Tailing Dioryl, Neltunia and the two Knights of the Order of Libertas was more exhausting than Viryl had anticipated. The path was strewn with unpredictable and discrete pitfalls.
Stepping out into the hallway that led to Neltunia’s room, Viryl found himself on an extremely slippery granite floor. No one had any particular trouble walking on it, except Hammerless, who at one point tripped and bumped into a candelabra. Dioryl apologized: “You must forgive me. As I explained when I came in, the housekeeper has just cleaned the floor.”
Hammerless protested: "Does it seem like time to clean up?"
“It’s just that usually there aren’t any visitors at this hour,” Dioryl explained.
Viryl didn’t think the slickness was justified by the floor cleaning. It was as if a film of oil had been spread on the floor. Viryl proceeded cautiously, but the distance from his objectives grew.
At the end of the corridor, Dioryl invited the guests to turn left and enter the shaft of a narrow, right-handed helical staircase. By the time Viryl began to ascend it, the rest of the group had practically reached the landing of the upper floor.
“Who the hell left something like that in their path?!” Viryl heard Dioryl yelling, and then something tumbled down the stairs. Being a couple of turns too far down, Viryl couldn’t see what was happening up there. But when a small, rolling wine barrel appeared in his field of vision, Viryl promptly leapt over it. The barrel then crashed cracking up at the bottom of the stairs.
The housekeeper had just washed the floors and Dioryl was dirtying them again, wasting good wine? That gesture of annoyance seemed completely exaggerated to Viryl. But there was no need to think about it too much: the fallen knight had to hurry to catch up with them before he lost sight of them.
When he reached the second floor landing, Viryl found the door locked. Here, another dilemma. Was it safe to open it or not?
Viryl stood in the doorway for about three minutes, then the door opened on the other side with the tinkle of a wind chime, and a young servant came rushing down the stairs with a broom. The fallen knight managed to step out of the way just in time, and narrowly avoided a collision with the boy.
Holy shit. How the fuck was he supposed to get past those wind chimes? Viryl leaned into the stairwell. The servant was busy wiping the wine off the entrance to the stairwell, blocking the way. There was no way to get back past him. So Viryl waited for him to finish and go back up.
Viryl had planned to return to Neltunia's room, go out the balcony, climb up to the second floor and find a new way to sneak in. However, when the servant reopened the door to the second floor, he offered the fallen knight a great opportunity that he could not ignore. He pushed the shutter all the way, and then began to close it from the other side with a movement that was not exactly sloth-like but slow enough. Instinctively Viryl slipped in, and found himself in a new desolate corridor.
A quick inspection of the room made Viryl conclude that this floor of this wing of the residence had been designated as the Grand Master’s private quarters. Viryl spotted a modern lounge, a luxurious bathroom, a library, and a dining room with a long rectangular table and glass cabinets displaying crystalware and shiny silverware. The study that Dioryl had mentioned must be up there somewhere. If the meeting was being held behind closed doors, it would be enough to eavesdrop.
The corridor was divided into a first straight arm that then curved at a right-angle to the right and ended in three doors: one on the right, one on the left and one in the middle. Only one was open, the kitchen door, on the left. And, in that last stretch, on the twisted patterns of the majolica tiles on the floor, there were a great number of brown, wooden marbles.
Viryl, refraining from stepping on them, took a closer look.
Walnuts, thickly scattered everywhere. A wicker basket was lying face down on the floor right in front of the kitchen. The servant, who had preceded Viryl by a few steps in their walk, knelt down, picked up the basket and began with a dismayed expression to pick up the walnuts one by one. Again, extremely slowly.
Viryl sighed, careful not to make any noise. It had probably happened something like this: the servant was a little scatterbrained, and had forgotten the wine barrel on the stairs instead of taking it to the pantry. Dioryl, annoyed by his employee's umpteenth oversight, had lost his senses. So he had thrown the barrel down, rushed to the servant and tugged at him as he carried around a basket of nuts that had slipped from his hand, and then sent him to clean up.
As comical as the situation was, it was a real mess. It would be hard to get near the two remaining doors without cracking any nuts. And considering the time the boy was taking to collect them, there was no hope of him clearing the way before the end of the conversation between the Grand Master and his henchmen.
Looking more closely at the pattern of the nuts on the floor, Viryl noticed that some were already crushed, and some spaces a few inches wide were empty. These must have been footprints the group had left behind on their way to the study. Indeed, those clear areas proceeded in a straight line, toward the central door.
It would have been possible for Viryl, retracing the steps of those who had preceded him, to reach his destination without moving or cracking any nuts. But it would have required surgical precision and an excellent sense of balance.
And Viryl, though he had lost some of his perceptive power along with his left eye, believed he possessed both those qualities. So, having identified the best path, he ventured to reach the door of the study, and put his ear to it.
The fallen immediately heard voices. His intuition had been correct.
“…do you think about it?”
"I have to say, it's superb! Sweet and strong, full-bodied but goes down like a charm!"
“Get a hold of yourself, Rustball. Well… good thing I have to drive.”
"Is the amount I gave you correct?"
“… yes, it is exactly sixty-three lire: the amount agreed upon.”
“Good. I hope you are enjoying working in my service.”
“Of course we do, Grand Master!”
“Yes, about our work…”
There was a creak of a chair on the floor. Hammerless must have stood up.
"One moment! One moment!"
"Grand Master, I don't understand why you insist on keeping us in your mansion. I've explained it to you. It's in both our best interests to let us go. I'm the best tracker on the team, as well as the coordinator of the search operations, and I should be on the field."
"Come now, sir Hammerless. At least tell me a little more about how the manhunt is going, and if there's anything else I can do for you."
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The young servant had finally gotten around to gathering nuts around Viryl’s left foot. His nose was pointing straight at his butt, and if his toes had slipped a little further, they would have touched his boot. Viryl lifted his left leg and flattened himself against the door. He felt like a bloody limpet on a rock.
"Unfortunately not, and in any case you’ve done enough already. As for the work, it's not progressing. We thought we had the man under control, since it's not the first time a fugitive has escaped into the sewers. We've always managed to catch them. It seems impossible to me that that old wretch is back walking the streets of Meridania and none of us have noticed. Unless, in fact, he's still down there..."
"Are you questioning my words, knight?"
"I would never dare, Grand Master. But I would point out that in order to better patrol the city, we have left the sewer outlet completely unguarded. If Viryl is still in the sewers, then..."
“Listen to me. The Meridania sewers are the headquarters of one of my most trusted allies. His control over the sewer system is absolute. If he says Viryl of the White Gale isn’t there, then he isn’t there.”
Viryl of the White Gale was just a few yards away, sprawled across the door of that mysterious office, fantasizing about what lay inside, besides the precious bottle of sherry. The surface beneath his left foot was finally clear, so he placed it in a more stable and comfortable position and raised his right, noticing that the servant was moving on to clean the other side.
"I see. Then we will trust your ally, as if his words were the Gospel. For now we are keeping a close eye on the station, because if he intends to escape he will pass through there. And then we are also guarding the most intricate and peripheral neighborhoods, close to the walls. As for the treatment we should reserve for him instead... are you still sure you want him dead, or do you want us to take him alive too?"
"Unfortunately for your pockets, yes. What I need is his corpse. The fact that that troublemaker is breathing is of no use to me."
“Well, at this point I think we’ve really said everything.”
“Yeah. Neltunia, we can go.”
In unison, all the chairs scraped and creaked on the floor. Viryl knew he had to get away as quickly as possible, but the door opened from the inside much sooner than he had expected, and he found himself face to face with Dioryl's ridiculous, waxed mustache. For a moment, Viryl could feel the man’s breath on his face, and he was sure Dioryl would have felt it too if his breath hadn't caught in his throat.
With a sudden leap on his left leg, Viryl hopped back, hoping not to land on a nut. Luckily the servant had already passed there and the ground was mostly clear. So he stepped aside to the wall and let the group advance.
Following the four back down the corridor, Viryl was left bitterly shocked to find that his espionage had been for naught.
Dioryl opened the door with the wind chimes, let the other three pass through, and closed it again. After a congruous wait of about thirty seconds, Viryl turned to look for the servant. He was still around the corner of the hallway, probably gathering the last remaining nuts. All clear. He put his fingers around the metal reeds of the wind chime and squeezed them gently, so that they would not make any noise when they bumped together. Then he lifted it from the hook where it hung and placed it next to the door jamb. Finally, opening the door just wide enough to squeeze his body through, he reached the landing of the second floor. He closed the lock with an almost imperceptible click and began his own descent.
Viryl was nearly halfway down the stairs when he heard the Grand Master exclaim, “Damn! I didn’t lock the study!”
"I don't think it's a big deal, Grand Master. You'll be back in your room in five minutes," Rustball downplayed.
“No, in five minutes we will be interrogating the prisoner you brought us,” Neltunia corrected him.
Hammerless let out a loud snort.
"Be patient. I just have to go up and come down. It won't take me long!" the Grand Master almost seemed to implore them, and then he began to run up the stairs.
The wind chime still laying on the floor invaded Viryl's thoughts like a bolt from the blue. This was the time they were going to fuck him for good.
Anticipating Dioryl, Viryl darted up the stairs and stopped on the landing. In a split second, he grabbed a shard of Fuligine Stone and visualized the space beyond the door in his mind’s eye, like a theater set. He had rarely used the “advanced telekinesis” spell blindly, but he had to try. He identified the point where he had left the wind chime, and imagined grabbing it with a steady, parallel force on each metal tube, and raising it to the center of the oak lintel above the door, right where he remembered the hook on which the wind chime hung.
Dioryl had now reached the landing.
Sweating cold, Viryl tried to ignore his presence. He moved the point where he was applying force upward, until it was also applying it to the ring that held all the rods together. He rotated the ring slightly until it was horizontal enough to slide onto the hook, and then gently lowered the whole damn thing until it met a slight resistance.
Dioryl pushed the door open vigorously, and was greeted by the usual clinking sound.
Viryl arched forward, clutching his knees, and gasped for air. This time he had really escaped by the skin of his teeth. He breathed a final sigh of relief, and leaned against the railing of the steps, waiting for Dioryl to return and continue his ridiculous procession.
Dioryl returned, and went to look right where Viryl was standing to shout down the stairwell: "I'm coming!"
Once again Viryl was able to sense Dioryl's intentions with a moment's warning and only miraculously dodged him. They then descended the convoluted coils of the spiral staircase together, and once Dioryl had rejoined Neltunia and the knights, Viryl waited for the group to advance down the corridor before following.
For some reason, the floor was still damn slippery. And Viryl was fed up with this bullshit. Although he realized that no one was actively trying to stop him, this unlikely series of random and unpredictable traps had unnerved him, and he had the feeling that if he followed, Dioryl would find new and absurd ways to make him tribulate.
So, fuck it. Viryl stopped in front of Neltunia's room and waited for the group to disappear down the grand double staircase on the other side of the hallway that seemed to lead down to the ground floor. Then he entered the lascivious pink room, opened the French doors to the balcony, and jumped down.
*****
“Well, it was a pleasure,” Dioryl greeted, his hands clasped together and resting on his pubic bone.
“It was even more so for us!” Rustball retorted, jingling a bag of coins.
“Now I must demonstrate my inquisitorial skills, so, if you please…” Dioryl continued, stripping off his purple nightgown and throwing it to the floor. The silver rays of the White Moon sparkled on his chest, outlining the fine and masterly chiseling of a metal plate of the same color.
“Shit… is that what I think it is?” Rustball screamed, his eyes full of amazement.
“Yes,” the Grand Master confirmed.
"It's none of my business what one does with another nation's Exoplia, but if that piece of steel belongs to who I think it does... well, now I understand why the fallen knight has crawled into a lion's den with his feathers all bristling," Hammerless observed, holding the reins of the cart.
“You didn’t see anything!” Dioryl whispered, putting his index finger to his mouth, a suggestive expression painted on his face.
"You have nothing to fear, Grand Master. As long as your coin fattens our pockets, our mouths are shut close. Let us know if your inquisitorial skills bear fruit," Hammerless reassured him, then he spurred his horse and set off at full speed.
As the wagon disappeared into the dark garden, a white shroud of silver-edged metal wrapped the body of the grand master. A helmet resembling the fierce features of a wolf covered his face, and his knuckles cracked in perfectly articulated gauntlets.
The fake knight in white armor turned to the priestess of Malsenial with a veiled complaint: "It seems we haven't managed to get him to bite this time either."
"Grand Master! In my heart I am so glad that this pantomime is over! I am extremely saddened by the treatment you wanted to reserve for poor Volbis! I have already said my opinion on this, there is no proof that the Rat King has betrayed us... perhaps what was reported in his letter was nothing but the truth," Neltunia retorted with a histrionic attitude.
Dioryl chuckled, “Neltunia dear, the boy knows it was all an act. As for the Rat King, I hate to corrupt your naivety but his machinations are clear. I see them as if they were in broad daylight. The man only bowed to me as long as I was a threat to him, and now that I am no longer…”
“But that’s not a given!” the woman insisted.
Dioryl placed his gloved fingers under Neltunia's chin and scratched her gently. "Oh, yes it is, my child. If the knights are still looking for him, turning Meridania upside down, it means our man is not there. Think how clever they were to capture Coronice, and that brat knows the city like the back of her hand. The fallen knight can't even be in the sewers, since they found the novice and handed him over to us. I won't deny that it's a bit bizarre how they decided to play it, but I think one thing is clear: Viryl of the White Gale is here and he's ready to ambush us. We tried to make good use of our money and have him meet his executioners, but he didn't reveal himself..."
The Grand Master paused for effect before concluding his monologue: “So, it seems, it will be up to us to get our hands dirty.”