[Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Novel – Episode 18] Bandages Wrapped Around a Rib
A hand dropped down from the stream flowing along the ceiling and seized Alucard by the hair.
Just before the black nails closed between those blue-swollen fingers, he lowered his head and raised his short sword in reverse. When the tip pierced the palm, the corpse hidden in the water was dragged out as far as the elbow, and the surface rippled while clinging to the ceiling. The dead body did not fall. Hanging from the water by its waist, it clawed at his face with its other hand, and when the wrist was cut off, it quietly reeled back into the water.
Only the severed hand remained on the corridor floor, curling its fingers twice. The black ring in his inner pocket gave one answering throb to that motion.
Alucard crushed the hand underfoot, then studied the direction of the water's flow. In the normal castle, the channels and ornamental ponds that had filled the floor in Olrox's Quarters had become a long river on the ceiling in the Reverse Castle. Fish and corpses, shattered goblets and candlesticks drifted overhead, and now and then, where the water split apart, droplets poured down like rain before changing direction midway and rising back up.
His body now knew what was below in this castle, but his eyes still mistook water for the lower place. Alucard did not look at the surface for long. He read the slope of the stone through the tips of his boots and judged the turns of the corridor by the sound of the current brushing the pillars.
His left shoulder, torn open by Darkwing Bat, felt light each time he moved. It was not the lightness of relief, but an emptiness that kept telling him where a blade would land. He pulled the straps of the remaining plate from the right and fixed the cuirass askew, then lowered himself so the cloth wrapped around his side would not get wet.
From deep in the corridor came the sound of dry cloth dragging over stone.
It was too long to be a sound made by a single person. When the first trailing end passed a pillar, it seemed the last was still several rooms away, and through it came myrrh, old oil, and the sweet leak of air from a grave never opened. The faster the ring pulsed, the more the corpses in the ceiling river turned their heads in the same direction.
Alucard slipped a hand inside his coat and pressed Vlad's Ring through the cloth. The feeling of metal biting toward his flesh lessened, but he could not conceal the force that called to other remains far away.
"Are you the one seeking the way?"
Instead of an answer came a sound like dozens of sheets of paper tearing at once.
A yellow strip slid out through the crack of the door ahead. The bandage crawling over the floor stopped before his boots, then raised its head like a snake, and the black writing on its surface spread as though soaking up blood. When Alucard cut it with his sword, the two pieces did not die but split apart toward different ankles.
He did not retreat. He stepped on the first strip trying to coil around his ankle and lifted the second on the flat of his blade, winding it around a pillar. The moment the bandage drew taut, something pulled from beyond the pillar. The stone shook to its roots, and the river on the ceiling heaved hard.
Following the pull, he kicked the door open, and an inverted banqueting hall revealed itself.
The high chamber where he had fought Olrox in the normal castle was the same size, yet it had become an entirely different tomb. Coffins were driven vertically into the walls near the ceiling, and in each lid a hand-shaped hollow had been carved where a face should have been. The long carpet in the center began at the floor, ran up the wall, and continued into the water. On either side hung bronze censers on chains, their flames dangling downward.
At the center of the chamber stood an empty sarcophagus. When the severed bandage from moments before crawled into it, the lid jolted from within.
At the first impact, only dust fell. At the second, the side of the sarcophagus cracked. At the third, the lid flew up to the ceiling river and plunged into the surface. From inside, a mummy one head taller than a man raised its upper body.
The layers of wrappings had yellowed with age, but only the center of the chest was soaked dark brown. The gold burial mask was broken across nose and mouth, exposing black holes, and below the neck, ornaments shaped like ribs spread open like a fan. Around the body a blue vapor rose low, turning over the insects on the floor.
When Akmodan II took one step forward, the bandages on its right arm came loose.
Alucard judged it too far for the arm itself to reach and raised his sword. But what shot toward him was not the arm, but the unwound cloth. The bandage bent up and down through the air like a wave as it passed between the pillars, and while the first strip coiled around his blade, the second aimed for his left shoulder, where the armor was gone.
The instant he cut through the first strip, black letters transferred themselves to the back of his hand. The joints of his fingers stiffened, and the weight of a weapon long familiar suddenly felt strange. The curse’s lettering began by binding not the wound, but the very power that remembered movement.
The second bandage wrapped around his shoulder. Alucard tried to loosen his body into mist, but the stiffness that began in the hand marked by black letters had already reached his chest and delayed the change. When Akmodan II yanked its arm, his body was dragged across the floor, and the mummy seized the prey drawn near with one hand and hurled him into the wall studded with coffins.
His back struck a coffin lid, shattering the hand-shaped hollow. The dried corpse laid inside spilled out and tried to wind around his neck and waist.
With his unstiffened right hand, he drew the heavy blade and slashed wide through the inside of the coffin. Corpses and bandages were severed together, but the moment the tip touched the vapor rising from the mummy's body, the mist that swallowed the black light thickened. Instead of wounding that dead body, the weapon steeped in darkness was feeding old power into it.
Alucard withdrew the sword at once. His first judgment had been wrong. While he cut the bandages first with the advantage of reach, the curse had crossed into his hand, and the dark blade only strengthened the aura wrapped around the mummy.
Akmodan II opened the broken mouth of its mask. Hot air trapped inside the body burst out as six short fireballs, spreading in a fan. Alucard kicked off the floor and cleared the first line, but the high ceiling of the Reverse Castle was blocked by water. When his hair touched the surface on the second leap, the hands within the ceiling river seized him all at once.
The fireballs rose from below. He twisted his body in the water to avoid two tongues of flame, cut through the wrists clutching him with his short sword, and dropped out from the surface. Water sprang from his wet hair and the tattered remains of his cloak, then turned white with steam when it touched the fire.
The mummy repeated the same order. When the left arm moved, a low-creeping bandage aimed for the ankles. When the right arm rose, a strip at shoulder height wrapped for the weapon. When both arms drew together over its chest, the poisonous vapor spread wider, and when the mask tipped back, the fireballs filled the spaces the earlier volley had left untouched.
Alucard watched that order more closely than the attacks themselves. Severed bandages returned to the sarcophagus and wrapped themselves onto the body again, and cloth grazed by fire did not burn. Only the black letters vanished from it, leaving it white for a moment.
The fire came from the mummy, but that fire was not protecting the mummy's curse as well.
He retreated along the central carpet and deliberately lowered the sword in his right hand. When Akmodan II's arm lifted, this time he did not cut the cloth, but let it wind between scabbard and blade. The instant the bandage tightened to wrench the weapon away, he let go of the hilt and threw himself forward.
With the weight it expected suddenly gone, the mummy's arm was drawn sharply back. Beneath the rib ornament on its chest, the point where the wrappings crossed was exposed for the space of a breath. From inside it came the same pulse as Vlad's Ring.
Alucard drove in barehanded, but the blue vapor around the mummy burned his throat and lungs. Holding his breath, he was just about to stab the cloth on its chest with his short sword when Akmodan II's other hand seized his throat.
The strength in those dried fingers did not come from living muscle. The force with which the ring inside his coat and the remains within the chest called to each other held the two bodies fast. The mummy lifted him, meaning to smash him down to the floor.
Alucard seized the mummy's wrist with his cursed left hand. As his stiffening fingers touched the bandages, the black letters spread darker, but he could also feel the direction in which those letters were entering his body. Every curse ran back through arm and neck to a single point below the chest.
The relic was making the curse.
Just before he was driven into the floor, he loosened his body into mist. A black shape streamed down between the fingers strangling his neck, and instead of reforming behind the mummy, he chose a place directly before its chest, where the poisonous vapor was thickest. If he widened the distance to escape the pain, the bandages would only gain more reach. This time it had to end before the vapor had time to burn through his lungs.
Akmodan II drew both arms to its chest. Waves of bandages came back from every side.
Alucard breathed fire at the chest. The flame he had mastered in a bat's body struck not the mummy's face, but the wrappings between himself and the relic. The letters on the yellow cloth flushed red one by one and vanished, and the oil soaked with burial incense drew the fire beneath the rib ornament.
For the first time, the mummy stepped back. The sound that came from inside the mask was not a scream, but the grinding of coffin lids sealed for centuries opening all at once.
As the wrappings on the chest burned away, a single white bone appeared within. Longer than a human rib and blackened at the tip, it pierced through the mummy's body and skewered the bandages at its back as well. Whenever the bone shifted, the strips that had been cut came crawling back to the body.
Alucard gripped his short sword in reverse and thrust his arm into the fire. With the point he severed the hardened knots above and below the bone, then twisted the hilt and levered the rib upward.
Akmodan II made one last swing. Not a bandage this time, but the dry back of its hand struck his left cheek and jarred his vision, and the fingers that followed dug into the wound at his shoulder. Instead of retreating, Alucard pressed closer. Once the mummy lost the space to fold its arm, the hand crushing his shoulder could no longer put its strength behind it.
He let the sword go and seized the bone with both hands.
Vlad's Ring thudded inside his coat. The rib answered that pulse and tried to drive itself back into the mummy's body, but Alucard hooked his fire-burned fingers into the inner curve of the bone and twisted the other way. Black force ran up both arms and tightened around his heart, and a fragment of his sleeping father's breath leaked low beside his ear.
The instant the rib tore free, the mummy's body collapsed.
The taut wrappings lost their strength and covered the floor. The poisonous vapor scattered low with nowhere to go, and the golden mask fell forward and split into three pieces. There was no face beneath it. Not even a blackened skull remained; only dust, long bound between the cloth to preserve the shape of the remains, rose up.
Alucard stepped back and steadied his breath. The black letters that had spread over his left hand were fading from the moment he pulled out the bone, but feeling did not return to his fingertips at once. He flicked the sword from the floor up with his boot, caught it in his right hand, and cut through the bandages where embers still glowed, snuffing them one by one.
The bone in his hand was not cold.
Vlad's Rib held a faint warmth, as though it had just been taken from a living body. Along the inside of the curve were cuts and old cracks, and at one end a small cross, almost worn away, remained as if carved by a human hand. It was the trace of someone who had tried to seal that power when Dracula's body was divided.
When he brought the rib near the ring, the two relics throbbed in the same rhythm. Even the blood running from Alucard's wounds followed that beat for a moment. The inside of his chest hardened, and the breath spoiled by poisonous vapor settled, but he did not mistake it for healing. The relics were making his body more durable, but in doing so, they were also making, little by little, a place inside it for his father's body to occupy.
Alucard wrapped the bone in several layers of the clean inner side of the bandages. After making certain there were no curse-letters on them, he placed it in an inner pocket apart from the ring.
When the second pulse began, the coffins on the far side of the hall opened of their own accord. Inside, instead of corpses, a narrow passage leading downward was revealed, and from its end came cold air and the thin cry of snakes that sounded like a woman's laugh.
All the dead in the ceiling river closed their eyes. For an instant a woman's face floated on the rippling surface, but when the black strands he had taken for hair opened their own mouths, the shape scattered.
Alucard opened his stiff left hand once, then entered the new passage. Behind him, the empty bandages were slowly climbing the wall in search of water.
From the darkness ahead came the sound of stone grinding. Then a small snake dragged a bird stiffened into stone across the floor in front of his feet.
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