Matabar

Book II. Chapter 32 - The Long Night (Part 3)

Slicing through the twilight veil that shrouded the isolated road, they rode through a rugged forest. To the left and right, diving out of the summer night’s grayness, wrought-iron fences would wink into view, highlighted by gleaming reflections—these were fences worthy of the Palace Embankment itself. They were every bit as opulent, refined and elegant as anything found there. And just as empty. The fences themselves weren’t empty, of course, but what they guarded with a kind of languid laziness, a feigned and showy reluctance.

In front of massive gates, where a sleepy—or more often than not, outright sleeping—guard would invariably be posted in a wooden booth, a wide road unspooled, paved with the finest cobblestones, or perhaps even asphalt. Sometimes, it was as straight as an arrow, and other times, it laid out a sweeping curve, but the road always led to some lavish building or another. Several stories tall, with facades that spanned dozens of meters and were adorned with bas-reliefs, marble, and sculptures on their canopies, the manors of the Mansionhills usually stood empty.

But they were empty in a peculiar way, a way that would be incomprehensible to the common citizen of the Empire. Light burned in the windows, the sounds of busy stables could be heard, and even the distant voices of people were audible as well—though in truth, only the ears of a Matabar would pick up on them—but the masters of these houses were not home. Perhaps they were away on business elsewhere in the country, but more likely than not, they were tucked away in their apartments or houses on Saint Vasily’s Island, right in the heart of the capital. And here, in these opulent palaces and estates, only their servants, their stewards, and perhaps their grown children remained. These were the type of “children” to throw a soirée and hide their thirst for revelry, grandiose balls, and games of chance under the pretense of “forging useful connections in high society.”

The Mansionhills hummed and rang out, not with the sound of real life, but with a kind of gilded deception, the polished sheen of sleek falsehood. Usually, only servants lived here. They did so amidst opulence that was not their own, earning their wage by toiling without rest to maintain life in a place where life itself was a rare visitor.

A foreign world was like a foreign pair of exes.

Ardan smiled.

When you thought about it, the Mansionhills were, on the whole, a miniature copy of the Metropolis itself, where everything played out according to the same script, only with more variety. It was the kind of script where people were allowed to maintain the illusion that-

“What’s on your mind, Magister?” Milar asked, switching the headlights from low to high beam.

The road was empty.

“Boris asked me to read a pamphlet from the Guild Union,” Ardan answered truthfully.

Milar answered with a low whistle and cracked open the window, letting the cool night air burst into a car that smelled of sweat and salt. The sweat was from their overwrought bodies, and the salt scent was there because the alchemy of Dagdag and his clever inventors always carried the scent of something edible with it.

“Lord Fahtov, a hereditary aristocrat, one of the ten thousand wealthiest men in the Empire, has taken an interest in the socialist party?” Milar asked, genuinely surprised.

Ardi recalled his friend’s life story.

“He has his reasons,” Ardan replied. After a second, he added, “Probably…”

Ardi hadn’t known that Boris was counted among the country’s wealthiest, but it wasn’t surprising when you considered the standard of living Boris and Elena enjoyed. Boris had never hidden his astonishing fortune or its origins (it had been made by his mother, a Star Mage and Anomaly Hunter who had cracked open a lich’s tomb in the Dead Lands), but he never really flaunted it, either.

“Let me tell you something, Magister. When a man’s needs are all being met and he feels perfectly safe, he gets into politics out of boredom and an abundance of free time,” Milar said, looking casual as he steered with just one hand. “But people like us, we don’t bother thinking about what’s going on in high offices. We worry about how we can avoid death and how to feed our families. That way, there’s no time for pamphlets from all sorts of champions of justice.”

“It’s beautifully written, by the way. Lots of clever words.”

“Well, there you have it,” the captain snorted. “Anything that can’t be explained in simple language is usually a facade for some sort of deceit. If you start explaining it like you would to a child, and then everyone around you suddenly realizes you’re just another… I don’t know. A windbag, probably, well…”

“And what are your political views?” Ardan asked unexpectedly.

“The same ones I told you about a year ago in the temple,” Milar said, his tone hardening slightly. “Politics, palace intrigues, and the international rat race are for the Daggers and those who get paid to worry about them. It’s not our place to get involved… Although, thanks to your little stunt in the Imperial Archive, they’re definitely going to notice us now.”

“You’ve said that before, but so far-”

“Exactly. So far,” Milar cut in sharply. “Anyway, let’s talk about something pressing, not pamphlets. What do you say?”

Ardi already knew what he was referring to.

“The Puppeteers most likely used the Matabar captured after ‘Operation Mountain Predator’ for their experiments,” Ardan said, gazing out the window, watching the life of the servant-filled palaces. “That explains the appearance of the Star-born werewolf, its knowledge of the Matabar language, and the fact that it knew bear-style wrestling.”

“You understand what that means, don’t you, Magister?”

Ardi nodded.

“Use your tongue, Corporal-in-training, don’t just bob that head of yours,” the captain’s voice came out a bit rough.

But that was understandable. Anything connected to Star Magic looked even more frightening to an ordinary, uninitiated person than it actually was. Even Ardan had been thoroughly shaken by the abilities of the chimeras, and he had seen… various things and heard about… all sorts of interesting stuff… in Professor Kovertsky’s lectures.

“It means our suspicions are correct and the Puppeteers were indeed involved in ‘Mountain Predator,’” Ardi elaborated. “And it also means that their direct subordinates were part of the operation, since they abducted the Matabar.”

“Good lad,” Milar grunted and, shifting gears, sped up a little, forcing a whole line of black “Derks” to hurry after him. “I’m telling you, you’ve got the makings of an investigator… But here’s what I don’t get, Ard. I haven’t delved too deeply into the documents about your father’s ancestors, but I take it the Elder Mothers are not the least of… the Matabar among… the Matabar. Eternal Angels! The phrasing is a bit odd, but you get what I mean.”

“What are you getting at?”

“What I’m getting at, Ard, is that you’re missing the obvious,” Milar said, switching off the high beams and letting an expensive automobile pass by. It looked more like a mechanized, elongated carriage from the last century than a modern means of transportation. “We didn’t find a dozen Matabar, whom the Puppeteers surely…”

The captain didn’t finish the sentence, but his meaning was clear enough.

“Killed in their experiments?” Ardi supplied.

“I was trying to smooth out the edges.”

Ardan kept watching as one palace was replaced by another, then a third, and in the distant windows, lights flickered, lit by the estates’ workers.

“I can’t say that I don’t care about the fate of the Matabar, Milar, but… at the same time, I can’t say that I do, either. It’s such a strange feeling,” Ardi ran his fingers over the streams of wind. “I can’t explain it to you. I’m sorry. Arkar understands me better when it comes to this stuff. In fact, he’s the only one I know who understands it at all.”

“No offense taken,” the captain shrugged. “I suppose that, in order to understand you, one would have to be born a half-blood… Alright, let’s skip this part of the conversation and get down to business.”

“You want to understand why the Puppeteers, through the Spiders, kept the Elder Mother alive for so long, while all the others were used as disposable material?”

Milar snapped his fingers yet again.

“Exactly,” he nodded. “It doesn’t add up, Magister. So enlighten me, please, what are these Elder Mothers?”

Ardi pulled his hand back into the car and closed the window on his side.

“The Matabar had no written language-”

“I know that,” Milar interrupted, then immediately apologized. “Sorry… I’m a bit on edge. Chimeras, magic, Firstborn… I just can’t get used to it. It’s somehow simpler with just murderers and terrorists.”

Ardan nodded and continued.

“I told Tess once about the structure of the language… well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that there was no writing,” Ardi mentally climbed the steps carved into the rock, winding alongside the drawings on the Mountain of Memory. “Instead, there were drawings and songs. And a place where they were preserved. The most sacred place. The Mountain of Memory. All the history of the Matabar is stored there.”

Milar whistled and cracked his jaw.

“Of course, not everyone could get to this mountain, and the Alcade is large and the tribes were scattered. Sometimes, the journey to it could take a month, or even more.”

“That’s quite a long way to go to teach children anything,” Milar noted.

“Exactly,” Ardan agreed. “That’s why the Elder Mothers came to be. I would assume that they were initially the oldest women or the mothers of chieftains and the Listeners.”

“Those are the ones who are almost Speakers, but not quite?” Milar asked to make sure, eyeing a cigarette with longing but not reaching for a lighter. “They can hear something-or-other, but can’t quite speak it?”

“That’s right,” Ardi confirmed again. Milar really had done at least a bit of research before they’d started working together. “Then, over the centuries, Elder Mother became a hereditary… not even a title, but more of a… I don’t know… a duty? Yes, I think the word duty fits best.”

“And what did being one consist of?”

Ardan thought about the question for a moment.

“I suppose it consisted of keeping the stories alive. Being a living Mountain of Memory.” He recalled a wizened, frail old woman with countless tattoos showing through her wrinkled skin. “Those tattoos you saw—they are the histories of the Elder Mothers’ packs. Living chronicles of the events that occurred from the moment of an Elder Mother’s birth until her death. And when an Elder Mother’s spirit went on to walk the paths of the Sleeping Spirits, her body was taken to the Mountain of Memory, and there, the tattoos became rock paintings, preserving their packs’ stories for posterity.”

Milar was silent for a time, then swore under his breath.

“So,” he said quietly, barely audible. “That means the history of an entire tribe died with that old woman?”

“A pack,” Ardi corrected automatically. “Although, I suppose you could call it a tribe. In this case, there’s no real difference.”

Milar swore again. One probably didn’t need to be a Matabar, or even a Firstborn, to feel empathy for a situation where an entire generation of another’s past, which could never be restored, had been forever lost in the whirlwind of bloody growth on the pages of shared history.

“And can we find out which tribe she was from?” Milar asked suddenly.

“Why?” Ardi didn’t understand at first.

“Think about it, Magister. The Puppeteers, through the Spiders, keep a single Matabar alive, who, coincidentally, was something of a walking archive… no offense.”

“You can drop all the ‘no offense’ stuff,” Ardi waved his hand. “I’m not lying when I say the Matabar are both my people and not my people at the same time. Just like the Galessians. From a mathematical point of view, I’m somewhere at the intersection of multidirectional vectors.”

Milar shot him a quick, slightly suspicious glance, but nodded nonetheless.

“Fair enough… though I don’t understand a damn thing about vectors, but that’s not the point… Okay, look. We know the Puppeteers orchestrated a bloodbath in the Alcade,” Milar turned at a signpost, and the manors around them became less numerous and their roofs lowered while the forest grew thicker and the crowns of the trees were now much higher than before. “They took a tiny fraction of the Matabar captive and let them rot in experiments, the rest died, and those who were lucky enough to survive have long since dissolved among the humans. Is that all correct?”

“Most likely.”

“There!” The captain slapped his palm against the steering wheel. “So where does a frail old woman, whose life they’ve preserved for so many decades, fit into this? What’s so special about her, other than the tattoos?”

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

Ardan shrugged.

“Nothing.”

“Exactly! And if it’s nothing, then it must be about the tattoos,” the road under the wheels turned from asphalt to sharp gravel, which kept bouncing off the undercarriage of the displeased “Derks.” “And since I doubt they’re all that interested in the history of some individual pack, let me ask you this: could it be that the Elder Mothers knew a little, let’s say, more than just the history of their tribe since their birth?”

Ardan shrugged again.

“Milar,” Ardan said a little tiredly. “I wasn’t told that much about the Matabar. There just wasn’t time for it. And when there was, the conversation almost never turned to the Elder Mothers. So, yes, maybe they could have known something else. They most likely did, because they were taught by other Elder Mothers who were already near death. But you can’t get the details from anyone now. Even if there are still pure-blooded Matabar left, I don’t think you’ll find them so easily. It’s just that I don’t understand…”

Ardan broke off. A single hesitation and a mere second of thought were enough for him to hiss out a curse:

“Ahgrat…”

“I see it’s starting to get through that bright head of yours that’s busy with all your magical ponderings, Magister,” the captain flashed him a smile that wasn’t at all cheerful, but quite predatory instead. “A prototype for new mining equipment, the construction of the Alcade railway, the Shangra’Ar in the Alcade itself, a strange situation in the Ralian foothills… Can you feel it?”

Ardan didn’t just feel it; he couldn’t shake the sensation that the story of the Spiders was repeating itself. Once again, they had a whole list of common denominators, but on the other side of the equation, there was still an unknown something. Only, unlike in mathematics or the calculations of Star Magic seals, this unknown had not only quantitative and qualitative attributes, but also motives.

“You think they’re looking for something in the mountains?”

“I have no idea,” Milar admitted a bit gruffly, angry not at anyone in particular, but at the situation itself. “But if demons are also showing up so often, then if we tie it all together, what do we get?”

“I have no idea,” Ardan repeated his partner’s response.

“Dammit, Magister! Did they let you mess with the seals of the Staff of Demons and read all sorts of slippery muck in the Grand’s library for nothing?”

After last winter’s incident on the train involving Alla Tantov (a mutant working for the Puppeteers), whose body half the criminal underworld of the Metropolis was currently searching for, Ardi had naively believed that he had managed to secretly take a copy of the seals on the staff that had once belonged to Lady Talia Malesh. She was the famous founder and creator of the Chaos School, and also, presumably, one of those responsible for the appearance of the Dead Lands all over the world.

But even Edward, after a few weeks, had hinted quite transparently that everyone was well aware of the fact that Ardan had a copy of the seals. As for the librarians of the Grand, they would send out notices about the specific titles he’d requested with the special clearance granted to him. And, of course, such notices invariably ended up closely scrutinized by the Second Chancery.

“That doesn’t mean that, in just six months, I’ve become an expert on, as you put it, slippery muck.”

“But you’ve read about it!”

“Do you have any idea how much is written there?!” Ardan couldn’t hold back. “And that’s just on demonology alone! There are also the malefic spells that make witnesses’ brains melt! Humanoid chimerology, which we just encountered! And on top of that, a whole list of forbidden schools of magic! And there’s an endless list of books covering all of this!”

“Eternal Angels, you really do sound like Aversky right now.”

“That’s because,” Ardi exhaled and leaned back against the seat. “My required reading list is about to become longer than the books themselves. But the more I research, the more it seems like I know and understand nothing at all.”

“Maybe you’re just not that intellectually nimble?”

There was a clear note of friendly teasing in Milar’s tone. And so Ardi, in an equally-friendly manner, narrowed his eyes at him and asked:

“You do know I can curse you so you’ll be braying like a donkey until morning, right?”

“Using malicious magic against an employee of the Second Chancery gets you twenty years of hard labor,” Milar chuckled. “Besides, you don’t know how to do that.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because if you did, knowing you, you wouldn’t threaten me with it, you’d just do it.”

Ardi just waved his hand vaguely in the air. Milar sure understood him better than he understood Milar. Perhaps one couldn’t expect anything less from a Senior Investigator of the First Rank.

Finally, when a dead end in the form of a felled tree appeared ahead of them, blocking the road with a dense, wooden wall, the captain killed the engine and pulled the handbrake with a crack.

“Well, let’s go have a look at the lair of an ancient vampire.”

They stepped out into the street. The air, which was a bit cool for a summer night, licked their faces in welcome and immediately rushed away in a gust of wind, disappearing somewhere in the rustling leaves of the tangled treetops.

The “Derks” carrying Din and Alexander braked nearby, and behind it, a third car, looking a bit newer and slightly more elongated, came to a stop as well. Mshisty climbed out, looking as… strange as ever. He was covered in scars, had the build of a bouncer, and he seemed simultaneously bored and yet as coiled and ready as a spring about to be unleashed. Behind him were his subordinates.

From the driver’s seat emerged the same middle-aged woman of about thirty whom Ardi had already seen on the train. She had an eagle’s gaze, a matching nose, and gnarled fingers that gripped a staff made of Ertalain alloy and carved with complex seals.

Klementiy lurked behind them—Ardan, for some reason, had remembered his name. He seemed like a relatively recent graduate of the Grand, looking simultaneously twenty and twenty-five. Dressed in a rumpled gray suit and slightly unshaven, he looked so frail that he might have been able to hide behind his own staff if he just stood sideways.

As with the female captain, there wasn’t a single seal above a Blue Star etched on his staff.

“Can you brief us now, Captain Pnev?” Mshisty asked with his usual indolence as he approached them. “Secrecy is secrecy, but working blind is just foolish.”

Milar, finally sticking the cigarette in his mouth and clicking his lighter, took a drag, exhaled some smoke, and, at last, answered:

“Over there,” he pointed with the red ember toward the copse of trees, “is the possible lair of an ancient vampire.”

Mshisty didn’t even raise an eyebrow at the mention of an “ancient vampire.” His female subordinate wasn’t particularly impressed either, but Klementiy, it seemed, was starting to regret being here. At any rate, he managed to look even paler than before, which Ardi had thought impossible.

“How ancient?” Mshisty asked to make sure.

Milar and Alexander exchanged a look, and the captain answered the question with one of his own:

“In what sense?”

Mshisty sighed as if he were being forced to explain things to a clueless halfwit using his fingers. In this, it seemed, he wasn’t much different from Edward. Although, when you considered how Mart Borskov communicated with ordinary people, Mshisty’s behavior generally fit the mold of how Star Mages interacted with those not familiar with their craft.

“Captain,” he said, without turning to his subordinate. “Explain, please.”

“The older a vampire becomes,” the stately woman stepped forward, her stride as crisp as a city guard’s, “the better it masters the power of Blood Magic, which is an integral biological part of it and the foundation of its very existence. In the Monster Hunters’ classification, vampires are divided into: newly-turned, lesser, mature, old, ancient, and elder. There is only one registered elder vampire in the Empire.”

For some reason, Ardi had no doubt about who exactly was the only registered “elder vampire” in the Empire.

“We already told you, the vampire is ancient,” Milar said, spreading his hands out.

“Ancient vampires are divided into subclasses consisting of-”

“Consisting of crap that I couldn’t care less about!” Milar interjected, clearly annoyed. “Do we look like Star Mages to you?!”

Everyone except Milar looked at Ardan, who was studiously pretending not to be the partner of the clearly-exhausted captain.

“With the exception of the corporal,” Milar puffed up like a turkey. “We have no idea, Major, what kind of vampire is in there or how gray its temples are. Maybe there’s no one there at all.”

“I’ve heard that your department hasn’t been particularly productive lately, Captain, but this is bordering on absurd comedy.”

“Mshisty, I tolerated Aversky, but I can’t say that I’m going to tolerate you, too.”

“You don’t have to tolerate me,” the major shrugged and, with a flick of his staff, calmly walked toward the trees.

His female subordinate hurried after him, and Klementiy, with an apologetic smile, retrieved a suitcase with a wooden handle from the trunk of their car and, heaving it onto his back, hobbled after his colleagues, bent over under its weight.

Milar, after giving the mages a chance to get ahead of them, turned to his department.

“We stay back,” he said simply. “If it gets hot in there, we won’t be of any help anyway. So, let’s try not to become Fatians and greet the morning somewhere other than a hospital. Is that clear to everyone?”

Alexander nodded and Din smiled happily.

“Maaaaaagister,” Milar drawled. “Turn your curiosity down to zero for today, alright?”

“Of course,” Ardan replied.

“And drop that squirrelly business of yours,” Milar raised his voice slightly. “You’ve had enough adventures for one night, Ard.”

At the word “squirrelly,” Alexander arched an eyebrow slightly, and Din peeked out from behind his partner’s shoulder and mumbled, barely audible:

“But his ears aren’t like a squirrel’s, really… Maybe like an opossum’s, but only a little…”

But Din was ignored, as usual.

“Alright, Milar,” Ardan averted his gaze. “I won’t be curious unless I have to be.”

“Unless you have to be…” Milar mimicked his intonation. “I swear on my good mood, which I sometimes forget I can even have, you’ll be filling out the reports yourself.”

The captain turned on the heels of his government-issue boots, and they headed after the others. Passing through the birches and maples planted along the road, they found themselves in a wide, green meadow, in the center of which stood a familiar kind of wrought-iron fence, and behind it, a manor that was, on the whole, unremarkable.

It was unremarkable by local standards, of course. After all, it was still a colossus of no less than fifteen hundred square meters, with a massive formal entrance left over from the era when horses were harnessed to lavish carriages.

An imperial marble staircase framed a fountain erected at its base, where a mermaid combed her lush tresses, and jets of water crossed above her. That would happen when it was turned on, that is; right now, the fountain looked like just a beautiful sculpture in a water basin.

The manor itself, whose facade featured aged crimson bricks, looked not so much abandoned as it did neglected, clearly hinting at the absence of an entire army of servants within its walls.

Mshisty and his dogs, who’d stopped near the fence, had already begun their preparations. Klementiy, opening the suitcase, took out several items, bathing them in the light of the twilight sky.

They had engineering Ley-goggles, which all three of them put on—the captain helped Mshisty, who did not let go of his staff, put his on—and a set of accumulators. Theirs weren’t set in rings, as Ardan was used to, but on a bracelet. A heavy metal bracelet with silver-framed recesses for Ertalain crystals.

Only now did Ardi realize that he had been slightly mistaken in his assessment. Mshisty did indeed possess a Pink Star (and, after the incident in the Dead Lands, could no longer advance), but his subordinates were not limited to Blue Stars, but actually held Yellow Stars as well. This suggested that he had been wrong about their age. The captain, who was currently flipping through her grimoire, was likely no younger than forty, and Klementiy was surely over thirty.

Ardan was still generally bad at guessing people’s ages. What he did understand, however, was that given the presence of one Pink Star and two Yellow Star military mages, he, Milar, Alexander, and Din would really have nothing to do but try not to get in the way.

And that was something he was glad to do.

“Klementiy,” Mshisty said curtly.

The mage turned a few gears on his goggles and made a couple of notes in his notebook.

“It has a stationary shield powered by a Blue Star generator with a voltage of forty-five rays, residential version. Nothing special.”

“Parela.”

The captain struck her staff against the ground and a complex seal composed of three smaller ones briefly flared beneath her feet.

“There are several interconnected elements of a Ley-structure in the house,” her voice was no softer than her sharp features. “There are also signs of moving objects with varying Ley-gradient loads.”

“What class would you assign it on the Hunters’ scale?”

Parela, after closing her grimoire, remained silent for a few seconds.

“No less than Blue.”

Milar nudged Ardi lightly in the side with his elbow.

“Ard, can you translate what they just said into normal people speak?”

“There’s an ordinary ward covering the house, like at the other manors, but not as complex as the one at Irigov’s estate,” Ardan explained. “But that’s on the outside. There are also defensive systems inside the manor, including living creatures.”

“Chimeras?”

“Possibly.”

Milar swore.

“And what about that scale?”

“It’s a threat assessment scale used by the Anomaly Hunters, better known as Monster Hunters,” Ardi could almost see the Hunters’ manuals he had studied after the incident at the Menagerie. “Blue means that the manor poses a threat no less dire than an abandoned fort from the War of the Birth of the Empire.”

The captain blinked a few times.

“The kind where hundreds of people looking to get rich quick go to die?”

“Yep.”

“The kind where, according to rumors, all sorts of filth has been roaming for half a millennium; all sorts of curses, demons, chimeras, undead, and ghosts?”

“There is no such thing as ghosts,” Ardan reminded him. “But, generally, you’re right.”

Milar, unable to restrain himself, raised his voice.

“Then by the Eternal Angels, how is this filth right here, in the Mansionhills?!”

The mages didn’t even turn toward him. Only Mshisty honored him with a short remark:

“You’re the investigator here, Captain, so you figure it out. Our job is to clear out this nest and burn it to the ground. Everything else is up to you,” Mshisty struck his staff against the ground.

Ardi, who was about to offer them the use of his demon-finding seal (which, amusingly enough, he had used right here in the Mansionhills when he and Peter Oglanov had come to arrest Irigov), immediately realized that his impulse would have been naive at best, and likely completely useless.

Beneath Mshisty’s feet, four seals, each complex in its own right, flared up, and then they merged, one after another, into a single construct, Ardi wished he could stop time and redraw everything his astonished eyes were seeing right now.

Yes, he had trained under the Lord Edward Aversky for half a year, but he had only seen him in action once, when the Grand Magister had fought the elven Aean’Hane, and Ardi had only fragmentary memories of that event.

A black, thunderous cloud shot out from Mshisty’s staff. The column of roiling darkness, concealing flashes of pink lightning within it, stretched out for several meters and then formed an arch. The dark cloud pressed against the shield dome, which had erupted in multicolored flashes, but despite being powered by a stationary generator, it didn’t stand a chance.

Just when it started to seem like the shield might overpower Mshisty’s magic, the lightning bolts hiding within the thundercloud pierced the defensive spell, stabbing through it in dozens of places, then connecting in a complex, web-like pattern.

With a distinct crackle, the shield within the radius of the thundercloud crumbled into shimmering dust. And it seemed like the breach should have ended there, but no. Mshisty’s spell had no intention of stopping at that.

The black cloud, which had previously served as just the border of the entrance carved into the shield’s dome, contracted into an undulating form. And as the lightning bolts became the new outlines of the entrance, the cloud unhurriedly, almost reluctantly, seeped inside.

It touched the fence and flew past, leaving behind melted and hissing red bars and posts dripping with lava-like streams. Of the gate, which had appeared to be a very serious obstacle, only pathetic fragments remained, and the cloud, having lost little of its volume, suddenly began to whirl wildly.

It curved toward its own center, revealing a steel vortex of dense wind at its edges. It spun faster and faster, gradually transforming from the wheel of a windmill into the surface of a whirlpool. But instead of a funnel, there was a relentlessly-shrinking core of clouds in its center, compressing under constant pressure.

A moment passed, then another, and after the wind made it almost impossible to breathe, and hats and cloak edges had to be held down, the barely-noticeable, dense cloud core in the center shot out a silent, dark beam.

In a fraction of a second, it crossed the hundreds of meters separating them from the manor. Ardi expected it to pierce the building straight through, but near the very entrance, the beam suddenly expanded into a dark shroud, taking the form of a gaping, fanged maw that slammed into the manor door.

But there was no explosion caused by splintered doors, no roar of collapsing marble from the massive staircase, not even the crack of the shattered mermaid statue in the fountain.

Instead, from beneath the ground, tearing it apart with bony fingers and scattering clumps of damp soil, skeletons rose, blue fire burning in their eye sockets.

Mshisty’s spell was shattered by a mass of flesh and bone that somewhat resembled a slug. This nauseating, brown mass was flowing out from the cracks between the doors, from the window frames, from the fissures in the stonework. It had no limbs, no head, no mouth, only bony fragments protruding from within, and it literally devoured Mshisty’s spell until not a trace of it remained.

“Captain, are you sure there’s an ancient vampire in there, and not a Pink Star Mage who’s never heard of the Al’Zafir Pact?” Mshisty asked with a chuckle. Without waiting for an answer, he was the first to step forward to face the fifty skeletons and the three-meter-tall pile of fat, muscle, lymph, pus, and bone.