by RW Krpoun
“Check the chests,” she whispered to the historian, who was loading his crossbow, and slipped toward the center of the attic, where she found a large trap door and folding stairs. Listening at the trap door revealed nothing; Pug, crossbow at the ready, moved past her to check the other end of the attic. When Philip and Tonya joined her she motioned to the standard bearer and made a lifting gesture, then indicated that Philip was to follow her.
When Tonya pulled the trap door open (having carefully oiled the hinges first), Elonia found herself looking down at a burly blonde-haired man looking up at her, a loaded light crossbow braced casually against his hip, a fighting knife and mace hanging from his belt. She shot him squarely in the chest, the impact of the quarrel making him stagger back and fire his crossbow into the ceiling, where it ripped through the thin decorative pine ceiling, punched through the heavier oak planking that covered the rafters to make a floor for the attic, and embedded itself in the attic’s roof, the missile’s sudden eruption through the floor a foot from her side wringing a startled yelp from Tonya.
Dropping out the trap door’s hole, Elonia discarded her empty weapon as she landed and rolled, finding herself on a long square balcony surrounding a stairway leading down, the trap door opening over the south side of the stairwell, while the head of the stairs was at the north side; four doors opened off the west side, and two from the east. Behind her the folding stairs crashed downward into place as the dying scream of the man she had shot had eliminated any chance of surprise and the need for silence.
Drawing a throwing knife, she raced past the guard, who apparently heard the boards in the attic creaking under their footsteps and come to investigate, and turned the corner on the west side as the nearest door opened. A portly man of sober demeanor, rapier in hand, stepped out, his eyes widening in shock at the sight of her. They were six feet apart when she threw, the knife making one complete revolution before striking the cultist, inflicting what would have been a minor wound to the side but for the poisonous quill glued into the carefully etched groove on either side of the knife’s point. The man brought his rapier up to middle guard, grabbed his chest with his free hand, and staggered back a step.
Ripping her yataghans from their scabbards, Elonia slapped his sword point aside and stabbed the gray-faced cultist through the throat as Rodolf Cens stepped out of the north-most door on the west side and aimed a crossbow at her. Twisting her weapon free, Elonia dove into the open door beside her as a bolt whupped past her.
Sliding down the folding stairs, Tonya tried a shot at Cens as he fired, but missed, the quarrel smashing an ornate waist-high pot two feet to his left. The tall standard bearer jumped to the side as Philip, resting his crossbow on the bannister, shot Cens squarely in the chest, the artificer slamming into the wall from the impact of the bolt.
Tumbling across the carpet, Elonia found herself in a neat little sitting room with two doors opening off of it; a young girl wearing a maid’s dress was curled on a settee, apron over her face, howling with fear.
“Quiet girl...eeahh,” the Seeress gasped as she dodged backwards and stumbled over a stool, the ‘maid’ having suddenly uncoiled herself and lashed out with a narrow-bladed poniard, the weapon’s point glancing off the Badger’s shirt; but for the enchantment in her girdle, which gave the cotton of her blouse the strength of light chainmail, the blade would have caught her just under the breastbone and penetrated deeply. The girl staggered towards the door from the force of her stroke, then abruptly spun and crumpled, a crossbow bolt standing out from her side.
Realizing that she was following Elonia when she was supposed to be teamed with Philip and Pug, and thus should be heading to the east, Tonya slid to a stop and turned to pivot as Maxmillian fired his crossbow into the room Elonia had jumped into. A sudden flame of pain coursed through her as her left leg buckled so abruptly that she crashed into the floor, badly spraining her left wrist. Rolling onto her right side, she saw an arrow embedded in her left thigh and was dimly aware of Pug leaning over the railing to fire his crossbow. “Wounded !” she yelled, hoping the Doctor was close, and cursing at the pain.
Philip thrust a quarrel into his recocked crossbow and leaned over the rail, aiming at the young man in footman’s livery who had shot Tonya; the cultist had lost his bow and dropped to the stairs when Pug’s bolt had caught him in the belly, lying sprawled across the carpet-covered risers halfway up the stairs. The Badger took aim and then cursed as a quarrel slammed into his crossbow from below, knocking his bolt out of the weapon as the bow released, the stock riding up with the impact to smack him smartly on the side of his jaw. Dazed by pain, the Badger fell back from the bannister, losing his crossbow when a bow-tip caught the rail, wrenching the weapon from his hand.
Shaking his head to clear it, he saw the Doctor kneeling by Tonya, Maxmillian running towards Elonia, who had just popped back out the doorway she had ducked into, and Pug, sword in hand, heading to the eastern doors. Drawing his short sword and dirk, Philip climbed to his feet and trotted after the Arturian, ignoring the sounds of shouting and door-slamming coming from downstairs.
Kuhler knelt by the wounded standard bearer. “Lay back and hold still,” he ordered, dropping his backpack onto the floor and jerking a cord; instead of opening at the top, the pack unfolded in four directions like flower petals opening, revealing various medicines, implements, and tools of the medical practitioner’s trade strapped to its interior. Selecting a small knife, the Doctor cut away the leg of the wounded Badger’s breeches, then used the sharp point to cut a row of runes just above the wound, muttering as he did so. Carefully gripping the shaft, he incised the last rune and slid the arrow out of his patient’s leg without the barbs catching or tearing. A second row of runes below the puncture caused the blood to stop welling from the wound; two more rows, flanking the wound to either side followed, and then Kuhler placed his hands on the rent and closed his eyes, muttering a sing-song cant as the lips of the wound grew back together, healing without a scar.
Wiping the knife’s blade clean with a rag soaked in gin, he replaced it in the case, swabbed off the shallow surface-cuts that made up the runes with another gin-soaked rag, took a swig from the gin flask, and closed up his pack. “Ten Marks to handle a pretty woman’s thigh, what a womderful job I’ve found. Lay still for a few minutes, and remember that the blood you lost will have to be replaced naturally,” he advised Tonya.
Trotting past Elonia, who had just ripped open the door to a linen closet, Maxmillian pulled open the next door and swore as a brass candlestick bounced off his breastplate, knocking him back a step. His crossbow quarrel stopped the heavyset maid’s howling rush in mid-step; stepping to the gagging woman who thrashed across the floor in agony, he stove in her skull with his hammer and then reloaded his crossbow.
The first room they checked was a study with a door leading off to a bedroom, neither of which was occupied. Philip led the way through the next door, the last on the east, finding himself in yet another sitting room, one with four doors leading off of it, servant’s quarters, he guessed.
Pug was right behind him as he lunged through the doorway, too close behind him as Philip spun around, unsettled at the way the inward-swinging door had bounced back well short of the wall. Before he could bring his sword into play or make room for his comrade, a man wearing a butler’s waistcoat and vest darted from behind the door and thrust a short dagger into the side of Pug’s neck, twisting the blade as he jerked it free.
“Wounded,” Philip screamed, leaping in to plant his blade in the cultist’s belly, following it by ramming his dagger into the man’s throat, ignoring the bloody blade that scraped across the front of his mail shirt. Ripping his blades free of the sagging cultist as Ernest darted through the door, dagger ready, and knelt to tend Pug, Philip began kicking the butler, driving the heel of his stout boot into the man’s head and face until the last traces of life had left the cultist.
Gasping for air, he turned to the Doctor, who was rinsin
g off his hands with gin. “Sorry,” Ernest shook his face grimly, taking another swig and offering the flask to the Badger. “It angled between two of the bone disks in the neck; he was dead before he struck the floor.”
Philip tossed off the gill left in the flask and handed the container back to the Doctor before violently kicking in the other doors in the room one after another in the hopes of finding another cultist.
“West side is clear,” Elonia told Philip as he approached the head of the stairs, the Seeress kneeling next to Maxmillian, who was reloading his crossbow after having finished off the footman-archer.
“Pug’s dead, Tonya’ll be fine, and we got the butler,” Philip knelt by the two, keeping his voice down. “Pug took a dagger in the neck; it would have been me, but he followed me into the room too close, right on my heels.”
“Damn,” Elonia sighed.
“He was with us at the Orc fort in fifty-three,” Maxmillian observed mournfully. “Never said much, but solid as a wall in a fight.”
“With your butler, that makes five men and two women dead,” Elonia deliberately put Pug out of her mind. “That leaves three men, my guess one of the Graveur brothers and two of the cultist artificers they brought here for extra security.” She plucked their only Storm of Disruption from a pouch. “I’ll use this, and we’ll charge. Are you ready?”
The sudden eruption of the storm filled the entrance hall with swirling clouds of dust, the device’s effect greatly enhanced by its use indoors. The three Badgers raced down the stairs as the whirling winds abruptly stopped. Maxmillian came around the stair’s right railing and shot a hulking artificer, whose streaming eyes betrayed his blindness, square in the belly, tossing aside his empty weapon to finish the cultist with his hammer.
A crossbow bolt fired blind whupped past Philip as he made for an expensive table of hand-rubbed white ash that had been tipped on its side to protect the cultist crouching behind it. He dove over the barrier, leading with his sword, as the blinded artificer discarded his crossbow and tried to draw his mace, the Badger’s blade catching him in the side of the neck, shearing through the stand-up collar of the man’s ring mail shirt and inflicting a terrible wound. Philip stabbed the screaming cultist to death with his dagger, unaware that an evil grin was stamped on his face.
Elonia saw the man who, from his clothes, she guessed to be the surviving Graveur brother coming out from a side door, having missed the effects of the Storm, an oddly fragile-looking crossbow in his hands, and threw with a force that spun her half around. At a distance of twenty-five feet her war net expanded to its full diameter of four feet before impacting with the cultist, his quarrel ripping through the net without doing serious harm to it or anything else, the sudden flailing folds of netting and shocking impact of half-ounce lead weights battering his body rendering the man helpless long enough for Elonia to recover and cross the distance between them. Just as he threw off the net the blade of a yataghan slid under his throat, causing the heavy-set man to freeze in place, his pale blue eyes regarding the Seeress with a chilly interest.
Philip came up from the side in a moment and relieved the man of his sword, dagger, and empty crossbow, then bound his wrists tightly behind him.
“Klaus Graveur,” the cultist nodded towards Elonia. “I suppose that threats about Imperial Law would be pointless.”
“Yes,” she nodded, examining the damage done to her net. “Corporal Elonia Starshine of the Phantom Badgers,” she added absently.
“Ah, yes, we were beginning to suspect that,” Klaus shrugged as Philip expertly searched him, coming up with three hidden daggers and a vial of poison. “Especially since Zari was found dead. For obvious reasons our people didn’t search the cottage until other possible locations had been checked. We knew that you had been taken, but how ever did your people find you?”
“We had a Watcher in the city,” the Seeress shrugged casually, the memory of being naked and bound to the sweat-slick boards sending a cold shudder through her body. The first Doctor they had interviewed had Healed the welt on her foot for a Mark after politely refusing to take employment for the raid, but the other whip-marks still burned on her body.
“Clever. We had no idea how sophisticated your approach would be; no one has made a serious attempt upon our Circle in many years, you see. Decades, even. I suppose my brother is dead?”
“Yes, I killed him.”
“A shame. Still, he was one hundred and ten years old; he would never have survived the loss of the Orbheart anyway. Nor will I, I’m afraid, even though I’m a sprig of ninety-seven.”
“You certainly are taking this well,” Elonia observed.
Klaus shrugged. “I’ve been expecting this since we found van Feuchter’s body yesterday. It was clear you had extracted the Orbheart’s location from him; when the rest voted not to risk moving the Orbheart and Zari went missing I knew in my gut we were dead. If you could kill the Duchess in front of van Feuchter and him not suspect a thing, well, I knew the end had come. How did you know about Priller?”
“A whore-runner named Keela located him, or news of him, and knew that he had contact with Cens; your people killed her without finding out what she knew.”
“That was Cens’ work, he was our master artificer,” Klaus shook his head. “I always thought it was stupid to plant the badges, and to commit simple murder. Far wiser to take them all away to our cottage and extract everything they knew, but Cens thought he could wipe the slate clean with his plan. Not only did we defame your Company, but his thugs failed to do their job properly on the two Badgers who started this whole mess. It was the novelty, you see, Cens was getting tired of simply playing, and wanted a taste of sheer bloody murder. You’ve killed him as well?”
“Yes, quickly.”
“A pity, a bit of suffering would have been in order to atone for his blunders. To be frank, between today’s work and yesterday’s action, you’ve quite eliminated our regular artificers.”
“Ground level’s secure,” Maxmillian advised her. “I’ve called Dooaun and Leta in.”
“Good,” Elonia nodded. “Check the cellar.” She turned back to Klaus. “Just how many are there in your Circle?”
“Of the seven in the Inner Spiral, you’ve slain the Master of the Beckoned, van Feuchter, the Head of the Artificers, Cens, the Head of the First Spiral, my brother, and the Head of the Third Spiral, myself. The Master of the Sphere and the Masters of the Second and Fourth Spirals are free at the moment, but I doubt they will survive the Orbheart. The First Spiral is made up of seven members used for recruiting, one of whom, Myra, you killed yesterday; one or two of the others ought to survive. Of the Second Spiral, the dedicated members of our Gathering, there are twenty, half of whom ought to survive. The Third Spiral are dedicated members who have not yet joined with the Sphere; they and the Fourth Spiral, who are persons not quite integrated into the Gathering, will not be affected, there are twenty and thirty, respectively. The Outer Spiral is large and vague; in fact, you and you husband were counted in their ranks until we detected your presence at our primary site.”
“I don’t suppose you would care to name names?”
“No, I don’t believe so. Eventually another Circle from outside Teasau will send ranking members into the area and rebuild the survivors into another Circle.”
“Just out of curiosity, where did Gerhard Stotz fall within your Circle?” Philip asked from behind Klaus.
“Ah, past tense, he’s dead too, I suppose? Yes, well, the badges were a connection you could not overlook, although how you discovered that he made them is beyond me. He would have fallen into the Fourth Spiral’s numbers. We would have brought him in at some point, but he was too high-profile for immediate upgrading.”
“Going to the Basement, that sort of thing?” Philip suggested.
“Exactly. We recruit from that place, but none of the Circle frequents it; too obvious by far. Gerhard was a man of too broad of tastes, and prone to fixations; we were waiting for hi
m to mature and settle down.”
“I’ve found it,” Maxmillian announced, coming around from behind the stairs. “In the cellar, it was. I haven't bashed it yet.”
“Good, wait a moment,” Elonia called. Turning, she half-smiled at the cultist. “Klaus, it was interesting speaking with you.”
“And you; that was always my chief vice: talking too much. They wouldn’t let me do interrogations in the cottage any longer, as I would be days at it, had to find out every little thing about the subject, every detail. It always drove my brother to distraction, that habit: he always said I ended up telling more than I learned. Anyway, I just wanted to get a feel for who you were, what you were like. After all these years, you stop encountering anything new, just variations on the same theme, as it were. But today has been very new, and exciting; I don’t even mind losing when it has been novel.”
“Good for you,” Elonia sighed and nodded to Philip, who drove the point of one of Klaus’ daggers into the base of the man’s neck. “And there’s something else you’ve never experienced.”
“There it is,” Maxmillian indicated the Orbheart: a skull fashioned out of a crystal-like substance sitting in a depression carved into a block of wood, illuminated by a light rod the scholar had jammed into the wall above it. Odd flickers of light seemed to crawl across its surface from time to time, and it radiated a chill that coated the block it rested upon in a fine layer of frost. “Not really much to look at, when you get right down to it.”
“Seen enough?” Elonia asked Ernest, who was studying the item with intense curiosity. Tonya and Philip each took a cursory look and then went about the business of looting the house.
After a few minutes the Doctor stood. “That ought to do it; the Eight knows when I’ll have another chance to see one. I have read accounts from cult-hunters, of course, but I wanted to actually see one. It twists the light in a very unusual manner, did you notice? The cultists must have had to expend enormous amounts of power to create such an obscenity, and all just to prolong their pathetic lives. What a horrible place our world is, sometimes.”
