A elegant and stately woman stood on a rise above them all.
"My darlings, every one of you~"
"Yes, Lady Mivelle!"
Below her spread a crowd a thousand strong.
"Do you all trust me enough to hear what I ask — and to do it for me~?"
A handful of words, and the thousand-some souls below felt something settle over them like—
—an enchantment.
"Do you believe me, all of you, that the people in the Eastern District are nothing but wicked folk?"
"We believe! We believe!" A thousand voices braided into one.
"Then these people need me to make a contract with them, don't they — to make them good, like you!"
"Yes!"
"So you'll go and bring them to me, so I can fix them to be just like you — won't you!"
"Yes!"
The crowd began to run, all of them at once, surging toward the land where a great high wall had once stood.
"Clerks, evacuate — every one of you! Riders to Central District with word, and raise the front line! Patrol units, cover the civilians! The rest of you — do as you were trained!"
There was a beat where the whole hall answered with their boots — a single hard crack of heels striking the floor in unison, a salute thrown as one, eleven hundred voices barking the affirmative loud enough to shake the rafters.
Then the battalion broke and ran, jostling and chaotic, scrambling for the new weapons.
"S-Senior..." Emil's voice shook. So did his hands.
Rafael's face had gone grim, no better than the boy's.
"Just as we feared," he said.
"Covering fire — now!"
The front line went to work, and it was the work of men with their lives on the table. RMO officers cast their catalysts in fast brutal succession, light tearing off their hands; rifle barrels clashed against raking claws; blades came down on hide so hard they rang like struck iron and skidded off. Renfield and the front-rank RMO cast and cast and cast until they were all of them heaving for breath, sweat sheeting down their faces in the cold.
"Hurgh—!" Renfield put his shoulder into a beast and forced it over onto its back, then hammered his catalyst into it point-blank, again, again, chest working like a bellows.
The clean shing of a blade leaving its sheath.
"Ah—"
A figure in black priest's robes burst from the dark and flew at Renfield.
The force of it took him clean off his feet and onto his back.
"Son of a—!"
They grappled across the broken ground — the figure pinning, Renfield bucking it half off, a knee driving down, his forearm barring a throat; advantage traded for advantage, neither holding it, the two of them rolling through the muck with nothing decided.
Something tore through the air — and burst the head of the thing straddling him, from behind.
Renfield sat upright, snapped his head toward where the shot had come from, eyes going wide.
"...Now that's more like it!"
A man in MP uniform, a peculiar long rifle slung at his shoulder, clapped Renfield's commanding officer on the back.
"Slow as a wagon, your carriage, Mister Otto."
"Fast as it gets, damn you."
Crack. Covering fire poured in from behind them.
But it was not enough. For every beast the rifles put down, two more heaved up out of the broken earth, and the line buckled — RMO, MP, Standing Army all giving ground at once, a captain dragging a legless man back by the collar, a section folding inward where the corrupted things had broken through. The front bent. It did not snap. Not yet. But every man on it could feel how little was left between not yet and now.
---
Nothing... there's nothing...?
The damsel in white tore through the books of the palace library.
The queen pulled volume after volume from the shelves and let them fall open and shoved them aside, her gloved hands moving faster than her reading could keep pace with. She did not know what she was looking for. She only knew that the one who always knew what to do was not here, and so she had come here, to the place where knowledge was kept, as though the knowing might be lying flat between two covers if she only turned enough pages.
The gas lamps were guttering across the whole of the palace, low and orange in the dim of an early dawn that had not quite arrived. One by one the books came down. One by one she set them aside. Her hands left faint damp prints on the leather.
When the lamp at her own table dimmed to almost nothing, she reached for the small ███████ at her belt and worked it, and a thin point of light caught and held.
She lifted it toward the dark glass of the cabinet door — and went still.
In the black mirror of the glass a pair of eyes looked back at her, and she could not make them out. The lamplight was too low, the glass too dark, her own sight too soft at the edges; the figure in the reflection was a smear of pale and shadow, its face a blur she could not resolve no matter how she narrowed her eyes. She leaned a fraction closer. The blur leaned closer too. She could not tell what its expression was.
She drew back, and gathered the front of her skirts, and left the library.
The corridor beyond was wrong in the way only a familiar place can be wrong.
She had walked it ten thousand times. In the half-light it had become long, and strange, and the gas lamps along its length flickered up and guttered down out of step with one another, so that the dark moved as she moved through it. Her own shadow stretched ahead and snapped back. The portraits on the walls were only deeper patches of black.
She caught her loafer on the lip of an uneven flagstone and went down.
Her hands shot out. A loose sheaf of papers scattered beneath them, and as she caught herself one sheet drew its edge clean across her cheek, a thin bright line of pain.
She pressed her gloved fingers to the cut. Then she pressed harder. Then she was rubbing at it, at her own cheek, scrubbing as though the sting were something that could be wiped off — and the scrubbing only made it worse, the skin reddening under her glove, her breath coming short and quick. She scratched at it. She made herself stop. She got up.
She walked on, faster now, half-blind in the failing light, one hand out ahead of her, until the dark gave way to a room with a lamp still burning in it and she half-fell through the doorway into the light.
It was some small antechamber. There was a side table. On it, a crumpled tissue.
She seized it and pressed it to her cheek before she had looked at it — and then she did look, and the thing in her hand was stiff and soiled with something dried and yellow-white, and she did not understand what it was, only that it was wrong, and she flung it from her with a small wordless sound and scrubbed the back of her glove across her mouth.
She cast about for anything else, any clean paper, and snatched up a sheet from the table — and it too caught her, a second thin cut across the same cheek.
"Ow..."
The papers on the table were correspondence. The first envelope her eye fell on was stamped across its face: FOR DESTRUCTION. The one beside it had not yet been sealed. It bore no such stamp. It bore only a recipient: Lady Black.
She picked it up.
To Claude Veilnoir: Eliminate the Exchequer Council, then proceed with Plan B214.
Install ███ in its place, assign agents ███, then move document set E██ to the incident site. And do not forget to extract ███ — we'll have need of him again.
1 October, 1324.
Signed: Flaure Rosier.
The room went thin around her. The world drew narrow and far away, down to the small square of paper and the name at the bottom of it, which was her name, in a hand that flowed and looped with a confidence her own had never had.
The paper slipped from her fingers.
Her eyes ticked side to side, fast, fixing on nothing.
"I— I didn't write that...?!"
She took her own head in her hands.
Kreeeeeeee
The world pulled narrower still. Her hand groped sideways and found something, the light stuttering—
—and then the voice, when it came, was smooth and ordinary, the easy mumble of a man half-asleep.
"Now, now, Lady Flaure~ Aren't you a naughty thing, making off with my tissue of love like that~"
"D-don't come near me!"
It was only a fat old clerk, as it turned out. Drunk, besides. He put out one hand toward her — and pitched forward onto the floor, a bottle tumbling off the table and cracking against his skull as he went.
She fled the room.
Out in the corridor again, the lamps still stuttered on and off.
Her loafers made almost no sound — soft soles, soft steps, the only sound the faint brush of them and the held rhythm of her own breathing, every footfall felt rather than heard.
Somewhere ahead the gate guards would be losing their minds over the failing lamp lines.
'EEKKKKKKKKKKKH"
A sound came from behind her. Low — and in the dark glass of a window to her left, a pair of red eyes met hers, looking at her from over her own shoulder.
She spun.
Nothing. An empty corridor. And then, from down the hall, the ordinary drunken muttering of the fat old man, somewhere out of sight.
She walked on.
She walked for a long time. She did not let herself look at the windows. Her shoulders had drawn up toward her ears; her steps had gone short and careful; once she stopped and pressed her back flat to the wall and stood breathing until she could make herself move again. Then there was a mirror set into the corridor wall, full-length, framed in tarnished silver, and she came to a stop before it without meaning to.
She tilted her face to the glass to look at the paper cuts on her cheek.
And on the white of her dress, as she watched, marks began to appear — dark smudges blooming up out of nowhere across the cloth. At her mouth. At her waist. At her hip.
She struck out at her own skirts and recoiled and ran — mind gone white, no thought left in it but the single animal need to be away — and threw herself through the nearest door and shoved it shut behind her.
A washroom. She turned and faced the mirror over the basin and bent to it, scrabbling for tissue, for water, splashing it up at her own face, again, and again, and again.
The water ran. She bowed her head until it was nearly in the basin, the water from the tap leaping up and breaking against her face and not stopping.
What is happening to me tonight... the lamps, and then those letters—
She thought of the soiled thing she had held, and her whole body crawled, and the thought layered over itself, doubling—
She lifted her head.
In the dark glass, the reflection that should have been only her own was not alone.
Pale hands had come out of the black behind her reflection — long, too long, the fingers tapering past anything a human hand should be — and they had laid themselves upon her. One cupped her reflected throat. One had closed over her shoulder. One pressed flat to her reflected waist. One curved low at her hip. They were the colour of something kept out of the sun, and they held her with a dreadful gentleness, and she felt them.
She felt the cool weight settle on her shoulder. She felt the press at her waist turn her, just slightly, the way a dance partner turns you — felt her own body shift along the line of that touch, swayed by it, moved by it, leaning where it asked her to lean.
She tried to scream. There was no voice left in her to do it.
"Ah... a-ah... ah..."
The hand at her jaw tilted her face up toward the glass. The one at her hip drew her back a half-step into an embrace she could not see the body of. And all the while the woman in the mirror — herself, only herself — stared back out at her with her own wide and terrified eyes, held in the arms of nothing at all.
Then her sight swam, and the basin came up cold under her hands, and when she could see again the glass held only one figure in it.
She did not remember leaving. She came back to herself already in the corridor, walking fast, face forward and rigid, seeing nothing.
...It's gone?
She walked on.
She was making for the stairs, for her own rooms at the very top of the tower, and she had found a kind of rhythm in it — one foot, the next, eyes ahead — when a sound came up behind her.
Footsteps. Faint. Not loud at all. Only — there.
Click.
Click.
A woman's heels, somewhere back down the corridor, drawing nearer.
Click. Click.
Closer. Unhurried. The sound was not large. It had no business frightening anyone. And yet each small sharp report of it landed like a hand on the back of her neck, and her own soft steps quickened, and quickened again—
A clerk came up out of the dark behind her.
For the breadth of a second, caught at the edge of Flaure's vision, the young woman's face wore a flat and tired and bored expression — the look of someone awake too long at a thankless hour. Then their eyes met, and in the space of a blink the clerk's face bloomed into a bright and proper smile, a curtsy half-begun.
A smile, an exaggerated smile. A Fake smile.
The heels clicked past her, sharp and then softer, and softer, and were gone around the corner.
Flaure let out a breath.
She walked on.
And a few steps later, from somewhere behind her, a new sound began.
Boots. Heavy ones. The deep deliberate fall of a big man's stride on stone, each step landing with a weight the clerk's heels had never had — and coming, unmistakably, after her, chasing her.