The short silence that followed Victor's words reminded Camilla of how much noise there actually was in a working laboratory. The click and clack of clockwork devices, the hum of electricity punctuated by an occasional crackle, they were familiar, even comforting sounds for the scientist. She wasn't feeling comfortable, though; in fact, the setting was just one more reminder of how this kind of investigation wasn't anything like what she had experience with.
Thinking about Loergwlith only emphasized that. Was she all right? Had her faked death continued to fool the Curia's hounds? Camilla wished that she was back at headquarters, able to check and see the state of the investigation—even though, intellectually, she knew that she was probably better off here, where in her concern she couldn't inadvertently give the game away. Curiosity over what had been found might, after all, imply that there was something to find.
Worry for Loergwlith. Anger at the Curia officials. Wariness towards her partner and of accidentally betraying herself. All of them distractions, complications keeping her from properly focusing on the business at hand.
"Sister Sara told us some of this," Muveil broke the silence. "According to her, there were a number of other murders, especially those of young women. Their bodies were mutilated."
"Harvested would be a better word," Victor said, his voice grim, "but we're getting ahead of the story."
"Go on, then."
"At first, Frankenstein was hesitant to go along with the Creature's plans. One monster had already brought about tragedy and death. What might result from two of them? But at the same time, he was driven by scientific curiosity, by the same dream he had invested so much time and energy into at Ingolstadt, and, perhaps, by the hope that he could put things right in some way."
"'Perhaps'?" Camilla asked. Her tone was dry to the point of being sarcastic.
"It's what he wrote. One of those things, I think, where the man himself wasn't sure of his own motives, even after the fact."
"All right; I can see that."
"That's when he built this laboratory. Of course, he was secretive about the precise nature of his work. Doubtless his friends and family believed it was because of his grief over his brother's death, but in any event he flung himself into it, beginning all over what he'd done in Ingolstadt. Creating a living being from dead tissue.
"Of course, as you will appreciate, this required raw materials. In short, bodies. And Vaseria being a far different place than Ingolstadt, you can imagine that this was a particularly difficult task, particularly because he lacked Professor Waldman's contacts with any established network of resurrection men. Frankenstein was forced to do his own grave-robbing. That was how he met Fritz, by the way. He was an out-of-work drifter, desperate to the point he no longer cared where his money came from so long as it came from somewhere, and Frankenstein hired him. Apparently, he saved Fritz's life from a fiend at the risk of his own on one of their excursions, which was the start of what bought the man's loyalty. The incident, however, was also what gave rise to the tragedies that followed."
"How so?"
"It was the logistical problems of grave-robbing. A crime that has to be committed at night, the time that belongs to the fiends. It soon became clear that the two of them would be killed long before they could assemble enough materials for the experiment."
"Come to think of it, why is that?" Camilla asked. "Why stitch together parts from multiple corpses instead of simply animating one body?" It was definitely a peripheral detail, but it was the kind of thing she couldn't help but think about. The question actually drew a faint smile, a flicker across his expression, from Victor. He knew, she assumed, the way scientific curiosity got hold of one.
"He didn't explain it in the diary, but I later learned that it's a question of things needing to be in a sufficiently good condition. Even in a relatively fresh body, there would be parts too decayed or damaged for use. In addition, the various materials had to be treated in a preparatory solution to receive the Blue Blood, and this process only had a success rate of about forty percent, so it was easier to break a body down, salvage what was usable, then treat what remained piece-by-piece so it wasn't an all-or-nothing process where even partial failure meant a complete loss."
"I see. Thank you; that aspect was puzzling me."
"Of course, none of that was any part of Frankenstein's medical end goal, but at that stage of his discoveries it was necessary."
Muveil looked like she wanted to be sick; her revulsion was plainly both moral and physical. Angry as Camilla was at Frankenstein's failings, she still found herself a little hurt at her partner's reaction.
"So it was necessary for him to obtain bodies, but going out at night to obtain them was too dangerous without proper precaution. He didn't have a Curia knight's combat training or specialized equipment, and I assume neither did Fritz."
"Quite. There wasn't anything so convenient as his new henchman just happening to be a disgraced agent or the like. And, of course, the Creature was pressuring him to work faster, more diligently."
"I see. Did he take the obvious step?"
"He did."
Muveil looked back and forth between the two scientists, a step behind Camilla's deduction.
"What obvious step?"
"To hand the Creature a shovel. A superhuman monster of the Blue Blood would have a much better chance of dealing with fiends than a couple of ordinary humans."
"And that's exactly what he did. Unfortunately, the grave robberies and eyewitness glimpses of the Creature rather understandably began to agitate the village, and Frankenstein's circle—his father, his fiancée Elisabetha, his best friend Clerval—became more and more worried about him, pressing him for answers, until his father forced the issue and broke into the laboratory and discovered the grisly evidence.
"No one knows what would have happened. Would he had tried to stop his son, to bring him onto the right path, betrayed him to the authorities, or stood aside? He never had to make the choice, though, as the Baron was an old man and his heart could not stand the shock. He'd been dead for hours when Frankenstein found him."
Victor let out a sigh.
"This was the last straw, the disaster that finally caused Frankenstein to find his courage. He made arrangements for the funeral, and the next time he saw the Creature he told it flatly that he wouldn't do any more of its hellish bidding."
"How did he plan to back that up?" Muveil asked.
"That was the sticking point, wasn't it? The Creature at once attacked him, began to throttle him in its rage, but realized in the last instant that it couldn't afford to kill the one man who could do what it needed. It threw him down on the laboratory floor. That night, it murdered Clerval out of pure spite, and then kidnapped Elisabetha."
"Directly invoking 'a mate for a mate,' I see," Camilla said.
"Exactly. Frankenstein couldn't bring himself to resist any longer, not with his own fiancee's life at stake. The Creature was already proven to be a brutal killer twice over, so there was no question that it would carry through on whatever threats it made.
"It was at that time that the doctor and Fritz moved their operations to the old watchtower on the outskirts of town. Under the circumstances, he wanted to devote all of his time to his work, so he could win Elisabetha's freedom. The burden of dealing with social callers, with condolences over the old Baron's death, even to dealing with servants, was too much for him to cope with, plus the risk of discovery was too great, as his father's death had already proven."
"That explains why you had to order equipment shipped to you when you moved in," Muveil said. "Dr. Frankenstein had already removed the key equipment from this laboratory."
"Yes," Victor said, then added, "Well, that and the fact that anything left over was eighty-five years old, meaning that most of it was in decrepit condition, simply out of date, or both."
"Not exactly the foundation for a great work."
"Quite, Doctor."
"Go on with your story. Given what you've already explained about the use of bodies and the tales Sister Sara told, I think I can deduce what happened next."
"If you mean murder, then you are right."
"Vaseria simply isn't big enough to provide fresh corpses of young women at the kind of pace Frankenstein would need. And since it was the Creature who was providing the bodies for him, I doubt the thought was very long in coming."
"At first, Frankenstein didn't realize what the Creature was doing. That's what he wrote, at least, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. Isolated in the watchtower without social contact, he had no way to receive reports of the crimes from the village, and he was working with feverish obsession on the project, sleeping no more than three or four hours a day, any stray thoughts he had devoted to his worry over Elisabetha. At last, though, he could not escape the truth, not when the body he was working on bore the unmistakable marks of the Creature's giant hands.
"He confronted the Creature, but the monster only laughed at him, told him that the deaths were but more blood on his hands—and if he didn't want to add Elisabetha to the tally, then he would return to work."
"I'm surprised that the police didn't focus on him as a suspect."
"He was the son of the Baron, Agent, and had himself lost a brother, a father, and a friend, which painted him as the victim, not the cause, at least initially. And then there were the glimpses of the Creature seen by witnesses, a hulking monstrosity yet with animal like agility, clearly more fiend than man, and just as clearly neither Frankenstein nor Fritz. But it was clearly not a fiend, either; it broke into houses, ignored protections that would normally repel fiends, and otherwise freely terrorized the village as it seemingly saw fit."
That was an interesting point. From Camilla's studies, she was aware that half-demons, too, did not show particular aversion to things that would repel fiends, and it seemed that Frankenstein's "half-fiend" wasn't too different.
"Near the end," Victor continued, "the tide of public opinion did start to turn. The story of Professor Waldman's death in Ingolstadt, the fact that all these events dated to Frankenstein's return to Vaseria, the way in which the initial crimes had been centered around his family, the townsfolk put all these together and realized something not too far off from the truth. But it took time, and during that time, nearly a dozen women and girls were…harvested…by the Creature."
"Good God! And he just kept on working, using the corpses of the Creature's victims freely?"
"By then, he was convinced of his own damnation, concerned only with the hope that he could save Elisabetha."
Muveil shook her head.
"I…it's not that I don't understand how fear for a loved one could drive a person, but…I hope that if I'm ever faced with that choice, I would not choose to protect one person at the cost of many lives just because that one was special to me." She clenched her hand into a fist at her waist, as if curling it around the hilt of an unseen sword.
Her partner's declaration made Camilla again think of Loergwlith's escape. It had not been without cost or harm; for its success she had been forced to take more than one life. At the time, she'd had little sympathy for them, for the inquisitors who'd blinded and crippled Loer for something the priestess hadn't even done. But now she wondered: had those people truly known what they were doing, crafting the Curia's official lie for the public? Or were they just tools, ignorant of what they did and had only been lost in passionate grief and despair over the fallen in Eurulm, driven too far by emotions they could not control?
And if the latter, would Camilla still have been willing to let them die if she'd known?
She didn't know the answer—how could she, when she'd only just now even thought of the question—but she did know one thing. Though there were significant differences between the two sets of circumstances, she found it hard to entirely condemn Frankenstein this time.
"Maybe you're right," Victor said. "I'm not sure I'd have that kind of courage, myself. Of course, I'm here, which kind of proves that. The whole reason I've involved myself in this is for Laura's sake, after all, so maybe I'm not that different."
"No one's died here yet, and tonight you and Andrews were more at risk than anyone," Camilla said. "If you're looking for a difference, that's the one that's important."
"Not that what's been happening isn't wrong for its own sake," Muveil added, "but there are degrees of guilt."
"Regardless, though, my great-grandfather made the choice he made, rightly or wrongly. Even so, he had his doubts as to whether the Creature would actually keep its word. Its need for revenge against him was so all-consuming that he doubted it could ever be satisfied. He became convinced that the only way to save Elisabetha was to destroy the monster, but of course he had neither a knight's skills and abilities nor weapons. So instead, he built a trap. The Creature had no training in biology or galvanic engineering, after all, so in constructing the device to channel electricity to animate the female Creature, he also rigged a second device, a spear that would be used as a conduit for another lightning strike.
"He knew that he would only have one chance, so they waited until the night when the Creature's mate was to be brought to life. Only everything went out of control. The female Creature was afraid of the original monster, and it attacked her in a frenzy of despair. Then it turned on Frankenstein, only Fritz managed to use the spear to incapacitate it.
"Then they blew up the laboratory using explosives they'd planted for that purpose, destroying any trace of the work, both equipment and Creatures alike. They rescued Elisabetha and that's when they fled Vaseria forever."
"Out of curiosity, how did he know where Elisabetha was being held?"
"He insisted on having regular proof that she was still alive, since it would be entirely possible for the Creature to murder her and claim she was kidnapped otherwise. The Creature brought him blindfolded to the general area and he worked it out from there."
"Thank you. So that brings us back around to you, personally, and your search for a cure for Laura's disease."
Victor nodded.
"Right. I read through the diary, not just once but several times, but what I've told you was all I got out of it—a story. No notes, no experimental data, no formulae, nothing tangible at all. But even so, it still gave me hope."
"How?" Muveil asked. "All I heard was a tragedy of scientific hubris and belated acceptance of moral responsibility. I assume that you didn't intend to raise your sister from the dead as a monster like the Creature?"
A shudder passed through the young man.
"Good God, no! I don't have any interest in reanimating the dead. But the point is that this was proof—proof positive that it was possible to use the Blue Blood under controlled conditions to animate necrotic tissue without creating a fiend. This is such an important breakthrough! If we could manipulate it properly, the phenomenon could be used on a living person to heal the damage from injury or illness. At the very least, it's based on science that was actually tested and produced results, even if those results weren't to the liking of the researcher at the time."
"That's something that the charlatans and snake-oil salesmen can't offer," Camilla said.
"Exactly! So we came here to Vaseria, in the hope that our great-grandfather had left behind something of his research. We arranged to rent Schloss Frankenstein through a land-agent—of course saying nothing of the family connection—and moved in."
"Obviously, you found something of substance. I'm surprised; Sister Sara told us that you're not the first person to come to Vaseria in search of the Frankenstein legacy. In eighty-five years, I would think that the previous searchers would have picked the place clean."
Victor offered a smirk, then held up the diary and wiggled it in the air.
"Ahh, but previous searchers didn't know about the secret compartment where Dr. Frankenstein kept his notes. They weren't complete—I have to think he took some of the most recent papers to the watchtower with him, and of course I don't have any documentation he may have made from that stage of the project—but they were more than enough to at least begin work. I ordered supplies, set up this laboratory, and began construction of some of Frankenstein's specialized devices, augmenting his designs when I could with my own modern mechanical and galvanic knowledge, things like the Blue Blood containment device or the collector trap and fiend beacon."
"I'll tell you one thing; the Curia is going to be absolutely fascinated by some of those inventions and the theory behind them. Your great-grandfather was a good fifty years ahead of us in some ways, and that isn't even getting into the question of the Creature itself." She rubbed her hands together. "Honestly, I can barely tell what I want to get a look at first."
Victor chuckled at his fellow researcher's enthusiasm.
"I'll be happy to show you anything you'd like. Honestly, I think Dr. Frankenstein would be glad to know his discoveries were going to be in the hands of a responsible organization that will use them for good purpose. His original purpose, after all, was medical in nature, to be a benefit to humanity, instead of…what happened."
Given the reason for Camilla's earlier outburst, it was hard for her not to feel a touch of sarcasm in Victor's innocent words, but she knew that it was her own feelings putting it there, since he knew nothing of Beatria Laboratory, Eurulm, or Loergwlith beyond the public stories. Even so, it still stung—but not as much as what Muveil next said.
"Dr. Victor, what you will or won't 'let' Dr. Camilla do isn't relevant any more. Surely you're not so deluded as to believe it's going to be otherwise, after your arrest?"
"Arrest? But it's not against the law to experiment with the Blue Blood, at least if it doesn't lead to a breach of containment or other harmful consequences."
Muveil was not moved by his protest.
"Grave robbery, on the other hand, absolutely is against the law, as is any form of medical or scientific experimentation on the bodies of the dead when those bodies have not been lawfully obtained. And once Dr. Camilla has evaluated the precise nature of those experiments, we'll know whether we have additional charges to add."
Victor held up his hands.
"Wait a minute. You two still don't think that I had anything to do with the body-snatching, do you?"
"You're here, following in your great-grandfather's footsteps, recreating his technology and inventions, concerning experiments which you just told us required grave-robbing both in Ingolstadt and Vaseria—to the point that eventually murder became necessary to feed the thirst for corpses."
"That was him, over eighty years ago! I told you, the reason we're looking at Frankenstein's work is to try and help my sister. Living tissue, not dead!" He swiveled towards Camilla. "You, at least, can see that, can't you?"
"I can't see why you'd want to create a half-fiend like the Creature," she said, "but that doesn't mean that you didn't require human tissue to test the principles on, or to refine the process towards your specific goal. Indeed, with a background in galvanic engineering rather than medicine, you'd be 'flying blind,' as it where, having to rely on your great-grandfather's work and a lot of trial and error. If anything, I'd expect you'd need more experimental resources, not less."
"Bloody…" The curse died, half-finished, on his lips. Then he stiffened and said, "Go on, search this place to your heart's content. You won't find any trace of bodies here."
"Meaning only that you stored them somewhere else, or that there's some hidden panel or room that you're confident will fool us like the cache with Frankenstein's research materials fooled eighty-five years of searchers," Muveil said, her face implacable, but it gave Camilla an idea. She snapped her fingers, the sharp crack making Davenant flinch and Muveil's eyes snap towards the sound.
"That's it. If you want to convince us, show us your research documentation."
Victor brightened at once.
"Of course! I should have thought of that."
"I don't understand. Notes are just that; he could have written anything he wanted."
Camilla shook her head.
"Dr. Victor has been carrying out complex research in a field that's not even his own. Regardless of whether he's guilty or innocent of the grave robberies, he'll have kept detailed records of that research—he has to, in order to accomplish anything, unless he's an unparalleled genius with an eidetic memory or a madman with such a disorganized thinking process that his experiments are pure chaos and he requires supervised care."
"That doesn't mean that he couldn't just give you false, doctored records, like an accountant keeping a second set of books for a criminal organization."
"No, because if he just glossed over everything that made him look guilty or otherwise replaced it with false details, it will show up in a self-evident way. The only way that would be possible would be if he wrote a completely false set of experimental documentation from the ground up, detailing research that didn't happen producing results that led to further nonexistent analysis and experimentation. Not only would the sheer time required to do that be prohibitive, it still might be ineffective if the details included didn't match up with what they ought to have—given that he isn't experimenting in his own field and so doesn't have an expert's underlying understanding of the Blue Blood—or if the endpoint of the falsified research was inconsistent with the equipment he has here in the lab."
"You really could tell that just from experimental records?"
"If you told your swordmaster that you'd been undergoing a three-month training regimen and gave them all the exact details of what you'd supposedly done, could they tell if you'd really done it or not?"
Muveil nodded.
"Yes, of course. It's a matter of expertise, then?"
"My good fortune, then," Victor said, "to have one of the world's leading experts on the interaction between the Blue Blood and human physiology here to audit my work."
"Only if you're innocent," Camilla said. But the truth of the matter was, she did believe him. Proof would come one way or another, but she was inclined to accept his story. Laura Davenant seemed, at least superficially, like a tuberculosis case. If anything, Camilla would have expected Victor to be testing procedures on living subjects even if he were obsessed beyond respect for decency or the law, not wasting his time on the dead.
And if the heirs of Heinrich Frankenstein weren't the grave-robbers in Vaseria despite all the connections of time, place, and family, then where did that leave them?