Harlan and Amber looked at the man, who had an appearance that didn’t draw the eye towards himself with beauty or deformity.
Brown hair, brown eyes, 5’8, simple clothes, a man like any other Harlan had ignored a million times.
The only thing odd was that he placed a gun on the table by Harlan.
“Before I get up, I think you are going to shoot me in the face. If you shoot me, I’ll spare Sam and Liat.”
Harlan grabbed the revolver and cocked back the hammer.
“I am going to love this. But, if you don’t shoot me, I’m going to detonate the bomb in my body, and kill your sister along with everyone else in this room.”
The man lifted his shirt, showing surgical wounds.
“Sure, the villagers may die, but unless you instantly kill them, it is unlikely that I can’t heal them.”
“I think you’ll find it very hard to do anything with magic after the bomb goes off.“
“You are the one who hurt Safira, aren’t you?”
“You drew that connection to my crystals in an instant. You see, that is what will make our time together so special. You understand how this all works, and you haven’t hesitated once. Now, with what you know, at this range, will your sister survive?”
“Probably. But the villagers will die.”
“So, shoot me, your sister loses her companions, don’t shoot me, everyone else in this room dies, and you are gambling with your sister’s life.”
“If I shoot you, how will you kill Liat and Sam?”
“When my heart stops, bombs under their beds will activate. You know, your soulsmithing, it is fascinating.”
“Under the frames or under the mattresses?”
“Inside the mattresses, so don't think about opening a gate to redirect the blast.”
“How are you going to activate the bomb in your stomach?”
“Just a thought is all it will take.”
Harlan rapped his fingers on the table.
“Amber, what do you think?”
“Don’t shoot him, take the risk that you can save me and that he is bluffing.”
“I can tell there is a mana gem instead of his body and his mind is odd. That along with him mentioning crystals specifically, I believe this is the same bomber. How bad do you think your survivors guilt will be if Sam and Liat die tonight.”
The man started slamming the table with his hands and kicking his feet as he laughed.
“Are you considering the villagers at all? Or is this really just your sister or her friends in your math?”
“Liat is my friend as well. But you are right, I’m not thinking about the villagers at all. It is just Amber or them.”
“Harlan, you can’t be serious.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Harlan leaned closer to her and took the gun off of the man.
“You know that I care about you more than just about anything, and by living, more lives will be saved over the course of your life than by these people. It will be a net negative for all of Ragne if you die. But it would only really be a negative for this single village if the other five or six people here die.”
Harlan handed the revolver to Amber.
“If you are certain, then take the gun, and throw it away.”
The man couldn’t take his eyes off of the gun as Amber held it in her hands, hesitating to toss it away.
She knew that Safira almost died, and she had royal guard armor.
So close to the bomb, could she be sure of her survival?
Harlan knew that the man would be entirely unable to look away from the gun, because it was the source of great joy for him, and because it is what he would do.
Thus, he failed to notice Harlan shift his hands into claws.
Harlan cut cleanly through the man’s chest and out the other side, he had a gem in his hand.
The man seemed shocked, but he was still able to speak.
“That’s… cheating.”
“Amber, get Sam and Liat, they're both awake still in Sam’s room. You, I’m not going to give you such an easy way out.”
He dropped the veil.
“EVERYONE OUT, THERE IS A BOMB.”
It wasn’t late enough in the evening for them to drunkenly stumble out, so they ran out normally.
Harlan opened a gate and held the man through it.
If he still managed to explode, then Harlan would take the brunt of it, but he had more bodies than just this one.
All he needed to do was keep the man’s heart beating, and no matter how much agony it caused him.
“Ah, I should’ve expected this. Next time I’ll make it so taking the gem out triggers the bomb.”
“I don’t see how there will be a next time.”
“See you soon.”
Harlan felt something change in the man’s mind, like he died and it faded away, no, it was more like a parasite had entirely enveloped the man and now fled.
Harlan tried to catch it, but he had only one hand to cast spells and his magic related to the subject wasn’t meant to trap, but rather to help Dawn.
The man with Harlan’s arm through his chest, but avoiding any major organs as best he could, began to scream.
Harlan called Rosewell.
Now that he was sure that he had only been a shell for that ghost, he decided that he should save the man.
“I have a man with a bomb in his stomach like Safira was hit with, and there are two more bombs in this inn.”
“Is he still there?”
“No. Why do you have a ghost problem?”
“Are the bombs active?”
“I have my hand through a man, and if his heart stops, the bombs will explode.”
Harlan saw Amber go out the front door, Liat had Sam over her shoulders.
“Amber just left, the building is clear.”
“I’m sending people to keep that man alive and get the other bombs.”
“I would caution against moving them very far. If they work like the blood crystals I use in the Reinoan communication boxes then the range should be very far, but if they work though some other method and there is a limited range, moving them would probably break the link and set them off.”
“I will make sure to warn them of that.”
The scientists, or whatever they were, arrived in bulky sets of armor.
If the issue was that the crystals would pierce armor and make it so they couldn’t be removed by way of them being turned to liquid, then the easiest answer was to just make thicker armor so the inside would still shift since the crystals had limited range and penetration.
Harlan explained everything as best as he could, and one of them grabbed the gem from Harlan’s claws.
He had put the man to sleep, since it might not be his fault, there was no need for him to suffer any longer.
Then as soon as Harlan’s arm was out of the man, the men in their strange suits told him he had to leave.
Harlan took Amber, along with Sam and Liat, back to the palace.
“You three, go to my room. I’m going to see Rosewell.”
He made the short walk to the office near the throne room, his arm still covered in dry blood past the elbow.
Yet the guards outside denied him entry.
“Queen Yggdra is not accepting visitors at the moment.”
“Are we really going to do this now?”
Safira stepped through the door.
“No, you are doing nothing but going back to your room and getting cleaned. When we need-”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“You will mind your tone with me.”
“When it was some nebulous threat, I bit my tongue and accepted it. Now some ghost has just threatened my sister and my friend with the same bombs that nearly kill you. Either I get some answers or I leave.”
Safira sighed and went back into the office, opening it after a few minutes and waving him inside.
Rosewell was unhappy, not just with Harlan, but with herself.
“I can’t believe you let him get away.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. If I had any idea what I was dealing with I might’ve at least had a chance, but no, you decided that I should be in the dark for some fucking reason.”
Safira backhanded Harlan, sending him to the floor.
“You will remember, she is your queen.”
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
Harlan swallowed the blood in his mouth.
“That is enough. Harlan, I kept you out of this for your own safety, not because I don’t trust you.
But, now that we are past that, and he targeted you despite my attempts to keep him away, we may speak about who we are dealing with.”
“What do you mean, for my own safety?”
“Nulson Harbinger. He was an assassin for my father, but, his personality could not be ignored.
It was not because he was an evil man that he had to be killed, it was that he was an evil man without the sense to know where the lines were drawn. I was 15 when he first approached me, and I thought nothing of it at the time, but my father saw what he was doing, and warned him.
Nulson waited, perhaps trying to make my father think that he listened, but when the time came for him to enact his plan to take me against my will, he fell into a trap, and was put to death.
We assumed that would be the end of it, and until you showed me that memory, I believed it was.
Right now we believe he is a revenant, a particularly powerful one, one that is unbound for any object, and can take the bodies of the weak minded.”
“That doesn’t really answer the question.”
“Nulson likes games. He will push every limit, every button, until you snap.
I hoped, foolish as I was, that if I prevented the two of you from ever meeting, by preventing you from being involved in finding out how to kill him, that the worse would not come to pass.
Now he has started his game, and you gave him a good showing, you beat him, outwitted him, and he got away because I was so stupid that I thought I could control this.”
“Why Balor? Why bring him in first?”
“You’ve been soft lately, I couldn’t risk that, because Nulson gathers information on his targets, and he knows your weak points, because you made them all clear through your sordid history.
Balor is a private man, with a certain amount of moral flexibility, Nulson simply has less means to attack.”
Rosewell explained more of the man, methods of assassination he favored, anyone who might be a possible ally to him, theories on where he could’ve been for the last 8 years.
Poisons were never his favorite, but when he did employ them, they were always something he brewed himself, and they were always unlike anything seen before or since.
A concoction that was undetectable, and only targeted people with certain hair colors.
A poison that would make the blood of anyone water aligned freeze, cutting them to shreds from the inside out in a bloody display.
Bombs, bombs were what he liked most.
Not because they were almost guaranteed to kill, or because they could be set ahead of time.
No, Nulson liked bombs because they caused panic, fear, and they had as much collateral damage as he made them to have.
A game he liked was to see if he could make bombs that only killed his target.
Directed blasts, elemental magic, gravity bombs, implosions.
He had tried just about anything one could think of.
But, sometimes things needed to be quiet, they needed to be accidents, will of the gods, old age.
A noble puts on his favorite jacket, and within the hour a faint powder makes him sick, and his heart stops moments after he realizes something is wrong, and it was too late to see a doctor.
A merchant grabs his pen and the spring mechanism breaks, shooting a piece of metal through his eye and into his brain.
He loved nothing but his work, so he poured everything he had into getting the job done.
The more Harlan heard, the more worried he became.
“Do you think that he understood that you wouldn’t tell me?”
“I didn’t know him all that well when he was alive, and I can’t imagine how much more dangerous he has become in these last eight years. If his coming back is recent, such as him failing to coalesce into a proper spirit for some time, then that is the best case. Otherwise, perhaps he has spent the better part of a decade as other people, setting up a series of events to get what he wants.”
“Does he want you dead, or alive?”
“I imagine he doesn’t care, he’ll do what he wants with my body either way.”
“Does Sepul know? I mean, he has hunted many spirits over the years I’m sure.”
“We’ve consulted him, but according to what he knows, Nulson is breaking the rules of what a Revenant can do.”
“When I first met him he told me that spirits couldn’t bind themselves to people, which might still be true.”
“In what way?”
“Dawn was technically a Ghost in my body for well over a decade, but she wasn’t naturally occurring, she was the result of my infant desire to have my mother hold me.
I need to speak with Nil, find out exactly what happened, what Nulson said before he died.
Was there an autopsy? Any way to see marks on his body at his time of death?”
“He was stabbed through the heart, decapitated, and then his body was reduced to ash by fire.”
“Do you have the ashes?”
“Harlan, in simple terms, what are you thinking?”
“Long story short, if he is as smart and… forward thinking, as he seems to be, he may have known he was walking into a trap, and he wanted to see if he could become a ghost.”
“That’s insane.”
“Page six of that file you showed me says that he would taste each poison he made in small doses just to know what it was like, and this nearly killed him 60 times. How much more insane is this?”
“Safira, tell House Harbinger that Harlan and I are coming over.”
They went through the wrought iron gates of the Castle Harbinger, their ancestral home, and were greeted by Nil and Voi, who knelt before her.
“Your majesty, what may your servant offer to you?”
“This is about Nulson, we need to talk privately.”
Nil flinched at the mention of the name; Voi seemed puzzled.
The four of them, flanked on all sides by royal guards, went to the most secure area in the Harbinger mansion, the catacombs.
Harlan could feel them, spirits infested the area.
“Your majesty, what is this visit about?”
“We need to see Nulson’s ashes.”
“Of course, they are in the hall of shame.”
As they walked, Harlan began his questions.
“Nulson, are these spirits I feel intentional? Or are your family just ones who often have feelings that make them linger after death.”
“How… no, I suppose you would be able to sense them. Your majesty, shall I speak of my family bloodline ability?”
“You are cleared to speak with Harlan on the subject within my presence.”
“Very well. Ix had the ability of astral projection, to separate his body from his soul and then scout an area. We can’t do such a thing, that power was granted by the Fae gods of Reino and died with him, but what we got was a certain looseness of the soul. We’ve long been able to achieve a state not unlike his, but with a far shorter range, using ritual magic.
I admit, when I first met you, I wondered if there was some relation between us due to your features and your penchant for soul magic.”
“And your family has been behind past advancements in soul magic, am I right?”
“Nothing like what you did, but yes, we have at least been involved in many attempts at better researching souls. The old golems, made from the petrified bodies of Trolls, came from this research.”
“And how does that work exactly?”
“Trolls naturally have very tight souls which can remain for hours after their bodies are entirely dead.
By carving the right symbols into their bones and organs before we petrify them, the soul stays, but the mind goes. This shell of a being then needs to be taught to follow basic commands.
They were expensive, stupid, but also strong. Now they are just oddities, something of a status symbol.”
“Were there any Troll golems there when you killed Nulson?”
“Yes, but two souls couldn’t be in the same body.”
“My birth mother, Dawn, lived in my body for over a decade as a mind, she had no soul of her own.
If your family’s looseness of the soul includes the mind, and Nulson found this out, I can see how he might’ve intentionally detached his mind from his body during his death and moved into a troll. It would also explain his ability to possess people. As you said, two souls cannot exist in a body, otherwise you end up with orc-like beings, but two minds? I am living proof that there are… minor, issues with such a thing.”
They entered the hall where the ashes of the Harbingers went.
They always tried to recover the bodies of their family and put them in large stone coffins, of which Harlan passed many on his way here, and the catacombs were massive, extending beyond the basement of the house and nearly to the outer walls of the castle.
To be cremated was an insult reserved for those who broke the code of the Harbingers.
Nil blew away the dust on the nameplates, searching for Nulson’s urn.
“Ah, here we-”
Harlan pulled Nil back before he laid hands on it.
“What are you doing?”
“Look at the plate where the urn is placed.”
Each had a small platform that raised it above the flat shelf with arms and kept the urn from falling in the case of an earthquake.
When Nil blew away the dust, Harlan noticed a gap between the shelf and the platform, a pressure plate.
“How?”
“He’s been here. I’m guessing his ashes are gone and there is another bomb in there.”
“Queen Yggdra, please stay outside while we disarm this.”
“No. Harlan, shift the stone to keep the plate from moving then examine the urn.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Harlan did as she said, but not before also using a bit of delver magic to look through the stone and understand the mechanism.
There was nothing special about it, if the urn was removed the plate would move up, and this would make a wire snap, then a striking arm which would ignite something inside the bottom of the urn.
The Harbingers, Rosewell, and the two royal guards who were there, Safira and one who Harlan had seen around but never asked the name of, all stood behind a stone wall that entirely blocked them from Harlan.
The area Harlan was in was entirely free of air aside from what Harlan was adding to his blood with magic, so long as he was there, the bomb had no way to light a spark.
He wiggled his fingers, taking a deep breath before he lifted the lid.
Inside was not a bomb, but rather, a note and a small amount of some alchemical liquid..
If the arm had struck the bottom of the urn, the note would’ve been ruined.
Harlan broke down the second wall, which he put up to seal himself off completely before removing the air from the impromptu room, and then he knocked on the one where everyone else was standing.
“There is something in the bottom of the urn.”
Nil stuck his finger into the oil, rubbing his index and thumb for a few rotations, smelled it, and then licked it.
“This is an oil synthesized from Skinwalker flesh. If it had burned then we couldn’t reform the note due to the Skinwalker’s metamorphic properties.”
The note itself, despite sitting in the oil, had been laminated in a fashion so as to make it clean when removed; on it was a variety of symbols.
“I’m not a cipher cracker, I assume House Harbinger can handle this?”
“We can, hopefully. Your majesty, I hope that we may borrow Dahlia for this?”
“I will send her over shortly.”
When Harlan returned to the palace, Rosewell asked him into a private room, just the two of them.
“This is why I didn’t want you involved.”
“What? I found out his possible method of remaining as a spirit, I found that pressure plate and saved the note, and now we’ve gotten an actual hint from him.”
“You were smiling.”
“What?”
“The others were too focused on the note, but I was watching you. You are enjoying this game, the cat and mouse, tricks and traps, souls and spirits. I knew that you would do this.”
“I don’t-”
“You know what his mind is like now, you can find him if you ever meet again, but I don’t want you taking part in anything more.”
“That is such bullshit, I can help, I’ve already helped, and all I had to do was look at his file.
If you-”
“No. I will not put you and your family in danger by letting you and him escalate this game against one another.
Tell me, could he control himself around you? How did he act?”
Harlan had to admit, Nulson really did have a manic amount of fun during their short encounter.
“I won’t go out, but please, just bring me notes, ask for my view on what he might do.”
“I will make that judgment on a case by case basis. Get that castle of yours built enough that your family can move, then I want them out of the palace along with my siblings.”
“Why them?”
“I’m going to cut down the number of servants in the castle to only the bare minimum required for upkeep.
I want you to personally vet every butler and maid that my siblings bring along with them, and I want you to keep them under control. Regardless of what they say, do not let them out of your control.”
“How harsh can I be?”
“They can either stay in the castle or they can go out into the streets with nothing.
If I die, then Alder will take my place, but don’t say that to him. I won’t have the royal bloodline end with me.”
“In that case, I’d like House Greatwall to overlook my blueprints for a final pass and I need to source some materials from them. I had contacted them before, yet they were less than happy with me not wanting any of their workers on site, and they’ve been telling me they’ll get back to me for days now.”
“I’ll make them help and cover some of your costs. How long before you can be gone?”
“Furniture will take a month, but if I call in some… extra help, and stick to minimum viability first, then two weeks.”
“You hesitated, I need to know who your help is.”
----------------------------------------
Harlan had to go back to the village to pick up his mammoth; he named her Mu.