We discovered a new property to the gunk in the windows now that our backs were to them: rather than filtering the light amber as it seemed they should, those cobweb-honeycomb structures inside seemed to gather and amplify sunlight, filling the chamber with a clean white radiance that was even stronger than if the sun were just allowed to stream in normally. It thus made some sense why something so apparently brittle was in these windows, as this was a room that needed to be well-lit.

This was probably originally built as some kind of parlor or sitting room, though all the furniture was gone. The wall of windows along one side had a semicircular protrusion in the middle, right next to where we’d accidentally broken in, and mirrored by a round nook on the opposite inner wall. In this alcove had been erected… Well, it could only be called a shrine.

An obvious altar stood against the wall in the center, upon which there were the stumps of several well-burned candles, currently dark, a few flowers that looked freshly cut, and one cup of tea that had gone cold. All these were arranged before the true article of reverence.

Upon a clearly custom-built akorshil display rack rested an unsheathed katana, its scabbard held below it in parallel. This was the real deal, not just in its distinctive cross-wrapped handle and coin-shaped crossguard; the blade was steel, not akornin, and even had the characteristic uneven wave pattern along its length from the differential tempering of the cutting edge. And to my Blessed eyes, the weapon put off the telltale glow of a powerful artifact.

Somehow, that wasn’t the most striking thing on display.

The whole wall was covered in paintings. They had clearly started in the curved walls of the alcove, spreading outward from a huge portrait that was hung directly above the displayed sword. Evidently their numbers had swelled over the last century and a half, having filled the walls of the alcove long since and then crawled outward. By now they covered the entire wall of the room, which wasn’t small, and had begun to creep further along the side walls on both sides. All of them were paintings of one woman, in a variety of poses, costumes, backgrounds and activities.

A Japanese woman.

Kurobe Yomiko was…really pretty. Like, movie star attractive. That surprised me for a moment, before I paused to consider the implications. It didn’t seem like a particularly useful trait in a Champion—I was no troll myself, but I was well aware that my success with girls had come from charisma and being a guitarist, not looks. And, well, there was no need to be mean to Yoshi even inside my head. But, I realized upon reflection, Yomiko hadn’t just been a Champion, she’d been a girl. In entertainment media, that made being unreasonably hot a necessary job requirement, and after all, the goddesses were just here to create their ideal live-action anime.

The whole thing felt gross and I really missed my pre-Cat Alley days when I didn’t have to think about stuff like that.

We stood in silence for a long few moments, slowly taking in all the pictures. Dark Lord Yomiko didn’t seem to have been a very expressive person; at least, in these portraits she rarely smiled, nor looked particularly angry even in obvious combat scenes, of which there were quite a few. Her resting expression seemed more serene than stern, though.

“She likes to paint,” Aster finally said. “Well. I guess…if you’re gonna be cooped up alone for a century and a half, you need a hobby. These are really good.”

“Hey, Biribo,” I said quietly. “What’s the enchantment on that sword do?”

“I…huh.” He buzzed over closer to it, flicking his tongue out. “Weird.”

“Weird? You mean you can’t tell, like Rhydion’s armor?”

“No, it’s… Well, Yomiko did get spawned in the heart of the Savindar Empire and they were quick to adopt her. I guess with the resources of a whole-ass empire behind you, you can get stuff like this. It’s a custom enchantment, boss, designed to work with a particular Champion perk you don’t have. For anybody but Dark Lord Yomiko, this would just be a piece of sharpened steel.”

“Do you want to take it?” Aster asked, turning to me. “We could think up something to tell Rhydion. It’s the sword of the last Dark Lord; there’s a case to be made that it should be yours.”

I shook my head. “People who haven’t studied iaido have no business handling katanas. I’m the farthest thing from a traditionalist, but I met enough idiot tourists in Akiba to have a bug up my butt about that in particular. Besides, I know a stalker shrine when I see one. Rhydion’s not the only one who’d like a discreet word with this witch, so let’s not do anything that’ll send her into a berserk rage. She’s gonna be pissed enough about the window. Don’t touch anything.”

Aster nodded, turning her frown back on the wall of paintings. “You realize we can’t let the others see this.”

“It’ll be tricky to come up with an excuse to keep them out.”

“Yeah, but… Seiji, I have now seen three Japanese people in my life and I immediately recognized this woman based on the other two. The eyes could maybe pass for highborn, but there’s no group on this archipelago who has those plus that hair and that complexion. The bone structure is distinctive, too, once you’ve seen a couple. Remember, those three hang around the King’s Guild; Dhinell specifically mentioned meeting Yoshi and I bet the others have, too. If they see this, they’re gonna have questions you don’t want to answer, and it might be putting Yoshi in danger as well.”

“Shit, you’re right. Okay…” I pivoted quickly, turning around. “Okay, this is workable. There’s only one door and it goes in the direction we need to head anyway. We can tell them honestly that this is a dead end and just not mention that there’s anything interesting in here. Biribo, any movement?”

“Not in the last minute or so. There was one person in the house when we first crashed in, out at the edge of my senses. It’s a big house. Humanoid, I think female. She’s either got some kinda magical surveillance or uncannily good ears, though, because she bolted once we broke through the window. Up a corridor and then down a flight of stairs, and now beyond my perception.”

So, the witch was home, but not in a sociable mood. Why run away? If she was a master alchemist and a century-old vampire she should be a match for any intruder. Unless she knew I was the Dark Lord, somehow…

“All right,” I said, “there’s only one way to go, then.”

“Right.” Aster stepped over to the room’s sole door and eased it carefully open, peering out. She didn’t draw her greatsword yet; while I knew she was capable of using the huge thing in tight corridors, it was prohibitively hard and not very effective. It was a better strategy for her to block the hall with her artifact armor and let me cast spells from behind.

I hesitated, though, turning back to stare once more at the altar, and then sweep my eyes slowly across all the paintings behind it.

It was…strangely awkward, having Yomiko humanized in this way. Seeing so many sides of her at once, I felt that… Well, honestly, we probably wouldn’t have gotten along. She seemed kind of…stiff.

Still.

I knew what she’d gone through, at least some of it. Granted, I’d never had to juggle imperial politics and she had probably not had to worry about going hungry, but the core of it was the same. Brought against our will to this hell world, forced to fight a pointless war for someone else’s amusement. I knew Yomiko had been loved by her troops and respected by her enemies—that she had been fair, and merciful when possible. She had freed slaves and redistributed wealth to the poor. And for all that, she had died alone, on foreign—in fact, alien—soil, at the hands of a man who’d been simultaneously her sole link to her own homeland and by all accounts one of the biggest dickheads Japan had ever spat out.

“You did your best,” I whispered. Stepping over to stand directly in front of the shrine, moved by an uncharacteristic impulse, I bowed. “Otsukaresama deshita, Kurobe-san.”

It felt wholly inadequate. But damn it, I’m a rocker; ceremony is not my strong suit.

Aster was giving me an approving little smile when I turned back around, which I ignored on account of it being even more awkward. We stepped out into the hall without another word, Biribo clambering back into his hidden nest in my scarf and arranging it carefully to hide himself.

“So.” In the narrow hallway outside, I peered around. It was dim, but not dusty. Very clean in fact; this place might be dilapidated from the outside but it did not look abandoned. “We’re next to the outer wall of the house here; we need to stick left and find a way to the next level down so we can help those three get in.”

“There’s no direct path,” Biribo reported from inside my scarf. “Need to follow this hall, take a right at the intersection, then take the stairs down two levels to the lowest floor. Gotta go through a few more corridors down there, then back up another staircase, and that’ll bring us to the door we saw from the parlor.”

“Oh, my fucking god, who would build a place like this?” I growled, setting off.

“Just be glad we’ve got Biribo to navigate or we’d be screwed,” said Aster. “So, um. Speaking of which, one look at this place and they’ll believe we got lost. If we wanted to…not meet up with them directly.”

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“You’re suggesting we go after the witch alone?”

“There’s a real possibility she’ll be more willing to talk with you if the Sanorites aren’t there.”

“…maybe,” I said pensively, considering. “From that room back there I get the impression she’s much more a follower of Yomiko in particular than Virya, in which case she might be more hostile toward me. And if she does pick a fight for whatever reason…well, Rhydion makes a better meat shield than you, no offense.”

“None taken, and I’m not saying we should ditch them,” she hastened to clarify, “because I’m not sure that’s the best course. But I do think it’s something we ought to at least consider. Rhydion is… I don’t know. He’s always been held up as this paragon, the ideal of Sanorite and particularly Fflyr virtue. The way he was talking about the Clans back there, though…”

“Don’t tell me you’re disappointed. Uh, it occurs to me, Aster, have I mentioned specifically to you that I’m planning to kill and overthrow the Clans?”

She half-turned to shoot me an Aster Look. “Yes, repeatedly, and I’m not thick enough to miss that subtext even if you hadn’t. I’m talking about Rhydion, and the fact that he’s playing a game nobody even suspects, on levels we don’t yet know. Just for starters, that talk about getting the Clans united and combining their focus? That sounds like a terrible idea to me. That would spell misery and disaster for everyone living under their power, and especially everyone planning to do something about them.”

“In a vacuum, yes, but there was context to that. He mentioned specifically the way they do it to the lowborn and everyone else: keep your targets’ anger directed to one place so you can hit them from behind while they’re distracted. If that’s his game, it’s a very good one. The huge, looming problem is that I have zero clue how exactly he is planning to capitalize on the Clans’ distraction if he can arrange it.”

“That’s no accident, you realize. He is leading you along, one crumb at a time.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“So…you gonna keep following him?”

I was silent for a few seconds, considering while we navigated through the halls to a grand staircase that descended two entire floors into an enormous, vaulted entryway. At the far end was the huge front door we’d seen outside, currently useless as it opened onto a melted-off ledge. The staircase descended one floor to a landing, then split around a central section which probably held some kind of statuary or painting right where it’d be visible from the front doors. We took the left flight, sticking close to the direction of the wall through which the King’s Guild party would be approaching.

“It’s risky either way,” I finally admitted. “The witch is a complete unknown, and Rhydion is…a big barrel of puzzles and hazards. But I know some of what he’s up to, and the possibilities… I am not ready to burn that bridge yet, that wouldn’t only cut off the potential benefits but immediately kick off a full-on war with the kingdom which we’re not ready for. Maybe we can still scrape out a deal with the witch, especially if Rhydion tries to be polite with her. Even if not, though, the worst case scenario of making her an enemy isn’t nearly as bad as doing the same with him.”

She turned to me and nodded, pausing to glance around the huge great hall of the mansion. It was bigger than some of the Convocation temples I’d seen; this must have been a very important noble family in whatever regime had existed here before Dlemathlys was formed.

“Heads up,” Biribo interjected softly before Aster could respond. “They made good time out there, just got in through the side door. If you wanna lose ‘em, the window of opportunity is shrinking. You wanna link up, head down that corridor on the left and hang a right at the first hall with windows.”

“Thanks, Biribo.”

“’swhat I do, boss.”

I caught Aster’s eye, jerked my head to the left, and set off to meet our dubious, temporary allies, hoping I hadn’t just fucked up again and squandered a valuable opportunity. It was a frail hope, and a depressingly familiar sensation.

----------------------------------------

“Ran away?” Rhydion asked as I led them back to the great hall.

“I’m being very conservative with my declarative statements here, but that’s what the signs pointed to. Faking a retreat so as to then spring out at me from behind would be a good ploy, but…there’s been nothing. It seems like she fled as soon as she heard us break in.”

Obviously I wasn’t about to tell them about Biribo, so I’d housed my newly acquired tactical data in a story about hearing rapidly retreating footsteps, and hoped Rhydion’s helmet was not in fact a magical lie detector.

“Unfortunately,” I continued, “that’s the best I’ve got. ‘Away’ is an annoyingly complicated concept in here. This place is enormous, and the hallways are a fuckin’ maze.”

“How’re you so sure she did run away, then?” Harker asked.

“Well you see, Harker,” I said in a tone of syrupy patience, “my advanced training and long experience as a musician has granted me the little-known insight that sounds get quieter as they get more distant. I was able to leverage my skills to carefully deduce—”

“Peace, please,” Rhydion interjected in a far more genuinely patient voice.

Harker, to my mild annoyance, grinned at me. He was a guy who appreciated a good burn too much to be offended when one was directed at him.

I was annoyingly uncertain about Harker. He wasn’t as mysterious as Rhydion, and not a fraction as important, but there were enough layers to the man that I hadn’t committed to an opinion about him. The one time I’d seen him genuinely angry on his own behalf was when I taunted him about raping beastwomen—a thing he had previously boasted about. What the hell was up with that?

People needed to stop being so complicated. All I asked was for my enemies to plainly identify themselves as such up front, and refrain from having sympathetic traits that made me feel bad about slaughtering them. Why was that so damn hard? I missed Hoy.

“Ugh,” Dhinell grimace, hugging herself and staring upward. I followed her gaze to observe, for the first time, that the vaulted ceiling of the great entry hall, almost four stories up, was completely swathed in enormous spider webs.

“Oh, damn. I didn’t even see that before.”

“Not surprising she hasn’t had time to get to the rafters,” Harker observed. “This place is entirely too clean to have just one person taking care of it. Look at this, there’s not even any dust. She’s gotta have some help or she wouldn’t have a spare second to do anything but push a mop.”

“Think she’s got zombies doing the housework?” Aster suggested.

“Not the ones we saw out there,” Dhinell sniffed. “They haven’t the coordination for complex tasks, and probably not the ability to follow instructions.”

“We should not rule out the prospect that the witch has more effective servants than those left to mill about unattended outside,” said Rhydion. “Still, try to refrain from speculation until we acquire more evidence. It is a mistake to prejudice oneself when conducting an investigation.”

“Uh, hey.” Harker had stepped ahead of us into the hall, bow out but not drawn, and now was turned to stare at the low wall below the landing on which the grand staircase divided. “Speaking of evidence… I think I found her.”

We swiftly moved to join him, then stopped to stare. For Aster and I it was the second time we found ourselves gobsmacked by a painting, but this was a new experience for the rest.

This one was huge, almost a full story tall; it covered the wall from floor to just below the railing of the landing above. It depicted a woman—not Yomiko, thankfully, but a light elf.

Except, not quite.

Her eyes were vivid crimson; her lips were parted in a lopsided little smile, just enough to display one overlong canine, a trait light elves did not normally have. The texture of the canvas itself would have obscured the subtly crystalline texture of elven skin if that was present, but it even so displayed her complexion as utterly bone white, lacking the faint jewel undertones light elves usually had. Her hair, too, was very pale, though it was a believable shade for non-vampire reasons. I’d seen highborn with hair that light platinum blonde, which suggested that at least some elves had it. There was just enough gold in its tint that it clearly was blonde, rather than white hair like Velaven had.

The witch was depicted wearing a stark black gown with a high collar, whose sleeves and hem were visibly ragged in such a way that they have to have been deliberately cut like that, rather than naturally frayed. She was holding a heavy book in her left hand and an unsheathed rapier in the right.

I took a step closer and bent down to read the simple inscription upon a brass plate on the bottom of the gilded akorshil frame.

“Khariss Gwylhaithe.” I straightened up, turning back to the others. “So… I know in Fflyr names, the surname comes first for women, but she was here since before this country existed, so…”

“Khariss is a woman’s name,” said Dhinell, staring up at the vampire’s self-portrait. “Dreadfully old-fashioned, but I have met a few elderly women with that name. Also a few Gwylhaithe families among the middleborn. There is no Clan Gwylhaithe, at least not anymore. To think they were full-blooded elves only a hundred and fifty years ago. No doubt the Goddess cursed them for the perfidy of this corrupt ancestor.”

“Dunno about that,” Harker commented, “but I’ve gotta say that putting a giant-ass portrait of yourself on display in the front hall of your mansion is a level of egotistical I’ve never even seen a highborn match.”

“And so,” Rhydion said quietly, “we have a face, and a name.”

I stared up at the vampire in silence. She had painted herself smiling, and it was not a nice smile. A perfect fusion of satisfaction and seething anger that resonated powerfully within me. This was the expression of a woman who knew what it was like to see her enemies broken at her feet, and planned on seeing it again.

And…she was pretty. Stunningly so, in fact, even more than Yomiko. Her face was angular to an extent that verged on hawkish, but still so perfect she looked designed by an artist. Of course, she was an elf; that was basically cheating. Looks weren’t the kind of thing to which I assigned much inherent value these days, but when it came to a non-human woman possessing immense, inherent magical power… To me, her attractiveness was a very relevant piece of data indeed.

What could I do with vampire powers, for myself and all my Queens?

I felt…a strange unease, thinking about her this way. Prowling through someone’s home made it hard to think of them in the abstract; I guess anything which taught you more about them would. Just minutes ago she had been a vampire witch. Now she was Khariss, the elf who did her best to keep her home clean despite the enormity of the task. She was an alchemist of great skill, and she liked to paint.

And strong indications were that she was gay, or maybe just Yomikosexual. The sword shrine I could chalk up to the respect of a survivor toward a much-revered leader, but there was just no hetero explanation for that wall of portraits. I don’t understand the visual arts enough to articulate the mechanisms the way I can with music, but the sheer adoration for their subject was obvious in the framing of every portrait of Yomiko, even to a philistine like me.

The witch was a person, which meant there was just no outcome here that wouldn’t be awkward at the very least.

“Let us press on,” said Rhydion, turning away from the portrait.

“Where?” I asked pointedly. “Look at the size of this place. And it’s one of those weird, organically shaped Fflyr structures; there’s no logic to how the halls are laid out. You…wanna split up and search?”

“Absolutely not,” he stated. “I believe we have pressed our luck in that direction as far as we dare already. But you are right, searching this place as one unit will be an arduously long process. I don’t suppose you can indicate a direction in which you heard our quarry retreat?”

Biribo would be able to, but there was no way to ask him with Rhydion’s full attention on me, and he had the sense to stay quiet and still.

I shook my head. “Sorry. Echoes in here are probably weird, but I doubt I could tell much anyway. She got more distant, that’s all I know.”

“What happened to all that musical training?” Harker asked innocently.

“Made your mom sing loud enough.”

“Ugh.” Dhinell turned away, grimacing. Harker just grinned at me, the bastard.

“Then we have freedom to choose our starting point,” Rhydion declared, setting off toward one of the halls branching off from the entry. Not, fortunately, the one from which we had originally come. Hopefully I wouldn’t have to work too hard to ward them away from the shrine to my predecessor. “This may go without saying, but remain alert and stick together.

And so we went deeper into the witch’s lair, which was a fantastically terrible idea that we were pursuing because we didn’t have a better one.

Story of my life.