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The oddness of a scholar’s tools still surprised him: inscribed golden dials spinning on globules of cetacean oil, quartz-dotted maps of starlight tucked above clicking gears that did not keep the time, and a bubbling green-blue liquid, unknown in origin, floating encapsulated within a glass rod that, in even the murk-light here, glimmered like a fey wand— but also brought to mind a carpenter’s level, the lazy drift of the bubbles across etched increments denoting some atmospheric shift, or a change in perspective. Each item balanced a measure of obscuring artifice against pure function; the scholars of the Church weren’t merely carrying around baubles. Still, Simon peered at each one, investigated, and could discern nothing.
The tools had been retrieved from a mumbling better-off-dead. He had discovered the black-coated Church acolyte wandering about in the puddling acrid spawning grounds of some unknown creature. He had been clutching at a threaded cane and lashing at anything that impinged upon his narrowing radius of control, stumbling as he went, and the whipping blades had caught against the rocks and reeds, tangling, driving his shins to shreds. His mouth had drooped lowly, sagging chin wrinkling against neck, splitting his jaw. A thin tongue of white flapped with his movements, the peeking periscope of a parasite; perhaps his body’s thrashes now were more the result of a puppeteering.
An arrow to his rolling eye allowed him to rest. The sinuous white thing slithered out of sight and hid somewhere within the corpse’s belly, shyly avoiding the approaching shadow as Simon took what he could from the Church’s man. There were the tools, and a few thumb-divoted quicksilver slugs, but no bottled blood.
After gathering his spoils, he left the burrow-body to sleep upon the mire. Upon reaching the slope of the shore, he dragged his heels against sandy pebbling and fuzzed lichens, scouring the worst of the filth from his skin. As he shuffled in place, an instinct stirred. It was the warning of a watching, of the oppressive weight of a stranger’s gaze upon his nape. The prickling awareness intensified and was aimed: movement shifting upon the stone. The displacement of air. The glint of an eye.
With a whistle, the arrowhead pierced stone. Simon heard a very undignified yelp. A half-dozen legs jerked and splayed as the spider clambered into sight. “Don’t shoot me, scoundrel! Those most holy bear witness to this place, so as to protect their flock! And I’m a special sheep, I am!”
Simon, accustomed now to an absolute solitude, and a professional whisperer even before that, spoke softly. “Then don’t sneak.”
The man-spider called out with a quivering querulousness. “What was that?”
Simon cleared his throat. “I said, don’t sneak.”
Simon daubed grease into the hinging mechanism of his blade. The slim segments widened, arced apart. “Well, lambkin, versed as you are in the mysteries— do you know of a way down from here?”
“Down?” the spider said. “For what reason do you want to go down for?”
Ship masts emerged from the cloud-tide with sails billowing. The unseen keel was aground, though; the clouds flowed and parted around the stuck beams. “In terms of intellectual domain,” Simon began, feeling out the cliff-edge sense of drop, that long distance to those shipwrecks, “that is the territory of the Church, is it not? What is above are the efforts of the college. Different— and yet the same. But it is the Church’s misdeeds that interest me, not the sophomoric histrionics of Mensis.”
“Such a scholar thou art,” the spider griped. “Different and yet the same, my spinneret. How did you get here, anyway? Surely not by invitation. I can hardly imagine you surviving a god’s grasp, you flimsy thing.”
With maintenance seen to, the bow snapped shut. “By sneaking.”
Patches huffed, but there was an undercurrent of respect— a recognition, at least, of each having their own plain secrets. “Right!”
Very rarely, one could catch a half-gleam of water between the clouds. Simon picked at his bandages. “So— do you know?”
“Descend to ascend,” the spider recited. “That’s the Byrgenwerth way. Rob the tombs to catalogue away the heavens. So, to address your conundrum, we must attempt the inverse— ascend to descend. Let’s go ask the brain trust, shall we?”
Simon had long ago found that the mechanisms of the body, when placed within the dreamlands, or projected there, depending upon the theories you subscribed to, ran on habit, on the daily rhythms observed for years and years; the stomach still complained for breakfast, lunch, and teatime. But just because it was desired did not mean that it was required, and so Simon had kept a narrow diet for quite some time, yearning only sometimes for the softness of bread, the round chewiness of gammon. That being said, it was easy, very easy, to refuse the meal spread before him now: some dusty white-rinded cheese, greasy teacups, and tack from a barrel that likely harbored a citadel of weevils. Survival rations for the scholars that had ended up not needing it, now sustained on this frontier by other, more intellectual means.
Still, his host favored theatrics, and so all the props were in place. “So!” the man exclaimed, and a twin set of ghastly puppets pulled out his chair for him. His head dipped and bobbed as he spoke, reminding Simon, in some way, of a rooster, this dramatic clucking; it made the great metal cage balanced over his shoulders veer off in what must have been painful trajectories, clamped as it was against the slope of his neck. “You have something of an interest in nightmares, do you?”
“I find them fascinating,” Simon replied, and he took his teacup, sipped politely. It tasted, if of anything, like soap.
“Wonderful!” Pale, damp hands clapped together. Micolash smiled widely and displayed grayish teeth. His skin sagged, loose on the bone. Simon, feeling something like pity, decided to be a little less harsh in his appraisal. The man had been here for— some amount of time, and with a mind as lofty as his, it was no wonder that his body grasped at any opportunity to not be a body. Futilely, perhaps, but still. He could glimpse mottled bruising, scabbing, where the base of the cage shifted, chafed.
(It was luck, perhaps, Simon thought, in regards to himself. Luck, that he had delved this deeply, and had still remained himself. No pale puppet-strings, hiding. Certainly, he no longer danced for the Church.)
That, and he didn’t want to stare as a butcher did— not when the man’s shadow sat primly upon the chair between them. He was Choir, clear in the aloof way the man held himself, and in his particular choice of weaponry. Ex-Choir, Simon assumed, in that he tailed the Mensis scholar like a wolf narrowly domesticated, rather than as an agent of the Church prepared to document the breaking of this top-heavy mechanism.
Patches, as heckling audience, took an escapee weevil and bit down, relishing the crunch. Simon could respect, if nothing else, his commitment to the bit.
Eyes, there were eyes all about, on the walls, underfoot, staring blindly through gummed pupils, some sprouting legs. A birdcage stuffed with them hung on a long chain and clattered against the mortar, swung by the chasm breeze. Simon pressed a finger to his temple and picked apart the prior lecture. Below him, the nightmare sank out to cloud-sea, or to nothing. Above him, a tower held a blinking thing that, thankfully, he only saw in peripheral glimpses. The rocky outcropping at the foot of the loft held the specimens pinned in place by its gaze.
(”If you imagine the encapsulating umwelt of the gods as an ocean, or a sea, or a lake, in which the refraction of this grand lake could be calculated,” Micolash had recited, “in a way quite concise, and one could discern at what angles the truth would be revealed, and by what means—”)
“Smoke?” the Choir man said, sidling up to him as quietly as any assassin. Simon burrowed his fingertips against the worn leather straps of his knapsack.
(”—hidden now, hidden from sight, but by reflection, by iteration, by replication, we can approach, or approximate, or simulate,” Micolash droned on, head nodding, and Simon had almost snickered. So much effort to say so little. Then, to his horror, the shambling puppets had retrieved chalk and slate, and the lecture was diagrammed.)
“My thanks,” Simon replied, “but I will decline.”
“Suit yourself,” Edgar said, and, with a long-handled flint and striker, as if instead lighting a laboratory burner, he doused his pipe in sparks.
Simon tilted his head and felt the stale wind waft against his jaw. “You know, I believe I came out of that knowing less than when I started.”
Smoke clouded Edgar's face. “Yes— he has that effect.”
(”And how do you simulate such a thing?” Simon had asked.
Chalk struck the board. “In wounds, my boy!” Gravestone-teeth grin. “The murky pooling of blood. It is water, clouded by the silt of ourselves. Oh— is that a heresy?” A sidelong glance to the cast-off Choir man. “I only half-believe it, myself.”)
“You believe him to be a fool,” Edgar said, biting down on the stem.
“Yes,” Simon admitted happily. All of a sudden, he craved the tobacco quietly crackling in the man’s pipe. “Do you?”
He hummed, squinted, and then pulled off his glasses to polish them against the tidy hem of his sleeve. “I don’t believe him faithless,” he said. “That’s what surprised me.”
(”That is a wound below us,” he had said. “A grand wound, reflecting. And you would like to burrow into it, like a maggot. Do you think it will sustain you?”
No disgust in the statement. Only a damnable curiosity. A gleam in the eye that sought a reflection.)
“I don’t think one can map a hell through maths,” Simon said, too amused to sneer.
“Nor can one do it through derision,” Edgar countered. “What do you want to find there, really? More nails for the Church’s coffin?” The end of the pipe glowed. “I think it will receive a sky burial, myself. Or, a cremation.”
(”The truth will sustain me,” Simon had answered. “I want the truth.”
Patches, with forelegs fondling his glimmering necklace pendant, had snickered. “Don’t we all!”)
“Wouldn’t that be fair,” Simon said. “The Church aflame. Naught left but ash. Masked by its own mourning.”
“Fair,” Edgar echoed.
“I’d rather the sky burial,” Simon added. “Let the crows pick it apart, and reveal every soured organ of the thing. People deserve to know what really happened.” A curling of his lip displayed an incisor. “Don’t think that you have freed yourself of implication, either. In fact, this may be worse.”
“Is that so?” It was said carelessly, almost muffled, as his mouth pressed against the pipe.
Simon, as he always did, felt the weight of his bow like a limb. He scowled. “That lecture was as rotten as the food.”
Edgar made one short, sharp bark of a laugh. “I know a quick way down,” he said, and he curled his grip around the crumbling railing of the balustrade. “If you’re innocent, you’ll sink.”
The vapor below the balcony drifted listlessly. It wasn’t as if Simon could not hold his own— a bladed jut to the ribs, or to the smile-creased eyes, would surely end any argument— but the man did have a steadiness, a broadness about the shoulders. He had to, to lug that great Church-sword casing around.
“Is it justice that you want?” Edgar asked. “Because that may be what you find. The justice of a god. It may not please you half as well as you expect. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a smoke?”
Simon held out his hand and pinched the stem between two bloodstained fingers. He exhaled. The plume was pleasant.
“I hope you get what you deserve,” he said, and he passed the pipe back to Edgar.
“It’ll make a martyr of you,” Edgar warned, and the stem clicked against his teeth.
“You’re not going back?” the spider asked, and he scuttled alongside as Simon walked.
“No.”
“A shame,” Patches said. “He was drafting you up a diploma.”
“Tell him to mail it to my nan.”
“He really would try to, if I did,” Patches insisted.
Simon paused. “You know the way down, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” he said, self-satisfied. “I only wanted to see if you got it.”
In that moment, he had. In a mild parting of the clouds below, he had seen Yharnam. It was as if he was already treading the path himself, letting each warped reflection pierce his sight. The cathedral and all of its miseries in duplicate, displayed from all different angles, dissected by its own subjects, in memory, in nightmare. Hunters, drawn to its bosom, and then trapped there, ensnared. The paths of the city like the silk of a web, or puppet strings. And yet— at its center, at the radiating shattered-mirror face of the clock tower— the true nature of the thing eluded him, and receded the closer he looked. Something small, foetal, far away. He clutched his head, bent low, and was alienated by the mere act of description. But then the clouds had rolled in, had distanced him again.
Still, down there was the city, and all of those it had damned with its aid. If he focused, he could catch little gleamings through the fog. And, somewhere else entirely, there was the same city, full of life, hope, despair. Hunters fatted for the feast here. Pupils forced apart until they were blinded even by the memory of the moon. Blood-drunk.
The few he had known, the fewer he had grown close to, flank-to-flank— in which city did they now reside?
“It is unfair,” Simon said, trembling.
“No rest for the wicked,” the spider said, smiling. “Come along. I’ll hail a hand.”