizened hermit that lives for the next book they can get their hands upon.”

“You don’t approve of that method then,” Buspi said more than asked.

Pulling off her butcher’s apron, she rolled it up and tossed it into a hamper Buspi motioned towards. “I’m not one for cloistering myself away from the secrets of the multiverse. I want to see and experience what I claim to be an expert in. I’m skilled in two of the four elements, a student in mental arts, and have a fleeting knowledge of hand-to-hand combat. I know more than other wizards my age who have chosen the other route, the Decemalum are those bound to serve their ten years of study at a desk, whereas someone like me go on a Tentrek, where we spend our decade wandering Pillar.”

“Well, if nobody else has said it to you, thank you for being here,” Buspi offered, holding out his hand as he pressed the text closed beneath his other arm. Vivian shook his hand, smiling. “Thank you so much for being here during your adventure.”

“I was bound to be somewhere, might as well learn practical skills. Now, do you have any alchemic tools? An alembic, a retort… I need both if I’m to discern what in the spirits this gunk is, as it’s been mixed with bile and blood. I have to remove the humors from the substance and make it as pure as possible before I can look through my journal over what it could be.”

“We have both upstairs, both and more!” Buspi exclaimed. “I’ll take your book, you take the bowls.”

“Fine,” Vivian smirked, allowing Astral energy to pulse through her rings, crackling out in arcs of blue lightning. Each bolt struck the bowls, causing them to float up, drifting on unseen clouds to orbit Vivian’s head. She grabbed her satchel and folded the strap over her shoulder. Walking towards the door she entered, Buspi rushing to catch up to her, slowly advancing beyond her to lead her to a room that was full of jars of different chemicals.

Vivian looked at Buspi as he pulled down a lantern to light it, revealing a long slab of stone jutting from the wall like a table, coming up top Vivian’s elbows. Chuckling, she looked at Buspi.

“I know, but Brother Marcus had this room commissioned when we had a skilled alchemist on staff. These jars are filled with concoctions he’d made, mostly different oils and scented gels, but a few valuable things such as jars of jellied fire, slop that bursts out a wave of muck that hardens quickly, and a medicine that aids those afflicted with ailments of the heart.”

Vivian eased her satchel down beneath the stone table, walking up to the racks of jars. She picked up a random bottle and blew the dust off the wide-mouthed jar.

Three grams Thrice-pickled trout eggs

Two grams powdered Leeching Willow Bark

Eight milligrams Sanguine Melon Rind, crushed

Two milligrams Violet Hibiscus petals

Four grams powdered garlic cloves

For Ailments of the Sanguine Humors

“This is something for blood and heart problems, isn’t it?” Vivian asked, looking at Buspi. He nodded.

“We make it en masse now and sell it as a condiment to pay the taxes set on us by Herod,” Buspi said, “most don’t even know they’re taking medicine when they sprinkle it into a stew or onto their fish.”

“Copy this down into my journal for me, if you would,” Vivian said as she grabbed the bowls and set them on the table, one-by-one, noting how the Astral energy she’d dispatched to hoist them had diminished when reabsorbing it. “Hm…”

“Something already?” Buspi asked, looking up from the tome, his quill scribbling away the recipe to the heart medication.

“Just a note to be made… the samples may have some amberum present in them. I must separate them using water and heat with the retort.” Vivian said. She began stretching out, pulling tools closer to her so she could have everything within reach.

Once ready, she took the bowl that had a mixture of saliva and blood within it, taken from the esophagus just behind the joint of the mandible. Taking careful, measured steps using heated tweezers to fish out bits of flesh and shards of bone from the sample. After spending half an hour working on it, she turned to Buspi, who’d taken a seat on a stool, flipping through the book with hungry eyes.

“Could you bring me a sample of bile, blood, and saliva from the cadaver?” Vivian asked.

Buspi nodded, setting the journal on a low shelf before easing himself to his feet. Hobbling away, Vivian returned to cleaning out the sample to make it as “clean” as possible. She didn’t feel like staying here too much longer, as the building was far too dark and cramped for her tastes. The low ceilings were perfect for her height, but the almost cavern-like feel of the temple made her far too claustrophobic for her comfort.

Pulling a bit of dark red tissue from the viscous gel, she stopped before discarding it. Looking at it closer, she placed it on the stone table before prodding it with the tweezers.

Scrape…

“Huh…?” She asked the small hard chunk. The curved hook was out of place to be embedded in the slime samples she’d harvested from the ruined throat, so she saved it for later. Stretched out to grab a smaller clear glass bowl, Vivian dropped them into the tray. By the time Buspi returned with bottles of the requested fluids, Vivian had gathered sixteen more pieces of out-of-place shards.

“Here, blood,” he said, setting down a stoppered bottle of dark fluid, “bile,” a jar with green-yellow fluids taken from the stomach, “and saliva.”

The last bottle held far less fluid, though it had at least a few milliliters worth of the spit. “More than enough,” Vivian noted before returning to her study. Taking the bowl and sliding the contents into the retort with several ounces of clean water, she lit the charcoal flame beneath the glass. Thinking for a moment, she pulled the bottom of her plait up to unwind her hoop once more, sliding it beneath the retort and letting loose a series of giggles as the water bubbled. Streaks of red slid out in rivulets in the now bubbling water, rising to the surface as the oils present in the human saliva and blood rose free of the gelatin.

“That should take half an hour, tops.” She said as she turned to the bowl that held a pool of sloshed gel and bile. “This will probably take the longest, so best start it now.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Buspi asked.

“Yes, yes you can,” Vivian said after a moment of thought. She slid the bottle of blood over to him and tapped the glass with her pointer finger. “Boil this and add in some water until it thickens from a clotted mess to the consistency of mud. Then add in some powdered bone, I’m sure we have some around here. Add in enough to the dark color to lighten a few shades, then set it all in a cauldron and set it to boil. If the amberum is present in the blood it’ll crystalize, and the powder will highlight the crystals sooner.”

“Sure,” Buspi nodded. “Should… should I ask the younger guard to get us some food? I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry.”

Vivian frowned before nodding. “Have them brought up something easy, bread and cheese with some sausage links. There’s a vendor next to a shop called ‘The Gnarled Root’. They had some delicious-looking sausage links made from Rekham haunch. I love Rekham.”

“I’ve never cared for it, too, gamey…” Buspi commented as he turned with the bottle of blood to walk away. “I’ll ask for something else. Do they have any other type of deer? Or boar?”

“I think I saw some boar meat, just take some silver from the pouch… in my satchel… great, he can’t hear me.” Vivian called out until she realized that he’d wandered too far, her cries now reverberating as crying echoes. “Hmph… hope I get those sausages.”

Vivian turned back to handle the chemicals it would take to separate the acidic bile from the mysterious substance. “Going to be here all night…” she grumbled as she poured in a few dribbles of Lye, pulling back as smoke bubbled up from the mixture.