The Vaen'ka: part 6

Some assembly required

This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: Lola Styles and Princess Daryla have been violently attacked by a vaen’ka monster while investigating a series of murders. Backup has arrived, but possibly too late…

Lairn.
3203. Early Verdant.

They came through the door as one, a plasma-infused arrow hitting the creature in the back, a metal chain extending from the projectile. The monster released a shrill cry and turned to face its attackers.

From where she lay, Daryla shifted her head to follow the chain: its other end was held by the largest, meanest koth she’d ever seen, skin grey and looking hard as rock, wings extended and bat-like, their horns protruding in curves from the top of their head. Their expression was grim and determined, as they wrapped the chain around one arm and yanked, dragging the monster away from Lola.

Another pull on the chain, and the creature seemingly decided to stop fighting and instead propelled itself towards the advancing group, teeth bared and claws out. It impacted on an invisible wall before it reached them, slamming into nothing and held in place, squirming. One of the group stepped forward: a mage, arm outstretched, dressed smartly but his apparent elegance offset by his focused grimace. She guessed he was a physologist and was holding it in a local gravity well, which was certainly a neat trick.

The monster distracted, Daryla began a long crawl towards Lola. There was only ten feet between them but it may as well have been several miles, with Daryla’s muscles refusing to cooperate. Inch by inch she dragged herself, by her fingers, or pushing with her feet, or scraping her jaw on the floor when all else failed. There was still a numbness in her body, all of her wielding having vanished.

A gesture from the creature prompted the mage to flinch in pain, the gravity well dropping as his arm spasmed. Daryla recognised the spell, as it was one of hers. Wasting no time, the creature responded instantly, finding its balance as it fell to the floor and leaping towards the mage. Before it could make contact, the mage was pulled roughly aside by a large, imposing man. At once, a woman who looked strangely similar to the man swung an enormous hammer, colliding with the creature’s face and sending it back into the centre of the church where it landed in a crumpled heap next to the pile of bodies.

The koth moved quickly, faster than its bulk would suggest possible, leaping with the aid of their wings to land beside the creature. In a swift move they wrapped the chain around and around, before it had a chance to recover from the hammer impact.

Its jaw shattered and hanging in pieces from its face, the monster tried to get to its feet, hissing at the koth. In turn the koth pulled to tighten the chains and thumped a clawed foot onto it, pinning it to the floor. “Going somewhere, motherfucker?”

The large man strode up to the koth and the monster, an enormous two-handed axe in his hand. He stood arm’s distance from the monster and looked into its mad eyes.

Face taut against the strain of holding the creature in place, the koth nodded at the human. “Is it him, boss?”

“It’s him.”

There was a strangled cry from the archer, an aen’fa, the sound of someone witnessing the worst possible cruelty they could imagine. She ran to Lola’s body, well ahead of where Daryla had managed to crawl to, and knelt beside her.

“Halbad, this is Lola!” she shouted. Daryla tried to speak, but no words came out. How did they know Lola?

The large man, Halbad he’d been called, gestured with one hand, casting a heat spell over the blade of his axe that left it glowing red. A single swing of the axe and the creature’s head bounced and rolled across the church floor.

“These things die when you chop their heads off, right?” the koth asked.

“Far as we know,” Halbad said. He glanced at the headless body. “Leave the chains on it for now.”

The mage and the woman with the hammer had reached Lola’s body. “Shit, what is Lola doing here?” the woman said, who had to be the sister of Halbad.

“Doesn’t matter,” Halbad said, striding back towards them. “Seline, do what you can for her. Erik, we have another survivor.” He pointed towards Daryla. “See to her.” He shouted back towards the koth. “Assuming that thing doesn’t move in the next sixty seconds, be ready. We might need a quick evac from here.” He put a hand on the aen’fa’s shoulder. “Breathe, Ellenbrin. Focus. You know the city, where’s the nearest clinic? Or a house of healing.”

The mage, Erik, crouched next to Daryla and helped her into a sitting position. He leaned her against a pillar. “Rest easy, my friend. You’ve encountered a vaen’ka, an especially unpleasant monster that has a predilection for wielders like us. You’ll be weak for days, but your abilities will return.” He smiled kindly. “Trust me, I know.”

Daryla didn’t care about herself. She only wanted to get to Lola. Then her head span, her vision blurred and a weight pressed down on mind.

She woke moments later. Or it may have been minutes? The woman, Seline, was crouched above Lola, a leg on either side of her, with a look of intense concentration. Sweat beaded on the woman’s forehead, and her hands were pressed to Lola’s chest.

The aen’fa, Ellenbrin, stood next to them, distraught, tears rolling down her face and streaking the dark make-up around her eyes. Erik, the mage, was sat on the floor by Lola’s head, his own arms outstretched.

“What’s happening?” Daryla’s voice had returned, at least, but she still couldn’t move.

“Erik is staunching her wounds,” said Halbad, his face grim. “Seline’s keeping her heart beating and her lungs moving.”

The woman must have had some wielding abilities, most likely a micrologist. If Daryla had her powers she could have assisted, but she could feel nothing; no connection to magic. She was less than useless.

“Can we move her?” gasped Seline between gulped breaths. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep this going.”

Daryla understood the strain she must have been under. Manipulating the heart to a constant beat, tweaking the chest muscles to inflate and deflate the lungs, on repeat, endlessly. Lola’s life was in the woman’s hands. She watched from where she lay against the pillar, unable to help, and her eyes were drawn to the aen’fa, whose face betrayed a close familiarity with Lola.

“Who are you people?” she asked, her voice quiet and rasping.

“The Six Blades,” Halbad said. “Monster hunters.”

Odd, thought Daryla, vaguely noting that there were only five of them even as she slipped back into a half-sleep.

A commotion from the door brought her back to consciousness. Opening her eyes, she recognised the others by the entrance. It was Yana, and Krystyan, and Slava and everyone else. They’d found them! They’d come to save them.

Her gaze shifted to the bloodied mess on the floor that had been Lola, where Seline was still working to manually keep her alive. The strong woman’s clothes and face were covered with blood and filth. Erik’s long robes were similarly sullied, and still they continued their endless tasks.

“You’re too late,” she whispered. “You’re too late.”

Lykasra was at Daryla’s side. “We’re here.”

“You’re too late.”

If there had been any tension between the two groups, it seemed to have dissolved. “It was a vaen’ka,” Halbad said.

“A vaen’ka?” Lykasra looked up at the man, their wings flexing a little. “I thought they were extinct.”

Halbad shook his head and looked down at the floor. “Not this one.”

Yana was by Seline’s side, her white dress already spoiled by the former vaen’ka’s lair. Daryla tried to call Yana’s name, but her voice remained resolutely weak.

“Save your strength,” Lykasra said. “You are wounded.”

Seline stood and moved away from Lola, Yana having taken over the duty of keeping her alive. Barely taking a breath for herself, Seline knelt by Daryla and put a hand to the stab wounds on her shoulder. Daryla could see in her face that the woman was exhausted. There was a fierceness to her, a visceral competency. If only they’d been there from the beginning.

“Any other survivors?” Seline looked up at Halbad.

He shook his head, then nodded in the direction of the body Daryla had seen when they’d entered the building. “We were too late for them.”

Daryla shook her head and tried to get their attention. They were both talking nonsense. “What about Lola?”

“She’s badly injured,” Seline said, still working on mending the fibres in Daryla’s shoulder. “But she’s hanging in there. Your friends are better able to care for her.”

“How serious are her injuries?”

“Just take it easy,” Seline said. “You need to concentrate on yourself.”

She wanted to stand, but instead the weary darkness took her once again.

Professor Simova was there, standing with his arms crossed, holding his chin in one hand, deep in thought. Daryla woke from her stupor, finding the pain in her shoulder now only a distant ache. There was still no sensation of being able to wield and manipulate magic, but she could at least think straight.

Hesitantly, she pushed herself up on her feet, using the pillar for support. Everyone else was clustered around where Lola was being treated, obscuring Daryla’s view.

“I believe I can do it,” Simova was saying.

“Sounds batshit to me,” came Halbad’s voice, deep and low.

“We need to work quickly,” Simova said. “If necrosis takes hold in the donor samples it’ll all be for nothing.”

“Are you certain it’ll work?” Krystyan’s voice.

“Perhaps fifty-five, sixty per cent.”

Someone whistled mournfully.

Daryla stumbled forwards, grabbing hold of Zlati’s shoulders. She pushed through the wall of people to see what was beyond.

On the floor was Lola, face and chest bloodied and scarred. One leg was gone at the knee. Both her arms were severed and nowhere to be seen. She was a husk of a person, her skin blue and purple from bruising. Blood pooled on the floor all around her. The filth of the vaen’ka’s lair persisted, an abattoir of murder.

Daryla turned away and vomited.

“Those odds are good enough for me,” Krystyan said. “Do what you need to. Tell us what you require.”

Simova nodded, took a slow breath, as if preparing himself. “I need an operating space. We must lift her from this filthy floor.”

“Leave that to me,” Ngarkh said, moving to the pews stacked off to the side of the church. There was the sound of splintering wood as they began pulling apart the benches.

“I will need an assistant who knows what they are doing. Pylpo?”

The slight aen’fa nodded, her face streaked with dirt and loss.

“Most critically, I need donor limbs.”

There was an awkward silence.

“They need not be from the living,” Simova said, “as long as we hurry and can sustain alternatives.”

“There’s a body here,” Halbad said, pointing at the blue-skinned aen’fa lying on the floor away from the vaen’ka’s pile of bodies. “Mostly intact, but only has one arm.”

Simova frowned and looked about the church, his nose wrinkled in disgust. “There,” he said, pointing at the vaen’ka’s headless corpse. “We can use that, as well. I have a list of essential equipment. A local butcher’s should be able to supply most of it, or ideally a clinic.”

“Give it to me,” Lykasra said, flexing their wings. “I can move across the city quickly.”

“I’ll come with you,” Zlati said.

“Very good.” Simova was scribbling into his journal. “Micrologists, I will need you to maintain blood flow and assist with the knitting of muscle and bone and nervous system. You, sir,” he said indicating towards Erik, “you have already done a superb job stemming the blood loss. A fellow physologist would be a most helpful ally in the task that lies ahead.”

He pulled a page from his journal and handed the list to Zlati. “Make all haste, please.”

They found Daryla a seat on a bench from where she could watch. The already grisly interior of the church became a butcher’s shop, with the sawing of bone, the knitting of joints, the mending of flesh and sinew. Daryla remained in a state of only partial awareness, her mind a flickering candle always threatening to be extinguished by the slightest movement of air. Across her body from fingertip to toes, there persisted a numbness, an absence of feeling that left her dislocated and distant from herself. She floated above the makeshift knacker’s yard, an observer rather than a contributor. She was on the spectator walkways at the asylum, watching a self-declared doctor perform supposed miracle surgeries on the mentally ill-equipped. There was a throbbing in her head, deep behind her eyes, and she was acutely aware of her pulse. Nausea washed in waves over her, forcing her to lie down on the wooden pew. The grime and blood and viscera of the place would never be washed from her skin; it was part of her now. The hours slipped by, melting into one another, until the inside of the church was the entire universe, all of it compressed into that small space.

And still the others worked, and Daryla sat or lay by herself, off to one side, utterly useless.

Night fell. Lights were lit, then enhanced by Maxim, casting a pale glow across the operating table. It could have been a sacrifice, a ritual procedure, but instead was an attempt to save Lola’s life.

“She is stable,” Simova announced, at last. He collapsed onto the bench next to Daryla. The man had been standing and working for at least ten hours without taking a break.

“Will she make it?” Daryla feared to even ask the question.

The professor made a noncommittal movement of his head, accompanied by a little shrug. “It is too early to say. And even if she lives, she may never wake. Perhaps fortunately, considering her suffering, she is in a coma. It may last days, or weeks, or months.”

“Years?”

“Indeed.”

The others had found seats of their own, in a half-circle around the table upon which Lola lay. Daryla struggled to her feet, her balance still proving elusive, and hobbled to her side. Lola was covered by a large coat, which must have belonged to Halbad, her own clothes cut and removed and discarded to the filthy floor. Daryla held a hand to her own mouth to hide her expression and the sound of her despair as she looked down at the patchwork that had been Lola Styles. Her skin bruised, veins and arteries visible through pale skin. Arms that had once belonged to others stitched onto the remaining stumps. Every limb now a different colour to the others. The stitches were thick and dark and ugly. Lola’s face was slack, her eyes closed, her breathing ragged and shallow.

“She will need supervision,” Simova was saying. “The flesh will require massaging and cellular manipulation to avoid limb rejection or other compatibility problems. I will remain as long as is needed. I can teach some of you.”

“How long?”

“It will take years for her body to fully recover and become whole again. She may need treatments for the rest of her life. This is new territory even for me.”

Standing, Halbad took his axe and clipped it to his back. “We need to leave this place. Get her somewhere safe and more sanitary. And we need to collect.” He turned to the koth. “Ngarkh?”

The big koth made a growling, rumbling noise in their throat and nodded, stomping across the stone floor. “I’ll get the head.”

---

Meanwhile.

Thanks for reading! I hope you all had a good Christmas, if that’s a thing you do. I experienced first hand the perils of being highly organised and relying on a timings document, under the specific circumstance of one of those timings being incorrectly calculated.

Well, the accompanying side dishes were excellent, at least.

As tends to happen in the holidays, schedules go entirely out of the window, which is why this chapter is dropping into your inboxes on a Saturday instead of a Friday. Presumably you’ve all had busy weeks anyway, so I trust nobody was sitting twiddling their things and hitting refresh all day yesterday.

Can you imagine?

Some things I’ve enjoyed:

• The Wallace & Gromit Christmas special was superb. I remember very clearly seeing The Wrong Trousers when I was 12, and watching Vengeance Most Fowl with my 12 year old, thirty years later, was quite the thing. It makes me feel old, but in a good way.

• Human brains are weird, especially when it comes to the comings-and-goings of phobias.

  Mike Sowden
  ’s latest piece is upsetting and hilarious in equal measure. Actually, it’s probably tilted slightly towards ‘hilarious’.

• After 12 games over the course of the year, we finished playing Ticket To Ride Legacy, and I can heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoys a) Ticket to Ride, b) legacy games or c) board games with the same group of friends. Beautifully designed, with lots of twists and surprises throughout (including right up to the end).

• I got into a debate with a friend at the pub last week about the complexities of liking art that’s been made by bad people. I got home that evening to find

  Ted Gioia
  covering that exact topic. I’m still undecided on the whole thing.

• Brian K. Vaughan
  and
  Niko Henrichon
  wrapped up Spectators, the online serial they’ve been publishing for several years. It’s very NSFW, very haunting, and very good. I’m not entirely convinced that this was the right format to release it in, but the completed comic taken as a whole is excellent.

• KG’s The Power Fantasy continues to be excellent. The first trade is out imminently, I think, so do grab it if you’re not already on board. Dense and clever.

• We got Super Mario Party Jamboree as a family joint gift. It’s a good time.

Right, that’s it for me. Enjoy the rest of your weekends!

Author notes

Another grim chapter. Sorry about that. At least there’s hope, right?

The trick here is to not trivialise Lola’s injuries. Or to make a recovery too easy. This is part of why having a five year time skip is quite handy.

This chapter could have gone all sorts of ways. My original assumption was that it would open from the POV of one of the Six Blades — probably Halbad, so we’d get insight into him finally ending Ceilhur’s life, and finishing what he should have done many years earlier. How many people have been killed by Ceilhur? It Halbad had put him out of his misery at the time, none of this would have happened — including Lola’s fate.

That guilt of inaction is something we’ll likely come back to in a future chapter.

But yes, that was the obvious POV, possibly then hopping around different characters: you can imagine it working well from Pylpo’s perspective, or Ellenbrin’s. Instead, I locked the whole thing to Daryla, a character who is essentially unable to act throughout the chapter. She’s an inert player, with zero agency.

I think that’s what makes it impactful: we’re used to Daryla being very active, and something of a leader. She’s the one who has protected Lola, helped her escape, got them through the wilds etc. It’s all the more shocking to have her de-powered and out of action. As the audience we’re also put into that same position, forced to watch — to spectate, to borrow from Brian K Vaughan — and hope that other people will be able to complete the task. We desperately want Lola to survive (right?), but there’s nothing we can do about it, as readers. It’s that same horrible feeling we get when we’re in a hospital waiting room, while a friend or family member is being treated. We have to trust the experts, but what we really want to do is just fix whatever is wrong.

And sometimes, you can’t.

We also get the return of the Monster Hunters, of course, which is a big deal. I love these guys. They made a big impact on me as a writer, even though they were only in a single storyline years ago. I’ve been waiting to bring them back into play for a very long time! Hopefully they can stick around for a bit longer this time.

I could probably write an entire spin-off series just about the Six Blades.

OK, I’m going to wrap it up there. Thanks, as always, for your support!