[Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Novel – Episode 20] When Stitched Flesh Swallows Lightning
Blue current raced along the battlements and surged up beneath Alucard’s feet.
He twisted to the right and avoided it, but the lightning licked across his unguarded left shoulder and melted one of the broken links of his cuirass. A metallic smell rose with it, and his arm went numb; a beat later, his fingers curled in on themselves. Over the skin still marked by petrification, blue light spread like fine veins, then vanished.
The current had not been aimed at him. Lightning that had run astray along the wall gathered into the massive lightning rod at the center, then split into dozens of branches and drove into the back of the shape crouching in the dark.
Flesh sewn together with iron spikes, plates, and thick black thread came clear one piece at a time in the light. One shoulder was a different color, as if it had been taken from another body. The left arm was too long below the elbow. Around the neck ran a ring of black stitching, like the lips of the dead sewn all the way around it.
When the lightning ceased, the giant raised its head.
The two eyes were set at different heights. The right was black, with no white in it at all. In the left sat a cloudy glass orb. Between parted lips, mismatched teeth crowded together, and only one fang at the center of the upper jaw shone with a black gloss.
The three relics inside his coat leapt at once.
The giant seized the broad axe leaning against the wall. One side of the blade was chipped, the other blackened with old blood, but the fingers around the haft clenched with strength no dead body should have had.
The first blow came down from overhead. As it lifted the axe, the stitched flesh of its right shoulder swelled first, and its heel ground stone beneath the weight. Alucard started left, then remembered too late that that shoulder lay bare. His body instinctively guarded the armored side, narrowing the angle of his evasion.
The axe head shattered the floor. Stone fragments burst up like rain, and the butt of the haft changed direction and rammed toward his side. Alucard caught it on the back of his sword, but the shock ran through his wrist into the wound in his shoulder and threw him against the parapet.
The Creature did not pull the embedded axe free. Keeping hold of the haft, it dropped its body low, tucked knees and shoulders into one mass, and began to roll across the floor.
Its stitched bulk became an iron wheel sweeping across the battlement. The axe blade and the spikes in its back scraped stone and spat sparks, and the first collision drove a deep dent into the opposite wall. The giant did not stop. It took the rebound and came back the same way.
Alucard sprang onto the parapet. As the huge body passed beneath him, he stabbed down with his sword, but the point only scraped the iron plate fixed into its back. Current ran up along the plate into the blade and burned his fingers, and while he bent his wrist to keep from losing the weapon, the shoulder following behind smashed into his waist.
His body was hurled into open air.
Far below the outer wall, the spires of the upright castle hung in the distance. Falling without even the last shred of his cloak, Alucard changed into a small bat. He caught the wind once and returned to the wall, but The Creature had already wrenched out its axe and was swinging it horizontally toward the place where he would land.
If he stayed a bat, the wings would be sheared away. If he returned to human form, his chest would be split open. Just before the blade reached him, he became mist and passed between edge and haft. He regained his human shape behind the giant’s back and brought his heavy sword down on the stitched neck.
Several strands of black thread snapped. From the split seam came not blood but yellow fluid and blue fire, and several different voices drew breath at once.
Without turning, the giant swung its long left arm. The back of its hand struck Alucard in the chest and sent him flying toward the chain-wrapped lift, and the plate armor on his back flared red under the impact. The force rebounding through the blow snapped the bone in the giant’s arm, yet the hand touched the floor and calmly shoved the bone back into place, resetting it to its old angle.
It was not that it felt no pain. It did not know which body's pain it was supposed to answer to.
The Creature caught the severed threads at its neck and pulled them with its fingers. Flesh was forced back together, and current descending from the lightning rod seared the wound shut. The seam fused more crudely than before, and the black fang flashed once inside its mouth.
Alucard looked up at the lightning rod. If lightning was the force moving that body, then cutting off its path came first. While the giant raised its axe, he climbed the chain to the support braces of the rod and severed three copper wires at once with his short sword.
The broken current writhed in midair. Light that had lost its course ran down his blade and into his arm, while the rest crashed onto The Creature’s head and shoulders.
The giant did not stop.
Instead, its back arched sharply, and the stitched muscles swelled thicker than before. Blue light filled the glass eye, and the broken arm straightened. Lightning was not its weakness. It was blood, carrying commands faster through dead flesh.
Alucard’s first judgment had been wrong again. The severed wires did not lessen the current; they concentrated it in one place, and even the iron rails below the wall began to tremble toward the giant.
The Creature threw away the axe.
It dropped to both hands and knees and curled its body, and spikes sprang outward from its back. It came rushing in as a narrower, faster wheel than before, and this time it turned before striking the wall and followed the direction Alucard had dodged. Even while the body rolled, the glass eye never lost a single point.
Alucard ran along the battlements. He cleared the first pass with another leap, and on the second he braced himself against a pillar and twisted his body aside. The giant smashed straight through the pillar and gained speed. When the third rush came, there was nothing before his toes but the broken lift chain and the outer precipice.
He could dissolve into mist and avoid the spikes, but then the giant would simply smash through the parapet, fall, and climb back by following the castle’s current. So long as a relic lay within it, the castle could stitch a dead body together again and again.
Alucard kicked up the chain on the floor and wound it around his left arm. Cold iron bit into the place where the shoulder plate had been torn away in the fight with Darkwing Bat. He forced down the pain, caught the end of the chain on the support of the lightning rod, and at the instant the bulk closed in, threw himself to the side.
As The Creature passed, the chain caught beneath the stitched seam of its neck.
The giant’s speed drew the chain taut and bent the support of the lightning rod. Instead of tearing the neck away, the whole massive body lost its course and swung back toward the lift. The iron cage crumpled under the impact, and the counterweight hanging below shot upward.
The giant rose again from the wreckage. It seized the chain around its neck with both hands and tried to tear it free, but current gathered in the lightning rod flowed through the chain into the seam. It absorbed the lightning and swelled its muscles, but the muscles taken from different bodies began moving in different directions at once.
The right arm searched for the axe; the left clutched at the neck. One leg tried to stand while the other curled the body again. The stitched flesh of back and chest split open, each command tearing against the next.
Alucard used the fact that lightning could not harm the giant. If it could not be stopped, then he had to force more commands into it at once, until no borrowed body could complete a single motion.
He leapt onto the bent support and dragged the remaining copper wire down with his short sword. The instant the blade touched the conductor, the smell of burning rose all the way to his wrist, and the current splitting from its tip poured through the chain into the giant’s body.
The Creature arched its back and opened its mouth.
Inside, the black fang shook in the opposite direction from the other teeth. Vlad's Tooth had not rooted itself in the jawbone. It had been driven deep through the palate like a nail binding the nerves of many corpses into one. The relic was taking in the current and distributing commands, and unless it was removed, no amount of cutting through flesh would matter; other flesh would move in its place.
Alucard let go of the copper wire and sprang onto the giant’s chest.
Different arms tried to seize him, but their movements overlapped and their fingers struck one another. He slipped under the right arm, stepped onto the chest where the seam had split apart, and climbed toward the jaw. The giant’s glass eye tracked him; the black eye stared wild at the ceiling.
The Creature tried to shut its mouth. Before the upper and lower teeth could take his arm, Alucard jammed his short sword across between them and braced the jaw. The blade bent and the hilt creaked, but the mouth stayed open wide enough for one hand.
Foul vapor and rotten breath washed over his face. He thrust his right hand into the mouth and seized the black fang. Beneath the smooth surface, his father’s power throbbed, and with each pulse the giant’s body tried to align itself in one direction.
At last the left arm caught his waist. His ribs compressed, and blood seeped from the wound in his side. The giant pulled, trying to tear him free, and Alucard did the opposite, hooking his feet against the lower jaw and leaning his body back.
Black threads stretched between the fang and the roof of the mouth. At the end of each thread hung a brief sensation that did not feel like memory so much as the last scraps of a life: a soldier dying in mud, a convict with his neck broken on the gallows, an old man giving up his final breath in bed. All of them were moving again inside one mass, against any will they had ever had.
Before wrenching out the relic, Alucard let go of the short sword. Catching the hilt with his left hand, he twisted it downward, and the blade sheared through the black threads. The giant’s jaw dropped lower, and teeth ground against his wounded shoulder, but the instant the last thread snapped, the fang in his right hand loosened.
He tore out Vlad's Tooth.
The light went out of both of The Creature’s eyes. The hand gripping his waist lost its strength, and the flesh taken from different bodies collapsed in the directions in which they had died. Shoulders slumped backward, legs folded sideways, and the head, still caught in the chain, tipped forward as the gigantic shape came apart all at once.
Lightning struck again. This time it could not join flesh to flesh. It only heated the iron plates and spikes blue, then streamed away beyond the battlements.
Alucard pulled himself free of the wreckage. Vlad's Tooth remained in his right hand, and the short sword that had fallen from the mouth was bent at the middle of the blade. He braced it against his knee to straighten it, then stopped at the sound of a crack. It was still usable, but one more blow to the same place would snap it.
Vlad's Tooth was as long as his palm. At the root, a bundle of blackened nerves had dried onto it, and at the point there remained the worn trace of ages spent biting into something. When the Ring, Rib, and Heart inside his coat answered, the fang gave a thin hum.
The instant the four relics were gathered, strength entered Alucard’s jaw and fingers. His body, dulled by wounds, tightened with the hard clarity of a blade—but with it came a passing urge to break, to crush. Teeth were not made for speech but for tearing, and the instinct was ancient.
He wrapped the fang in a scrap of metal so it would not touch the other relics directly and secured it inside his belt pouch.
Behind the wreckage of The Creature stood a small lift built into the wall. Though the current had been cut, the sigil above the door still shone blue, and four of the five grooves indicating directions responded to the pulse of the relics. When Alucard stepped inside, the bent door closed on its own.
The lift moved neither up nor down. A long vibration ran sideways, as though passing through the space between one wall and another, and when the door opened, the air beyond had changed to the smell of wet earth and mushrooms.
Between the stone pillars of the deep Cave, black cloth slowly rose.
At first it looked like a swarm of bats, but moonlight flashed on every edge, and each gleam was the blade of a small scythe. Dozens of scythes traced a circle without touching one another and blocked the way, and from the darkness at their center came a courteous voice he had heard long ago.
“You have recovered quite a lot, young master.”
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