Published at 31st of August 2023 9:43 am

Chapter 4

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The following week, Jakob worked diligently in his laboratorium. At night, he and Heskel would venture out of the basement in search of materials to add to their steadily-growing supply of flasks, alembics, needles, saws, knives, vessels for storing organs and other harvested material, miscellaneous parts, plants for alchemy, and, most importantly, new subjects.

All while bolstering their new base, they awaited the return of Holm. They knew from observing the guards and utilising their servants in the bakery, that the Wrought Servant had yet to be caught. Thus far, Jakob was pleased with his ingenuity, though he grew restless waiting.

In the meantime, he experimented with new ideas. He was limited by his lack of Demon’s Blood, as it remained the core catalyst for most Demonological rituals and spells. But working around such limitations was something he had long since learnt under Grandfather’s tutelage. At the age of twelve, he had been sent out into the sewers alone to find a place for a new laboratorium that he had to build from what he found within the sewer. He had been at a loss for the first couple of days, until he came upon the idea that, in the absence of wood and other building materials, he could scavenge the local wildlife and utilise their bones and hides. Though crude and wretched-smelling, Grandfather had been quite pleased with the result.

Jakob thought back fondly on that moment. Praise was hard-won from his surrogate parent, so every instance was one he cherished.

Suddenly, he was pulled from his reverie by a commotion upstairs.

“Unhand me, you cretin!” came a voice slick with conceit.

There followed a bustle, as the whatever-it-was came down the stairs to the basement.

A man in fancy clothes was tossed before Jakob’s workstation, where a half-dissected cat lay open, its skin pulled aside on needles hammered into the tabletop.

“Holm.” Jakob was simultaneously furious and elated at the development. “I told you that you should first see me, before you acted!”

The Wrought Servant looked him in the eyes, then down at the man slowly lifting himself off the floor. The bone blades and claws sprung out of his right arm, but, before he could act, Heskel put a firm hand on his shoulder. Though Holm was tall, he was still beneath the towering Wight.

“Thank you, Heskel. Holm, you may leave us. Ensure that we remain undetected, and then stay within the bakery until I call on you again.”

“YES LORD…”

As the Wrought Servant retreated upstairs, Jakob regarded the man kneeling before him. Though Holm had failed to fully comprehend his instructions, he had brought him exactly what he was seeking. The man, though haughty by the looks of him, had a build that spoke of untapped acrobatic potential.

“Who are you! I demand you let me leave!”

Jakob let out a puff of spent breath from his mask, his eyes sparkling with ideas.

With a simple nod, he bid Heskel prepare the subject.

After the lengthy dissection and dismantling, where Jakob took care not to ruin the superb sample he was dealing with, his final concept had formed in his mind’s eye. He had never thought to use the captured man as yet another servant, but rather to utilise his physique and innate litheness to aid Jakob as a sort of semi-living tool. Grandfather was quite fond of his repertoire of self-thinking additional limbs, and Jakob, ever the aspiring student, sought to imitate this, while still retaining his own flair. After all, Grandfather extolled ingenuity and individuality, viewing plagiarism and copying as the death of creativity.

With reverent care, he laid out the skin that he had purposefully cut and stitched to produce a long sleeve, even before his final idea had formed. Within it, he lined up bones from his subject, starting with the femur, the largest and thickest of the lot, and continuing down the length of the skin with continually-smaller bones, ending in all three phalanx bones of the subject’s index finger. Afterwards, he artfully recreated the ligaments between each of the joints, ensuring minimal rotational stress and maximal flexibility. He was fortunate that his subject was such a perfect specimen, since, with a normal corpus, the rate of deterioration with such a flexible semi-living appendage would require near-daily maintenance.

He considered how, despite failing to accurately comprehend his commands, Holm had indeed brought him exactly what he had required. As Grandfather always said, you could not blame a beast for its beastly ways. A Wrought Servant was limited by its capabilities prior to subjugation, meaning an illiterate person turned servant would remain as such. It was of course possible to improve on the knowledge and comprehension of a Wrought Servant, but the time spent doing it would make it ineffective, when a better subject for subjugation could be found instead.

The alternative to a servant like that was to insert the soul of a demon into their body instead, as these were superhuman creatures of boundless wit and inventiveness, who would accrue knowledge and grow all by themselves. Granted, this trait also made such servants unpredictable and dangerous, requiring dozens of warding spells to limit just how free they were allowed to be. Raleigh, Grandfather’s Demon servant, was covered from scalp to sole in runes and sigils, all to prevent him from escaping his bond of servitude. And yet, the creature retained much of his independence and personality. The prospect of such a servant terrified Jakob quite a bit.

After laying the final tendon, Jakob moved on to inserting the muscles. He was generally more proficient with splicing flesh than muscle, but with Heskel’s oversight, the result was near perfection. It took close to half the afternoon, but when he finally stitched shut the skin around his creation, he felt an immense sense of accomplishment. To date, it was his most intricate creation, but though the fleshwork was over, it still needed several spells to become functional.

As Jakob stared at the two-and-a-half-metre-long appendage on his worksurface, he considered the order of the spells he needed, before proceeding with the necromantic Reanimation Rite. The new limb had no veins, as such were not required for an undead limb to function, but, in the future, he considered trying to recreate the appendage with a fully-living brain, heart, and digestive system to sustain itself. Even Grandfather struggled with such creations, so he would surely praise him if he could pull it off. That being said, aside from the appendage before him, Jakob’s knowledge only really extended to modifying and combining creatures and humans, not making them from scratch or forcing unnatural life to occur. Such an undertaking would require a level of skill he did not yet possess, but with enough practice and experimenting, anything was possible.

Eventually, he settled on the order of spells, starting with the Rite of Prolonged Life, and, though it was a common staple of nearly every single one of his creations, he did not require the Amalgam Hymn for his creation, as Heskel had helped ensure the stitching and bonding of the many joints of bones were flawless.

Using a cup of his own blood, which he poured over the appendage as he moved down its length and sang the Hymn of the Safeguarding Dependant, he enforced within the appendage the bond between them and made it view him as its heart, which it must protect at all cost. Even though it was not yet unliving, the limb immediately started twitching and squirming with every tiny impulse he sent it. It was quite possible to already use the appendage in its current state, but it would require a lot of concentration and mastery, and Jakob wanted a tool to assist him without his need for supervision.

Like the Amalgam Hymn, the Hymn of the Safeguarding Dependant was another of Grandfather’s spells. All of his unique and purpose-made spells centred around a lost technique of magic, Chthonic Hymnals. The songs of the ancient language were longwinded and complex, as opposed to the more traditional magic spells featuring fairly-simple incantations and ritualistic symbols, but they could be easily adapted to all manner of purposes. Using them in any combat setting was a terrible idea though, even despite the fact that Grandfather’s Hymnal repertoire included a few quite destructive songs, like Implosion, Unravelling, the Hymn of Devouring Madness, and quite a few other ones that Jakob had yet to learn.

He finished his preparations with two Necromantic rites, Ironflesh and Unbreakable Bones. True to their names, they ensured the skin of the appendage was resistant to damage and that the bones would not easily break. The combination of both ensured that, if necessary, the new limb would be quite useful in a fight, should Jakob need it. Their drawbacks only really extended to living beings, as Ironflesh could cause living flesh and skin to necrose and tear, and Unbreakable Bones tended to cause things like bone spurs that were debilitatingly painful, according to Grandfather, who, decades prior, had made the mistake of assuming a living body could also benefit from Necromancy.

After a short break, where they ate some of the baked goods Jakob’s new servants had created, Heskel showed him how to set up the Reanimation Rite. It would be his first time ever performing it, so he had to rely on the Wight’s extensive knowledge of Necromancy.

They had to move a lot of the flour sacks to create ample floorspace for the hexagram. Using bonedust and charcoal, Heskel outlined the six corners and lines between, after which he drew within its confines first a circle, then the Eternal Serpent along its insides, and then another circle within which they curled up the appendage, like a massive snake imitating the iconography surrounding it.

Though often associated with skulls, the being whose power was invoked for Necromantic rituals, was the ever-growing and ever-self-devouring Eternal Serpent. Its continual existence was the foundation upon which undeath was made possible, as well as the inherent magic of certain demons. Jakob did not fully comprehend how such a thing made sense, but he had never worked up the confidence to ask Grandfather for a deeper explanation.

The Eternal Serpent was one of the few Great Ones Above that did not belong in the fold of the Watcher’s vassals. Such was its tremendous power and influence that it stood alone besides the Mightiest of the Entities to whom humans and their planets were but motes of errant dust.

Heskel continued and drew three words along the circle that confined the serpent, and which in turn confined the appendage. Each was written in the phonetic Block-Script of the Necromantic Cult, from whom Grandfather had long ago obtained the many rites and spells he had passed on to Jakob and which Heskel had naturally absorbed in his long service to the Fleshcrafter. He wondered just what sort of price Grandfather had paid in return.

The Wight stood up from his task, and then pointed to each of the strange words in succession:

“Servant. Protector. Extension of Self.”

To Jakob’s knowledge, Necroscript, as was its shorthand, was similar to Chthonic Hymnals, in that it could be modified to suit very specific tasks, though, in Necromantic rites, this was in the form of adding the block script to the ritual circles or vessels for the spells. He knew that, if he became proficient with the script, he would be able to modify many of his most-commonly-utilised rites. It was on his list of things he still needed to learn, though it seemed to be a list that grew exponentially with every new fragment of knowledge he obtained.

After the Necroscript came the tallow candles of human fat. These were candles that, just by their heretical nature, contained potent magic, though they were arduous to produce. Fortunately, they had prepared several in the previous week. Without needing the Wight to tell him, Jakob placed one at each of the six corners of the hexagram. He first assumed that he needed to light the candles, but Heskel stopped him with a hand.

“Kneel. Repeat spell.”

A bit confused, but compliant nonetheless, Jakob knelt before the hexagram, the stitched-flesh apron cushioning his knees on the hard stone floor. Heskel then took Jakob’s hands, placing them on two of the six corners, so that the candles there sat between his thumbs and index fingers.

Then the Wight started chanting, with Jakob repeating in a sort of canon-singing. The words were meaningless to him, but he made sure to enunciate them clearly, and, before long, the air became charged with potential energy. Suddenly, the six candles all lit up with a pale flame that was a hazy blue at its fringes and a pure white within.

The flames of the candlewicks grew-and-grew, reaching near to the ceiling and then curling inwards, like serpents seizing the still-laying appendage within. The flames struck the coiled appendage the exact moment Jakob intoned the final verse. Immediately, the flames disappeared, leaving not even smoke nor the smell of burnt tallow. Shortly after, the appendage within unfurled like the imitation snake that it was, squirming anxiously, before slithering to where Jakob knelt and coiling about his body.

“It’s perfect.”

After sewing the new appendage to the back of his flesh apron, he now had a tail that moved around and could hand him tools with a single thought, or helped hold whatever he needed it to. It was easily the single-most important thing he had ever created, though much of its design had been possible only with the help of Heskel.

“What do you think?” he asked the Wight, as the tail coiled around his waist, which seemed its preferred resting place when not in use.

Heskel nodded solemnly. “A man is no more than the tools in his belt.”

It was yet another of Grandfather’s many sayings, but Jakob knew it was meant as a compliment.

“Now. How about we try to find some way out of this district?”

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