Camilla supposed that Victor's reaction wasn't entirely unjustified. He had been, after all, caught red-handed by operatives of the Curia who had been sent to investigate scientific malpractice in Vaseria. Moreover, there were certainly…elements…of the Curia that used methods that would satisfy even the most rabid Vaserian's desire to punish the legacy of Dr. Frankenstein. She knew it from personal experience, from what they'd done to blinded, broken Loergwlith.
"That's entirely up to you," Muveil said. "If you've been involved in grave-robbing and unspeakable experiments, then things will not go well for you."
Victor slowly got to his feet.
"Chief Liebnitz will be annoyed that you found the evidence to hang me," he said, the bitterness heavy in his voice. "Though she can at least console herself that you're an official investigator, not a torch-carrying mob of villagers."
"No one's hanging you, Master Victor!" Andrews spoke up, and Camilla was reminded that while Davenant's gun was empty, the servant's still had at least one shell, and that anti-fiend ammunition would still work quite well against humans.
Mainly, she was reminded of this because when she turned to look at Andrews when he spoke, she found that he was aiming the weapon at her.
"Put it down, Andrews," Victor said wearily.
"No, sir. I'll not see you dragged off to the rope, or to an inquisitor's cell. If you set off now, they'll never catch you."
"And what about you? What about Laura? Damn it, Andrews, don't be any more of a fool than you have to be. Put the gun away before you make Agent Muveil take it away from you."
"I…"
Camilla could see his resolve wavering.
"Besides, it's rude to point pistols at people who just saved our lives."
He lowered the gun, and Camilla grabbed it away from him before he got any other quixotic ideas.
"Let's get back to the house, where we can discuss this like civilized people," she said. "Or better yet, like barbarians who haven't yet introduced firearms into the etiquette manuals."
~X X X~
"Well, this is it," Victor said, opening the door into the long, vaulted chamber. "The laboratory of the notorious Dr. Heinrich Frankenstein."
"Not his final one, surely," Camilla said, even as she took in the serried ranks of chemical and electrical apparatus, right down to the ceiling mount where, as she'd surmised, current from lightning strikes could be channeled down into the room. "If we're to believe the stories, the watchtower that was destroyed was the site of his last experiments."
"Actually, his final laboratory was at Exham University, London."
Victor hoisted the bag up onto what looked like a writing desk and snapped it open.
"I hope you don't mind if I work while I talk, Dr. Camilla. I'm sure that you appreciate that the Blue Blood is volatile, and this collection unit is less secure than devices like Agent Muveil's Rosier Clock. Though I understand that even those need for the Blood to be purified by a priestess, but that's more of a capacity issue than a storage failure, I believe?"
"More or less," Camilla agreed.
He took the device he'd used as a fiend trap out of the bag and set it onto a workbench opposite the desk. He then began to connect it to various wires and tubes.
"I don't have access to the kind of spiritual powers you use in the Curia, so I have to rely on purely scientific methods. It isn't my particular field of expertise, either, so I've had to learn on the fly, as it were. As you probably deduced, the original design was Frankenstein's; I've made only minor adjustments to account for modern methods. This storage array," he explained, pointing to a series of glass capsules suspended in a metal framework, half of the capsules full of glowing azure liquid, "uses both a suspension of lavender oil in these silver tubes in the frame here, here, and here, as well as an electrical field generated by this galvanic apparatus connected to the battery at these terminals. There are six batteries, but it only requires the output of one to maintain the field, unlike eighty-five years ago. Then, the capacity of storage cells was such that it took five, and the sixth was in case any one failed—and even that was a significant advancement. They were still using Leyden jars at Ingolstadt at the time, apparently."
"Since you say Dr. Frankenstein apparently survived whatever happened when the watchtower was destroyed and moved to London, I suppose that explains what brings an Englishman here."
Victor glanced back over his shoulder and gave a quirky smile.
"Well, in a manner of speaking. It's quite true that thanks largely to the aid of his assistant Fritz Rosenmuller, Dr. Frankenstein and his wife Elisabetha escaped the laboratory watchtower before it was destroyed, and realizing that he had no chance of escaping his own reputation here, they fled to England where they Anglicized their names to Henry and Elizabeth Franks.
"Two years later, my grandfather Charles was born."
"Your grandfather?" Camilla repeated, out of surprise rather than from any confusion.
"Yes, so technically I'm leasing my own ancestral family home—though as my mother was Charles Franks's daughter, I think its title would have gone to someone else by patrilineal descent even if my great-grandfather hadn't abandoned the property and title decades ago."
He turned two valves and pressed a switch on the trap device and the Blue Blood began to flow through the coiled tube into the containment device's empty capsules, probably driven by a pump operated by a clockwork spring if Camilla was any judge.
"I'm guessing that there were stories handed down in the family of Dr. Frankenstein's experiments?"
"Yes, in general terms. But I'm getting things out of order." He set his hands flat against the workbench, inhaled, and gave a deep sigh. "You see, the story truly begins when Laura was first diagnosed with tuberculosis."
Of course, Camilla thought. That was the one point of it all that made complete sense.
"Our poets and novelists have done their level best to teach us that a well-to-do young lady wasting away of consumption is the most romantic state possible for a heroine, but that idea is as absurd as it is unscientific. Even the word root for its popular name—consume—describes it better; the disease does that, steadily eating away at a person until they're a shadow of their former self, and then they die! What in God's name could be romantic about that, I ask you?"
He whirled on his guests angrily, then broke off.
"I'm sorry about that outburst, Dr. Camilla. I forgot to whom I was talking for a moment. Obviously you don't need a lecture on the reality of tuberculosis as a vicious, incurable disease."
"Since I suspect most of the conversations you have on the subject aren't with medical doctors, I think it's forgivable."
"Thank you. As you can imagine, we grew increasingly desperate, particularly as the so-called 'treatments' we were offered were really just palliative care, or in the alternative quack remedies that any scientist with even a vague understanding of medicine could tell were nonsense. And then, of course, there are the so-called supernatural cures. Some of which might have some validity, but how would I separate them from the wishful thinking, folk superstition, and outright confidence tricks?"
"I do know that in the Curia's history, the power to cure disease is rare enough that there isn't even a reliable body of research. It's categorized with the rare and unpredictable powers." The abilities of priestesses weren't her own focus of expertise, but Camilla had to have some knowledge of spiritual energies if she was going to apply them through alchemy to anti-fiend measures.
"That actually makes me feel better, in a way," Victor said. "To have an expert opinion, I mean, let me know that by not chasing after supernatural healing we hadn't made a terrible mistake."
The Blue Blood appeared to have been completely transferred into the containment device; he turned off the pump and closed the valves at both ends before disconnecting the flow tubes. Victor then made additional adjustments to the containment, and Camilla could see faint flickers of yellow spark along the framework between points of insulation. If she had to guess, she assumed it was because he'd upped the intensity of the electrical field due to the greater quantity of Blue Blood now stored.
The Curia's laboratories already had better mechanisms for Blue Blood containment, but Camilla couldn't deny that she'd have loved to see the device's full design, to learn the principles behind it and see if there was anything applicable to her own work.
Between the devices, Victor's story, and the actual question of what Victor was up to, her curiosity had far too much material to work with. It was like throwing three prime cuts of meat to a starving wolf and watching it try to decide what to eat first.
Muveil, however, did not have that problem. "The question here is, what did you chase after? Your great-grandfather's forbidden research, I assume?"
He sighed.
"In a roundabout way, yes. You may not credit it, but a year ago I knew no more of Dr. Frankenstein's history than an ordinary scholar in my field might have heard. Mad doctors, murder, grave-robbing, and monsters stalking the night were hardly dinner-table conversation, after all. But under the circumstances it was a short enough step from rumored experiments in revivifying dead tissue to the idea of using a similar principle to maintain the vitality of a living body. It may sound absurd to you, here in Vaseria with the local stories as well as the current outrages, but the idea seemed grounded enough in reality to me at the time, particularly given the lack of real hope offered by conventional and un-conventional solutions alike. We went to our grandfather's home and delved into the family papers, hoping that we'd find notes and experimental records left behind by our great-grandfather."
"Clearly, you found something."
"Less at that point than you'd think, Agent."
He crossed the room back to the desk, across the elevated top shelf of which a row of bound volumes was set. He pulled one out; it was leather-bound with a strap and a tarnished brass lock.
"The diary of Dr. Heinrich Frankenstein," he said, holding it up. "Begun, according to its own words, the day after the family and Fritz crossed the border in their escape from Vaseria. He set down the entire story here, as a kind of preface. You see, he did create the monster the legends credit him with making. As a young man, he was obsessed with conquering death, in pushing medical science beyond what conventional wisdom believed could—or should—be achieved."
He gave a wry little chuckle.
"I suppose that you think I have little reason to draw a distinction between him and myself. Apparently our motivations were even similar: Laura's illness for me, while for Frankenstein it was apparently his mother's death from scarlet fever in his childhood that marked him and gave rise to his obsession.
"He was a brilliant student at Ingolstadt University, earning his doctorate in half the expected time, but it was his private project that truly set him apart. He had constructed a theory by which galvanic energy could be used to stimulate but also control the Blue Blood as it was merged with human flesh, and in this way limit and contain its transformative power to achieve only the desired result."
"That sounds impossibly optimistic," Camilla said.
"Perhaps, but it was, he claimed, grounded in sound principles, and that experimental tests with minute quantities of Blood appeared to work. He experimented with animal tissue as well, and while his early tests were either complete failures or resulted in the creation of simple fiends, he was eventually able to refine his theories and create what he called a half-fiend, a resurrected creature with the intellectual attributes of an ordinary animal."
"You mean, with none of the enhanced emotional reaction, let alone true sapience, that characterizes a fiend?"
"Yes, exactly."
"Not even a matter of being a self-willed fiend, what we call a Servan, but truly no more or less aware than the original animal?"
"According to his story, just that."
"Well, I think I owe your great-grandfather an apology for my previous comment."
Victor couldn't resist a grin.
"I thought you'd appreciate the significance. I admit, I myself didn't understand the point until I read his own explanation of why that was so important, but I'm not an expert on fiend behavior."
Camilla crossed her arms under her breasts. Flattery was hardly appropriate at this stage.
"From the sound of things, though, I assume matters didn't continue to proceed so smoothly."
"No."
"And?"
He sighed.
"It was at this stage that Frankenstein recognized that he needed help to take his research to the next level. He needed resources: money, equipment, raw materials, and the expertise needed to obtain them. He approached the closest thing he had to a mentor at Ingolstadt, Professor Waldman, and took him into his confidence. The man was hesitant at first, but eventually threw himself wholeheartedly behind Frankenstein's work. He proved invaluable, not only by providing a genuinely useful expert second opinion, but in giving access to the university's resources, including contacts who could provide…"
"Human bodies," Camilla finished for him. To Muveil, she added, "During that time, it was difficult for medical researchers to obtain adequate dissection materials through legitimate channels due to laws left over from the medieval era about the sanctity of the body and other such nonsense."
"Nonsense?"
She adjusted her monocle.
"I admit, my opinion on the subject is biased by my own profession, but I don't think there's anything sacred about dead flesh. When I die, I want my corpse to be used to benefit science in whatever way it can, not be shoved in a box under the earth to uselessly rot away."
"I…see."
"Anyway, the point is that medical schools had to resort to illegal means such as grave-robbing or buying bodies to get their specimens. Waldman would have had the connections to get the samples of human tissue Frankenstein needed."
"Eventually, things reached the stage where they had come to the ultimate test: to animate a man, a creature crafted from the remains of salvaged and preserved tissue. Unfortunately, something went wrong. Frankenstein wrote that the creature 'awoke' in a confused and disoriented state, and it was frightened by the crash of the thunder, the flares of the lightning, and the additional noise and light of the laboratory equipment. It fought to free himself, the men tried to restrain it, and in the struggle volatile chemicals were spilled, machinery was smashed, and electrical discharges ignited a fire. Waldman was killed, Frankenstein nearly overcome by smoke and heat before being dragged free by the fire brigade, and the Creature disappeared into the night.
"The aftermath of the incident left Frankenstein seriously ill. The physical recovery was one part of it, but the mental shock of the Creature's reality and Professor Waldman's death was far worse. Plus, of course, the months of obsessive work and lack of sleep leading up to the night of the great experiment had all but shattered his health before it even began."
Camilla knew that particular risk well enough. She'd been victim to it herself, more than once, when she'd had a particularly compelling matter on hand and the need to learn more drove all other considerations aside. More than once, Loergwlith had stepped in, making sure that Camilla put the books aside for proper food and sleep.
"In between hours of fevered delirium," Victor continued, he was terrified that it all would come out, that the Creature was roaming free. But he told no one, made no mention of the nature of his experiments and their possible consequences. It was a choice he would come to bitterly regret,"
"Given the legends we've already heard, I assume that the Creature survived and later returned."
"Yes. The day after Frankenstein finally returned home, his young brother was found dead, drowned in a pond, with clear signs that he'd been held under the water by force. That night, the Creature appeared outside Frankenstein's window, calling to him. When he slipped out to meet it, he found that the thing could speak—moreover, that it was clearly intelligent, even educated! It poured out a torrent of hate: in the intervening months it had been left to survive on its own, knowing nothing of the world around it, always greeted with fear and violence by humans whenever they saw it, both due to its hideous appearance and its savage, animal-like ways—and, Frankenstein speculates in his diary, due to some subconscious awareness of its unnatural origin."
"I doubt that last point," Camilla interjected. "Neither demons nor fiends produce that effect, except in the case of specific individuals with a spiritual sensitivity to the Blue Blood, and even half-demons, which are probably the closest analogy to the Creature, don't create any such awareness. My grandfather had a personal acquaintance with the half-demon Arnice and nearly filled a book with his observations, from the useful to the ridiculous, and never mentioned her having any effect like that either on himself or on the other humans around him."
"I see."
"Under the circumstances, I wouldn't be surprised if Dr. Frankenstein was experiencing his own emotional reaction and assigning it to external forces rather than to his own guilt."
Victor shrugged.
"It certainly isn't impossible, given that he wrote this all well after the fact and in full knowledge of the horrors the Creature committed. As you probably appreciate, it was responsible for the death of Wilhelm Frankenstein, an act of revenge against its creator. It threatened that it would have retribution for its suffering, then fled into the woods with more-than-human agility despite its size.
"Not long afterwards, a young woman was arrested for the boy's death on circumstantial evidence. Dr. Frankenstein vigorously defended her in court, giving rise to the unusual situation of the village howling for the blood of a 'child murderer' but the victim's family standing fast behind the accused. But since he would not speak of the monster, his pleas were dismissed as those of a grieving brother unwilling to accept the 'truth' that a family friend had committed the crime."
"Coward," Muveil interjected. "To let an innocent woman die to preserve his own neck."
Camilla nodded.
"And that on top of his actions in Ingolstadt after the disaster. His health was an obvious mitigating factor that time, but even so responsibility didn't seem to be Heinrich Frankenstein's strong suit."
"I'd argue the family honor," Victor said, "but I hardly can, given that the man himself castigates himself in his diary with exactly that assessment of his actions. If this wasn't enough on its own, the later consequences brought that understanding down upon him with inescapable force.
"Of course, the monster inevitably returned, and it made Dr. Frankenstein an offer, or perhaps a demand would be a better way to describe it. It wanted the doctor to make it a mate, another creature like itself. If he complied, then the Creature would take its 'bride' off to the ends of the earth and never trouble Frankenstein again."
"And if he refused?"
"If he refused, then it would destroy everything that Frankenstein loved, leaving its creator as alone, despised, and outcast as the Creature itself was."
"It's poetic, at least," Camilla said, sighing. "It's all so typical."
Victor's eyebrows went up in surprise. "Fiendish creatures brought to life by alchemical science and committing murder are what you'd call 'typical,' Doctor?"
Even Muveil looked taken aback by the assessment.
"You'd be surprised," Camilla drawled. "But no, what I'm talking about is the lack of responsibility. It's one thing to be taken off-guard by unexpected consequences. When you're pushing the frontiers of human knowledge, you can't always anticipate everything that might go wrong. But you do make contingency plans for what you can predict. You don't just push forward in the blind hope that it will go all right. And above all, if something goes wrong, you try to solve the problem! Frankenstein and Waldman tried to create a sapient being with at least some of the physical attributes of a fiend and didn't plan on what it might do. And then Frankenstein did nothing to find it after it got loose. He was more interested in protecting his own skin from the social and legal consequences of his actions, and then he did it all over again when his brother was killed." She slammed her left fist down on the worktable next to her, making empty test tubes rattle in their rack. "I am sick and tired of it! Of researchers who become obsessed with their results and won't do a thing about the harm they cause along the way!"
She was shouting by the end of the rant, chest heaving with the emotion, the heat of her skin telling her that her face was flushed. Muveil and Victor both stared at her, taken aback by the storm of emotion. Camilla wasn't surprised at their reaction; though neither had known her long, she was certain they both thought of her as the stereotypical scientist of popular impression: emotionally distant but for some wry snark born of intellectual impatience with those around her, more interested in objects and ideas than people. And it wasn't like they'd be entirely wrong.
That just wasn't all that there was to her. She sincerely did feel a responsibility as a researcher to proceed with caution and care for consequences. Bad enough if she herself blundered into trouble as she'd done more than once as a teenager, but to end up hurting others…
But now, now her emotions were far more on edge on this particular topic. The fall of Eurulm was directly caused by the outbreak of fiends from Beatria Laboratory. The researchers and workers who'd died there, the miners who'd concealed the laboratory's presence with their sham operations, the lives lost in the evacuation and the further deaths among those like Muveil who'd fought the fiends. Even among those who'd lived, the hundreds of thousands of lives turned upside down as citizens rich and poor alike were turned to refugees.
And Loergwlith.
Not content with being an appalling disaster on its own, the outbreak had had to strike close enough to Camilla to be personal. her closest—arguably, only—friend torn away by the inquisitors for the "crime" of trying to warn people and save lives. They were so many Dr. Frankensteins, too, too shortsighted to see, too selfish to risk themselves, or too evil to even care for what could go wrong, and instead punishing Loer to hide it.
If Camilla had Pope Beatria in front of her right then, she might well have pulled out her gun and shot the old woman dead on the spot and considered it a fair trade if she had lost her own life in the exchange.
"Doctor?"
And if Muveil truly was assigned to keep an eye on me for any involvement in Loer's escape, I've certainly gone and confirmed any suspicions she had about my attitude.
She let out her breath with a sigh.
"I apologize for shouting at you out of the blue. I have…strong feelings on the matter."
Plus, I can't even explain myself fully, since Muveil, if she isn't assigned to watch me, wouldn't know the truth and Dr. Victor absolutely wouldn't be authorized to hear it.
Even if Muveil was exactly what she appeared to be—as Camilla was becoming more and more convinced that she was—telling the story of the Beatria Laboratory outbreak would be a violation of Curia secrets and Muveil would be obligated to report her.
"So I see," Victor said with a wry twist of his lips.
"My grandfather was a Curia researcher, so I've had the scientific process as part of my life from a young age. And when you work for an organization with so long a history, and with the number of personnel involved…"
"Particularly where the Blue Blood is concerned," Muveil said. Her tone was stiff and clipped as she spoke, and Camilla wondered if she was thinking of Eurulm again. "There is no excuse for scientific recklessness among any researcher dealing with fiends."
Her stare was like two frozen chips of bloodstained ice, pale pink and unyielding. But it wasn't directed at Camilla; she had turned meaningfully to Victor. He held up his hands as if to ward her off.
"Believe me, I understand you both. Even my great-grandfather himself came to understand it at last, even if it was too late to do any good. Honestly, I think that's half of why he felt the need to write it all down. Part, I think, was just the human need for confession of some sort, like a purgative, but the other part was as a warning to family members who might be tempted to follow in his footsteps.
"After all, if you're at all familiar with the popular version of the story, you already know that the worst is still yet to come."