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Heirs of Cain
Venus in League - part one

Venus in League - part one

Heirs of Cain

Venus in League

Including her name serves no purpose, for she was never going to be a citizen of our village. Such was her stated intent, with so much simulated earnestness that I could not smell the trick, nor could my goddess, lover, and wife Wanda Blasphemer Pelts, until she encountered the applicant up close that is.

Her waiting period was nearly over, which all potential residents of Quarantown had to endure to even step foot over our borders and barriers, both obvious and arcane. The plague called Throng's Delirium, the impetus for the founding of Quarantown in the first place, before it was commandeered, still in secret, by my Wanda, and before I was wooed as her chief disciple and chiefest confidante, still ravaged the continent.

For every person we added to our enclave the disease took tens, necessitating the waiting period, as the nefarious pathogen, whatever its nature, was only contagious in the stages immediately preceding obvious symptoms. If an applicant made it the entire time without the characteristic rash-lashes across the back, or the fever, or the delirium (not to mention the death that came to a full third of the sufferers), they were pronounced clean and allowed to enter.

She who is here nameless was not clean, but it wasn't Throng's that Wanda smelled on her; it was yet another insidious form of sabotage employed by one of her jealous siblings, several of whom sought to usurp her throne-town and growing godhood.

Time it was for me to learn of a new one, as Wanda kept familial information so close to the vest that it was perpetually under her furs, which meant no probing hand but hers could even pull it from the recesses of that peculiar and hexed motley garment. Already I had encountered her vampiric brother Ruthven, the stillborn phantom Devorgoil, the famished Goriana, and the sex-shifter Melmoth, none of their strange powers and presentations preparing me for what was stowed away in this latest victim of the murderous line, this guillotine edge, of Cain.

Wanda and I entered the humble applicants' house unannounced, prepared to welcome this nameless young woman, when the furs of Venus's coat bristled. At the sight of her Wanda's nose scrunched into a dog's snarl, compressing her many fanning freckles into a few crowded loaves of burnt bread.

If she had a lie to tell us she was not given time to tell it. I barely had opportunity to register her face: big eyes that got bigger as Wanda lunged, raven hair that flew like whip cords as she was pinned flat on the nearest table, and earthen skin that broke out into a muddy sweat when she was flipped over and forced to breathe between the cracks in the wood.

That was when the screaming began, coupled with extreme flailing. I doubt I would have been able to restrain her, despite being the larger, but it was trivial for Wanda. Any extra hands she needed were provided by loose tails on her furs, which shot out and held the young lady as still as possible.

"What's the matter?" I asked, keeping a healthy distance. The applicant's screams contained words and sentiments, but I paid them no heed, and see no point in reproducing them now that I know they were all concocted for the singular aim of deception. There and then she was not a person, but a poison-dipped arrow.

"I smell a sister on her," Wanda growled, tearing at the clothing around the woman's waist, exposing more muddy skin.

"Goriana?"

"No." To elaborate she ripped away the last piece obscuring the base of her spine. There we both spotted a shocking interruption of the flesh: a perfect circle of bony cap split by a cross. The nearest comparison I have is bone protruding from a wound, except this was far too neat and tidy, looking downright machined. The skin surrounding it wasn't even irritated, not at first anyway. As we watched swelling and redness radiated out from it, as if it objected to our intrusion and was getting red in the face as it insisted we turn around and give it some privacy.

The words I will not reproduce became a string of curses I will not reproduce, partly because they may bear actual power in each expression. Where she got them was a mystery to me, and I was half-inclined to wash her mouth out with bar soap purely by instinct before I recalled that our little daughter Nepenthe, hardly on her own two feet, wasn't actually with us just then, watched as she was by my friend Porter.

"What is that!?" I sputtered.

"An attempt at infiltration," Wanda said, her face drawing closer to it; a cloth of furs passed over it. After that initial inspection her hand swept in, one finger suddenly sharpened into a claw that fit into the cross. With a twist of her wrist she forced the bony cap to turn, and from the host's piercing wail we could assume that unseen parts of the thing had also pierced.

Squeaking against other more native bones, the cap turned and rose, turned and rose, bringing with it glossy blood slurry jellied by the addition of liquefied flesh, which ran down the threading that appeared. A screw. A screw grown from bone. I knew it wasn't carved, as an heir of Cain wouldn't need craftsmanship to make such a thing, just guile released into their own material as an order of production.

"This is the primary recruiting technique of the Diodati second-eldest," Wanda explained, "whom you will hopefully never meet, cowardly as she is. Matilda Screwshaft Nunbleeder. She makes these and drives them into the spine, controlling her disciples remotely. Why she tried it now I can't say. Obviously I would be able to sense it, as it is made of her own bone. Perhaps she is just trying to scare us, keep us on edge."

Once the screw was mostly extracted it stood on its own despite the ragged wound it left behind. I asked Wanda if the girl would live, to which the answer was yes, but that was not necessarily a blessing. Falling under the influence of an heir of Cain is not an experience that you can ever be fully rid of, and I imagine the effects would be worsened with a gaping hole in the back where the heir had planted a flag, threaded in the hopes it would never be extricated.

We couldn't keep her either, tainted as she was, so she would have to be sent away on the next train, to a fate unknown. As my wife's bridge between her and her people, I tried to keep abreast of everyone who so much as brushed up against Quarantown, or heard distant whispers of us, but I could not make time for this nameless sufferer, busy as I would soon be with the turning of the screw she set in motion.

Neither Wanda or I suspected that Matilda's plan was more insidious than a thorn in the side. The potentially-fatal error was not made until Wanda, in her infinite but often hidden and downplayed compassion, reached out and grabbed the bone screw to free the poor victim. Nothing came of it immediately. Or came the next day. While I cannot pinpoint the exact number of days that passed before its sinister poison took effect, owing to Wanda's loose grip on my sense of time, intended to stir me to premonition and prophecy in service of her grand designs, I can guess... based on the typical progression of Throng's delirium.

That's right. Somehow, beyond all of the logic I operated by, my Venus in furs contracted the plague that had instigated the building of Quarantown as an untouched health retreat for the wealthy. Whether the result of sheer chance, she was still technically a sort of human being after all, or through a curse placed upon the infectious material by Matilda Screwshaft Nunbleeder, the love of my life, the very center that I chose to waltz about rather than orbit, was struck down.

Temporarily! I hoped. I prayed... yet she who I prayed to could not answer them as coherently as usual. Before the sojourn that would become the rest of my life, I'd overheard a sufferer of the delirium describe one of its intensest accompanying hallucinations as a 'roseate supersensual mist', from which the only valuable information I was able to take was that this mist would overwhelm perception entirely, a thing that my dear Wanda had never come close to suffering.

She was not prepared, having never been ill once in her life, having never sneezed, never contracted so much as a case of a single hiccup. No surprise then that she did not understand what was happening in the earliest stages of the symptomatic phase, which can last one to two weeks, and then progresses on to either full recovery or death by fever accompanied with euphoric asphyxia.

(To address any concerns that this incident, and the revelations that poured out from it, was the portent of Quarantown's doom, it should be noted that the contamination, perhaps through sheer luck, did not spread to the populace at large. If anyone was to have contracted it in the asymptomatic infectious period it would have been me, intimately close as we are every moment of every day, her breath living in my lungs even when she is far, and I did not, which could have been a benefit of Wanda's broad magical investment in my health.)

Yet there was no one to invest in hers, myself such a lax watchman that I hadn't known there was any watching to do. Still, I was the first to notice, and significantly disturbed when I heard Wanda's furs hit the floor of our rather stately master bath. The floor was itself a luxury item, tiles of black slate, gifted to us by Quarantown's wealthiest resident who actually bothered to live there, the obnoxious braggadocio Doppler Burstyn.

In gifting it to us I imagine he was trying to compete, cognizant of Wanda's powerful magnetism without yet recognizing its divine nature, attributing it to a more esoterically-flaunted fortune than his own. At the time he'd told us that he very much liked to take off his shoes and feel a cold floor when using the washroom, and since he was bound to be invited to all our dinner parties and imbibe enough liquor to need the washroom, it might as well cater to his expensive tastes.

Their cold touch was not of interest to me, only how Wanda's furs hit them. Heavily. Wetly? Had she been sweating, into her furs? Given pause, despite the fact that I'd expected her furs and the clothing underneath to come off shortly anyway, I turned to examine her. Normally she would meet my gaze when she sensed my eyes on her, but she was turned away, a hand massaging the back of her neck. Soreness? We'd done nothing to make us sore that evening, not yet.

That was supposed to come after the bath we were about to share in the large copper washtub that stood in the middle of the chamber. The conditions for it were right, normal, with Nepenthe already down for the night in her nursery and the tub already full of water that would soon be heated solely by the carnal passion of a demigoddess.

"Wanda? Are you alright?" Her head swung toward me, pupils unusually inky, looking ready to overflow into her vivisecting green eyes, which were missing the typical crackle in their color, like a vivid illustration bleeding and fading on a wet page.

"Of course... what worries you, my precious Severin?" She continued to disrobe, unsteady on her feet, at least compared to her usual; she seemed only capable of running as fast as a dog just then, rather than her usual fox.

"Strange as it sounds... I'm confident you took your robes off several seconds earlier than you normally would. And you less 'let them go' than 'dropped them'. She would know my meaning. I did not expect her to deny that she knew it.

"Have you lost your way again Severin?" she asked coyly, but the words were almost slurred, imperceptible to all but me. Her approach was downright unbalanced; she'd never sounded so heavy in her soles. Both slender arms slapped onto my shoulders, a gesture in which I instantly recognized the absence of her characteristic 'ownership' of my form and in its place an attempt to support herself on me like a pillar. "Straying from the path of time I cleared for you... seeing a newer habit and forgetting that I started it weeks ago, or was it months?" The punctuating tease did little to dissuade me.

She looked fuller than the tub, personality gushing, aura sloshing all over me and the floor. Her eyes were flat, expression expanding like ice melting and pooling. When she breathed on me it was, comparatively, as if a cow had done so after gorging on grass and stowaway pebbles. Messy flecks of her intent struck my cheek wetly.

"You're burning up," I said sternly, the heat in her arms practically welding them to my shoulders. My Wanda pulled back, a drunken cobra, ready to spit venom but unable to pick a target through double vision.

"Severin! How dare you take such a tone with me!?" My hand made it to her forehead before she could react, which was another worrying sign, but less so than the inferno that must have been devouring the last of the fuel inside her skull. A scorch on my palm. I let her see. Her eyes seemed to have trouble focusing on it.

At last she acted out some confusion and concern, stumbling back, slowly spinning around, looking for a culprit for her condition, but it was within, where an heir of Cain could not look. To them, and to her especially, reflection was the weakness of the children of Abel. When they understood themselves they understood how flimsy they were, and they invited a Death they should have been watching out for.

"Matilda," she muttered, expecting a face to appear somewhere and sneer maniacally, out the window, or from the depths of the tub perhaps. Nothing. Nothing but the fire growing in her flesh. Manifestations she had likely subconsciously combated for days sprang up in this unnerved opportunity, and I watched as nasty lashes of red swelled across her shoulders and hurdled her ribs, taking no more than a minute.

"Wanda, it's the delirium," I told her, applying as much chill to my words as I could. "You've come down with it."

"Impossible. I'm... That's a mortal ailment. That's..." In her following babbling she deduced, and then disregarded, what had likely happened. Her nasty sister Nunbleeder had coated the bone screw with the contagion, relied on Wanda to remove it, and in the process infected her.

"We need to cool you down," I instructed, recalling the treatments that were by then widely known. Ice for the fever. Lots to drink. Remove meat and salt from the diet, to relieve the swelling and internal pressure. And beyond that, nothing more substantial than patience. "Into the tub my love, quickly now."

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"You do not order me!" she honked, like a goose with a plucked tail feather. Thankfully she had enough clarity following the brief descent from the improperly regulated shout, which cracked a tile underfoot, to recognize both concern and wisdom in my face. "Severin, my chief disciple, and prophet of the new, glorious, and everlasting age of Wanda Blasphemer Pelts, I order you to escort me to the tub. I wish to bathe."

"Yes goddess, right this way." I took her arm in mine as if taking her to the dance floor, and I did dip her, but it was right into the water. Like an eel she slithered out of my grasp, weighing nothing, disappearing under the surface without so much as a second ripple. As if spineless she contorted to reorient herself face up, then her head reappeared leaning against the copper curve, with relief apparent in her tiny chilled gasp.

But it couldn't last, not with an inhuman fever ravaging her; the water soon began to steam. With so little understanding of how the line of Cain dealt with the line of Throng's, I was myself relieved to see that the bath did not come to a boil. Still, there was much work to be done to make her as comfortable as possible.

At first she didn't speak, trying to plot I'm sure in the darkness of closed eyes, the closest she came to meditation short of staring between the stars on the darkest nights. In that worrisome silent gap I ran about town, fetching the doctor, fetching ice to store in the basement and replenish her bath, arranging care for Nepenthe once the morning came.

Of course the doctor admonished me for putting her in a hot bath, unaware the sufferer herself was heating it, but once I hauled a block of ice up and dropped it in, his sudden shock indicating he thought I was far too rough with the process, he dropped the matter and simply told me to keep adding ice, but carefully.

Beyond that I already knew the treatments he prescribed, making it no wonder people were so helpless under the red whip of the scourge. Once he was gone I brought up another block, as the first had melted already, and as I dumped it Wanda caught it, cracked it as her fingers dug in, and she carried it into the depths as if drowning a mesmerized sailor.

And depths the bath now had. Intentional or not, Wanda worked magics upon it in order to feel less confined. If one looked closely they would realize the bottom was gone, replaced only by shadow, Wanda sometimes disappearing down into it for minutes at a time before resurfacing for air. I said nothing; perhaps with more of a world around her to control she would regain some composure.

By midday next, give or take, always given to me and never taken by me, she had, but only enough to think she was back to her old self. Upon hauling in her next dosage of ice I found the window flung open, a strong breeze carrying in leaves and clinging insects upon her order, to give the tile some comforting forest floor touches. Spots of moss had begun to swell in various seams and the moist joints of pipes.

I'd kept the bath down to the wispiest simmer, but I didn't doubt it was still uncomfortably warm for the various pond and puddle creatures she had somehow gotten to join her in her new swampy domain. Our feathered firstborn, Mergini the brilliant drake, was paddling idly, quacking nervously under his breath, smart enough to know that if Wanda requested him as bath toy he had best obey.

Him I worried over less than the minnows darting about, looking for cool spots under her knees and between her toes. Retreating into the depths might help them, but that was less of an option for the toads, reliant on air as they were, that she had seated on lily pads around her head and at the foot of the tub.

"Ahh Severin," she said, slithering into a strange swim, head and neck fully upright and aimed my way, as if she stood on something. "See what I have created even under this foul spell. It is a whole world now, and it reflects the larger Quarantown. When something goes wrong out there I will see it here, in some form," she assured herself. Rather than responding immediately I lowered in the ice, slowly as I could, so as not to disturb her dubious project. The sweat of my efforts ran almost as thick as hers under the fever, and I was drenched despite having dipped no more than a forearm into the bath. This frazzled fatigue was taken for a lack of confidence, of belief.

"And now that I've restored my surveillance, I must dispatch you to do what I cannot," she continued, patrolling in a circle around the sinking corner of ice.

"Darling... toads don't swim." Her eyes, mostly dark, rolled toward me, like little boats rowing silently through the steam, so that their soldiers might disembark and attack with the element of surprise.

"I made them," she breathed as her head glided, mouth slightly open, below the surface. She was waiting out my resistance to her will, and came back for a breath only when my posture was sufficiently supplicant.

"I am busy keeping you afloat, and the household," I explained, practically hearing my concerns bounce off her like walnuts off brick. "Can Quarantown not fend for itself until you are well? Are your familiars not remaining vigilant even as we speak?"

"They are, but vigilance will repel nothing," she said. "You must go while I plot. Take this." Her hand emerged, grabbed my shirt. She bent me over the side and rose to meet me in a kiss, which she used to instill a sickly but powerful breath. I could taste her fever, her stewing anger, globs of yammering mania as a fatty oil coating my mouth. It gave me a sense of urgency, but a hot shadow of her own.

Full of her breath, there was only one more thing she could give me to make me into the best imitation of herself: her furs. I was instructed to don them for the first time, only having pulled them over myself as a blanket before. At first they wore as heavily as one would expect, like a mound of dead animals bones and all, but within seconds they adjusted just outside of my perception, became something I was only reminded of when I felt I needed them.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, which Wanda enabled, dispelling the blurring condensation on it with a wave of her hand. The very definition of a fierce cave-dwelling femininity on her, I found that the furs altered themselves without need of a tailor on my shoulders, into a masculine coat with broad shoulders and more flared sleeves hanging behind my arms.

Altogether it was more like a cape, and i felt compelled to straighten my already admirable posture, if only to puff out what little chest I had and match its energy. I can't describe it any better than to say I suddenly looked naked without a fat cigar in my mouth and the darkest stubble on my jaw.

"What they do for me they can do for you in part," she assured, trusting I would remember the garment's many abilities. "Now we get back to the business of running this place. First I want you to go to the mine shaft and Burstyn. He has dragged his feet in closing it. Machete through his excuses and have it blown shut. When a large bubble bursts right here," a dainty fingertip poked out of the water, startled a sweltered toad, "I'll know you have done my bidding."

"Yes I'll see to it Wanda, and I'll also be back in an hour with more ice." Never before had I felt it a relief to leave her behind, though I never did that fully, even discounting the breath I was vessel to and the fur coat hung on me. This was not my Wanda, but a concussed and dizzy impersonator, a furious crawling pomp ready to drag other lives down with her.

I should have always known this was possible. An heir of Cain has a harsh selfish nature, one prone to abandonment when the pressure is on, one which sees all love and connection as ballast the moment their survival is called into question. The ultimate goal is to perceive and avoid the reaper, and to destroy everything that might prevent that evasion, including family who are doing little more than standing ignorantly in the path they flee down.

I did not love her any less. Instead I recognized what she worked so hard to suppress when all her faculties were under her own command. My Wanda aspired to be a goddess, not a tyrant, and her bloodthirst could only ever paint the stony pillars of justice that hold up her presence. This illness had to be waded through, slowly, painfully, so that we might be reunited on the other side of the delirium's fog.

Regarding the mine shaft, it too had been weighing on my mind. Only once had I entered, when we were dispatching the stalwart stalking skeleton of Melmoth into the swift coursing of its subterranean river, where Wanda, and myself after a time, had sensed a separate ominous presence.

I cannot recall how long ago she ordered it to be closed with explosives, but it was at least days, and I doubt she would've allowed it to drag on for months. Now technically Wanda had no legal grounds to order such a thing. She was not the owner, on paper, of anything in Quarantown aside from our home, but so great was her power of persuasion, even without revealing her true nature, that she could order any such thing and have it done within a day.

Except where Doppler Burstyn was involved. The man's ego was so swollen, alongside his pocketbook, that he thought of my wife as a social connection to foster rather than someone to please. He'd not outright rejected her request that his mineral explorations be closed, but he had generated a seemingly endless list of excuses for why it couldn't be performed on any particular occasion: poor weather, insufficient manpower, faulty fuses, improperly stored powder, previous engagement, and so on.

When I visited him, with Wanda's furs on my shoulders, he immediately suspected something. The man was not stupid, but through a life of doing business with the stupid he had come to rely a good deal more on instinct than intellect, which gave him a conversational style something like my Wanda's, albeit the pestering dragonfly version to her righteous hawk. He sniffed around suspicious things, nipped at them, played it all off as good fun, and even with the furs artificially inflating my presence he still out-barrel-chested me and managed to defray me temporarily.

Long enough to cause a good deal of trouble. You see when I asked him why he hadn't closed the shaft yet he said he was in preparations, and that I could go and inspect the site myself to confirm. Like a fool I did. 'Preparations'. They were not preparations. They were in fact complete given that he clearly had no intention of taking them any further.

Never would I proclaim myself an expert in demolition, not even an admirer of fireworks in fact (does anything need to be that loud?), but it only took some measured thought to read the scene outside the shaft mouth. Yes there were fuses wired up along the mountain's bluish stone, disappearing down its gullet, and yes as well to the plungers and boxes used to detonate, but everything was hollow or in poor condition. The fuses had been sitting out so long birds had pecked away at their fibers for nesting.

After dealing with Wanda's sudden sickness, and presumably being without sleep for the past thirty hours, I was in no mood for this discovery. I had every intention of marching back to Burstyn's residence, scuffing every last slate tile in the place, and using some percentage of Wanda's strength to drag him up there and make him push the plungers himself... until the poetic muse finally, after an entire life of longing, reached me.

She came on the wind, cold and spritzing like the ocean, but slightly clammy, so the origin could only have been the cave. Poetry was one of my primary passions, alongside fashion and maths, before Wanda placed me upon her mantle, and it hadn't gone away despite her overshadowing presence.

If ever I'd had poetry of my own to share with her I know she would have listened, cherished it, even if she deemed my efforts 'cute' rather than truly inspired. Lines. That was all I could ever write. Getting through a whole stanza left me wheezing, as if each syllable was a step on a ladder made too far apart from the last.

Maths were much simpler. Everyone shares the same arithmetic. Old Man Mathematics is a decrepit yet undying creature, kind and loud and coughing, always eager to show you some numerical trick on a scrap of paper, not minding that he loses your attention when he tries to relate it to everyday life. I love him for that, and I like his rambling stories.

What saddened me was the comparatively cold shoulder the poetic muse paid me. From just after I put down my first book of poetry (Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake) and attempted to write something as concise and profound as The Clod and the Pebble I resigned myself to a fate of deserved obscurity.

But now came verse, fed to me out of the cave on cold breath. Only I could warm it up, give it the breath of life, and only by speaking it aloud!

"The hour arrived—and it became

A wandering mass of shapeless flame,

A pathless comet, and a curse,

The menace of the universe;

Still rolling on with innate force,

Without a sphere, without a course,

A bright deformity on high,

The monster of the upper sky!

And thou! beneath its influence born—

Thou worm! whom I obey and scorn—

Forced by a power (which is not thine,

And lent thee but to make thee mine)

For this brief moment to descend,

Where these weak spirits round thee bend

And parley with a thing like thee—

What wouldst thou, Child of Clay! with me?"

I whirled around, somehow expecting an audience to have congregated, and have their hands properly oiled for long-lasting applause, but of course I was alone with the spotty grass, the discarded stones, and the false blasting equipment.

There or not, the audience was deserved! True poetry, you know it on the tongue first and the ear second, the echo of a flavor, that was it! Now I understood it hadn't come solely from me, inspired as I was from the breath of the mine, but no poet works without inspiration. Perhaps the verse had simply been worked through me, but that was in keeping with my identity; I have always felt worked through. Like a tool of a tool of the universe. A small but vital part, and vital in its obedience to its designed form.

Just as the lines flying out of me like an epiphany drew great pleasure, they then flagged and crashed troublingly upon my psyche. Discord, not in my meter, but my relationship. The ill Wanda and I were now in a genuine disagreement. I did not want the mine blasted shut, or shut at all.

How I would justify such a position was beyond me at the moment; all I had was the sensation, the yearning, and the hope that it would continue. Some future version of myself who had to stop every now and again, in the market, on a tree-lined trail, and expound in rhyme on the nature of the world was itself an inspiration to me. Poetry was an event that happened within, and without warning, a surprise gift from the soul.

Normally Wanda would be understanding of the state it put me in, but there was much doubt she would appreciate it now, swamped in restrictive sickness. All the same, I had little recourse. She would need to know why that prescribed bubble hadn't appeared and popped.

So I returned to our master bath for counsel with the master of the bath. Someone was heading out the door, closing it behind them; we locked eyes and paused.

"Devorgoil?" Surprise had me questioning him, not uncertainty, as there was little mistaking the man-phantom for any other thing living or dead. Thus far I'd only known him as a presence barely solid enough to hold a razor steady, a flitting specter thanks to his stillbirth, yet here he looked more alive than ever, glistening with steam. I guessed it just a skin he couldn't avoid accumulating inside her hothouse.

"There you are Severin," he said, smiling thinly, dabbing at, and slightly into, his forehead with a handkerchief. His blue eyes were much softer than Wanda's, broad face more inviting. "I was hoping you would help me talk some sense into her before she kicked me out, but you're a little too late."

"Did you have some advice for us?" I asked so that he might impart to me what Wanda would automatically refuse. Devorgoil Oblivion Goblinry only appeared when someone was at their most vulnerable, which meant Wanda was at her lowest point in all the time I'd known her, for his only previous visit in memory was to me when I had a blade against my throat.

"Before she screamed at me to get out of the room first and her town second, I offered to help see her through this, keep an eye on Quarantown while she couldn't."

"That has been relegated to me," I explained unnecessarily, as he could surely read it in the fur coat hanging off my shoulders.

"It's not that I don't have confidence in you brother... but this really is something an heir should handle."

"If she won't accept your help there's nothing we can do about it," I told him, letting slip my current attitudes, and my impatience. "But do drop by again the next time one of us is about to die. Perhaps the third time is the charm."

"The third?" he said with an amused puff out the nose, before he caught my puzzled expression. "Yes, the third. Good to see you again Severin, as always. Give Wanda my best once she's at her worst again." He embraced me, like a hug from an empty wool coat, and then walked down the hall, achieving a total vanish before he would've turned the corner.