Matabar

Book II. Chapter 66 - "I take it back."

Chapter 66

Arkar, shouting something in the steppe orc tongue, emptied both cylinders. They held five massive rounds each—cartridges that were hefty enough that their recoil could tear the shoulder off most men. Each bullet stretched into a long, dark cone as it flew, leaving pale streaks in its wake. The faces of everyone caught up in this sudden and baffling confrontation flashed across the gleaming surfaces of the walls they passed by.

In those reflections, one could see: the half-orc, baring his fangs in a grin—one mad with fear, surprise and a resolve to fight to the last; Ardan, who was feverishly recalling everything he knew about Strigas; and the Homeless Fae herself, from whose maw lolled not one, but two tongues, the first of which slithered across her face and then over her bulging, dark eyes that were nearly popping out of their sockets.

Despite her bizarre physique, the Devourer of Bodies proved far more agile than one would imagine. Digging her claws into the walls and ignoring the laws of biomechanics and the fact that her joints should have snapped and her tendons ended up torn, she spun like a top. Her forearms and upper arms twisted into sinewy cords, and her paws glittered in a frenzied, aerial dance.

Some of the bullets were sliced to pieces and ended up becoming lead shrapnel embedded in the walls. The rest, after piercing the creature’s legs—or rather, its hind limbs—went whistling off into the darkness beyond.

“Looks like I wounded her, Ard!” Arkar whistled with a hunter’s excitement. With a sharp movement, he flipped the spent shells out of his revolvers’ cylinders and reached into his pocket for some spare “moons.”

The Striga, however, spun in the opposite direction like those spinning tops on strings that children had often played with in Evergale. Ard wasn’t sure whether she was cackling or cawing, or perhaps hacking up the black ichor that served as her blood.

And along with the drops of blood gushing from the rapidly-closing holes in her body, an acidic milk sprayed toward Arkar and Ardan from her wildly-whirling breasts.

Ardan was faster. Throwing himself between the wall and Arkar, he slammed his staff down on the floor, and one of the modifications of the Standard Shield shimmered to life before them. The multicolored veil did a good job absorbing the jets of acid, but it kept flashing with rainbow flares, and Ardi felt the rays in his Star guttering out.

Fortunately, he had brought along all the spare accumulators left over from his past adventures.

“Ard, ahgraz,” Arkar swore, using the orcish version of an old Fae curse. “Should I be laughing or crying right now?”

It was clear that the orc was referring to those long breasts flailing around like whips, but given that their acid was making the bricks on the walls slough off in a hissing, boiling, smoky slurry, Ard was inclined toward the latter option.

“Reload!” he shouted in lieu of answering the question.

Ard saw no sense in asking questions or trying to reason with the grinning, fanged creature. Even if she wanted to talk, she likely couldn’t tell him anything without risking an explosive end thanks to the Puppeteers’ seal planted inside her.

Instead, he focused on one of the modifications of his Ice Artillery, which he’d intended to test in the next round of the Magical Boxing qualifiers. It seemed like he would have to use it a bit sooner than expected.

The Striga cracked her maw wide open and let out a shrill, scraping cry that sounded like someone was dragging several dull knives across glass. Muscles bulged in her already bloated arms, which were now even larger than Arkar’s. She clapped her hands together, and a shower of stone shards hurtled toward the two half-bloods like a hail of brick bullets which, thanks to all their jagged edges, bore the same lethality as lead.

But Ardan had already slammed his staff against the ground. Diverting most of his focus from his shield spell, he forced the moisture from the air, from their bodies and the walls, to coalesce around the tip of his staff and congeal into a sparkling sphere of ice. It vibrated faster and faster until, a split second later, with an ear-splitting crack, it burst free and shot forward.

The Striga, whose eyes were already bulging from their sockets, crossed her forearms and doubled over to shield her body. But the impact never came. Instead, about a meter from its target, the sphere swelled like a water droplet and burst no less violently than the blasting charges used by miners.

A cloud of scalding steam wrenched a very different scream from the Striga, and the wall leading outside shuddered and collapsed midway between the Homeless Fae and Ard.

“Run!” Ardan yelled while severing his connection to the shield that had saved them from his own spell. He shoved Arkar’s shoulder and bolted toward the breach.

While the Striga was boiling alive in the seething vapor, her howls filling the air, Ardan and Arkar were already slogging toward the factory, ankle-deep in mud and sometimes sinking halfway up to their calves. Or rather, they were awkwardly stumbling more than running.

As fate would have it, the workers had managed to break the wooden footbridges with their trucks. The lack of light due to it being the dead of night had likely caused the issue.

“Why are we running this way?!” Arkar shouted, holding his revolvers almost comically as he struggled to yank his squelching boots free of the mud that threatened to bury them.

“Because there must be something over there that we can kill her with!” Ardan roared. Then he brandished his staff and free hand at the laborers ahead. “In the name of the Light, run! A foul thing’s here—run! Something unclean comes, run!”

But even though Ard used words familiar to the pious folk of the northern communities, the workers still looked at him like he was insane. They were far more troubled by the sight of a snarling, spittle-spraying Arkar and the collapsed wall than by a mage with a staff warning them about such outlandish dangers.

After all, it was one thing to believe in scary bedtime stories in theory, and quite another to truly believe in them when it counted the most.

“Why didn’t you just smash her with that spell?!” Arkar finally snapped, the absurdity of the situation and his frayed nerves pitching his voice from a shout into a shriek.

“Because it’s...” Ardan, who had turned toward Arkar, suddenly froze. What he had at first assumed to be the clamor of factory workers turned out to be something else entirely. Something from which flesh dripped like melting wax; something that, raking meter-long claws through the masonry as if it were no sturdier than wet paper, was crawling out of the steam-shrouded hole in the wall; something that, opening its maw so wide that its lower jaw hung almost to the middle of its torso, let out an unbearably high-pitched sound—a shriek so acute it was more like a shrill squeal. “...because it’s a Striga.”

Ardan never got the chance to explain that the Striga had, in all likelihood, recently eaten. Due to that, killing her, or even stopping her, would be virtually impossible without harnessing the power of a Blue Star or a major shard of a Name. Human myths often got it wrong, claiming that Strigas devoured the dead, or that they ate flesh at all.

No, they were called Devourers of Bodies because, by beguiling their victims, Strigas fed on, to put it nicely, “bedroom fluids,” through which they drained their prey’s vitality. Poor Lajak Majakov would wake up in the morning and find that he’d both aged and grown weaker. The Striga would be able to wield all the strength she had absorbed for a while, and a Blue Mage had more than enough strength to give.

That was why Ardan had prioritized delaying the Striga over doing more damage up front. She’d have simply recovered, potentially forcing them to fight her in close quarters.

“Unclean!” The workers shouted and then froze in their tracks.

Ard shifted his gaze from them to the Striga, but instead of a horrific monster, he saw the enticing, naked form of Anila. Swaying her body that was as lithe as that of any dancer in the Crimson Lady’s “cabaret,” she kept her dark eyes fixed on the workers. Arkar, like Ard, had clearly not been caught in her glamour, and he raised his revolvers.

“Run!” He barked as he squeezed the triggers of both guns.

The thunder of the shots merged into one continuous, deafening barrage that smothered the Striga’s scream. Still wearing Anila’s guise, she used movements reminiscent of that mutant from Tazidah Ardi had recently encountered, kicking off from the walls with suddenly elongated claws and soaring into the air.

Covering almost twenty meters in an instant, she leaped over Ard and Arkar. They weren’t her target at all. As Ardan watched the ugly creature reflected in the muddy ground below and the lovely, beguiling woman streaking overhead, she aimed for the northerners’ throats.

Arkar’s bullets tore through the black shroud of night, vanishing into the void. By then, the Striga had already landed behind the northerners, which prevented Ard from sending his prepared Ice Bullet after her. He’d known that he could never, even if he had a lifetime, calculate the parameters for a target flying above him, so he had waited for the monster to land—but now his spell was useless, and dismissing it to waste energy on another one would be just as risky.

“Don’t move, Speaker,” the Striga hissed. Standing behind two northerners, she retracted her claws, clamped her hands around their throats, and hid behind their backs. “Or these two will go to their false god.”

As the deadly, icy projectile whirled at furious speed above his staff, Ardan started to reply, but then he caught himself at the last second.

Strange...

Very strange...

“Why are you speaking Galessian?” Ard deliberately switched to the Fae tongue. “For a Fae—even one thrice Homeless—human languages are as bad as iron.”

This was the pure truth. Even Atta’nha could not speak Galessian, which was why Ardi had nearly forgotten his own native language once upon a time. Human tongues, for some reason, caused the Fae the same pain that iron did.

“Clever Speaker,” Anila cooed, licking her lips as dark stains spread down the two workers’ pants and their faces contorted into masks of animal terror. The Striga herself was peering just over their shoulders, with only her eyes visible. “Go on then, look into my eyes. Learn the answer. Come now. Try…”

Ardan genuinely struggled for a moment against the urge to meet her dark gaze. He had already endured a similar trial of willpower once before, when he’d stared down the creature that had been possessing Lusha’s body and soul, but... Now, after using his Speaker’s abilities several times while simultaneously resisting the pull of the dead Ley, there was not much strength left in his mind.

“What are we waiting for?” Arkar growled, holding both of his revolvers straight out as he stepped up to stand alongside Ard. “I’ll shoot them in the head, and you send her... back to wherever she came from.”

The Striga laughed upon hearing that, and one of the northerners went limp as he fainted. This didn’t even make the Homeless Fae flinch—she continued to hold all eighty-odd kilograms of him aloft, while the second, sobbing and choking on his own thick tears, was babbling prayers. He wasn’t praying because he feared Arkar or his revolvers. Not even the blood spilling down his neck had made him pray.

He was praying because of the being standing behind him. A man can fight the fears he understands even a little—those he’s faced before or heard about. But the terror that lurks in the dark folds of reality, hidden in childhood stories you forget by the next morning… That horror can’t be vanquished so easily.

“She’s going to kill them.”

Arkar drew back the hammers on his guns.

“Snap out of it, lad, she’s going to kill them regardless,” Arkar snarled. “With or without us. Those two are dead men already.”

Ardan grit his teeth and his fangs slid slightly out of his gums. Intellectually, he understood... he knew Arkar was right. Whatever they did, however they tried to play the next few moments out, the northerners were as good as dead. Their wives would not get to greet them when they came home from their shift in the morning. Their children would not get the chance to come running and laughing to see their tired fathers. None of that was going to happen.

All that would remain would be that cackling scrape of dull knives on glass—the sound that served as the Striga’s laughter as she doubled over with glee.

“Forgive me,” was all Ardan could choke out.

Arkar squeezed his triggers, and Ardan gave the mental command to his spell.

The Striga, still cackling, began spraying blood and crunching her bones anew as she cast off her Anila mask. Her maw yawned open wider than a wagon wheel, and in one sweep, she sheared off both men’s heads. Gulping them down her bloated, toadlike throat, she hurled the gushing, headless bodies toward Ardan’s spell.

The Ice Bullet tore through the first body, which blew apart in all directions in a burst of crimson ice shards, and then shattered against the second. At the same time, Arkar’s shots struck home. The first round punched through the Striga’s gut, flinging shreds of flesh both in front of the monster and behind it. The bits of gore faintly resembled intestines. The second bullet blew apart the left half of the monster’s face. But not even a second passed before the wounds sealed. Bones crunched back into place, innards slithered back like worms into the closing hole in her belly, and the Striga was soon lapping at her long claws with both tongues, which glistened in the night.

“Well... hell,” Arkar gulped. “Run!”

He was the first to lunge toward the factory gates leading into the workshop, his boots squelching in the mire. Thankfully, the wood decking there proved far sturdier.

Ardan, his staff once again squelching through the mud, drew yet more energy from his Stars. Beads of moisture swirled in a silvery dance around the tip of his staff, and a layer of ice shrouded the space around the Striga. A split second later, her enraged scream was cut off as three massive blocks of ice slammed together into a mighty barrier. Ardan didn’t know how long the Reinforced Ice Cage would hold. However, judging by the spiderweb of deep cracks spreading farther with each thunderous blow of the creature’s fist against the ice, it wouldn’t be very long at all.

He and Arkar sprinted toward the factory, leaving muddy tracks across the planks. The lamps atop the perimeter posts were already flickering on, and somewhere near the center, a rotating siren fan had begun to howl. Its mounting wail pounded their ears as oil-and soot-stained workers came spilling out of the factory.

“Run!” Ardan shouted at them, waving his staff and free hand. “Unclean! Run!”

They stared at him in confusion at first, but then, after following his frantic gestures to the collapsed wall of the administrative building, and to the ghastly, woman-shaped monster clawing at the blocks of ice, they threw down whatever they were carrying and bolted toward the gates as well.

Ard and Arkar were running the other way, however. Darting beneath the high arch of the workshop, the two half-bloods looked about for anything that might help.

All around them lay welding rigs that had been dropped right on the spot and were still plugged into their Ley-sockets. In the center, a makeshift “conveyor” of several machine tools for milling small parts had been mid-assembly. To one side, raised on a dais, was the shift supervisors’ and engineers’ booth, and behind its glass-and-wood walls, a few desks were strewn with heaps of papers and documents. Farther back, down in a shallow depression, stood several furnaces and hydraulic drop hammers intended for forging metal casings.

“Think that’ll help?” Arkar rumbled tersely, nodding toward those furnaces.

Ardan didn’t know how susceptible the Homeless Fae’s flesh might be to physical matter (especially since he still couldn’t smell her at all), but perhaps the red-hot tons of iron used to stress test the structure of a car could do the trick.

“There should be a control panel or a mechanical lever for the bellows,” Ard said, pointing his staff at the brick furnace control cabin. “Crank up the temperature until the tanks start to howl.”

“What?”

“The tanks! The ones with propane! Make them howl!” Ardan barked. “You’ll know it when it happens!”

Arkar let out a displeased, animalistic growl right in his face, but then he whirled and rushed toward the furnaces. In the meantime, the young mage, sensing in the back of his mind that his Reinforced Ice Cage was weakening, pressed the stud on his communication medallion once again. Only a few minutes had passed since he’d called for backup, so the Black House wouldn’t have had time to send in the cavalry yet. Ardan hoped with all his heart that the incident with the Tazidahian mutant and this Striga weren’t connected. If the Puppeteers had infiltrated government organizations not only in the Empire, but throughout the Western Continent…

If his medallion failed to elicit a response, then that would mean… that’s exactly what had happened.

“Thoughts for tomorrow,” Ardan hissed and turned away from the workshop to face the inner yard.

With a gesture that had become second nature to him, he flipped open his grimoire to the chapter on healing seals. Arkar would need a few minutes to switch the furnaces from test mode to maximum blast. And for each of those minutes, Ardan would have to stand alone against the Homeless Fae.

If he’d been a Blue Star Mage, the fight might have been more or less even, but as it was...

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“Why is she chasing us?” Ardan suddenly asked himself aloud after seeing that the Striga had only a few blows left before she would shatter the icy barrier. “If she’s guarding whatever’s in that safe, then how... how did she even end up here?”

Ardan recalled how, while hunting along the snowy trails, he’d ended up getting caught in other snow leopards’ traps more than once. Each time, he’d thought that he was following the quarry’s tracks, but in reality, he’d only gotten more and more tangled up in the silken snares laid down by more experienced hunters.

He had spent three weeks interacting with Anila, and he still hadn’t sensed that she was a Homeless Fae? For three weeks, he had, by any means necessary—magical or otherwise—tried to figure out what the problem was with an Manish’s company. And now, three weeks later, some monstrous coincidence had sent him to a factory where, somehow, the answer to all his questions just happened to be there?

Milar had once warned him that the biggest mistake a rookie investigator tended to make was trying to draw connections where none existed.

But what if... What if everything that was happening right now wasn’t an attempt by Ardan to sniff out another lead that could bring him closer to the Puppeteers? What if... What if... What if this was their attempt to remove a piece from the board? What if all of this was nothing more than a cleverly-played gambit? What if the plan had been for Ardan to end up facing a Striga against whom his spells were practically useless?!

“Ahgrat,” Ardan cursed under his breath.

Even if everything that had just flitted through his head was true, it changed nothing right now. The Striga, with one more slam of her meaty fist, smashed the wall of the ice cage to pieces and, leaping free of it, arched her neck like a wolf and threw back her head to howl. It was a howl unlike anything any beast or human could produce. It drowned out the blare of the siren and even overwhelmed the distant shrieks of the approaching fire brigades as the Striga tore at her own vibrating throat.

Ardan did not waver. Yes, the last time he had encountered a mighty Homeless Fae, Milar had been guarding his back, they’d both been surrounded by an enormous concentration of dead Ley, and Ardan had had time to prepare in advance and bring along several handy artifacts. But that was back then. In the past. Nearly half a year ago.

“I’ll send you back to the shadows, Homeless One,” Ardan declared and slammed his staff against the ground.

The Striga ran both tongues over her gore-stained fangs, stretching her lips into a ghastly grin that no facial muscles were meant to make. The corners of her mouth nearly reached her earlobes, and the creature’s bones and joints began to resonate again. They cracked and bent at sickening angles until she had assumed a stance that resembled both a four-legged beast and a grasshopper all at once.

“Go on and try, Speaker,” she taunted. She was still speaking in Galessian, and with every word uttered, boiling black ichor—her substitute for blood—dripped from her maw.

Churning the earth into bubbling, filthy froth and leaving a few small craters where she’d just stood, the Striga launched herself at him. Her body elongated into a long, nightmarish blur in the twilight as she hurtled almost thirty meters and brought one of her clawed limbs down at Ardan’s head. Only the presence of a dozen half-transparent Orlovsky discs that automatically interlocked like a honeycomb kept her talons from tearing Ardan’s head off.

This, however, didn’t stop her from trying. Snarling, she struck again and again, shattering one disc after another. Ardan mustered his will into a tight fist. He hadn’t practiced this particular spell often, and had only ever used it in a life-or-death situation once before, but he had no other choice left.

When only three of Orlovsky’s discs remained between him and the Striga—who knew neither fatigue nor fear—Ardan slammed his staff down once more. The concrete floor of the workshop shuddered in a fine ripple, and an icy whirlwind burst out from beneath the young man’s feet. It was far denser and swifter than the one that had swept through the Night Folk quarter not too long ago.

The seal of the Ice Dolls spell shone with a chilling winter’s enchantment, and out of it sprang a rough semblance of a bear—mutilated, lacking a clear form, with three legs and only half a head. It didn’t look like a monster so much as a broken doll.

The Striga laughed:

“Is that all your sorry excuse for the art can manage, Speaker?” The Galessian words clearly caused her pain, yet for some reason, she still chose to use them.

But Ardan had no time to dwell on that. He issued a silent command, and the prototype spell finished weaving its lattice of runic links. The misshapen bear, drawing in the freezing moisture from the air as it charged, rose up on one hind leg and brought its deformed, icy forepaws crashing down on the Striga’s shoulders.

Ardan, after hearing the crack of shattering concrete, turned and sprinted toward the machine banks. As he ran, he swapped out both of his accumulators, brushing the powder left over from the previous pair out of his rings.

These were the last ones he had—both for the Red and the Green Star. He wouldn’t get a second chance.

Placing himself between two lathes so that nothing could flank him, Ardan watched the ice bear pummel the Striga with its paws. It was even trying to slash her with the fangs of its upper jaw, which was all it had. Each of the bear’s attacks—every motion of that icy body—reverberated in Ardan’s mind like a hammer blow. Focusing on a spell where dozens of fluctuating parameters continuously took on and transmitted new values to each other was no easier than performing rapid spellcasting.

Seizing hold of a lathe for support, Ardan clenched his teeth and let his fangs slide out. The Striga, meanwhile, was laughing as she clawed off chunks of the icy beast, smashing them into silvery powder. She was one of those Homeless Fae who did not wield the art in the usual sense. Her kind had traded away their mastery of Names for flesh that was nearly invulnerable.

That had been enough, in ages long past, to strike fear not only into ordinary humans, but to sow chaos among the settlements of the Firstborn as well.

The operative words there were “nearly” and “long past.”

When the Striga’s next strike finally shattered the glassy Ice Doll, Ardan, who felt as if an actual bear had slammed a paw into his chest, was ready. The creature stretched out its body and lunged forward, yet Ardi still stood calmly between the machines.

“Hoping iron will save you, mortal?” The Striga rasped, unscathed, sated and smug. “I can endure it now, Speaker. I can hide among the humans. I can speak their language... I can do many things. We can do many things. The Harvest is nigh.”

Utterly assured of her invulnerability, she crept closer and closer to her prey, like a predator playing with its food. Deliberately, she grabbed iron bolts, nuts and tools with her hands and feet, which were hardly any different from her hands, as she advanced. They seared her flesh, but in less than a heartbeat, each burn knit itself over with fresh skin.

This was why Arkar’s bullets had done her so little harm. It wasn’t only because the Striga had so recently dined on a Blue Mage’s strength, but also because there was a reason Ardan hadn’t been able to sense her presence.

The Puppeteers’ experiments, the wild thought came to Ardan, but he brushed it aside.

Now was not the time...

“Go to Aror, spawn of Gales!” the Striga cried out. Her bones cracked anew, and the creature began to swell until she turned into a three-meter-tall monstrosity. One massive paw—as large as the lathe beside Ardan—went up, ready to deliver the final, crushing blow.

“You first,” Ard snarled, spitting out some blood as he slammed his staff against the floor.

A prearranged seal flared to life in a red pattern under his feet, and the gale of the Breath spell—snatching six full rays from his Red Star—slammed into the Striga from the flank.

Not long ago, the force of this spell had been enough to break his and Milar’s fall when they’d found themselves inside the lair of another Homeless Fae that had been implanted inside Lusha. And now that same storm blast plucked the Striga off the floor like a rag doll and flung the astonished creature straight into the gaping maw of an enormous furnace.

With a scream that sounded like the chittering of panicked locusts, the Striga writhed in the pool of molten metal. Shrilling and moaning, she struggled to escape from the belly of that searing, devouring iron that she had treated with such disdain just moments ago.

Her flesh burned with black fire, and her bones cracked and crumbled like charred logs. Ardan caught hold of Arkar’s proffered forearm as he reeled back.

“You know what, Matabar?” The half-orc drawled thoughtfully, watching the Striga thrash in the flames.

“What?”

“The next time you ask me for a favor, you can go right ahead and shove your proposal up your own ass.”

“How very kind of you.”

“You can very kindly go f… on a pleasant and highly erotic walk, I mean,” Arkar amended on the fly. “She’s taking a long time to die. Is that normal? Is it supposed to be like this?”

“I don’t kn-”

But before Ardan could answer him, a charred arm—aflame yet regenerating even as it burned—burst out of the furnace, flinging molten iron across the floor as it tore free.

Arkar and Ardan exchanged glances.

With a flourish, Arkar raised both of his revolvers, relentlessly cocking the hammers and pulling the triggers. Ardan, who was running on fumes, displayed the same quick spellcasting that he had shown off during his Magical Boxing fight.

A storm of lead and Ice Bullets pelted the Striga. She shrieked louder and even more furiously at first, but soon fell quiet and stilled.

“What a bitch,” Arkar spat through his fangs, running a smoking barrel along one of his tusks. “No more demons or any other riffraff, Ard. I’ve had enough of-”

“I’ll devour you!” a rasping scream echoed from within the furnace.

“Will this damned thing die or not?!” Arkar bellowed, feverishly reloading his revolvers.

Ardan, already dreading the inevitable paperwork, sighed wearily.

“On my signal—we run like hell!” He shouted and slammed his staff one final time against the floor.

“What do you mean by…”

A tiny cone of ice shot out with a pop, leaving behind a pale swirl of disturbed air around the tip of his staff, and buried itself in a four-meter iron tank that housed the fuel canisters.

“...signal?” Arkar finished. As one, they both tore off toward the exit.

The Striga—now reduced to nothing but a mangy skeleton and a pair of eyes spinning madly in their sockets—was already scrambling out of the furnace and screaming something at their retreating backs. But her voice was swallowed by the explosion—a blast so powerful that it was likely heard all across the Tend and Tendari.

The shockwave caught Arkar and Ardi, burning their backs, tearing into their clothes, and singeing their hair. It hurled them a few dozen meters, where it dragged them through the mud that mercifully cushioned their fall.

Face down, burned and cut by flying debris, they lay at the base of the factory’s blazing walls.

Groaning, Arkar rolled onto his back, which started smoking and hissing the instant it met the cold, brown mire.

“By the Spirits, Ard, sometimes I’m glad I’m not human,” Arkar croaked as he fished out a cigar stump with a shaking hand and tried to wipe the mud off it. He didn’t have much success.

“I get it,” was all Ard could wheeze out. It felt like it wouldn’t be him scrubbing his cloak on a washboard tonight (assuming anything was even left of it), but rather… like he himself would end up being dragged back and forth across one for hours.

Indeed, humans would never have survived such a “ride.”

Lying on their backs, the two of them basked in the glow of the immense fire now merrily devouring the workshop.

“Well, maybe they’ll be able to put it out quickly...” Ardan said, almost pleading with the universe. “And maybe-”

The rest of his words were drowned out by a secondary explosion that literally lifted the warehouse off the ground—the generators must have failed, or perhaps the flames had reached the barrels of oil intended for their combustion chambers. Smoking, scorched sheets of metal, reminiscent of autumn leaves, drifted slowly down to the ground.

“It’s still not too bad,” Arkar tried to console him.

As if mocking him, the workshop’s roof collapsed with a crash, and along with it, the walls and pipes caved inward, disappearing amid the flames.

“I take it back,” the half-orc grunted.

***

The Colonel, twirling a caramel lollipop on a wooden stick between his fingers instead of a cigar, was gazing wistfully at the spot where his ashtray used to be.

“Tough, is it?” Milar asked with a ton of sympathy in his voice.

“What do you think, Captain?” the Colonel sighed. “I had a cigar in my hand before I ever had a woman. And now I’m expressly forbidden from ever indulging in one again, unless...”

The de facto head of the Second Chancery sighed again and, leaning back in his chair, tossed the lollipop into his mouth. He let out a slight cough and took a sip of water from a cut-glass tumbler.

“But what troubles me far more is this,” the Colonel said, snapping his fingers against a sheaf of papers. “I don’t know, Captain, what kinds of conversations you’ve had with your subordinate, but this time, the Corporal caused damages to the tune of...” The Colonel lifted the papers to his nose and cleared his throat. Ardan hoped it was on account of the man’s lung issues. “...To the tune of twenty-nine thousand, four hundred and seventeen exes and thirty-six kso.”

“This is outrageous, Colonel!” Milar burst out, his temper flaring up. “First of all, how do they manage to tally the damage so quickly every time? Where do they dig up all these kso? And secondly—the factory most likely belonged to a Puppeteer subsidiary!”

“And that is the only thing staying my hand right now!” The Colonel, as he would have in the past, pointed first at Milar and then at Ardi, but this time, he used the lollipop instead of one of his beloved cigars. “Eternal Angels... That doesn’t really have the same effect, does it?”

“Not really, Colonel,” Milar allowed himself to relax enough for a tiny smile, but, catching the stern glint in the Colonel’s steel-gray eyes, he snapped back to rigidity. “Of course not, sir—it was highly convincing. Corporal, are you convinced?”

Ardan nodded.

“He lies, the mountain dog,” the Colonel muttered, popping the candy back into his mouth as he leaned into his chair again. “Report, Captain. And try to curb your torrent of words. I have to brief His Imperial Majesty soon, and I’d like to wash off all the drivel you’re about to fill my ears with before I meet with His Majesty. Because this...” The Colonel snapped his fingers again, but now at another set of documents.

Specifically, he was snapping at the report Ardan had written while waiting in the Second Chancery’s truck. The Black House reinforcements had arrived almost at the same time as the fire brigades and guards had, but not because Milar had received Ardan’s signal. The explosion really had been heard across all of Tend and Tendari. And that had confirmed Ardan’s worst suspicions... The communication medallions were no longer reliable when it came to matters concerning the Puppeteers.

Fortunately, Milar, as well as Alexander and Din, had arrived along with the backup. They’d seen to it that Arkar was escorted past the cordon without undue questions or document checks. As for the administrative building and office number “zero,” it had turned out to be quite interesting...

“We found this in Lashim Inakov’s hidden office,” Milar said, spreading several blueprints and photographs out on the desk. “As we suspected, Colonel, an Manish’s company really did have a Doll.”

“A doll?” the Colonel repeated, peering grimly at the blurry photographs.

“That’s what we’ve decided to call those who cooperate with the Puppeteers,” Milar explained promptly. “As you can see in the photographs, the safe contained both materials related to and the prototype of an engine based on a Paarlax generator.”

Ardan closed his eyes. He recalled how the late Senior Magister Erzans Paarlax had once shown him a prototype of his generator—one that wasn’t based on the principle of vibrating blades striking Ertalain crystals to produce sparks, but on what Paarlax himself had called a field. And now, barely half a year later, the entire scientific world was referring to that phenomenon by the name of the man who’d discovered it.

“As you recall, Senior Magister Paarlax stored a copy of the documentation in a bank vault, which Lea Morimer and her cronies reached before we did,” Milar went on, sliding over a photograph of the pried-open deposit box.

For a time, the Colonel silently rolled the candy from one cheek to the other, until he raised his gaze to stare at Ardan.

“What do you say, Corporal?”

Ardan flinched.

“On the subject of-”

“On this subject,” the Colonel said, tapping a finger on the photo of the engine prototype. “What can you tell me specifically about this?”

“Colonel, sir, perhaps it’d be better to consult Lieutenant Dagdag and-”

“Don’t fret, Corporal, I’ll consult him too, as well as a team of Grand Magisters loyal to the Crown, but I want to hear your thoughts specifically,” the Colonel interrupted him again. He moved his lips and throat slightly—it was something he used to do when blowing out cigar smoke—and nearly spat the lollipop onto the desk. “Damn it... old habits... So then, Corporal, since you keep landing in the thick of things time and again, it falls to you to do some thinking.”

Ardan paused, organizing his thoughts.

“For a long time now, people have talked about creating an engine that doesn’t rely on energy released by burning petroleum products, but rather on the more efficient Ley-energy,” Ardan began, dredging up everything he’d heard in his General Knowledge and Engineering lectures. “However, that’s only a theoretical concept. In practice, only living organisms can draw energy directly from the Paarlax field. And the mechanism of that process is still not understood or studied by anyone, which means we can’t harness it for mechanical purposes. What you see in these photographs is, essentially, a compact generator which is probably extremely useful in certain applications… but it isn’t the sort of breakthrough that can turn the whole world upside down.”

“It doesn’t need to be, Corporal,” the Colonel murmured, sliding the photos aside and turning toward the window. “The world’s ready to do a double somersault on its own at any moment... Now, do you think this engine could drive a heavy machine?”

“A machine... not an automobile?” Ardan caught the Colonel’s wording.

“A machine,” the de facto head of the Second Chancery repeated.

The Colonel was alluding to the military inventions of recent years—the monstrous engines of death and destruction like tanks and self-propelled artillery. These were things Ardan hadn’t glimpsed even on the Fatian border, and he hoped to keep it that way.

“The device in the schematics and the prototype could, at best, put out half a horsepower while being eight times more wasteful than a diesel engine,” Ardan said, though all he could really hear was the frantic pounding of his own heart.

The Puppeteers had been conducting experiments related to not just demonology and possession, but Ley Engineering as well? Ardan had never seen a tank or any sort of self-propelled artillery in person, but he’d heard enough from Edward to know how horrific those fruits of human ingenuity were.

And if you combined them with Ley Engineering?

Sleeping Spirits...

“And all of this in just half a year,” the Colonel murmured, closing his eyes. “Half a year ago, none of this even existed, and now they even have a working prototype...”

For a time, an oppressive silence hung in the office. All three of them were likely thinking the exact same thing...

“Captain.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Let’s get back to more down-to-earth matters,” the Colonel said, carefully gathering up the documents and photographs and fastening the ribbon ties of their folder. “What can you report about the course of the investigation?”

“We need to verify all the details and detain the suspects,” Milar said, glancing at his watch. “Mr. Inakov, it seems, was warned, since he left on the daytime train toward the Taian border. By tomorrow evening, he’ll most likely be intercepted, and then brought back to the capital a few days later.”

“Good,” the Colonel nodded. “Go on.”

“Brant Und and Adakiy Landyshev were detained at their apartments and taken in for interrogation,” Milar recited, leafing through his paperwork. “Senior Magister Idrad Radov was escorted to the proving grounds by Mshisty, where he’s also awaiting interrogation. The only one whose whereabouts we couldn’t confirm tonight is...”

Ardan covered his face with his hand.

“...So no, it won’t cover the whole factory. Or any part of the factory at all. It’s going to be right here, in the admin building—a single office.”

“Odurdod Nudsky,” Milar confirmed Ardan’s hunch. “He wasn’t at his residence, nor was he at his usual haunts. Neither his wife nor both of his mistresses know Mr. Nudsky’s whereabouts, or anything about any trips or business he had planned.”

Both mistresses... so much for his vaunted morality.

“Corporal.”

“Yes, Colonel?”

“Do you understand what this whole circus means?”

Ardan understood. He understood perfectly.

“It was a trap,” he replied. “Just for me. There’s still a mole in the Second Chancery who knew I would be at an Manish’s company.”

“Good,” the Colonel murmured, nodding in a detached way. “Glad to see you’re still using your head, rather than the place Mshisty throws his spells from... Captain, you’ll get a list of everyone who was aware that the Corporal would be at the company, but I suspect our illustrious mole won’t be among them and is working from the shadows.”

“Most likely,” Milar agreed.

“Check everyone regardless,” the Colonel ordered. “And then spread the word about Mr. Nudsky using all the Black House stations, through every cell of secret agents we have, and among the Daggers and our trusted civilian contacts as well…”

“But then the mole...” Milar began, and then, shifting his gaze from the Colonel to the folder of documents, suddenly smiled a predatory smile that was not unlike Arkar’s. Apparently, he and the Colonel had figured out something that Ardan hadn’t. “This was someone’s personal decision, Colonel. They acted as soon as the Corporal arrived... Someone was very eager to eliminate him. So eager, in fact, that they used Inakov’s factory, which clearly wasn’t meant for that.”

“Precisely, Captain,” the Colonel said, a dangerous light igniting in his steel eyes. This was something that made Ardan think he’d prefer to face several Strigas rather than become the target of that gleam. “The Puppeteers stumbled. One of their leaders has a strong dislike for our dear Corporal. This means that emotion is involved. And we will take advantage of that emotion. You will assign the Corporal to ‘Operation Winter Guard.’ Let’s see if we can lure the fish out of this pond.”

Milar sprang up from his seat.

“Colonel-”

“Sit,” the Colonel said. He hadn’t raised his voice, hadn’t even lifted his gaze, but even Ardan—who wasn’t being addressed and was already seated—felt as if he needed to sit up a little straighter. “We all serve the Empire’s greater good, Captain. Every one of us. In that, we are equal. And none of us is ‘more equal’ than the others. Every single one of us risks their neck alongside everyone else. Is that clear?”

For the first time ever, Ardan heard a note of protest in Milar’s voice when he answered the Colonel.

“It is, sir.”

“Then you are dismissed.”

Ardan and Milar rose from their chairs and said in unison:

“Colonel.”

And they received the customary reply:

“Captain. Corporal.”

Together, they left the office of their superior, walked through the corridors, which seemed to be abandoned (a ruse), went down the stairs and, collecting their coats from the cloakroom, stepped out into the street.

They were greeted by a damp and unpleasant autumn wind that was herding heavy, gray clouds across the sky. Soon, it would rain again. In the Metropolis, when autumn and spring came around, it was easier to count the days when people didn’t need umbrellas than the days when you wouldn’t dare show your face outside without one.

“Come on, Ard, I’ll drive you home,” Milar said. He glanced at his cigarette case but ultimately left it closed, tucking the silvery box back into his inner pocket.

“And what exactly is ‘Operation Winter Guard?’” Ardan couldn’t resist asking.

Milar only gave him a bitter smirk.

“Providing security for the guests of the Congress, and for the whole event in general.”

Ardan nearly stumbled.

Sleeping Spirits...