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Date: Fri, 05 Feb 1999 12:46:05 +0100
From: Davide Mana
A while back it was proposed on the list that we post brief summaries of narrative works not available in English, so that all interested parties can mine them for ideas.
As nobody told us that this is bad, here's my first offering. I'll keep it short and (hopefully) focused.
First, a general word of introduction on the Eymerich books. Written by Italian novellist Valerio Evangelisti, starting in 1992, they are published by Mondadori (Italy), Rivages (France) and Editorial Grijalbo (Spain).
The stories center on the (historical) figure of Nicholas Eymerich, a 14th century Dominican General Inquisitor and author of a basic handbook for inquisitors. The historical character is slightly modified by Evangelisti, so that he is still a first class manipulating bastard, but he also acquires a grim style and dignity. And he faces some pretty unusual situations: aliens, weird blood-sucking cults, ancient fertility goddesses...
The series curently includes: Nicholas Eymerich - Inquisitor; The Flesh and the Blood of Eymerich; Eymerich's Chains; The Mystery of Inquisitor Eymerich; Churedek; Picatrix, the Staircase to Hell.
The interesting part: each novel tells two apparently unrelated stiories, one set in the 14th century and detailing Eymerich's investigation, the other set in the present and with a more scientific/conspiratorial bias. Both misteries cannot be solved separately, so that Eymerich's solution of his case also brings a close to the present-day mystery.
[I always thought that this would be a nice trick to use for a Cthulhu game, but it's hard to set up]
Here we go with the first one (and probably the weakest in the series).
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The 14th century story - something's amiss in Saragoza (Spain), 1352.
Strange people stalks the dimly lit corridors of the Aljaferia castle, where King Paul IV mourns his women (whife, daughter and sister) killed by the plague.
As the Feast fot the Virgin of the Pilar approaches, the old inquisitor dies ranting about "things" in the water reservoir, and the newly appointed father Eymerich - strangely hindered by Court officials and Church representatives - soon faces strange occurences: a gigantic woman appears in the sky over the city, and a dead infant is found in the reservoir - an infant with two identical faces (the second on the back of his head), that melts into an unpleasant white liquid after a few hours, leaving no other trace. Witnesses confirm the fact that similar occurrences were already observed in thepast and investigated by the late Inquisitor to no avail.
Further investigation (Inquisition-style) leads Eymerich - travelling incognito - to the hamlet of Pedra, apparently peopled only by women, sharing some kind of hive-mind and endowed with devastating psichic powers. After a close shave, Eymerich finally patches together the scenario: the King's daughter Maria did not die in the plague, but was simply "put away" in a monastery after showing extreme psichic powers (the two-faced infants being product of her ectoplasmic materialization powers, maybe sort of her distress call to her father). "Rescued" by the Pedra cult, and by now totally demented, she's being used as the focus/amplificator of the coven's powers - and also as a means to keep the official investigations at bay.
The "witches" want to tap the psichic pool created by the Virgin of the Pillar processions around the country to fuel a ritual that will call their goddess (a fertility/woods entity) back into our reality. Eymerich's course - as he calls into action the Guard unit at his orders - is set: kill the princess, slaughter the witches, burn the village and afterwards celebrate a Mass on the smoking remains.
The 20th century story - the resident oddball at the Astrophisics Dept. of the University of Texas, dr. Frullifer, has been working on a theory: using psichic powers to fuel spaceships. The idea is to build a psichic amplificator and use it to materialize a copy of the spaceship anywhere in the universe the captain and crew can dream of (literally). A socially inept nerd more interested in bedding a certain researcher (a hopeless dream) than in the moral use of his researches, Frullifer has no problem handing his results to the government - appearing on the scene in the form of two canonical black-dressed guys. The Govt. plans appear to be as sinister as they come, but the bungling researcher sets up a demonstration of his psichic amplificator to bask in the official ammiration. Just for show, he decides to materialize an idealized woman for his audience. Through the collective unconscious, he gets the Heymerich's massacre psichic aftershock instead.
The research is archived and a clean-up team sent to the demonstration hall.
