YMMV / The Red Necklace

• Complete Monster (includes The Silver Blade): Count--later Citizen--Kalliovski is a serial-killing Loan Shark in the time of The French Revolution. A blackmailer and consummate destroyer-of-lives who always carries a book full of the names of those he keeps under his crushing thumb, Kalliovski is only too gleeful to murder those who don't pay their debts or simply get in his way, ranging from a magician who recognizes him from before his days as nobility, to Romani families he hunts for sport, to the mother of the novel's heroine Sido de Villeduval. Kalliovski deigns to make the underage Sido his bride as well, gloating how he'll have her in his bed whether she wants it or not. Kalliovski also creates magical automata out of the bodies of his victims, a pastime expanded upon in The Silver Blade. Whether from those he's sent to the guillotine or killed with his own hands, Kalliovski seeks to create a being "without the inconvenience of a soul" from these automata; his most prized of them are the Seven Sisters Macabre, each a woman he's murdered and preserved in beautiful undeath. Even love cannot dampen Kalliosvki's evil; when he encounters a woman who "threatened the perfect void of his being", Kalliovski murders her and promptly attempts to kill the child he bore with her as well.