This was strength that positively cried out to be used (especially after the labor of creating them had been so incredibly expensive), but the Grafters were still cautious, and, above all, they were scientists. They needed a proving ground, a contained area in which to test their strength. And so the Broederschap turned its eyes across the North Sea to the British Isles, with the avaricious blessing of Carlos de Aragón de Gurrea, who saw this as the ideal place from which to launch a conquest.
In 1677, the army of the Wetenschappelijk Broederschap van Natuurkundigen marched out of the waters of the British Channel onto the shores of the Isle of Wight. Van Suchtlen and de Leeuwen were present, but only as observers — it had been made very clear to them that the general appointed by Carlos de Aragón de Gurrea was in command. And so, mounted on creatures that might once have been horses, the cousins observed as the invading warriors brushed away the musket fire of the English soldiers stationed there. Then, at a signal from their commander, the Grafter troops briskly slaughtered their opponents and set about conquering the island. Against such an army, no earthly force could stand.
It turned out, however, that the British Isles possessed some forces that were decidedly unearthly.
The first the invaders knew of these forces was a man who stood in the middle of the road as they marched to Newport. A hunchback, empty-handed, barefoot, and clothed in crude homespun, he watched their approach not with fear but rather with pursed lips and an unflinching gaze. He held up a hand as they drew near, and the general at the head of the column called for a halt.
“Move aside,” growled the general.
“I am here to deliver an ultimatum,” said the hunchback. “If you cease your advance, you may live. This invasion is over.”
“Vermoord hem,” said the general. Murder him. The two huge soldiers flanking the general stepped forward. One carried serrated swords coated with venom that seeped down the jagged blades from glands in his hands. The other had a carapace like a beetle’s and bore a giant war hammer covered in the same poisonous substance.
The hunchback stepped back and clenched his fists, and a curious thrumming reverberated through the air. Midstride, the two monstrous fighters fell to their knees and clutched at their stomachs. Before the stupefied gaze of their comrades, their torsos began to crumple in on themselves. The soldiers screamed briefly before their voices strangled off into nauseating wet gurgles. The chitin on one and the steel armor on the other cracked and were retracted into their bodies as they collapsed. No one made a sound as the two were compressed. What remained were two rough nuggets of flesh and armor, each about the size of a human head.
“So, you s —” began the man.
“Maak hem af!” shouted the general, and the rest of the troops rushed forward. The hunchback was swiftly engulfed and cut down.
Later, after they’d set up camp, eager Broederschap alchemists dissected the man’s corpse and, much to their bewilderment, found absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Every element of his frame was bog standard, unremarkable. His brain was not particularly interesting. His blood was tediously unoriginal. There were certainly no signs he’d received any modifications such as the Grafters had performed. Even his spine, they reported disappointedly, was textbook for a hunchback.
When they gingerly chiseled open the dense little ingots that had once been two of their comrades, the alchemists could not find anything to explain why the men had suddenly imploded. There were no chemicals, toxins, or mechanics. It appeared that every fiber of the warriors’ bodies had suddenly felt the need to occupy the same space. That evening, when they made a report to Ernst, Gerd, and the general, the scholars gave a long, awkward description before calling the whole event “an inexplicable phenomenon.”
“And what does that mean?” asked the general.
“It means they don’t know what happened,” said Gerd sourly.
“But how can they not know? What if there are more?”
“It is troubling.” Ernst shrugged. “But one thing we do know is that they can die.”
That night, there were more inexplicable phenomena. As a group of soldiers warmed themselves around a fire, the flames suddenly flared up and then leapt from the wood. They enveloped a warrior and could not be smothered or extinguished until he had died through a combination of burns and strangulation.
Then one of the scientists was found dead in his tent. A hurried autopsy revealed that every drop of water in his body had been transmuted into a coarse white powder that his colleagues identified with some bewilderment as talc.
As word got around the camp that night, the men began to feel decidedly ill at ease. Most of them were not sophisticated folk, and their understanding of their own augmentations and modifications was far from complete. They had been assured that not only was it all based on science and natural philosophy but it was reversible, and the power they had received had been enough to outweigh their concerns. The stuff with the fire and those men shriveling down on themselves, however, was worrying. It didn’t make any sense.
The next day, as dawn broke, the invaders met the inexplicable phenomena on the field of battle.
When they came, they were not regimented troops marching in formation. They were not even a horde of hunchbacks. Instead, bewilderingly, it was as if a random selection of the populace had spontaneously decided that it was a nice day to attack an army of monsters. Out of the morning mist came men and women of all ages and social classes. They were dressed in clothes that would not have drawn a second glance on any European street.
The people were so unremarkable that for a few moments, the invaders did not react. Then a man in the black robes and mortarboard of an academic stepped forward from the small crowd. He ran his hand across a long pistol and wordlessly raised it at the invaders. A glowing torrent of molten metal burst out of the barrel of the weapon and screamed with the voice of a woman as it jetted across the field to engulf a soldier.
And the first battle commenced.
It was utterly chaotic and utterly hideous. The Broederschap troops’ feet thundered on the turf and many of them vaulted high into the air to land in the midst of their enemies like mortar bombs. Their enemies struck back, some with conventional weapons and some with... not. Waves of force smashed out against the Grafters. Liquids and fumes spread and did harm. Twice, explosions blossomed on the field, sending fire and pressure washing out and devastating nearby fighters. These were all the more terrifying because they had no accompanying sound.
Their adversaries appeared to have been endowed with terrifying, inexplicable abilities according to no discernible rhyme or reason. A periwigged gentleman, gorgeous in lace and velvet, bounded toward the enhanced troops on all fours while razor-sharp tusks erupted out of his jaws. Meanwhile, the outthrust finger of a fat laundress puffing along through the wet grass caused a Broederschap soldier to turn on the comrade at his side and hack him to pieces.
The battle went on for over an hour until, to the surprise of the invaders, their attackers suddenly withdrew back into the fog. A couple of the troops, caught up in the frenzy of the battle, pursued them, but after fire flared momentarily within the cloud and a charred head came rolling out, no one else felt like following.
The field looked even worse than a post-combat battlefield usually did. There were corpses from both sides scattered across it, but none of the crows circling overhead appeared interested. All the bodies were gathered up. The brotherhood dead were harvested for any useful organs or appendages. The injured were repaired briskly, in some cases receiving the still-warm anatomy of their fallen comrades.