Matabar

Book II. Chapter 47 - Driba

“Driba?” One of the Sisters in the bucket brigade moved toward the old man. “Mr. Driba, what’s wrong with-”

She was perhaps thirty. She had freckles, funny ears that poked out just a little from beneath the cloth covering her hair, and a smile that was wide and kind. Ard remembered her. She was the one he had seen playing with the children near the orphanage, her laughter bright as she’d tickled those unlucky enough—or lucky enough—to end up in her caring embrace.

Driba didn’t so much as glance her way. He merely tilted his staff toward the nun who had stepped forward, her face a mask of concern for an old acquaintance. The fiery vortex that spun around and above the old man shuddered, and a ribbon of fire peeled away from it, and along that ribbon flowed a wind, hot and fast. It was so dense you could see it with the naked eye, a streak of the purest white contrasted against the gloom.

This line of wind and fire cut the nun’s body in two. A flash of flame followed a breath later, and the Sister died without even knowing what had killed her. Her legs and hips still stood rooted to the ground, while her torso and head, her arms flailing in a way that was both clumsy and terrible, were already falling. But it was only a handful of black ash that touched the rain-soaked grass below. The ash was caught by the storm and swept toward the sky, where it vanished into the black press of the clouds.

Those who saw this happen froze at first, then scattered with screams that were thin and sharp compared to the storm. Panic, like a forest fire, like the very same flames that were so eagerly devouring the old walls and roofs, spread like a sickness through the people. They dropped their buckets and ran, scrambling away from the terrible old man, the half-naked non-human, and the sheriff with her two revolvers.

In Ard’s head, equations bloomed and faded away in an endless cascade of threads. Driba had clearly spent the greater part of his strength escaping the epicenter of that roaring, wild flame, a flame made monstrous by the substance stored in that apparatus of his. He had spent even more energy to maintain his active defense when the building had come down, and now… now he was not attacking. He just stood there, watching them. But why kill the Sister, then?

Though, if one were to assume that-

“You old bastard!” The sheriff shouted and took a half-step forward before Ardan’s hand clamped around her arm.

“Don’t move,” he warned her, hissing the words through clenched teeth.

“Why the hell-”

“He messed up his seal,” Ardan explained, his eyes never leaving the mad old man. “He can’t control it directly. All that’s left are indirect reactions. The spell will respond to the vector of an intervenor and-”

“Shit! Corporal! You-”

“Don’t move!” Ard barked at her, and then added, his patience snapping like a dry twig, “And shut up! I need to think!”

The sheriff actually fell silent, but the look she gave him promised future trouble. So be it. If they survived this, an offended Maryana Sestrova would be far from the top of his list of concerns.

Lists…

A list!

It was unlikely that the old man’s spell could react to multiple targets at once. Even assuming Driba had woven no less than a full triad of four Stars into the spell’s structure—three rays from each—its energy was not infinite. Some had been lost in the collapse and more still was being used to maintain the structure’s integrity, which meant it could… operate for a long time in a passive mode, yes, but that it also only had a few active attacks left in its reserve. The spell was likely compiling a priority list of intervenors.

Driba knew this, but could do nothing about it. He was bleeding out and glaring at them with a terrible fury.

Maybe they could just wait for the old man to bleed out and meet his ancestors on his own. He had to know his spell wasn’t all that dangerous, not if you understood the error that had been made in its casting, and…

Ardan stopped himself. Edward had taught him, first and foremost, to never trust an opponent. All those on-the-fly rewrites of seals, all those false nodes bearing no load, designed only to distract… They all spoke of a single truth: victory was attained not just with Stars and rays, but with other qualities as well.

Driba was no battle mage, but he was an old mage. A real exemplar of the old school. Which meant that, when he’d been in danger, he’d acted on instinct. And right now, he didn’t think that he was fighting some novice student who had spent a mere year in the Grand University’s lecture halls. No. Driba saw him as an enemy. A war mage of the Black House. And that meant that this…

“Run!” Ardan screamed.

…was a feint!

The sheriff, letting loose a curse so foul it would have made a drunken sailor blush, threw herself to the side. She was just in time.

A huge swathe of the sky above their heads ignited with bright, crimson stars. They broke away from the body of the rapidly-shrinking serpent of fire, stretching into long needles against the sky and spinning madly. They took on the properties of the attack that had cut down and burned the Sister, but with something more. They also warped the space around them, and in doing so, they moved faster still.

It was a similar principle to what Ardan’s own Ice Artillery used. Only this was rooted in something deeper than elasticity, something far more tangled in the principles of gravity and matter.

Less than a second passed between Ardan’s shout and the moment a hail of dozens of superheated plasma rays, each sheathed in a cutting vortex of wind, fell from the sky. The compressed air tore through the earth, ignoring stone and rock the way a red-hot knife ignores a stick of butter. And behind the wind came the heat. The plasma spread like liquid flame, turning stone to lava, earth to ash, and the air itself into a series of sharp pops as sparks ignited and died in the same breath.

If Driba had not made that mistake in his casting, there would have been nothing left of Ard, or Sestrova, or a good portion of the monastery. As it was, the barrage turned the chapel and several other buildings into heaps of burning rubble, and from beneath them came the groans and cries of those who had sought the false safety of stone walls.

Sestrova had fallen, and now she groaned through clenched teeth, tying a belt around her left leg. A terrible wound smoked along her thigh, looking like someone with a giant scalpel had carved out a piece of her flesh, reaching the bone. If not for the searing heat that had instantly cauterized the wound, she would have bled out in moments.

And Ardan… wasn’t even surprised that his six Orlovsky discs had failed to stop the ray from targeting him, had failed to slow it down, had failed to even have the slightest effect on it. Ardan roared as scorching wind and unrelenting fire bit into his right side, taking with them a piece of his skin, muscle and liver.

It was only his Matabar blood and the adrenaline that kept him from passing out as the wave of pain crashed over him. And it was only the hours spent on Edward’s training grounds that made him strike his staff against the ground. After his clash with Semyon Davos, Ard had learned the basic version of the Flesh Restoration spell, but this was far from a “basic” situation. All Ardan could manage was to restore his liver and a portion of the muscle around it. And now it lay exposed and pulsing, dripping with hot, greasy blood that sizzled on the ground.

Driba just smirked and spat out a mouthful of blood. The spell was likely draining the last of his mental reserves. It would take him time to prepare another volley like that. This was the most obvious weakness of complex, multi-part spells, the very same weakness that had pushed Ardan toward developing his concept for the Ice Dolls.

“Corporal, we’re dead, aren’t we?” Sestrova managed to ask, spitting out thick saliva despite the pain.

Ardan never took his eyes off Driba, who was swaying slightly as he prepared to finish what he had started. But despite the spell’s active function, the passive one still remained, and it was clearly beyond the old man’s control.

“When you see an opening, shoot,” Ardan answered. “If you hit him in the head, we get to live.”

And without waiting for her reply, Ardan used his staff to push himself back to his feet. It felt as if a starving wolverine was gnawing on his side, and the whole world swam before his eyes, but he stood straight, just as he had stood before the storm a half hour ago.

The spell would compile a priority list of intervenors—a useful bit of engineering… which could be turned to his own advantage. Edward had always taught him not to waste time on overly scrupulous analysis in a magical duel, but perhaps that very trait would save them now.

There was only one thing left to find out—could Ardan cast enough spells in a short enough time to overload Driba’s defense?

“You want to meet your death standing, whelp?” There was nothing left in Driba’s eyes that was reasonable, or even human.

He seemed like he was saying something else, but Ardan wasn’t listening. Nothing was threatening Driba, or the hissing, spitting plasma vortex of his fire serpent. The list was empty. It just needed to be filled.

Ardan focused on… casting Spark, the simplest, most basic training spell of battle magic, and struck his staff against the ground. A thin ribbon of flame shot out from the tip of his staff and, arcing around Driba, vanished in a flash as it met the fire serpent’s counterattack. Another bolt of plasma sheathed in roaring wind consumed the Ember and carved a deep gash in the wall behind it.

But where there had been one Spark, another appeared. It was a different shape, had a different intensity of heat, and it attacked from the opposite direction. Ardan was changing the parameters on the fly, striking his staff against the ground again and again. It cost him just a single Red Star ray each time. Spell after spell, strike after strike.

After every third attack, he used Resonance to replenish his reserves with the Ley he had just spent. And so, the needles of fire flew, one after another, toward the fiery vortex, which met each one of them with monstrous attacks of its own, attacks that sliced through and incinerated entire buildings.

Driba was shouting something, maybe even laughing, but he could do nothing about his own spell. Ardan, after exhausting his Red Star and then his last accumulator for it, switched to using his Green Star. Now, there wasn’t just one, but three fiery needles that surged out from his staff’s tip with each attack. The number of parameters cubed, and for a moment, the young man became a living arithmometer.

He kept slamming his staff against the ground with less than a second between each action, and in that time, he calculated dozens of new and unpredictable runic connections. He did anything and everything he could to keep Driba’s spell from “getting used” to his attacks and lowering their priority on its list. After all, as the Sleeping Spirits could attest, a Spark could never break through the passive defense of the flame wall circling Driba.

Blood gushed from Ardan’s nose, blood vessels popped in his eyes, and dozens of seals flared to life beneath his feet. Like a belt-fed machine gun, he relentlessly threw spell after spell forward until, at last, he roared:

“Now!”

For the briefest of moments, the computational module inside Driba’s seal was overloaded by the constantly updating “list” of priority targets. The flame around the old man wavered and, for a sliver of a second, froze. A breach appeared in the impenetrable defense. Sestrova had held Driba in her sights for all those seconds that had been an eternity for Ard and nearly imperceptible to the rest of the world. She squeezed the trigger smoothly and the shot rang out. The bullet exited the barrel, leaving a puff of orange-tinged powder smoke hanging over the muzzle, and began its slow, lazy journey through the air.

It spun on its axis, flying over the charred earth. It caught the reflections of the furious fire along its gleaming sides. It seemed to bask in the sparks of lightning that cut across the sky, and it also seemed in no particular hurry to reach the rapidly-closing breach. A victorious smile was spreading just as slowly across Driba’s face. Ardan, for his part, knew they wouldn’t make it. He was about to turn around, to grab Sestrova and try to throw them both behind any cover he could find, but he knew with a cold certainty that he would be too slow.

And the bullet kept flying. Like a bumblebee trapped in jelly. Stately, unhurried, it approached the curtain of fire that was slowly twisting back around its creator. Sestrova had been too late by a fraction of a second. She had missed her chance. And so, the bullet slammed directly into the silken flame, which cleanly melted the lead cone.

Or rather…

It sheared away half of it.

The other half, continuing on its trajectory, buried itself between the eyes of the still-smiling, and now finally surprised, Driba.

Once again, no more than a fraction of a second had passed during all of this. Sestrova had not had time to curse and Ardan had only just turned his body toward her, and now Driba was already collapsing to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, his spell dissipating into the air.

“That was the best fucking shot of my life,” Sestrova breathed, lowering her revolver. She was still gripping it tightly, and it was unlikely that she would be able to let go of the iron anytime soon.

Ardan understood her completely, because he too was clutching his staff, unable to find the strength to uncurl his icy fingers.

Ard exhaled, wiping away the blood that had dripped down to his upper lip. He felt a little sick. A nauseating lump was rising in his throat.

Well, now it was surely-

“Corporal.”

“What?”

“My brother, he-”

A wild cry, not entirely human or animal, tore through the air, and then the distant rubble began to stir.

Ardan couldn’t even find the strength to curse. Tossing aside wooden debris to the accompaniment of heavenly thunder, its glistening growths of pus and acid catching the flashes of lightning, something… Something was slowly climbing out into the rain.

It looked like a chimera assembled from mammal and reptile parts, and it was covered in patches of coarse fur and dark scales. What should have been its head had a human upper half, a hollow where a nose should be that was covered in a slimy, yellow substance, and a lower jaw made entirely of serrated fangs. A forked tongue with two small knobs at its ends shot out, frog-like, several meters ahead of it. It deftly snatched at sparks, burning itself, but caught them nonetheless.

Beneath its torso—if you could call that amorphous, broken thing a torso, with its ribcage bent and seemingly twisted inside out—dangled small, human arms and legs. They swung through the air, unable to touch anything but smoke and soot. The creature supported itself on four stalks crowned with something like buds, but they were of animal origin. They pulsed, and wherever they touched the ground, they left behind puddles of hissing acid.

Ardan had seen his share of abominations in the past year, but this creature went beyond not only his experience, but beyond the limits of even the most depraved imagination. What had Driba and his students been trying to create, to have spawned… this?

Ardan mechanically raised his staff. He didn’t really do it in order to use a spell, for which he lacked the Ley, but in an attempt to defend himself. Admittedly, it was unlikely that a branch from an old oak would have helped him, wounded and exhausted as he was both mentally and physically. The monster loomed over the ruins, making sounds that were a mix of a roar and a reptilian croak. It stood three and a half meters tall at the withers (or neck), with a body nearly five meters long.

The chimera that had guarded Lorlov in the underground construction tunnels would have looked like a harmless toy next to this creation. And only the two perfectly human eyes filled with bitter tears hinted at the fact that this was not simply a mindless chimera, but a person. A person who had spent nearly two decades enduring torture that perverted minds had called experiments.

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Ardan could have done nothing to it.

He knew that.

Maryana Sestrova did not.

The click of a cocked hammer rang out, and then, gleaming in the flashes of lightning, the barrel of the sheriff’s revolver was pointed straight at Ard. And all he could do was crawl aside and lean his back against a stone fragment of the nearest wall. Breathing heavily, Ardan, for some reason, smiled a little wearily.

“You want to die with a smile on your face, mage?” Sestrova asked without malice, but without any particular warmth either, keeping Ard in her sights.

The monster continued to dig itself out, tossing aside debris and clearing a path for itself. It seemed like it couldn’t just jump, so in order to reach its target, it had to break through the ruins. A task that it was, albeit slowly, succeeding at.

“That’s not your brother, Marya-”

“Shut up!” Sestrova screamed, shaking her revolver. “Shut your mouth! Don’t pretend like you know anything!”

“But I do,” Ardan said with a shrug. The young man turned his face up toward the streams of rain and closed his eyes. “You could only have become the Sheriff of Larand if the previous one was removed. But I haven’t heard from you a single story about the previous sheriff’s retirement. And it’s convenient, isn’t it? That the Dead Lands are so close. You could always say that the sheriff died trying to catch some poachers, or was helping the Hunters with some creature that managed to get past the Perimeter.”

Sestrova remained silent. Ardan didn’t sense any hatred from her. Or anger. More like sadness. And pain. More pain than sadness. She was steeped in it from head to toe. And that smell, that stench, could not be washed away by rain or blood.

“And it’s also very strange that in all these years, only you ever found out about the underground catacombs,” Ardan continued. “You found out about them and searched for answers, all the while constantly mentioning your brother. The whole monastery knew about your soul-searching. Which means Driba and his students knew, too. But they did nothing? Didn’t refine their spell? What nonsense.”

Lightning flashed overhead. It mingled with the raindrops, falling to the earth where it found its sisters—the sparks of the fire. They danced together, showering the ground with smoke and heat.

“You don’t know anything,” Sestrova repeated at last.

“I know that you made a deal, sheriff,” Ardan said, watching the dark sky through a half-closed third eyelid. “The Puppeteers needed their own person here. But not an inspector from Nigrad. They’d be too easy to check on, and the Black House branch in Nigrad, even if it let a mole slip past them, would still do its job. No, a corrupt inspector would be found out quickly. As would the mayor of Larand. Neither of them could be used. Too obvious. A sheriff, on the other hand…”

Ardan paused for a moment. He opened his mouth, catching some fat raindrops in an attempt to quench his thirst. And somewhere out there, a hundred meters away, the monster created by Star Magic and a lust for forbidden knowledge was clearing its path.

“Shut up…” Sestrova repeated without much force. “Shut up or I’ll shoot you.”

“But a sheriff is also a pretty obvious figure,” Ardan went on as if he hadn’t heard her threat. “So the sheriff needs to be changed. Preferably as often as possible. Luckily, you have the Dead Lands and smugglers and marshals. So, it’s not hard. But it’s inconvenient. It’s better to have your own person permanently than to constantly change the variable… the piece. You can bribe, blackmail and intimidate for a long time, but sooner or later, the system will fail. And so you need someone permanent and reliable.”

Behind them, past the blazing monastery, cries and noise could be heard. It seemed like the locals had begun their descent from the cliff. They were on horses, with carts full of sand, earth and firefighting tools. A blaze like this was likely visible all along the western coast of the Dancing Peninsula.

“If you think you can stall for time until the cavalry gets here, you’re mistaken, Corporal.”

Sestrova was right. Driba’s spell had turned the central part of the monastery complex into a labyrinth of flaming rubble.

“Then why don’t you just shoot me?” Ard didn’t even look at her. “If you wanted to, really wanted to, you wouldn’t have shot Driba, either…”

“I wasn’t going to,” Sestrova whispered. Her revolver trembled almost as much as the woman herself, a woman broken by fate and the cruel hands of others. “I wasn’t going to…”

“And you weren’t going to blow up your husband, either,” Ardan said, checking his belt and rings. No accumulators left. No rays left in his Stars. “Or cover up the disappearances of children, probably not that, either. And everything else you did at the behest of your masters—you weren’t going to do that, either.”

“Just shut up!” Sestrova finally fired, but she aimed somewhere off to the side. She’d fired more from helpless anger than any desire to kill Ardan. “What do you know, you big city bastard?! You think you understand anything? Do you understand what it’s like to live when no one around you gives a damn? No one! What it’s like when you look into someone’s eyes and see kindness? But not aimed at you. It’s for themselves. All so that, later on, when they’re shitting on the pot or stuffing their faces, they can tell themselves they’re good people! That they did a good deed today! They helped an orphan… but… they don’t give a damn, Corporal. No one, not a single person does. Everything here is rotten. Me. Them. And you too.”

The monster flung another multiton chunk of stonework aside. It flew over their heads and, crashing into the remains of the chapel, showered their shoulders and heads with gray dust and fine grit.

“You wanna know why the children disappeared?” Sestrova turned to him sharply. “Because of that, Corporal. Because no one gives a damn. You think I had to make any effort to forge the documents? I just burned them! Right in the sheriff’s office! And that was it. Because… no one gives a damn. That’s why… for so many years…”

She fell silent.

Maryana Sestrova. A little girl who’d lost her brother in her childhood, and had then become the victim of an engineering error. It was ironic that, in the end, Driba himself had died, in part, because of an engineering miscalculation. Perhaps he’d been an excellent chimerologist and, judging by the seals on his staff, had known his way around demonology and necromancy too, but not the tangled matters of complex Star Engineering.

And so, instead of erasing Sestrova’s memories, Driba and the Puppeteers had decided to use her.

“What did they promise you?” Ardan asked quietly.

She turned toward what had once been her brother.

“You already know, Investigator,” she said, that last word spoken with a touch of irony.

“I do,” Ardan did not deny it.

And again, there was silence. On one side, a huge monster was approaching them. And on the other, there were the townspeople, along with the Hunters, the sheriff’s deputies, and maybe a few marshals as well.

“How long?” Sestrova asked.

“I suspected something from the moment I heard your last name,” Ardan said, swallowing raindrops that, for some reason, tasted bitter and hot. Not cold at all. “There are too few reasons for a former orphan to come back. Especially one in your unique position. Then you confirmed it yourself when you mentioned your brother. If the other missing children never reappeared, why would the smart, brave Maryana Sestrova assume her brother’s situation would be any different? Because she felt something? It was more likely that you knew that I would sense it if you lied. Just like with those Speaker amulets. And so, you told me half-truths so you wouldn’t have to lie directly.”

The simple spell Ardan had used a few days earlier had shown him that there was something in the monastery. Something not of nature. Something contrary to its very essence. A demon, a Homeless Fae, or, for example, a furious chimera monster with the tear-filled eyes of a child on its hideous, formless face.

“You knew your brother was alive,” Ardan said, gesturing at the creature moving toward them. “And that’s what they bought you with. You and everything you did for them. Tell me, your husband-”

“I loved him,” Sestrova interrupted him. “Or I thought I did… I didn’t want to kill him… but they needed his research and a way to advance me in their goddamn play. But you know, at some point, I just stopped caring. I just did what they told me to. To save him. To save Marin. The only one who ever gave a damn about me.”

“Your husband gave a damn about you too.”

Sestrova just shrugged.

“Maybe… Investigator.”

Ardan looked up at the sky again. There hadn’t been much to investigate, really. The sheriff had ordered her deputies to find out something about the newcomer Egobar while she herself had gone to follow him? Because Larand rarely saw… what? Mages from the capital came here regularly due to the proximity of the Dead Lands. And on the Day of Weeping, far-from-simple citizens flocked here as well. As for the Firstborn, they, too, occasionally ended up in the Hunters’ Guild, which meant that they also came here. Otherwise, the bartender and the others wouldn’t have so skillfully identified Ardan as a half-blood. You couldn’t pull off a trick like that without experience.

This meant that Sestrova’s words had been at odds with her actions. That had been enough for a hunter’s instinct to spot the trail. And from there, it had been a simple matter of tracking the prey and its habits. Just as Ergar and Shali had taught him.

Ardan hadn’t needed the records from the town hall to learn about the layout of the underground passages. He’d needed to be certain that Sestrova had access to such documents. And if she did, why hadn’t she used them sooner? She was supposed to be so desperate to find her brother, and yet she hadn’t taken the most obvious path to solving the problem?

And the fact that such a complete archive existed, one that held materials from a century ago, strongly suggested that other materials were kept with the same scrupulousness. That meant that, for every child who’d ever entered the orphanage, besides the records in the monastery itself, there should have been duplicate papers in the town hall as well. And Sestrova, in her two years as sheriff, had never noticed a single discrepancy?

And her story… She went to the far north, where she married a chemical engineer who was developing something for the army, and then died under strange circumstances? And out of everyone there, only Maryana Sestrova had been able to find the “culprits?” Her gender was irrelevant here, what mattered was that Sestrova hadn’t had the resources that military investigators, guard detectives, and the Cloaks’ own investigators had possessed. And yet, she had somehow succeeded despite that.

It was almost like she’d known where to look. Or maybe she had been helped to frame the right people.

The Puppeteers always tried to achieve several goals with a single move. And they often succeeded.

Of course, these had still been circumstantial suspicions. He’d had to make sure. And when Driba, a frail old man, had intercepted him despite the fact that Ardan had needed to run for a while to get out of the lab, it had become clear. Driba simply hadn’t bothered to stick around for the explosion and had been waiting for his uninvited guest instead.

Because he’d known that he would come. He’d known and so he’d waited for him. That was probably why Ardan hadn’t found much in the catacombs, only the laboratory itself, which was rather difficult to move.

“Driba’s students took all the samples and research with them, didn’t they?” Ardan decided to ask her this for some reason. “Because the monastery is compromised. That’s why they fled. Not because of the fire at all.”

It was laughable to think that Sestrova would answer him… The sheriff remained silent, not taking her revolver away from his face. It was as if neither of them was bothered by the chimera that was almost upon them.

“Tell me, did you know that there would be something other than hay in the storage, or did your masters want to destroy you along with the other evidence?” Ardan looked at his watch. Not much time left… “Is that why you shot Driba?”

Sestrova did answer him this time, though not immediately.

“I always knew they’d want to get rid of me. I just didn’t know when. So no, Corporal, I wasn’t surprised when I was almost sent to the Eternal Angels by the blast wave and shrapnel. And I did shoot Driba for that very reason. Because he would have finished me off anyway. You saw it yourself. The old bastard was trying to…”

Ardan nodded. That fit his profile of the Puppeteers. In the end, if they had succeeded, the fire and destruction would have been blamed on the mentally ill Maryana Sestrova, who had gone mad searching for a fictional brother. And the monster, which at that moment was drooling acid saliva and breaking through the last of the rubble, would have simply been buried in the cellars, where future contractors assigned to do the repairs would hardly have bothered to dig.

And thus the monastery would have forever buried all the evidence beneath it, and any speculation would have remained just that because there would no longer be any possibility of either confirming or refuting it.

But their plans had been disrupted by the second explosion, the one caused by Ardan and Driba.

“That’s not your brother anymore, Maryana. He stopped being your brother the moment he fell into Driba’s hands.”

“Shut up…” For the umpteenth time, she didn’t even say it, but whispered it. “Shut up… I know that already.”

“Then why? Why do all this, Maryana? So many lives… so many children…”

She looked away for a moment.

“I already told you, mage. No one gives a damn about orphans. No one. Including me. But I care about Marin. Maybe… Maybe he’s the only one I've ever give a damn about…”

They fell silent again.

“If you knew that I was working for… them,” Sestrova said that last word a little strangely. “Then why didn’t you arrest me right away?”

“Because your splattered brains wouldn’t have helped me,” Ardan shrugged. “The moment you say something, you’ll be off to the Eternal Angels. I’ve seen it a few times. An informant like that is of little use.”

Sestrova smirked.

“A self-assured mage,” she said, still without much emotion. “And now you’re the one going to the Angels.”

She fired. Or rather, she tried to fire, but her body wouldn’t obey her. Only now did Sestrova realize that she had been holding her revolver at arm’s length despite being so tired. She’d been holding it and yet not feeling it at all.

“What… whhhhhhhhyyyyyyyy…”

Her last word stretched out into a long note, and then Sestrova froze. Only her wildly darting eyes hinted that she was still alive. Alive, but immobilized.

“Fetid Cinnamon,” Ardan said, getting to his feet. “When I was traveling here, I took this herb from a certain lady. She was brewing a concoction from it incorrectly. A simple one. They teach it in the first year at the Grand University. I altered the composition slightly so it wouldn’t take effect immediately. Then I strengthened the main formula to prolong the effect. Until tomorrow evening, you won’t be able to control your body, but you’ll be conscious the whole time.”

Ardan didn’t want to take any chances. Who knew what kind of safeguards might be hidden in that seal tied to alchemy that had prevented him and Milar from getting any information from the Puppeteers’ pawns for a year…

Ardan, leaning on his staff, limped over to Sestrova and took the revolver from her numb hands. Straightening up, he held it out in front of him. Just as the cowboys on the farm had taught him, he lined up the front and rear sights, aligning them with the monster’s head.

Maryana Sestrova’s brother, Marin, having cast aside the last piece of debris, began to walk toward them on his long, thin, stalk-like legs. He roared and croaked. Was he trying to say something? Was he trying to scream? Was he trying to say the name of the sister he was seeing for the first time in almost twenty years? Maybe that was why his childish, tormented eyes, so out of place on that hideous face, were leaking tears.

Ardan didn’t know.

He did know that whatever was standing in front of him, it had nothing to do with the Tazidahian military chimeras. Not at all. This was a child tormented by countless experiments and brought to a state where he was no longer human and not a beast, but not yet a demon or a chimera. He was something in between, forever trapped on the border of several worlds at once.

It was because of him that the enchanted petals had not dared to cross the invisible line.

“I’m sorry,” Ardan said.

Who exactly was he apologizing to? To the drugged Sestrova with her tear-stained cheeks and wide-open eyes? Or to the boy trapped in the monster’s body? Or to Zirka, whom he had failed to save?

Ardan didn’t know.

Maybe all three of them.

A shot rang out. Ardan was terrible with a gun, but when the target was only a few meters away, even he could hit the mark. The bullet, after piercing the monster’s head, exited somewhere in the middle of its back. The creature swayed on its stalks and fell to its side with a crash.

Its eyes were still looking at Sestrova’s face, and she, it seemed, was screaming silently.

Ardan turned his back to them and, limping over to Driba’s body, picked his grimoire up off the ground.

“Encrypted,” Ardan exhaled, closing the book. “I hope Dagdag and the smart guys can decipher it… in less than a couple of years.”

The noise behind him was growing louder, and so Ardan hung the foreign grimoire on his belt’s chains and pulled out a slightly crumpled but still intact Second Chancery employee papers from a separate pocket.

It seemed like he was in for a long conversation with the Hunters and the nuns.

One long conversation later

Mother Belava, whose scar was somewhat reminiscent of the lightning flashing in the sky, did not take her intense gaze off Ardan. Once the Hunters, townspeople and nuns were convinced that he was indeed a corporal of the Second Chancery (which caused Nathan Balitsky and his men to discreetly and very quickly leave the monastery grounds), Mother Belava stepped forward from the crowd. Ardan, who was still standing over Sestrova, holding a foreign staff and grimoire, and behind whom the monastery complex was burning down and crumbling, did not retreat a single step. Not even when the old nun came right up to him.

Wizened and tall for a human, she didn’t even reach his chin.

“Did you know, Corporal?” She asked. “Did you know that beneath us… was Darkness? You knew and still said nothing. You didn’t warn us.”

During the discussion, Ardan had had to share some details of what had happened, otherwise the crowd would likely have torn him apart, regardless of any documents or explanations. But now that everyone had calmed down and was looking with horror at the bodies of Driba and the hideous monster Marin had been turned into, their emotions were directed elsewhere entirely.

Had Ardan known? He’d begun to suspect something the moment Sestrova had told him about the underground passages. He had lured prey into traps more than once while hunting on snowy peaks and among the forest trails. And so he knew perfectly well when someone was trying to lure him in turn.

So?

“Yes, I di-”

He hadn’t even finished speaking when Mother Belava struck him across the face with the back of her hand. Then she gave him another ringing slap. And another.

“Children! There are children here!” She screamed again and again, breaking her old, human hand against his half-blood Firstborn bones.

Ard barely felt the physical pain. However, something pricked in his chest, and Sestrova’s voice echoed in his mind:

“No one gives a damn about orphans.”

Belava only stepped back once thick, hot blood was no longer dripping, but streaming from her fingers to the ground. Only then did she silently turn and, cutting through the crowd, head off in a direction known only to her.

Ardan, wiping his slightly itching cheekbones, said:

“I need the captain of a sailing vessel, any vessel, to take me and my cargo to the Metropolis!”

His satchel had been left behind in his room at the tavern, but Ardan had no time to go back for his things. He couldn’t risk the Puppeteers trying to intercept him and Sestrova. He would have to say goodbye to his regalia, some clothes, almost all of his documents, the remainder of his travel allowance, and a few trinkets, as well as the hat the cowboys had given him. Though he wouldn’t need it anymore…

For that same reason, he couldn’t use the railway, even though Nigrad was much closer than the Metropolis.

No one in the crowd moved. Ardan could see their eyes. They were filled with contempt, disgust, but far more than that—a wild, almost animal fear. This was how stories of the cutthroats from the Black House were born.

Well… Ardan himself had agreed to wear the black suit with the silver emblem of the Empire.

“By the authority of the Second Chancery and His Imperial Majesty,” Ardan opened his document holder and raised the eagle emblem above his head. “I need the captain of a vessel. Immediately!”

A moment passed, then another, and an elderly man with a wrinkled, tired face stepped out of the crowd.

“I’ll take you, Mr. Investigator. But it won’t be an easy trip. The storm… And we only have provisions for four days, and the journey will take about ten.”

Ten days later

“Magister, while I understand that people usually come back from assignments looking a bit rough, this…” Milar looked over the bearded, unwashed Ardan, who had been at sea for ten days and was now sitting in nothing but his underclothes, holding two staves and two grimoires, in the hold of a pleasure yacht.

He sat there, his gaze fixed on the ladder leading into the dark room, where, for the first time in ten days, a candle had been lit. And next to him, bound hand and foot, with a gag in her mouth, emaciated and gaunt, was a woman stuck in magical slumber.

“I take it that your trip was, let’s say, worth a thick stack of reports. And a couple of hours in the bath, because you stink so bad my eyes are watering.”

“Milar?” A tired, not very clear voice asked.

“The one and only, partner,” the captain nodded. “Alexander and Din are already upstairs, chatting with the captain. Listen, please tell me that the partially-exploded, partially-burned, almost a third destroyed Larand Monastery of the Sisters of Light was just an unfortunate accident due to the storm and has absolutely nothing to do with your trip.”

“Milar.”

“What, Magister?”

“Do you want me to lie or tell you the truth?”

Captain Pnev sighed and swore with a kind of detached, even lazy, air:

“Fuck.”