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Case Three: The Talisman Assassin

"Y ou…" he hissed. A dejected sigh. The gun went down. He waved her into his flat, and she followed. As he closed the door behind her, he continued muttering, "Of course you'd show up. It was only a matter of time. I'll have to disappoint you; I don't know shit about the incident. Just that my cousin's dead and the Hashems probably did it."

Krahe was more than familiar with people she knew personally meeting unfortunate ends. Even without the hazard factor of associating with her, abrupt and unceremonious death was a part of life in Megacity Gamma. But… such an incident struck a bit differently without the relative amelioration of a world where it was the norm. It was a familiar feeling. A numb pressure in her chest, spreading like a parasite unfurling its tendrils, burning and seething, gripping her stomach. A faint shiver went down her back, and murder flared behind her eyes.

Before she could say anything, Garvesh noticed her brief dissociative stare into the middle-distance, realizing the truth.

“Hol’ on, you didn’t know? Why’re you here, then?”

“I…” she started, then took a moment to collect herself, blinking a few times and sighing. “I need these.”

She handed over a paper listing several reagents and materials for the Rite of Dho-Hna.

“Occultism, huh? Some of these are a bit out there, stuff from the Beyond Frontier, but I can source that. There’s just one problem: I’m a bit shook up what with the incident…”

“You don’t have to leverage me. I was already planning on finding out whoever is behind this—and then who is behind them .”

“You’d better. I won’t blame you for anything, but it couldn’t be more obvious that this whole mess is some brainfuck with too much influence trying to take revenge for what you and Casus did at Slaughterhouse 9. I gotta wonder, though. Why’d you decide to do it of your own volition? Y’liked Imraal’s street food that much?”

“I’ll tell you. Mind if I take a seat?”

“Sure. Want… Well, I’d offer you coffee, but I don’t have any. Ever had homemade machine crab juice?”

“I’ve had it a few times, but only from a street cart,” she said, curiously looking around as she sat down.

“Yeah, I know that guy. Mine’s better; at least, I’d like to think so!”

The lizard returned, having already disappeared into his kitchen. Krahe heard pouring, mixing, chopping and grinding.

A few minutes later, Garvesh returned with two bulbous glasses that at first looked like ornamental, colored glass, but Krahe felt a faint magical aura from them, and they felt heavier than they should’ve been. This version of the drink was purplish rather than blue, and tasted of banana and ekarone, though it was a different kind of banana than she was used to. Overall, she found it to be sweeter and somewhat stronger than the alternative, and undeniably better, but better in the way that something made by hand was better than something bought for cheap from a street cart.

After drinking one-third of her glass, Krahe explained herself. “Imraal wasn’t the only one they came after. I almost got turned into mincemeat myself. Someone shot a thaumshot through the warded, solid thaumstone window of a church safe house. If I remember correctly, it was a bladestorm-type. It came from a rooftop around two hundred meters away. So if you’ve got any leads, I would appreciate those, and if you want to pay me for this in some way, feel free. For starters, besides those ingredients, I’m looking for a very special kind of voidkey.”

“Even more special than the Twin Serpents?” Garvesh smirked. The expression vanished nearly instantly.

“C’mon. It’s a third-order key. It’s not that special. But that’s not what I mean. A fourth-order key would be nice, but what I want is a Gulf Key.”

“So instead of something hard to get due to restrictions and hoarding, you’re looking for something that’s hard to get for those same reasons… plus sheer obscurity.”

“More or less.”

“I’ll look into it. No promises. As for the occultism supplies, I’ll have them within a week. I’ll even throw in some Red Reapers and a Howdah pistol for when you get your eidolons, just something to get you started. No charge, so long as you promise to get even for Imraal. His place is on lockdown; you won’t get in there on the down-low, but… I knew what had happened the moment it did, so I was able to take a look around before the lawmen arrived. He had a Bloody Reaper that I’d given him, so I knew he was in deep shit the moment it went off and burned out one of my eidolons.”

He took out a yellow talisman paper, curled inward and charred at the edges.

“Here. There was a shell of these things there in the shape of half a man. I’ll bet a horn that it was some kinda protective artifact. It grieves me to know that the filthy rat probably crawled away to live another day, but hopefully, the tail he left behind will lead the cat to his burrow. Wait here for a touch. I’ll bring the gun and bullets.”

With that, he stomped off.

She finished another third of her drink in the time he was gone. The pistol was a chunky, crude thing with two triggers and barrels twice the diameter of her Pattner.

“Finish the drink and leave. I wish to be alone. And close the door on the way out,” he said, taking his glass and leaving for another room.

???

For the next two weeks and four days, Krahe balanced obsessive study against obsessive investigation. Like a lascivious rumor, she made her way across the city, from reputable markets to small agencies and seedy bars and everywhere in between, and much like a rumor, she took a different form each time. A different hairstyle, a different coat, a jacket or other top, different trousers and footwear, skirts and heels on a few occasions. On two occasions, she even used a wig. None of this was cheap by any means, but that wasn’t a problem; a small wardrobe of disguises didn’t make too much of a dent in the funds she received for the Slaughterhouse 9 incident.

Bit by bit, she found grains of info on the influx of strange, yellow-paper talismans of abnormally high quality. It wasn’t long before she bought herself a corkboard and started working things out using it and an array of memslates and documents. By the end of the first week, she’d gotten her hands on a device that could take notes onto a memslate directly from her thoughts merely by funneling a hair-thin strand of thauma into it.

There were multiple threads to follow, and, in her pursuit, she pulled on all of them.

First was the source of the talismans: a foreign woman known only as the “Talisman Mistress.” Supposedly, she contacted prospective clients rather than the other way around, and she has yet to actually meet with any, using remote communication talismans to discuss orders, even to deliver goods and receive payment in the same act.

Second and third were the assassins. The first was both well-known and considered utterly unreachable: A wizard known by a variety of nicknames, the most common among them “Crescent Jezail,” for his rifle-staff, which was nearly as renowned as himself. He was known to be difficult to contact and expensive, charging not for results but for his effort.

“One shot costs a hundred thousand dregs, against any random individual. The price doubles for “direct hit insurance.” Double the price for the bastard to make sure he actually hit his target. Can you believe that? He must be one hell of a killer if he still gets work. Tracking and shooting someone that might be a troublesome target for any reason. Every bit of extra effort is another charge. If I could afford it, I would sooner hire him than, say, Hassan Asadi.”

As for her studies into eidolons and the Astral Gulf, she progressed in a significantly less concrete manner. She couldn’t exactly quantify how much closer she felt to getting results, but she did feel she was getting closer.

Then, on the seventeenth day, she broke through.

Krahe sat in the living room, wearing only her biosuit. The table was pushed against the wall, out of the way. There, using thaumine-based ink that had cost way too fucking much, she drew out a so-called “angle-web” across the floorboards, a strange pattern that both detailed a series of movements, guided Kenomaic energies, and subtly weakened the Banishment Veil, merely widening one of its eyes rather than trying to tear at the net.

In accordance with Barzai’s instructions, she held out her most potent casting catalyst—her left arm—and began chanting, stepping onto the angle-web from the Gate of the North. Barzai’s texts had specified a general structure and what each incantation should contain and mean but demanded the practitioner to construct their own.

Krahe called on key-holders and lock-openers, breakers-down of walls and locked gates.

She invoked the pseudonyms of hackers and jailbreakers, of those who had torn down the meticulous protections wrought by almighty megacorporations out of petty spite or for their own amusement.

Reaching the South-most Pinnacle, she initiated a partial dive. The void tore in, the world fell away, and the angle-web now sprawled across untold eons. Barzai had foretold this.

With a breathless hiss, she invoked digital daemons and dataphagic AI, whose names had been plundered from the names of ancient gods.

Proceeding to the Angle of the North-east, she recalled words and thoughts which she had dredged up days prior. It had been a mere query as she worked away on the incantation, and the answer she had gotten was a deluge—a vision of what she was certain to have been her entry into this world, nothing but fragments of light dancing over that chamber of the words by which it had been carried out. These words of power, alongside others, the Wound-like Grin gave unto her; or rather, it spoke them in pieces, rearranged and twisted, in a soundless voice that blasted through her head and made her nose run bloody.

Even now, as she repeated them, she couldn’t quite comprehend many of the words coming out of her mouth. Zasas. Zasas. Nasatanda. Amrakas.

Crossing the Penultimate Angle to the Pinnacle of the West, she once more invoked: “Eternal darkness now surrounds me, Sunken One be my guide!”

At once, the final, eastward path became as a burning road of coals, and, as she walked across it, she traced with her left arm’s fingers Barzai’s Sigil of Transformation and chanted: “Stepping past the precipice, into the howling vortex, let the Black One’s yawning maw carve my chosen path! Trespassing the boundaries of mortality, I embody the key, ancient and immortal! ZENOXESE, PIOTH, OXAS ZAEGOS, MAVOC NIGORSUS, BAYAR! ”

At the Ultimate Angle, on the angle-web’s south-eastmost corner, the world rippled and tore open. Krahe stepped through, finding herself now wholly submerged within the Astral Gulf. She no longer felt the urge to breathe, and she plunged deep into the cosmic depths, feeling drawn in a particular direction. In accordance with the Rite of Dho-Hna, the angle-web would collapse and draw her back to realspace should she stray outside the Astral Gulf or remain submerged for too long, giving her a limited time to find herself an eidolon, or hopefully, three.

???

Casus returned merely for a change of clothes, as his shirt was drenched in gore, blood, and other vital fluids, but found himself perplexed at the state of the living room. He found a complex, eldritch sigil drawn on the ground, shining so brightly it projected a cage of unlight all the way to the ceiling.

It took his Third Eye to peer through and see Lady Blackhand slumped down near the south-easternmost corner of the sigil, her body constantly billowing with ghostly smoke, as did her hair, back and forth in all directions. He turned his gaze to the pushed-aside coffee table and instantly knew what was happening when his eyes fell upon the manuscript. There was nothing he could do at this point but watch, and so, after quickly changing his clothes, he did just that. His butcher’s work for the night was done regardless.

???

There, in the depths, she found them. Atop a vast, blackened spire, something that her mind interpreted as a volcanic funnel, surrounded by fathomless astral depths, she found a gnarled tree of coral and a pool filled with a swirling, writhing mass of formless serpents, indistinguishably blending into one another. The Wound-like Grin gaped wide upon the tree, affirming that these were eidolons. Specifically, Grade Three Lesser Eidolons; eidolons comparable to those which had empowered Shiva’s Red Reapers and Yellow Atropals. The deeper she delved into the well, the greater and more powerful the eidolons would grow. That was the knowledge which made itself known to her before the Wound-like Grin vanished.

Through the mass, she pushed, further and further still, feeling these Kenomaic spirits rubbing against her, yet also passing through her as if she weren’t there. The mass of astral bodies gave way to a bottomless well, eidolons of increasingly greater magnitude hidden within recesses in its walls like eels. There, she went down, and what felt like an eternity passed before one of them shot out of the wall and entered her ribcage, vanishing within. A second one followed, and what yawning emptiness she had felt upon awakening was suddenly filled, though only most of the way. Curious still, she pushed a bit deeper, only to find each and every eidolon drawing back from her, no longer interested. The way above, too, had cleared, and as she exited this strange un-place, she found the writhing mass of astral eels splitting in her wake.

At the shore of the brine pool, upon a branch of the coral-tree, a raven made of smoke awaited, with eyes like burning coals.

It opened its beak and said, “Gwah. Gwah. Gwah… Wawawawa.”

Then, upon closing and opening again, came a horrible, distorted woman’s voice. No, not just a voice, but an atrociously compressed recording of I Love Beijing, Tiananmen . That song had a somewhat macabre connotation, as Goujian II had erased Beijing from the map in his Reconquista of the mainland, with the first of his fusion bombs having been detonated in the middle of a parade in Tiananmen Square by a CCP official who had been brainjacked and had the bomb implanted in his chest cavity. How that official actually met his unfortunate fate was still a topic of heated discussion in Krahe’s time.

Again, it closed its beak. Were the situation any different, she would have dismissed it, but she felt it would be exceedingly foolish to dismiss something so explicitly foretold to her in a dream. So, she approached the bird, and, turning its head to stare at her with a single burning eye, it once more made a noise. This time, it was the ticking of a geiger counter, followed by the clatter of something to the ground, and the slamming of two heavy metal objects together. The ticking instantly turned into a scream, and the noise was drowned out by buzzing.

The Raven fell silent, and just as Krahe realized what that sequence of sounds meant, it flew off its perch and dove headfirst into her chest, and no more did she feel an iota of that strange, intangible emptiness. She still felt a strange pull, a call to another place deeper in the Gulf, but she knew better. Barzai had warned of this time and again, and so, she focused her will and carried out the Sign of Return. In an instant, the Astral Gulf fell away, and she found herself in the center of the angle-web, disoriented and gasping for breath.

???

Casus had been watching for hours now, cautiously looking for signs of the angle-web’s failure. Then, when he least expected it, the web collapsed. Unnatural darkness engulfed the room, and as light flooded back in, there came a high-pitch screech. If he didn’t know any better, he would have panicked, thinking that Krahe had just triggered a full-blown Archon Flash. Compared to the tsunami of such an event, this was a wave lapping at the shore, and with it, Krahe washed up. In the middle of the floor, her astral form collected itself, and into it, three indistinct shapes of blackest blackness entered. One was an oblong spheroid, while the two others were long and narrow, like serpents or perhaps eels. Then, she snapped into physicality, drawing in a desperate breath and glancing about.

Before he could express his relief, however, something else began to take place. A distortion made itself known under her biosuit, right in the center of her chest, like something trying to pull it apart. The viscous material tore, and beneath, a fanged maw into cosmic nothingness yawned open, running the whole length of her chest from the sternum to her waist. Out from the black flew a black bird, made of smoke and with coals for eyes, and the maw snapped shut, vanishing in an instant. The only evidence it had been there—the ragged tear in Krahe’s suit. She stood, seemingly unaware of Casus’ presence, the smokey raven landing on her shoulder.

???

It was at this point that Krahe fully regained her bearings and realized Casus was sitting there.

“Thank Zavesh,” he said. “When the clock struck the third hour, I began considering whether to collapse the angle-web myself. I hope you’ve succeeded in… whatever was your reason to dive into the Gulf?”

“Three hours?” she asked, glancing at the clock. It had been over six hours. “I’ve been down there for six. Christ.”

“Christ?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she sighed, struggling to her feet. The raven hopped off of her shoulder, tilting its head side to side. It moved as if to crow, and the sound of a geiger counter spiking came out, mimicking the sound pattern of a raven’s caw.

“Yeah, I did succeed. Got myself some eidolons to work with.”

“You… carried out a full dive ritual and spent several hours in the Astral Gulf in order to capture eidolons? Forgive me for casting doubt on your choices, but I must admit that even I, lackluster as my knowledge of occultism is, must wonder what led you to such a choice in favor of a simpler spirit-calling rite.”

She would’ve thought anyone else was mocking her with such a question, but nothing in Casus’ tone or demeanor suggested that his question was anything other than wholly genuine.

“It's 'cause of these. Got special access to their section of the library,” she gestured to the coffee table, over which all four of Barzai’s scrolls were rolled out. “There was another text noting that one could find eidolons that would otherwise be exceedingly rare to obtain from a spirit-calling rite.”

It was a half-lie. She had, indeed, read that the results of most spirit-calling rites were unevenly distributed, with weaker eidolons of a given class being more common. It just so happened that by then, she had already decided to get her eidolons by diving directly into the Gulf.

Turning to the raven, she held out her hand. It was a strange thing, as she felt a place in her mind connected to it, and when she looked there, she saw a window through the raven’s eyes. Its vision was in a different aspect ratio, but it saw in full color, largely unlike a real bird would see. Within Krahe and Casus, the bird spirit saw glowing flames, centered in the stomach and brain, coursing throughout their bodies.

“Now, what do I call you, huh?”

She considered several names. From one of the ravens of Odin, to the names of several nuclear scientists, to something as trite as Nevermore. Quickly, she decided to name the spirit in honor of the man who had facilitated her ability to capture it in the first place.

She shrugged. “Barzai won’t mind if I borrow his name.”

The response she got was another bit-crushed sound clip, this time the instrumental opening to Red Sun in the Sky . It wasn’t funny, yet it caught her off-guard, and Krahe laughed.

“Alright, that’s enough. Get back in.”

And it did. As before, Barzai dove straight into her chest and disappeared in a burst of smoke.

“I have never seen a True Eidolon, yet I feel this one is somehow aberrant. It erupted from a great maw that split your chest down the middle.”

“It… did, did it? Interesting. I didn’t realize until now.”

She furrowed her brow in focus.

“Oh, yeah. I can feel it pushing right here when I try to call it out again,” she commented, offhandedly rubbing up and down her sternum.

Moving on from that unsettling fact as if it weren’t anything to worry about, she looked around. The angle-web had burned out, leaving only ash and crusty residue. Her eyes went wide after she crossed and uncrossed her arms, and long threads of slimy residue were pulled between them. Instantly deciding that cleaning the floor was a lower priority than this, she made her way into the bathroom.

Casus, struck by curiosity, turned his attention to Barzai’s writings and found himself unable to parse anything past the halfway point of the first scroll. Moving onto “Occultic Practices of Ashametan,” he quickly skimmed over the fundamentals of occultism and theurgy, then moved on to the manners in which an eidolon might be called forth. It even included a tiering system for Eidolons, breaking up the greater system classes into a wide variety of sub-tiers. Amusingly, of the top three eidolon rating systems, the Reaper Standard and Atropal Standard were numbers two and three. The number 1 was, of course, the Seven Spoke System’s own method of classification, though the book described it as imprecise, breaking each greater eidolon class into only three sub-tiers. In this same section, he learned of the diverse methods for achieving what Krahe had just done and realized that what she had said was wholly correct; compared to the uncertain rod fishing of these rites, she had simply decided to do it herself.

Wet feet on tile. Frantic. Then, the noise was gone. Krahe’s astral form strode through the flat, into the kitchen. Rustling of paper. Water being poured. Then came the unmistakable sound of someone trying to swallow a Class-1 rejection suppressant all at once. A full minute later, she once more passed through the living room in astral form. Casus continued his reading, unperturbed.

Meanwhile, in the shower, Krahe took time to look inward.

[EIDOLONS]

[LESSER EIDOLON VAULT NO. 1]

[Astral Morphology]

Three-eyed Chthonian Eel

Developed through consumption of astral matter sloughed off from humanoid souls traversing Kenoma and residence within the astral brine pool.

[Eidolon Status]

Tier 1

Fully Nourished

Unbound

[LESSER EIDOLON VAULT NO. 2]

[Astral Morphology]

Three-eyed Chthonian Eel

Developed through consumption of astral matter sloughed off from humanoid souls traversing Kenoma and residence within the astral brine pool.

[Eidolon Status]

Tier 1

Fully Nourished

Unbound

[TRUE EIDOLON VAULT NO. 1]

[Astral Morphology]

Raven of Ruinous Eyes “Barzai”

Developed via retroactive cogniphagy of the host upon bonding.

[Morphological Archetype]

Scout/Skirmisher

[Eidolon Status]

Boon Symbiosis: Deathsmoke Blessing

When manifested in its natural form, this eidolon is difficult to notice for those not intended to notice it and may appear as a mundane raven.

Boon Symbiosis: Phase of Earthen Jade

This eidolon benefits from the reinforcing properties of this boon.

Fully Nourished

Unbound

By all accounts, it couldn’t have been more of a success. Her Lesser Eidolons fell well into the highest tier of their class, though she couldn’t quite grasp how she might achieve the Demon Core or whether a True Eidolon could even be stretched that far. Perhaps one of her Lesser Eidolons might suffice for a smaller version of it, if they turned out powerful enough; after all, a Bloody Reaper demanded only a Tier 2 Lesser Eidolon to empower it. Who was to say that her Demon Core couldn’t be made to work with a Tier 1?

While she mulled these thoughts over, she meticulously scrubbed away the film of slime that had formed on her skin. It was among the listed side effects of the rite, supposedly “benign astral condensate.” Then, as she reread Barzai’s listing, a new boon symbiosis appeared.

Boon Symbiosis: Chernobog’s Mystic Wisdom

This eidolon wishes to become a Daemon Core.

The second to last word continuously flickered back and forth between “Demon” and “Daemon.” It looked more like Daemon than Demon, so Daemon Core it was. It fit, Krahe supposed, if this spirit—this daemon, by any other name—was to fuel her magical atrocity.

When she looked into the place inside herself where Barzai made its nest, she found the raven spirit gorging itself on… something. She wasn’t sure what. Vague, smoky wisps floating in the void. It ate the last wisp and turned the burning coals it had for eyes directly into her mind’s eye, staring at her from nowhere. Looking at the raven and knowing its wishes, she reconsidered her original concept for the Daemon Core thaumaturgy. At that instant, more wisps of smoky substance appeared around it, and it began its feast anew.

Not quite sure what was taking place, Krahe honed in on the fundamental concept of the Daemon Core and tried to fine-tune its specific elements. In particular, the possibility of altering the instability of its core so that, if necessary, it could be enclosed only most of the way to direct its ruinous energies in a particular direction. Before she was even done showering, Barzai had already fallen asleep. At least, that’s what Krahe interpreted from the spirit losing all cohesion and reverting to a vaguely spherical ball of smoke.