The Artisans Pride VI
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For the most part, Vee had never felt the need for many of the small spells and enchantments that many others mages swore on. She still preferred a rinsing in the morning and a warm bath once a week over cleaning herself with spells. Likewise, she didn't really see the point in floating books, pens and other things with petty magic, something that both fresh students and the Scholarium and old men at court loved to do to seem more important. She did use mage-lights though, because they were a lot more practical then candles and torches, and definitely knew the worth of an unseen extra hand when wielding a scalpel, but those were practical concern.
When she had left Castle Black though, she had cast a spell to make her more comfortable regardless of the weather. A thick wool coat had done fine to keep out the cold of the north, but where she was going, the temperatures were much harder to cope with. Gogossos was pretty much the exact opposite in climate from the Wall and even with the spell to numb the feeling, it still felt as if she was hit by a club when the rush of teleportation had deposited her in the sweltering heat of the jungle.
In some way it reminded here of the swamps of Braavos. Back there, there were only two kinds of weather. Cold and wet days, and colder and wetter days. The fog was always there, with the sun rarely more then a diffuse glimmer in the sky, so anyone going there had to learn to live with being constantly damp and chilly. For her, who had been born there, it was just the way things were and she had much more trouble to get used to dry winds coming from the hills south of the Deep every evening.
Here though it was hot and wet, with some days being hotter and wetter. It made her feel as if she was being cooked alive, especially when she didn't have the time to get used to it. It was no wonder that Salladhor Saan had spent quite some money on hiring Djinn cryomancers to devise a way to cool the buildings being erected here. Luckily she didn't have to deal with it for long. Just for the duration of the guards making sure she was who she claimed to be, a process that was as tiresome as it was important, especially now that there were daily shipments of all kinds of materials coming to Gogossos.
She wasn't even greeted when entering the halls of the Flesh Forge. Sure, they had sent up one of Qyburns four armed servants, but the mute skeleton was still a step down from Qyburns little shadow that had welcomed here the last few times. So with no one to talk to, she just observed as they walked, quietly wondering what a few short months had done to the abandoned ruin. No sign of disrepair and decay had been left. Every wall had been mended, every stray patch of mold purged and she would wager the floors were clean enough to eat from them, even with the heavy traffic she saw in every tunnel and hallway.
Servitors of all kinds were swarming through the structure like ants in a hill. It seemed pure chaos to the casual observer, especially with the diversity of creatures moving about. There were Seekers carrying crates bearing the seals of Amun Kelisk and Astral Currents, skeletons hauling glowing bars of crystal stamped with the seal of the Shaitan's Sultana, something that seemed a cross between a worm and a snake slithering along, some great painted lizards corpse held in the distorted bulge of its middle, and many other things that Vee was dimly aware would be rather worrisome for most observers to behold.
But there was order and purpose in these movements, no matter how random they seemed. If Gogossos was a living thing, then these legions of monsters were it's blood, carrying the things around that it needed to live. And it didn't so much live as that it bloomed. There were just too many plans and ideas of Viserys that revolved around this place. Too much power to be gathered from it.
She rarely thought highly of the old Valyrians, those few she knew in person being the usual exception, but while she beheld the swarming masses, she had to acknowledge their wisdom in fearing the power of the forges. On the other hand though, they were still morons for doing so little of note with them, and doing what they did in the most cruel ways just because they were slightly easier then doing it properly, so on average, she still felt entirely justified in calling them idiots. Thus, the natural order of things was still in perfect balance.
With her mind occupied with these musings, the long march to the secluded labs in the lower levels was soon over. It was very hard to avoid thinking that this was where Qyburn and Elaheh had made their lairs, since it was pretty much true. While the former had begun to work on a few workrooms that soon turned into an entire wing where the Flesh Forge had been infused with necromantic energies, the latter had mad herself a cavernous room in which no light ever shone. Some had tried to carry some in, but the shadows in the room were far more resilient and nasty then any magelight or torch could hope to banish.
In between, another few rooms had grown over the last months and soon it would likely become its own wing of Gogossos. At least if the message she had received was true and she had little doubt it was. And indeed, when she entered the large laboratory made for the Praetori project, much had changed since her last visit. Gone where the many rows of organs growing on the walls, replaced by two rows of tanks resting on them. Their shape was that of giant eggs, though instead of a shell they were made from a clear membrane that gave a good view of the interior.
Within them, floating in a murky, green liquid, were almost all the parts that made up a man, though nobody had bothered to attach them to each other. Muscles and bones floated everywhere, only a few connected by sinews with each other and many having a dull grey tone that Vee recognized as the sign of an infusion with Adamantine. Amidst that she saw organs, only loosely connected by blood vessels. A heart, two lungs, two kidneys, a liver and a few other clumps that she felt less sure of naming since unlike the others, they didn't even have a passing resemblance to something found in a human torso anymore.
After passing a few tanks, she finally stood before the other two fleshcrafters, both politely nodding their heads at her approach. She did the same in turn, the only greeting anyone in Gogossos felt necessary towards the others. "So, you managed to fix the problems?"
Clearly expecting that question, Qyburn handed her a clipboard and pointed towards the tank they stood before. "Indeed, we have. We managed a full conversion under mostly realistic circumstances and have set up multiple cultivars to confirm the results. This is a full list of all samples we have in storage and of all tanks currently undergoing the process, so you can take your own if you want."
Vee just glanced over the papers, not bothering with the details for now. Qyburn liked his neat and orderly lists of things he had done, cut apart and pickled in a glass somewhere, but she had about as much desire to read them as she would have had to read the ledgers Alinor kept dropping on Viserys desk. Instead she turned back to the tank, whispering a few spells to get her own impression of everything, but when she did, she frowned. "It seems the heart and lungs are stopping."
"Yes," Elaheh breathed as she stepped closer and ran a hand over the membrane.
"Our problem was not the transformation of the organs, but that we kept them working during it. Qyburn found the solution in the crystal the King brought from Oldtown."
"I got the inspiration from the way the Illithid are transforming their hosts," the man explained further. "When the ceromorphosis begins, the body begins to store nutrients and oxygen in the tissues. Later, the lungs and heart are stopped while they are restructure and the body lives from these reserves."
Vee nodded along at the explanation, before concluding on her own. "So you did the next best thing and made a set of lungs and hearts for the tank to take over for the duration."
Qyburn seemed less then pleased by this assessment though, his professional pride stung by having to settle for 'the next best thing'. "It's not as if we didn't
try to mimic the process more closely, but this was the best we could do without introducing serious risks for the subject."
"Part of the reason the body can live from these stores is that the brain has already been devoured by the larva at this stage." The Kyton smoothly took over, the turn of her head implying a mental glance of her colleague that her empty eye-sockets couldn't convey.
"If we tried it their way, we might have just given the subject brain damage in the process, especially since we need to keep them dreaming instead of sedating them fully. Otherwise they might not wake back up when the process is done."
"Wasn't meant as criticism." Vee idly thumbed throw the papers at this point, more to mollify the old Maester then any real attempt to read them. "So, you think this is ready for the first volunteers."
The old man just nodded at this, turning to the hall at large and gazing over the tanks. "It is. There are some marginal risks left, since we could not test the process on a living human yet and cultivars can only tell so much, but nothing that the attention of a good surgeon and healer shouldn't be able to address. We have twenty tanks ready by the beginning of next month and we could easily expand to fifty, if we can expect as many subjects for the first trials. More then that would require additional funds for raw materials though."
"I'll talk to the king about that," the young girl said, but while she still pretended to read the list of kidneys in jars, Qyburn handed her another set of documents. "And what would that be?"
The old mans voice turned flat and dry when he answered, something she recognized as him clamping down even harder then usual on his emotions. "Some materials I would need for another project of mine. And a request for assistance from the Inquisition for a short excursion into the canalization of Oldtown." Elaheh on the other hand seemed quite please, though she only spared that some attention from the corner of her eye.
This list Vee did read. Then she read it again after recognizing a few things on it from another list she had read years ago. In Lys. In the laboratory that Xor had entered this world in. "What kind of tissue are you trying to grow here?"
"Illithidae and some of their servitors. The exact cultivars depend on the results of the excursion. Ambrose always had been sloppy and superficial when dealing with things he rather wouldn't have to, so I doubt that their destruction of my workplaces was very thorough, but it's harder to gauge if the preservation has worked for the more uncommon samples and if they are still viable." He quietly turned back to Vee, his gaze meeting hers.
He had an intensity to him that she rarely saw in the man, especially lately. There was fervor in them. "I would consider it a great, personal favor if the king would agree to this. There is much that we can learn from the Illithidae, the crystal he obtained being a stark reminder of that. If there is a chance that some of my samples can still be used to further our understanding of this enemy before open hostilities resume, then it could be a most fruitful investment of his resources."
Vee mulled it over for a moment, glancing over the list again. There was something else he didn't say that he was hoping to learn from this, that much she was sure, but it ultimately wasn't her call to make. "I'll speak to him about this too."
AN: The necrotic sludge plot thickens.
