CENEVIERES FRANCE, 2022
Le Château de Cénevières hovers over the Lot River and looks upon broad fields hedged by small islets of Juniper and Lavender. It is a castle that has stood since 760 AD and passed from ruler to ruler until it was classified as a historical monument in 1957.
The weather is mild, and something in between what you get near the sea and in the mountains. The Black Coach dropped me off a short walk before the gatehouse, which is impressive and medieval—a small archway flanked by two towers, one more ancient than the other.
Cénevières was a small commune with a bustling population of one hundred and sixty-seven people. There were occasional tourists, and I imagined their experience of the castle was substantially different from mine.
The 13th Sagittarians, under the command of Samson des Merveilles, chose the locality for their camp while in the south of France. The red and white banners, with a tilted-looking cross, whipped happily in the soft breeze. The cross is really a kind of stylised bow.
Some of the banners showed the full image of a charging centaur with a bow and arrow in hand.
Despite the radical changes in warfare over the centuries, the Eldritch legions maintained their fanatical adherence to tradition. They continued to dress and train as if they were still fighting during the times of Charlemagne. This was on the whole affectation. Besides, who doesn’t think it’s a romping good time to flit about on horseback and joust in clanking armour?
The Eldritch world is less populated than the mundanes, and our military is about one one-hundredth the size you’d expect. There are only sixty soldiers in the 13th Sagittarians, whereas a Roman Legion, from which they were tentatively modelled, would have had six thousand men. The irony is that just what period they were trying to conserve seemed arbitrary. Why not prance about with a gladius and leather armour? If they updated to the medieval period, why couldn’t they at least get to something in the early twentieth century? I didn’t dare ask, but I assumed they preferred to dress at least five hundred years in the past for pure aesthetics.
Magic is a force multiplier far and above that of even a nuclear weapon, or so the Eldritch world believes. Their capacity for slaughter would be the envy of every tyrant in history. Our world has engaged in very few confrontations with the mundanes. However, when we have, our armies were usually outnumbered one thousand to one, and the mundanes were annihilated.
I passed through the portcullis to the ward, where a dozen knights were training in catch, a form of wrestling. I paused to watch them momentarily and appreciate the blinding speed with which they moved, even in their heavy mail armour.
Not wanting to be a distraction, I mounted the stairs to the residence. I wondered what I would do to access the large knocking rings that were easily two metres off the ground when the doors parted in a slow rumble and opened to a stone foyer with a large trestle table in the centre.
The lone unmistakable shape of Samson hulked over the table. He looked up to see me and then at the sword-shaped package I clutched under my arm. His face broke into a smile.
“Master Boz!” He spread his arms wide. “Welcome, come, come, put her on the table.”
I gave a polite bow, for I didn’t know whether I should or not and decided to err on the side of respect. With careful attention, I placed Cecily on the table before him. I carefully pushed the various papers and maps with arcane symbols to the side. I unwrapped his sword, and it glistened in the light. The room had substantially more light than the narrow windows could provide, though I didn’t see any candles or source for it.
Samson leaned forward and ran his fingers over the repairs. “Ah, Cecily, how beautiful you look. Fine work. Yes, fine work Master Boz; you’ve earned your pay and then some. You will lunch with us, of course?”
I nodded my assent. “It would be my pleasure, Sir.”
Samson laughed deeply. “Hah, you may regret agreeing to my invitation, Lions eat well, but simply.”
“I shan’t say either way until I’ve tasted it; I haven’t had the experience.”
“Well said, half-ling, well said.”
Lunch for a Red Lion was beyond simple and Spartan. What they called smoked bacon was just the fat, something akin to Lardo. Their bread was made with salt and water and nothing else. Their water was about one-quarter malt vinegar but surprisingly refreshing.
The meal itself was prepared by Samson, and not an attaché which I found curious, but also somewhat of an honour. He was a reasonably august personage, to be sure.
“What say you, Master Boz? Don’t we eat well then?” He laughed.
“I would say if one is to eat lard, then the water having vinegar seems to work in the stomach’s favour.”
“That it does.”
After draining it, I set down my wooden cup and watched as Samson admired Cecily. His lips moved as if talking, but I couldn’t hear what he said.
I had much the same experience with Cecily. I found myself talking to her as I worked and received back some kind of impression of what she thought. She was, in my experience, a bizarrely bloodthirsty and mildly insane type of person. She was affable, though, almost joyous.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“May I ask perhaps an impertinent question?”
Samson ignored me momentarily, but I was sure he’d heard.
“Don’t stand too much on ceremony Master Boz.”
“I don’t mean to pry, but magical devices are a bit of an obsession for me, and though I’ve read of daimonia, there is very little information on how they are constructed. I wonder if I could ask how you came by her for my edification?”
Samson pursed his lips and tilted his eyes towards the sky.
My breathing became tense and shallow. “If I’ve offended in any way — ”
“No, Master Boz, it’s not that.” He ran his hand over Cecily. “If she doesn’t mind, then I suppose I shouldn’t either. We made our peace on it long ago. Very well, then. I will tell you the story of how I got the sword.”
Samson paused for a long moment. His brows furrowed, and his eyes squinted as if he were looking off far in the distance.
“I joined the Lions in, ohh, nineteen and fifty-one. I was sixteen. My mother, Clodia, had been a slave of the Lion’s, just as her mother had been. Usually, when they swell up, there’s herbs to solve the problem. Only they didn’t work on her, so there was a bit of discussion about how to handle it. Finally, they decided if herbs didn’t work, an oubliette would, so they threw her in a hole and covered it up.”
I didn’t want to comment on how horrible that sounded. But also in line with what I’d heard about the Lions, they aren’t opposed to having children; they just prefer not to have them with slaves. To the Red Lions, being a slave is a sign of some deep internal flaw they wouldn’t want to see propagated.
To become a Red Lion from the position of a slave requires — significant felicity. The reason is relatively simple. Ultimately a slave remains a slave because they fear death more than slavery. Fearing death is a particularly unattractive trait to a soldier. If you don’t have enough honour to die like a man, you shouldn’t have the right to live like one. Or so they believe. They are, however, pragmatic, especially when slaves are taken young and raised in slavery.
Samson scratched his beard. “Course, in those times, Lions were soft. If it’d been me, I would have gutted her on the spot. No use for a slave that doesn’t respond to the herbs. But she was fair, and they’d all enjoyed her more than was sensible.”
I made every effort not to allow my eyes to bulge out of my forehead. His own mother? Well, I’d read stories of Spartan mothers who’d dash their own baby’s heads in if they found it weak and sickly or kill a cowardly son not fit for battle. So I suppose in the grand history of humanity, there are all kinds of familial affections.
“How did she survive, and thus you?”
“Ahh, well, Provence has a lot of Cicadas; they burrow deep in the soil.”
“So your mother survived on Cicadas?”
“Yeah, after about two months, they found her alive, drinking from a trickle down the wall. So they took it as a sign. They guessed the strong Lion seed must have done it. So they let her have me. When I was old enough to be on my own, they gave her a choice. Her or me.”
I nodded. I don’t imagine it was a difficult choice.
“So I slaved for the Lions; I grew big ‘n strong, so they gave me a chance to join if I volunteered to go to the 38th parallel and take three hundred hangook heads.” He held up his sword. “With this. And only this. Didn’t even give me a rifle or armour. Well, I got good at taking heads, so I earned my armour. After the end of the war, I came back well-sated on blood and in need of another kind of satisfaction. I didn’t much care for the slave stock we keep for recreation, so I went to the villages and ploughed my way through every woman I could get my hands on.”
“Laudable.”
Samson laughed. “Aye, I suppose, but eventually, you meet just the right one. A raven-haired, olive-skinned, South American girl. And you fall in love.”
I smiled broadly. “Was she a sorcerer?”
“Aye, a good one, too, from a proud family. Headstrong, intelligent.” Samson twisted the sword in his hand, letting the light glimmer across its edge. His look was almost lecherous but quickly softened to something like adoration. “Cecily Arbor was her name. A girl with bookish brains and a taste for violent men.”
I knew the type. It was the oldest story, quite literally. There was, after all, something of Enkidu in the burly Samson. And even his namesake was seduced by Delilah.
Samson laid the sword across his knees. “But then the Vietnam War started, and I was sent down to the Visayas, which we were using as a staging area in support of the war. Colonel West was beginning his latest project, and there was a need to refresh the store of bodies for his experiments.”
I assumed by Visayas; he meant the Philipines. And by Colonel West, he must mean Colonel Herbert West, a mundane doctor from the 1920s who had stumbled on a scientific practice of necromancy. Strictly speaking, there is no rank in our military called Colonel; it’s something Herbert West maintains from his mundane military service in Canada, I believe.
“Down in the Visayas they have these head hunters. Funny people them, they cut off their enemies’ heads, trap their souls in it, shrink it down, and wear it like jewellery. They feed off the souls of the dead.”
I had heard about witch doctors and headhunters before, but not about them trapping souls. Essentially, once a body is dead, it’s an inert object. So binding a soul to it was effectively creating a daimonia.
“I am deadly curious about what you learned from them.”
“On how to make a daimonia?”
“Yes, strictly a professional curiosity, of course.”
“Wouldn’t matter to me. It weighs on you, though. Depends on who you do it too, I suppose.”
“How so?”
“It’s permanent. There’s nothing more terrifying than forever.”
“I wouldn’t imagine you’re terrified of much.”
“Listen well, half-ling, and think long on it; eternity is the only real terror. Immortality is a horror. To live and die is a blessing. Especially to die. Imagine a fine meal that never ends. You must keep eating and eating. Would you not hate food before too long? The finest part of eating is the time between. The longer it is, the better the taste.”
“I see your point. So a daimonia is eternal?”
“It can be.”
This was all very fine and philosophical, but he hadn’t cleared up how they are precisely made. Not that I would want to make one, but it seemed a valuable sort of knowledge to have.
“But how do you bind the soul to the object.”
“How do you catch a fish?”
“With a hook?”
“Or a net?”
It dawned on me. How simple. I decided not to ask for more details; I could likely figure it out alone.
Samson nodded with finality. “I was involved in the war until it ended in nineteen and seventy-five. During that time, I rarely returned to France, only once a year, which was not enough for her. So she tried to leave me. But I refused to accept it. So each time I’d return, she’d be with another man, and I’d kill him and take her back.”
Samson’s countenance fell for a moment. “Well, after the war, I returned for a good long while, and nothing more of interest was brewing for the Lions. She resented me, hated me. But I couldn’t let her go. I thought I loved her.”
“But you didn’t?”
“No half-ling, if I’d loved her, would’ve let her be. I loved myself.” Samson ran his fingers through his hair.
“She ran off one day, and I went searching for her. I found her in Paris, shacked up with a Peregrine.” Samson lifted his sword and ran his hand up and down the blade several times.
“When it was over, she lay on the bed with this through her chest—looking up at me with dead eyes. I’d seen thousands of dead eyes before. But I couldn’t stand seeing hers.”