Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey (5 page)

Von Helmutter lashed out, but his lunge fell short. Heraclix backed away.

“Cowardly devil!” Von Helmutter spat.

Von Helmutter stepped in foot-over-foot,
passe’ avant
, cutting the distance between them so quickly that Heraclix stumbled in an effort to get out of his way. Too late! Von Helmutter stabbed underneath the golem’s left arm, aiming for the torso, but Heraclix’s stumble invited the blade to his lower tricep.

The silver bit deep, and Heraclix cried out in pain. From the wound, a shimmering liquid, like quicksilver, spurted forth, trickling around his arm, dripping down his side, and evaporating in an evanescent sparkle that left no evidence of wounding save the gash itself.

Still, the giant backed away, struggling to control his left hand. He only wanted to defend himself, but the hand seemed to have
a will of its own. If he failed to control it, he would be responsible for the death of yet another victim.

The more experienced guards chuckled lightly, while the newer recruits watched in awe at the prowess of their commander, who could single-handedly wound this brute when eight musket balls and more bayonet stabs couldn’t harm him.

“I don’t want to harm you,” Heraclix said, spittle whistling from between his gritted teeth.

The guards laughed, all except for a soldier in the back who wore the gold sash of an officer. This must have been the graf’s major, likely the “Von Graeb,” who had been summoned by the infantrymen earlier. He looked on with steady curiosity, studying the situation, walking around the perimeter behind the guards, but never taking his eye off the pair in the middle.

“Oh, but I want to hurt you,” Von Helmutter said. “I’ve encountered your kind before.”

Von Helmutter stabbed again, missing short of his target’s belly, then slashed upward, opening a shallow cut across Heraclix’s chest that welled up with quicksilver, glittered, and again disappeared, leaving the skin etched where the dagger had met flesh.

But, rather than following up with another thrust, the graf swatted at some invisible pest that had taken an interest in him. His hand connected with the assailant, knocking it aside.

Von Helmutter advanced, once more, toward Heraclix.

The graf’s free hand suddenly shot up to his eyes. He screamed something incomprehensible, dropping the dagger to the ground as he reached up with the other hand to cover his nose, which had begun to bleed profusely.

The onlooking soldiers muttered among themselves.

Just then, the graf’s breeches fell down around his ankles. His hand shot down to cover his exposed groin. He screeched out in pain and dropped to his knees, one hand trying to protect his face, the other his naked crotch.

The guards moved in, the experienced ones assisting their commander, the inexperienced ones laughing at his embarrassing plight. In the background, the one called Von Graeb seemed to be hiding a smile behind a raised hand.

Heraclix turned round and round, not knowing where to go or what to do.

“Pomp!” he cried out.

“Here I am!” she said, alighting on his arm, coming into visibility. The left hand, almost instantly, calmed itself.

“Where to?” he asked.

“That way!” she giggled, pointing east.

The pair bowled their way through a set of guards who had set themselves to receive Heraclix’s charge.

Heraclix ran through the streets, bounding over carts and barrels, knocking over anything he could to create obstacles for any pursuers. Soon, he and Pomp ran across a bridge, disappearing from the guards’ view.

Von Graeb stooped down to pick up the silver dagger that Von Helmutter had dropped. It was a crude weapon, rough hewn from a single silver vein, with marks on the handle that might naturally have occurred in the ore from which it was extracted, or might have been intentionally carved—a set of sigils whose purpose he could not divine. He wrapped it up in a cloth in order to return it to Von Helmutter.

“A dead giant lives. A ghost fixes the dice of chance to turn a prediction of misfortune into one of good luck, then the Chief of the Imperial Guard reveals himself as a demon-hunter trained by who-knows-who or what. Grandmother would have known what to make of this,” he said to himself. “But she’s gone now,” he sighed, “and I am left to winnow through my own memories for enlightenment.”

While the others were attending to Graf Von Helmutter, Von Graeb surreptitiously wandered over to look into Mowler’s apartment. He looked back to where the men were helping the indignant Graf to gather his things. “I wonder,” Von Graeb said, “If there’s a connection . . .” He turned to the burned out remains one last time, then, shaking his head, he began to walk back toward his men. “How odd,” he said. “How very odd, indeed.”

C
HAPTER
4

E
very flash of white—every mislaid ribbon, painted door, or cloud in the sky—sent Heraclix darting for cover in an alleyway or behind a wagon. His wounds still ached with a burning pain that ebbed and flowed, though it never fully left him. He didn’t want to encounter Von Helmutter or his men again, that much was certain. Nor did he want a repeat of the uncontrolled actions,
his
uncontrolled actions, that had resulted in the death of the young guard.

Mid-day burned off any remaining clouds that had lingered through the morning. Heraclix and Pomp found shelter from the sun in an abandoned stable near the outskirts of town. Insects bothered the golem’s seams but kept a respectful distance from Pomp, who baffled them whenever she appeared. She was so like a bug, yet so unlike a bug. What was a tiny insect to think of her?

“You rest,” Pomp said to Heraclix, who kept rubbing the sore spots of his wounds. “I need to get something.”

Heraclix started to call after her, then stopped, remembering the consequences of his last outburst. Best to keep quiet.

He watched her wink out of sight and groaned as the insects that had surrounded her now flocked to him, joining the others to explore his seams and gashes. But not only did the bugs crawl over and through him, questions also buzzed through his thoughts like gnats. He swung blindly for phantom answers.

Why had Mowler created him? Why not someone or something else?

Why did Mowler choose Pomp to sacrifice to Beelzebub? Did it have to be her?

And why was Mowler summoning Beelzebub in the first place?

Was Von Helmutter a crony of Mowler’s? He seemed to know a great deal about sorcery. Was he a customer? A patron?

Most importantly, what were the origins of the many pieces of Heraclix? He was like a puzzle to himself, an unknown being or beings, self-aware, yet unaware of the individuals from whom he had been constructed. He was familiar with himself, yet his reflection, if he dared to look at it for any length of time, was an enigma wrapped in flesh. Or, more properly, fleshes.

Reflection shifted to boredom as the paucity of answers became clear to him. He wondered when Pomp would return.

“Where is she?” he said to himself.

“She is here!” Pomp said, startling him. She appeared with sheets of folded paper and a book in her arms. “You think too much,” she said.

“And you spy too much. Perhaps you are right: perhaps I think too much,” he said. “But I have no other way of gaining the insight I seek.”

“You talk too much, too! Here, read these,” she said, dropping the book and papers to the ground. “They are Mowler’s.”

“I’m afraid they are no one’s. They were Mowler’s, but Mowler is dead.”

Pomp looked at Heraclix with a puzzled expression.

“When he dies, his things, his papers, his book; they are no one’s?”

Heraclix thought for a moment. “Well, no.”

“So they are everybody’s?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“When you die, whose are you?”

“Me?”

Pomp nodded. “That big blue eye. Whose is it?”

“Well . . .” Heraclix stopped. “I don’t know how to answer. It’s part of me, of course.”

“But whose is it before you are alive? And whose is it after you die?”

“I don’t know,” Heraclix said. “Maybe these papers will tell us.”

Heraclix unfolded the papers, quickly read them, and then skimmed through the book.

Paper 1:

          
Good Sir,

              
I agree to your terms. I will herewith surrender the goods. Please give me two days to make arrangements.

In truth, I am,

Your servant,

Vladimir Porchenskivik

Paper 2:

An ink-colored diagram of a severed human hand,
sinistra
, painted indigo with death. Each digit, each nail, each nerve and blood vessel is diagrammed, called out, labeled with magical symbols and marginalia that Pomp has no hope of interpreting.

Paper 3:

A letter, scripted in handwriting so awkward and clumsy that it is almost unreadable.

          
Good Sir,

              
I have delivered the hand via courier, a young man from the neighboring village of Bozsok. He is sickly and stooped, a runt, but a good, innocent lad. Do treat him kindly. You can trust him entirely with the necklace, so long as you do not corrupt him. I will expect to receive him at Szalko two weeks from hence with the necklace, after which the remainder of the agreed sum will be sent.

Again, I am, truly

Vladimir Porchenskivik

The Book:

A wood-covered notebook bound with black and gray locks of human hair. The wood is thin, light in weight, dark in color. The front cover is unadorned, but the back was engraved with a representation of a rectangular tray or box, viewed from above. The
tray was full of writhing worms with human faces. Each face was unique—a distinctly individual person, but with the same mouth full of sharpened teeth and the same expression of seething hatred as all the others.

The frontispiece was a handwritten page bearing the simple title
The Worm
. The bottom of the page showed a stylized human-faced worm, like the ones on the back cover, but abstracted into more of a sigil than a picture. The work was signed in a large-looped, flowing script by one Octavius Heilliger.

The bulk of the book was a treatise, mostly in German with an occasional Magyar word or phrase. Heraclix saw that between these sections were indented paragraphs in Latin, Greek, or Arabic. He was surprised by how easily he understood these languages and felt confident in his ability to read and translate them all.

Among the section headings were “On the Soul of the Homunculus,” “Beyond Life, Beyond Death,” and “The Alchymical Basis for Tissue Restoration.”

Heraclix browsed the book, flipping past such passages as this:

“Memory loss is an almost inevitable consequence of wresting the life force from beyond the veil of death, for while the subject may not have yet abandoned all hope at the gates of Hell, he is almost certain to have at least sipped from the waters of the River Lethe, due to the hot, dry exhalations that emanate from the sixth circle of Hell, parching the throat of the newly arrived soul. Thus it is that practitioners of the necromantic arts often find that the extraction of information from the dead, no matter how exquisite the tortures applied, proves frustrating and possibly fruitless. The dead can only relate what they remember. All else is fancy or deception.”

In the last few pages of the book, he found several symbols, like a swarm of strange black flies, surrounding an illustration of a malproportioned human body. The individual body parts were color-coded, making the grim picture appear far more cheery than he thought it ought to be, given how badly mismatched the parts were with one another, like some awkward children’s painting. It was both grim and beautiful at the same time. Heraclix thought that the cost of producing such a book must be enormous. The
author was obviously willing to sacrifice a great deal to have it printed!

A feeling of familiarity overcame him as he read, not merely a sense of identification, as if he was receiving the information for the first time. Rather, he was confident that he had seen it before, though he could not recall where or when. The color-coded drawing was of him, obviously—or at least of something so much like him as to appear to be a doppelganger.