Lazarus 6 - SEVENTEEN: Modern Architecture, Ancient History

We searched the rest of the room just to be safe. Dealing with eldritch beings and ancient powers tended to make me more than a little paranoid. I mean, sure, Wayland said he wasn’t fully on board team Morrigan, but how the hell did I know that wasn’t just a bunch of lip-service, designed to draw us into a false sense of security? Fae couldn’t outright lie, they had to couch everything in half-truths, but the Dökkálfar weren’t technically Fae. Distant cousins, but that seemed like a lot of wiggle room to trust my life on. So first, we locked down the main chapel.

We scoured the room, looking for traps, hidden doorways, arcane wards that might summon some fiend or flood the room with acid.

Once we were reasonably sure everything was as it seemed—disgusting but harmless—we hunkered down and took a few minutes to tend to our wounds. Everyone was in bad shape and there was no guarantee that the next room, blocked off by a pair of ornate cathedral-style doors, would hold answers and not monsters. Chris had broken out the med kit, and this wasn’t your standard first aid kit you stow under your sink or in some dusty drawer. Nope, this was a full-on Corpsman kit: a heavy duty MOLLE pack, dotted with modularized pouches filled with assorted tools.

He carefully sorted supplies on to one of the steel-topped surgery trays, laying out everything and the kitchen sink. Pills, ointments, iodine, and bandages galore. He had gauze and medical tape, over the counter band-aids and liquid skin, ace bandages and even super glue. He eyed one of the deeper gashes marring Winona’s shoulder—courtesy of Wayland’s Chimera’s—frowned, then aided a curved needle and suture thread to the growing pile. We congregated around the supplies like parishioners, cataloging our wounds, then snagging what we needed to patch ourselves up.

Chris helped Winona while Sullivan gave me a hand. Overall, Sullivan had a few dings and scrapes, but nothing like the myriad of deep gashes I had, most of which required at least a few stiches. My body healed a helluva lot faster these days thanks to my demonic buddies, but infection was still a worry and roaming around this place with open wounds was just asking for a case of super dysentery. And I’d knew enough about Oregon Trail to know that super dysentery would get you in the end every time.

Levi ignored all the medical supplies, instead pulverizing a hunk of stone, turning it into a pile of gravel and sand.

He plopped down against a wall, tore open the muddy scab wound covering his shoulder joint, then meticulously started packing the gaping hole with the mixture. Grinding the dirt and stone in.

“Why do you do that?” Chris asked, though keeping his head down, using iodine to clean one of Winona’s many cuts. “I’ve seen you shapeshift. You can turn your arms into sedgehammers—why not just regrow the limb?”

“It’s complicated,” he offered curtly, still mashing dirt and gravel into the hole. “This is my true form.” He gestured at his lumpy,misshapen body. “The golden stuff is my ichor and it suffuses the clay that makes up my body. It’s the ichor that allows me to shift. I can alter what’s there, but regrowing parts or healing wounds is tricky business. To do that, I need new material to convert.”

He picked up another handful of pulverized stone and jammed it into a puncture wound the size of a golf ball in his leg. “My ichor, it saturates the earth and turns it into clay. Makes it a part of me with enough time. That’s how I heal. How I make new parts. Something small like this”—he pointed at the leg wound—“will only take a few minutes to patch. Regrowing an arm will likely take most of a day.”

“Winona has the most interesting friends,” Chris said with a thin smile. “Are there a lot of creatures like… whatever you are?” He asked, cocking an eyebrow. “I sure would love to be able to fix bullet wounds with some shuteye and a bit of dirt.”

“No,” I said, before Levi could answer. “Levi’s a werido even by our standards. He’s a golem, powered by a piece of magic that shouldn’t exist. The Philosopher Stone. He was built back in the 40s as part of some sort of Nazi research assignment.”

There was a sharp intake of breath from Sullivan. Apparently, he didn’t know Levi’s backstory. Not surprising really. Levi was great in a pinch, but he wasn’t big on sharing or bonding. Shit, I’d fought beside in the Flesh Colosseum and I barely knew his backstory.

“Oh my god,” Sullivan said, staring at the golem with wide eyes. “It wasn’t just a rumor.” He shook his head. “Crimea, August 1942. The Guild dispatched me and a few other heavy hitters to investigate rumors circulating about Ahnenerbe SS officers, rounding up various”—he twirled his free hand through the air—“occult objects for the Reich. It was supposed to be a low-level recon assignment. Quick. Easy. In. Out.

“Instead, we stumbled on a whole platoon of low-level spell-slingers working under the thumb of a demonic Katallani. The demon was taking its marching orders for someone highly placed in the regime, who was trying to construct a working philosopher stone. My team got pinned down in a week-long firefight behind enemy lines. Lost four good men in that engagement. Never did get to the bottom of that mess.” He stared at Levi, a new appraising light in his eyes. “But I guess they were successful after all.”

“Goes even deeper than you know,” I said, wincing as Sullivan threaded a curved needle through my shoulder. “The guy running that little operation was our buddy Hogg. And speaking of,” I said, turning my gaze on the MudMan, “seems like maybe there’s a few details you’re not telling us. Care to fill us in on about Siphonei? For starters, what in the hell is she and how does she ties into all this?”

“It’s a complicated story,” Levi replied, focusing on his arm. “A while back I got my first good lead on Hogg after more than seventy-years of searching and turning up nothing. He was working with the Kobock Nation in the Deep Downs—they were abducting people, trying to build a flesh homunculus.”

“Sorry,” Chris said sheepishly, raising a hand. “I’ve heard about the Kobocks and the Deep Downs, but what exactly is a homunculus?”

Levi waived the question away. “Just a fancy word for an empty vessel. A container capable of holding a powerful entity. Hogg is the last remaining member of an ancient cult, dedicated to the worship of a murder deity. The first murder deity, really. Cain, brother of Abel and the first murderer. Some of the older texts refer to him as Dibeininax Ayosainondur Daimuyon, the Eternally Cursed One. After killing his brother, God cursed Cain, drove him from the land of his forebearers and into the outer regions, east of Eden. Sentenced him to a lifetime of endless wandering.

“From what I’ve been able to glean, Cain eventually made his way to the land of Nod, which I reckon is an ancient term for Outworld. He passed into a different realm, one filled with a myriad of beasts and creatures. He fathered children there, the first Scions, and eventually stumbled into dark alchemy that allowed him to become both more and less human. He transmuted the boundaries and ascended to a twisted divinity. The process drove him insane and someone—no one seems to know who—locked him up in a pocket dimension.”

“That thing, Siphonei,” Levi continued, “was Cain’s warden. She stood guard over his prison, deep in the Sprawl, until Hogg broke him out. Originally, Hogg built me to house Cain. But a good man, Rabbi Yitzchak Tov Ganz, gave me this.” He reached up and traced a fat finger over a crude sword carved into his chest. “Turned me against Hogg and the Nazi’s before they could complete their work. Hogg didn’t give up though and eventually figured out a way to build a new homunculus capable of containing his master.”

“The thing on the cross,” Chris said.

“The thing on the cross,” Levi confirmed. “I stopped Hogg last time. Barely. Couldn’t kill the man before he got away, though.”

“Maybe it is just me,” Winona said, face pensive, “but it seems very unlikely that this is a coincidence. Did not Wayland the Smith say that Hogg has found a new host?”

“He sure as shit did,” I replied as Sullivan cut and tied off his suture work. “Might be I’m grasping at straws here, but Wayland is designing a weapon capable of killing immortals and a now we have a murder god in the mix. How much you want to bet the two are related somehow?”

“Let’s go find out,” Levi said, standing.

Finally patched up, we headed for the double doors, braced ourselves for an ambush, then pushed out way inward.

I let out a sigh of relief when nothing jumped out like a Jack in the Box intent on eating our faces. It looked like Wayland’s private quarters. A single room with a sprawling bed, a sleek study, and a connecting bathroom with a tub big enough to accommodate the gangly weaponsmith. Honestly, it was hard to imagine the mad king of the dark elves lounging in a sudsy bubble bath after a long day designing magical weapons of mass destruction, but all signs pointed to yes. What we really wanted, though, was scattered across the study. A hulking chrome table displayed a miniature scale model of the strange building down in South Africa, while a high-speed low-drag drafting table held a series of meticulously detailed blueprints.

There was also a slew of quickly jotted notes referencing a variety of esoteric texts, filling a mahogany bookcase along the far wall.

We crowded around the table, staring down at the model. The building was a work of modern art, a sphere of glass and steel and bloody red marble. I crouched down, glancing in through the miniature windows, taking in the graceful lines, beautiful curves, and interlocking spirals. Gorgeous, but also like modern art, the damned thing made no sense. Not as a building, at any rate. There were hallways that abruptly dead-ended, staircases that went nowhere, false walls, secret passageways, and sweeping arches that didn’t seem to have any discernable purpose. On top of that, the whole thing was an absolute warren of passageways that would be almost impossible to navigate without a detailed map.

I couldn’t even begin to fathom why someone would spend six months solid building something so wildly impractical.

Levi though, went stock still, his eyes wide, his jaw hanging open in an expression of shock. Of recognition.

“Impossible,” he whispered, creeping closer to the building. He trailed a finger along the model, the fat digit faltering as he traced the odd symbols engraved into the building. He straightened and ran that same finger over his chest, right where his heart would be if he had one. “I know what this is. And I know what he’s planning.”

“All by just looking at the building?” Sullivan asked from the drafting table.

“It’s not a building,” Levi said. “At least it’s a building in name only. And I know what it is, because I’ve seen this a thousand times before in the mirror. It’s as similar as my own face.” With a grimace he dug his fingers into the clay covering his chest. With a grunt, gray skin and earthen muscle parted like the red sea, revealing an elegant crimson sphere filled with swirls of churning gold. If you stripped away the dining halls, furniture, and toilets, the building would’ve been an exact replica for the thing beating in Levi’s center.

“It’s a scaled-up version of the Philosopher Stone.” He let the gray skin close and shook free the golden ichor marring his digits. “These markings,” he said, lightly touching the sigils decorating the model building, “are the ancient names of God. All three-hundred-sixteen of them.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

“The ancient names of God or more than just names—they’re the words he used to speak creation into existence. To set the foundations of the earth. To form the boundaries of the sea and put mankind in its place. His voice continues to echo throughout creation, and those names are the reverberation of the creation itself. The DNA of the universe. The Stone has the power to transmute because it has the power to reorder things through the echo of creation. With that, you can make lead to gold, and you can transmute the mortal to the immortal.”

“Or vice-versa,” Sullivan said.

“How would one power such a terrible ritual, though?” Winona asked, leaning forward to stare at the model.

“By channeling the power of the Immortals through their Scions,” I said, the pieces clicking together in my head. “Dagda told us. The Scions are links. Conduits. She’s going to use their own power to fuel the weapon that’ll kill them.”

“You’re not wrong,” Levi said. He trundled over to the blueprints, quickly skimming through the pages until he found whatever he was looking for. An intricate room with an enormous summoning circle etched onto the floor. “It’s not enough to have a working Philosopher Stone—there’s an equivalent exchange that needs to happen. The stone, it produces the ichor, and the ichor produces the transformation.” He tapped the center of the circle. “She needs equivalent exchange to strip away Immortality. She needs a creature that is powered by death instead of life.”

“Hogg intends to summon his master, Cain,” Winona said with a gasp.

“It’s the only way the weapon would work,” Levi said. “If the Morrigan can get the Fae Lords and Ladies of old into this contraption when that ritual finishes, Cain will be reborn through their Immortality and they, in turn, will wither away to mere husks. Consumed by the power of death and murder.”

“And then the Morrigan will be able to install whatever puppets she wants. She and that brohole the Savage Prophet will run the show and with the New Wave in place, there won’t be anyone left to stop her from running roughshod over all of humanity.”

“I think I’m going to need a stiff drink,” Sullivan said running a hand through disheveled hair. “Come on, we’re wasting time. Round up everything we can. I want all the blueprints, and pictures of this. Multiple angles. We need to get back and reconvey with the Arch-Mage. If anyone will know what to do here, it’s her. The faster we move, the better.”