Bring Me the Treasury of Mamilius Turrinus!
A second discovery in the catacombs recalls Chemistra's seedy days of villainy.
Challenger Confidential: Mazes and Monsters
Part III
Bring Me the Treasury of Mamilius Turrinus!
By Michael A. DiBaggio and Shell "Presto" DiBaggio
Other Chapters: Part 1, Part 2
Days passed without progress either on the thawing of the petrified mice or unravelling the mystery of the lost catacomb. It was the late arrival of a bronze plaque –an afterthought, really, delivered only to satisfy Geo Templeton’s punctiliousness– that provided an unexpected breakthrough.
Chemistra crouched over the verdigris-encrusted plaque, brushing the worn ridges of the inscription with her fingertips. She looked back at the Promethean, her face etched with disappointment. “This is all?”
“You don’t think it’s significant?”
Mary Jo found those impassive, non-committal expressions irritating. She always suspected that he was testing her intelligence whenever he did that, but by this point she was too frustrated to care. With an exasperated sigh and a heavy shrug of her shoulders, she said, “I don’t even know what I’m looking at.”
“Templeton’s men found it in a midden.” The Promethean gestured vaguely at the artifact. “You see the corroded chain links at each end: their mates were found draped over the shoulders of our petrified Roman.”
“So what is it, a ‘For Sale’ sign?” she quipped. “I can’t read it.”
The Promethean arched his eyebrow. “You’re completing a doctorate and you don’t know how to read Latin? I don’t believe it, even in this degenerate age!”
“Yeah, yeah,” she crossed her arms. “What’s it say?”
He thrust out his hand, underlining each word of the inscription as he read it:
DEA TRIVIA ET CIRCE, V. MAMILIUS TURRINUS…. CONSECRO… EXCIDIO INIMICUS
“To the Goddesses Trivia and Circe, Mamilius Turrinus dedicates this statue to you, in thanks for the destruction of his adversary,” he translated.
“It’s a religious formula, an offering of thanks to his patrons for delivering his enemy into his hands. His enemy, quite likely, became the statue.
“Trivia, or Hecate, was a goddess of sorcery. Circe, if you remember your Homer, was the witch who turned Odysseus’s men to swine. Evidently, this Turrinus fancied himself some sort of warlock. But who was he? I regret to say the name means nothing to me. Do you recognize it?”
She tossed her head as if the question was preposterous. “Turrinus? No, of course I don—” And as her voice trailed off, her memory drifted.
“Never heard of him,” Mary Jo said as she sauntered past the bowing, overstuffed shelves of the Sin-Eater’s subterranean library. She casually plucked a title from the stack —The Wisdom of the Avatars of Mount Shasta as Conveyed by Phylos the Tibetan— and flipped it open. Her nose wrinkled at the smell; the pages were spotted with mold. She slapped it closed again and looked at her mysterious benefactor. “Should I have?”
The Sin-Eater froze and stared down at her, his arm halfway extended with a flickering match between his gloved fingers. Even in the candlelight, Mary Jo could see her shadowed reflection in the mirror-mask that sat where a man’s face should be. There was some sort of trick to the mirror such that whenever you spoke, the lips of your reflection did not move, but when the Sin-Eater spoke to you in turn, the mirrored lips moved as if you were the one speaking. Indeed, the false reflection had the full range of human expression. The effect was supremely disconcerting, but Mary Jo nonetheless forced her gaze to linger on it. She was willing to put up with his eccentricities; Sin-Eater was too valuable a resource not to. But she’d be damned if she’d let him think he could scare her.
Sin-Eater finished lighting the candelabra, carefully descended the step ladder, and tucked it away in its clutter-filled corner. At last, he repeated the name.
“Vibius Mamilius Turrinus. He was an old Roman gangster and power broker who flourished around the time of the Second Punic War. And he was a powerful magus. Apuleius refers to him in his Apologia. He is believed to be the inspiration for the protagonist in Caecilius Statius’s parody of the King in Yellow. Otherwise, we know him only through scraps and rumor. There’s an off-hand mention by Albertus Magnus, and three pages in Unausprechlichen Kulten.”
Mary Jo interrupted with a cough. “Your encyclopedic knowledge of Roman wizards would be truly impressive if your mask didn’t make it look like I was reciting it myself.”
Sin-Eater snickered, an ugly, congested, porcine grunting. Life in the damp and mold-eaten dark obviously hadn’t done his respiratory system any favors.
“The point, lovely and impatient Medusa, is that he was known to turn men to stone and then back again. One of his favorite tactics was to petrify a henchman, giving the impression of an exquisite statue, and have it delivered as a gift to a man he wished to assassinate. At night, the formula would wear off and the ‘statue’ would murder the victim and disappear, baffling the authorities. I naturally assumed that you had run across his name in your research.”
“No,” she replied, grinding her teeth. “But now I feel stupid for not checking. I assumed Boris Yvain was an innovator.”
“Perhaps he was.” The Sin-Eater shrugged. “How many secrets were lost and rediscovered independently throughout the long march of time?”
“But Yvain didn’t leave any notes. There are no formulas, no samples,” said Mary Jo. “So why are we wasting time with him when we could be discovering the secrets of Fibius Mammal-whatever?”
Sin-Eater turned aside and went back to ordering his books, obviously unimpressed by the idea. “Ah, would that life were so easy! No one ever discovered Turrinus’s lair, and many have tried. Nay, more: I have tried. And failed. It’s a pity, too, because I think I’ve figured out the secret to accessing his vault.”
“Oh? And what’s that?”
Sin-Eater made a buzzing noise, as if in thought. “You know that I don’t give my knowledge away for free, Medusa. That is a secret that would command a dear price indeed. But… as I have no hope of ever putting that knowledge to use, I suppose there’s nothing to be lost. I will tell you under the condition that, if you ever penetrate Turrinus’s lair, whether by aid of my words or any other, you will share its contents with me.”
Mary Jo shrugged. “Sure.”
Sin-Eater held up two crooked, gloved fingers and thrust them at her nose. “Wait! I will bind you to this promise with a curse, and seal the curse with the Voorish Sign! If you breach it, misfortune beyond bearing will fall on you. And because you take this curse on yourself, it can never be broken!”
Mary Jo flinched, her lip curling in offense at the proximity of his hand. “I’m insulted that you would—”
“Do you accept it or not?” Sin-Eater’s voice screeched. In his mirror-mask the reflection of Mary Jo’s own face snarled with manic, spit-flecked intensity.
Mary Jo believed in curses about as much as she believed in whatever a ‘Voorish Sign’ was, and she wanted to tell him so and then slap that stupid mask off his face. But she also didn’t want to jeopardize her chance of learning something that might help her quest for the fossilization solution, no matter how remote the possibility.
“Yes, I accept.”
Sin-Eater’s out-thrust arm hung in the air, vibrating. For a moment, she wondered if he was having a seizure. Then his spasming hand slowly uncoiled, and a nervous titter echoed from behind the mask. “Very good, Medusa. Very good. Your commitment and generous spirit are admirable.”
She tilted her head and flashed a plastic smile.
“Certain clues were given in the ancient writings,” Sin-Eater finally began his explanation, “clues that must have sounded meaningless to minds mired in the mundane world, but sensible to those with gnosis of the invisible world. Exempli gratia, Turrinus was said to fashion locks out of gold. It was only appropriate, he boasted, since the contents of his vault were as far beyond gold in preciousness as that noble metal was beyond the base iron that locked the Roman treasury.”
Mary Jo shook her head and frowned. “Uh, I doubt it. Gold is far too soft to use in locks.”
“For a normal padlock, yes,” Sin-Eater replied. “But Turrinus was first and foremost an alchemist. And that is the secret! They must have been alchemical locks, alike to those of the great alchemist Rosenkreuz. The mechanism was unlocked only by the dissolution of the gold, not merely by its breaking.”
“That’s not much of a secret. Any alchemist worth his saltpetre knows how to dissolve gold,” Mary Jo said.
Sin-Eater shrugged. “That’s centuries of accumulated knowledge talking. During his time, the secret was not well known. In Statius’s pseudo-King in Yellow, the Turrinus character has a cup that turns him into a gaseous vapor. This is based on the report that the real-life Turrinus had a cup given to him by Circe that allowed him to walk through walls, and this is how he protected his vault.
“Unless we absurdly presume that he had also invented the Tillinghast Resonator, ‘walking through walls’ is an obvious metaphor for opening a secret door. And the symbolism of both the cup and Circe as agents of transitioning form couldn’t be more obvious. And there are many additional hints in the legend that support my conclusion.”
Mary Jo hummed thoughtfully. “Intriguing.” Of course, it didn’t do her any good without knowing where his vault was.
The Promethean stared at her with one graying eyebrow cocked. “Well?”
Mary Jo shook off her reverie. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I asked if you recalled something about the name Turrinus,” he said. “You trailed off.”
She shook her head. “No, no… Just daydreaming, I guess.”
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Heh, I love the historical exposition here. Also Chemistra knows something ... and she may be cursed, too. I do wonder where this Sin-Eater guy is, and what he does. All I could think of was the sin-eaters from Final Fantasy 14, only google them if you have a strong stomach. :-D