Chapter Eight
Chuter had been a horrible person. Whoever had designed the scene in front of me was worse.
I stared in utter horror. The hall looked like a giant butcher’s shop. Bodies - human bodies - hung from the ceiling, blood pouring from their veins and pooling in glass jars below. They were alive and yet ... my eyes traced tubes running from high above, feeding yellowish liquid into their veins. It was hard to tell what they were being fed, but I guessed it was something akin to a nutrient potion. There were limits to what one could do with blood replenishment potions ... I shuddered, suddenly understanding why the mystery master had hired Chuter. If he was ready to break all the rules, laws imposed by the empire and later confirmed by its successors, what did it matter if he hired a vile monster? I felt sick. There was nothing I could do for the poor bastards. They would be drained of blood, then ... then what?
My stomach churned as I moved forward, slipping between the bodies. There were over twenty people in the room - male and female, young and old - and they were all being drained of blood. Why? I knew quite a few rites that involved blood, but this much? Did the mystery master intend to cast the rites time and time again? I found it hard to believe. Doing them once was quite dangerous enough. Something moved at the far end of the room and I froze, drawing my obscurification charm around me. Two men, clad in white coats, appeared from a side door and made their way to a dangling body, one that had expired, removing it from its hook with practiced ease and placing it on a table. My gorge rose as they hacked the body to pieces, carving it up as easily as a butcher would carve a pig. They bottled the organs and placed them on a trolley, dumped the bones in a sink to wash and pushed the trolley out of the chamber. I took a final look around, then followed them, keeping within the shadows.
The next chamber was no improvement. It was smaller, walls lined with shelves crammed with jars of potion ingredients. I hadn’t seen so many in one place since I’d left Whitehall. Smaller jars of human organs were clearly visible, all carefully labelled by someone who knew what they were doing. I peered at the writing thoughtfully. It wasn’t Whitehall’s style. Mountaintop? Or Laughter? It was hard to imagine Stronghold producing a monster who could do this. Perhaps it was someone from the legendary Hierarchy. But everyone considered the Hierarchy nothing more than a rumour ...
I warily looked around, then slipped into the next room. It reminded me of an advanced alchemical classroom, with long tables lined with cauldrons, ingredient jars and everything else an apprentice alchemist might need. The men at the tables, dressed in the same white clothes as the butchers I’d seen earlier, were too busy to pay any attention to me. They were intent on their brewing ... my eyes narrowed as I studied their work. It wasn’t safe to brew potions by rote, yet ... they were doing it. I wondered what was keeping them in place. They didn’t look to be slaves. I walked around the chamber - half the trick of maintaining a successful obscurification spell is not doing anything that suggested you didn’t have a perfect right to be there - and through the next door. A grown man lay on a table, completely naked. His arms and legs were firmly strapped down, eyes wide and staring. Another man was holding an injector tube. As I watched, he pushed it against the other man’s neck and triggered the spell. I grimaced. Anything that needed to be injected like that was bad news.
The victim started to twitch, body struggling against the restraints. I watched in horror as his muscles bulged, his eyes practically popping out of their sockets. The table itself shook, even though it was bolted to the floor. I’d heard of enhancement spells - I doubted there was a boy at Whitehall who didn’t consider experimenting, as he grew older - but this was dangerously absurd. The victim’s upper body was growing stronger, his muscles larger; his lower body seemed to be actually shrinking. If it went on, he would have an adult chest balanced on a child’s pair of legs. I wanted to run away as the victim started to scream. His heart was thudding against his chest. I could see it.
He twitched one final time, then lay still. “His heart gave out,” the other man said. I wasn’t going to call him a healer, not after that. “He wasn’t as strong as we thought.”
A pair of white-clad men appeared, took the body and wheeled it away. I took advantage of the distraction to sneak off. The obscurification charm had its limits. Besides, whoever had dispatched Chuter was bound to be expecting him. I doubted Chuter was permitted to spend his time in the lower levels. His memories certainly hadn’t shown this degree of horror. Everything he’d done had been on a smaller scale. I pushed the memories back down as I walked into another chamber. It was a smaller alchemical lab, one designed for experiments rather than mass production. A handful of scrolls lay on the table, one pinned open. I took a moment to read it. My heart nearly stopped as - finally - everything started to make sense.
It wasn’t uncommon for sorcerers and court wizards to experiment with using magic to improve dogs and horses, to grant them more strength and endurance and even - perhaps - a greater degree of intelligence. Actually uplifting them to human-level intelligence was flatly forbidden - there were too many intelligent non-human creatures out there, some of which were very dangerous
