The hall Rhydion picked was on the ground floor—or I guess the second floor, with the actual ground being below us. Good, that put the party two stories separate from the Yomiko shrine I didn’t want them to see.

The downside was that it was…a hall. Clean and silent, with polished akorshil floorboards and decoratively carved akorthist lining the walls, with occasional doors. Everything was eerily spotless, but there was nothing to see—literally nothing until I summoned an Orb of Light, as this was an interior hall with no windows and unsurprisingly the vampire had not obligingly left torches burning in every corridor of her mostly empty mansion.

This wasn’t going to get us anywhere in a hurry.

Quickly growing bored with this, I stepped to the right once we appeared to be about halfway down the corridor and pulled open a nearby door, causing the rest of the party to stop and turn to me.

Beyond was a small library, lit by floor-to-ceiling windows and with its other walls lined by fully stocked bookshelves, with a comfy-looking reading chair next to the inert fireplace and a low table alongside that. It was also extremely clean, and generally looked like it belonged in any modern Fflyr manor house.

Aster craned her neck over my shoulder. “Hang on, is that a full set of the Encyclopedia Novara?”

“Is your plan to search every room in this place one at a time, then?” Dhinell asked acerbically.

Turning to her, I shrugged. “It’s that or aimlessly wander the halls. Don’t you think anything interesting is more likely to be in the rooms? Or do you just litter all your important projects and documents around the hallways of your house?”

“Sure, but here’s the obvious downside to that plan,” said Harker. “If I was gonna booby-trap a house, especially one I lived in, where I would put the traps specifically is on the doors. That’s how you snare people trying to rummage around in your stuff. One person in a place this size doesn’t need to use most of the rooms for anything; all she’s gotta do is remember which doors not to open and let dumbasses like us blunder into the rest if they make it this far.”

“You think the house is booby-trapped?” I asked.

He jerked one shoulder in a half-shrug, peering suspiciously around at the empty and silent hallway rather than looking at me. “It’d be the logical way for her to defend herself. She’s an alchemist; that’s a specialty that lends itself to making nasty traps. She doesn’t seem to have reliable guards; those zombies are only a threat in big enough packs and too uncontrollable to be let in the house.”

“I was wondering why someone as deadly as this witch has been hyped up to be would avoid us instead of offering a fight,” Dhinell admitted.

Harker nodded. “No point in fighting dangerous enemies if you can just dump acid or something on ‘em. Less overall damage to her home that way, too.”

Aster and Dhinell immediately scooted back away from the door. I followed at a more sedate pace, because such unseemly haste did not befit my dignity.

“Well, it seems the solution is obvious,” I said, grinning at Harker. “You should open the doors! You’re the advance scout, after all. The one we should trust most to spot a trap and not trigger it, right? And if something goes wrong, I can just heal you.”

“That’s an idea,” he replied blandly. “Alternatively: fuck you.”

“I will open the doors,” Rhydion interjected in his come-on-kids-stop-fighting voice, with which we had all become quite familiar by now. “You are both correct; anything of interest or value is certain to be secured in some kind of chamber rather than sitting conveniently about the halls, but Harker’s insight that the doors are a significant point of danger is an extremely good one. Thus, that duty should fall to the person protected by the strongest artifact armor. I was insistent upon bringing a healer, Lord Seiji, because in dealing with undead any injury or even contact can result in terrible side effects if not immediately treated by magic. However, the damage that can be inflicted by an alchemical trap is on another level entirely. It is no insult to your powers to say that you may very well be unable to remedy such harm.”

“All right,” I agreed. “So what’s our strategy, then? You wanna go hall by hall, start with the ones on the left?”

“Dhinell’s insight was also of value,” the paladin replied. “Such a search would take days. Rather, I have in mind to narrow our focus by looking for the rear stairs.”

“Ah.” Harker nodded, his expression clearing as if he’d just figured out something I hadn’t. It was something of a relief to see that Dhinell and Aster looked as confused as I felt.

“This manor was clearly built by our precursor culture,” Rhydion explained, “but it has enough features in common with similar Fflyr structures that I believe some of the same underlying logic will apply. We saw from the outside that the lowest floor is inside the thickest foundational walls, without windows and possibly no direct exterior access. That space is most likely used for all purposes which the nobles who built this house preferred not to see, just as now. Kitchens, stable access, storage, repair and production facilities, and so on. In the manor’s current state, chambers originally meant for those purposes would be best suited for performing complex alchemy—not to mention as defensible points to which the vampire might retreat. That, then, is where I most expect to find something worth investigating, if not our hostess herself.”

“Oh.” Yeah, that actually did make sense, and it was something I probably wouldn’t have spotted, not being a member of this culture. The Fflyr mansion with which I was most familiar was Caer Yviredh, which was an old repurposed Lancoral fort built along totally different lines. Which was to say, straight lines.

“Assuming the pattern holds,” Rhydion said, turning back around to resume course down the hall, “there will be servants’ stairs accessing the lowest floor in a discreet location in or near the back of the house, possibly hidden. Come, let us investigate.”

Well, it was nice not to be wandering around at random, anyway.

“Boss, there’s a big spider around the corner,” Biribo whispered just below my ear as we progressed, causing me to nearly miss a step. He was warning me about that?

“Bigger than Junko,” my familiar added, apparently realizing his mistake.

Oh. Yeah, that was another goddamn matter. I’d envisioned a tarantula or something. I did not reach for my sword, not wanting to give away that I had a secret source of information, but I formed the comforting mental weight of Shock in the front of my mind, ready to fire.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to sit on my advance knowledge for long; the spider came around the corner ahead of us before we reached it.

Everybody froze. Including the spider. In fact, it reared backward, raising its two front legs in a gesture of surprise that honestly verged on adorable. It helped that it was a fuzzy spider, not one of those bony ones that looked like a skeletal hand crawling around. Well, actually, it did have a lankier build than most of the fuzzier spiders I’d seen, but there it was: clearly fuzzy. Might have looked almost cuddly, were it not for the eight glowing eyes of livid, poison green.

The same green as the slimes that powered the zombies, which cast the same glow in their eyes.

Rhydion and Aster drew swords; Harker raised his bow. In response, the spider lowered its bulk to the floor, partially covering its head with its two extended forelegs. Not the reaction I’d expected.

“Hang on,” I began.

“Kill it!” Dhinell screeched, lest anybody have a sensible conversation about this. Harker’s general disinclination to follow orders from her seemed to terminate at Giant Fucking Spider; he took aim and drew.

“Wait!” Rhydion, who had not taken the shield off his back, threw out his free arm in front of us; Harker lowered his bow, releasing some of the tension. “Lord Seiji?”

“Yeah, I got it,” I said, stepping forward and raising one hand. “Tame Beast.”

The spider peeked between its legs at me. Well, rather, it shifted its legs apart in a pointless gesture; the legs were too thin and its eyes too numerous to really block its vision of us.

I frowned and tried again. “Tame Beast!”

My target finally burst into motion, executing an extremely awkward pivot which involved scampering halfway up the nearest wall as it about-faced and skittered away, back around the corner. Man, the sound of eight rapidly moving feet is a whole other level of horrifying when they’re carrying that many kilos.

Behind me, Harker let out an amused little huff. “Hey, man, I hear it happens to most guys sooner or later.”

Ignoring him, I turned to Rhydion. “That was like trying to cast healing spells on a corpse. Invalid target. Tame Beast didn’t work on it because…it’s not an animal. That thing was undead.”

“Did you guys see what was on its back?” Aster inquired. “It had a backpack. Look, it dropped something.”

Rhydion nodded at me, then stepped forward, striding toward the spot Aster had indicated. He carefully picked up the two objects left incongruously in the hall where the giant undead spider had been moments ago.

“It’s a dirty rag and a…shovel?” I said.

“This is what happens when you don’t contribute to the housework,” Aster retorted, earning an irate glare from Dhinell for some reason. “That is a dustpan, and a rag which has clearly been used for dusting. That giant spider was cleaning. And by the way: zombies doing housework. I told you so!”

“Oh, shut up, you are not taking credit for this. Nobody called giant undead spiders!”

“In fairness, none of us are quite crazy enough to have seen that coming,” Harker commented.

“And for all of this,” said Rhydion, “what was most striking to me was its lack of aggression. Such a thing can only be described as a monster—yet it behaved much as I would expect of a maid upon finding her master’s house invaded by heavily-armed vagabonds.”

“Damn,” I muttered. “I’m especially glad we didn’t kill it, now.”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

He nodded, managing to look grave and solemn despite not having an expression. “With every step, we learn more. Let us press on, friends. And do not assault the witch’s servants nor damage her property if it can be avoided. I still hope to engage in her a productive conversation before the end.”

On we went, then, now with the prospect of giant zombie spiders to worry about in addiction to alchemy booby traps and of course the still-unseen vampire. Biribo waited just enough seconds for everyone to be fully occupied by walking and keeping watch in every possible direction before whispering to me in an extra-cautious volume that even I could barely hear.

“Okay, boss, don’t get mad.”

I immediately began to preemptively get mad. The knowledge that apparently I had a reason to was enough, even if I didn’t know what it was yet.

“There’s some tactical information I don’t bother telling you because it’s just background noise and you got more important stuff to think about. One thing like that is how many bugs are around you at all times. Seriously, even indoors—bugs everywhere. That’s just life. So that’s why I didn’t mention there are spiders all over this house, because there are spiders all over every house, that’s normal and unimportant. But after that big one I started paying more careful attention and… There’s only spiders, and that is not normal. No crawns, no roaches, no ants even. Even in deep winter like now, that’s unheard of. Also, it really seems like there’s a whole century and a half of accumulated spider webs around the ceilings in here, which is pretty odd considering how carefully everything else is cleaned. The spiders are distributed pretty normally and don’t seem to be following you or anything, they just sit there in webs like normal spiders, but there hasn’t been a second since we crashed in here that we weren’t in sight of several of ‘em. My senses can’t tell if there’s anything, y’know…biologically weird about ‘em. Sorry.”

By the time he finished, I was no longer mad. Biribo was dead right: it would be ridiculous for him to tell me about everything within the range of his senses, so he had to make judgments about that. He’d re-evaluated one based on new information, like a smart person does. At every step it seemed like he’d made the most rational call, and thanks to him paying attention we were now a leg up on where we would be otherwise.

I casually scratched my ear, and gave a surreptitious pat to the Biribo-shaped fold in my scarf as I lowered my hand.

Spiders, hm. He was right, it was the absence of every other kind of normal creepy-crawly that made this peculiar, that and the intact webs. I glanced up and…yep. They festooned the arched ceiling of this hallway. It wasn’t easy to make out due to the background color of the ceiling and the overall dimness in here, and they didn’t hang down over doorways; I probably wouldn’t have noticed if he hand’t told me.

So the questions were: what did this mean, and should I tell the others? The second answer was reluctantly “no,” because I couldn’t think of a plausible way to bring it up without raising curiosity I did not want directed my way. But what was Khariss doing with the spiders?

How scared should I be right now?

We had turned the corner while Biribo was whispering to me, finding the hallway beyond empty of any sign of life. Or un-life, as it were. There was, however, an open door, the first such we had seen since setting foot in here.

Upon carefully approaching it, we discovered that this opened onto a narrow stairway descending to the lower floor.

“Just as expected,” said Rhydion.

“And left invitingly open,” Harker added, “which I don’t mind telling you spooks me. Place like this, in a situation like this, I’m nervous about anything that looks too convenient for us. Do we wanna go in a direction the witch wants to herd us?”

“I would not assume this to have been Mistress Gwylhaithe’s handiwork,” Rhydion replied, “when we just saw a terrified servant flee in this direction, toward what can be assumed to be the servants’ quarters. People often fail to close doors after themselves under such circumstances.”

“People,” Dhinell scoffed. “That was a monster. Don’t assign rational motives to it!”

“He’s right, though,” I said reasonably. “It was a servant, and it was clearly scared of us. So it’s a spider, so what? I still think Rhydion’s plan is the best one for now.”

The paladin nodded at me, and stepped into the stairs.

Down we went, finding ourselves in dimmer, narrower halls with fewer doors. And more: here, finally, the ominous looming silence of the house was broken. The noise was faint, muffled; clearly separated from us by distance and at least one door. Rydion paused at the first intersection we came to, peering around.

“Where’s it coming from?” Dhinell stage whispered.

I shook my head. “Can’t tell. The echoes in here are weird, with all these irregular halls and arched ceilings. I believe I mentioned that earlier.”

We all turned to Rhydion, who was still surveying the options.

“This way,” he finally decided, setting off with confidence down one corridor. I had to wonder: helmet magic, or just projecting certainty for the sake of group morale?

Whichever it was, he turned out to be right. The muffled noise grew louder as we drew closer, till I could begin to pick apart individual threads. It was rhythmic—well, at least two counter-rhythms operating over each other. One was composed of thunks and soft scrapes, reminding me of some kind of large machine running, while another element sounded liquid. Not like running water, but like something splashing repeatedly into water. Additional, softer noises became clear with our increasing proximity, a set of rattling, rasping undertones.

It was all very ominous, and in short order we found ourselves coming to a stop in front of a door positioned in the middle of a hallway. The sounds were clearly coming from behind it.

Rhydion turned his head around to each of us, nodding once. We took positions, Aster next to him with her sword at the ready, the rest behind prepared to cast or fire. He reached out, grasped the door latch, and with one decisive motion turned and pushed it open.

The wide room beyond was full of giant spiders.

Two were operating a big apparatus which I recognized as a loom, weaving together threads that came…ugh…directly from their own butts. Another was behind a big tub of soapy water beside a heap of soiled linens, clearly doing laundry with a washboard. A slightly smaller spider was using a big device like a paper cutter to trim fabric, while three more were engaged in what it took me a moment to realize was dyeing; their fuzz was splattered multiple bright colors.

All of them instantly halted what they were doing when the doors opened. Several sets of eight green, glowing eyes turned to fix on us.

For an interminable moment, everything was silent and still.

Then Aster, moving very slowly, gently pushed Rhydion out of the way. Very much to my surprise, he let her. She reached across him to grab the door handle he’d just released, and equally slowly pulled it shut.

After a second, the various sounds of fabric production resumed.

“Gonna be seeing that in my dreams for a while,” Harker noted.

“I…yes.” For what I think was the first time since I’d met him, Rhydion seemed at a loss for words. “Well. Intriguing as that was, it is not what we were seeking. Come, let us continue.”

“Why spiders, though?” I muttered as we moved on. The others glanced sympathetically at me, but nobody had an answer.

The next door we tried was quieter, and a hall distant from our previous attempt. Rhydion paused with his hand on the latch, turning to look at the group.

“Do you see any sign of a trap, Harker?”

The archer shrugged. “No, but… I’m way more experienced at trapping in the wilderness than an environment like this. Besides, all she’d have to do is hide the mechanism on the other side of the door.”

“Can’t hurt to ask,” Aster murmured.

Rhydion nodded. “Indeed. Stand back, then.”

We all did so, and he pushed the door carefully open.

Nothing happened.

Encouraged, Rhydion stepped through and paused, causing the rest of us to bottleneck in the doorway as we tried to follow him. At least I got stuck with a decent enough view of the room, if I craned my neck.

This was another large, rectangular space similar to the cloth facility we’d just seen; I guessed this must’ve been meant as a warehouse area when the mansion was first built. Now it was an alchemy lab.

The profusion of glass bottles and equipment all over the tables which lined the walls of half the room and formed an island in their middle was dizzying, most of it entirely unfamiliar to me, though I recognized a few pieces similar to Youda’s setup. The other half of the room was even more interesting, though, being given over to storage. A lot of it along the back wall was just inscrutable barrels and drums, but there were also whole racks of sample jars in which floated the most amazing variety of horrors. She had lots of miscellaneous body parts from all kinds of different species, as well as entire preserved corpses of various animals and a whole wall of bottled slimes, both normal and in various stages of whatever process made them viable zombie puppeteers.

There were three large operating tables in the middle of the floor dividing the alchemy and storage areas, one with a partially-disassembled human cadaver on it apparently in the middle of an autopsy. The flesh was greenish and looked…preserved, somehow. It had clearly been somewhat desiccated, but was not visibly rotting and smelled more like chemicals than decomposition. Spread across the other two were the components of a giant spider, obviously in the process of being constructed.

Now that I could see it in that stage… Holy shit, she had built those things? Obviously her green puppet slimes were part of the process, but they were also being put together from various parts, ranging from animal organs to pieces of crawn and khora shell being assembled in various configurations. That was a relief, both because it meant there weren’t colossal spiders just living on Dount, and because…

This woman was obviously a genius. Or, well, maybe she was an average intellect who had just been practicing her craft for much longer than people normally live. Whatever the reason, Khariss Gwylhaithe was by a wide margin the most skilled alchemist I’d yet seen on this world. Mentally, I moved the possibility of getting her onto my team to a higher priority. If I could. Persuading her might prove…a challenge.

“Well,” Dhinell stated in a tone of grim determination that frankly didn’t suit her, “if nothing else, finding this represents an achievement. Whether or not the witch continues to elude us, we can demolish this infernal hive of evil and do the people of Dount a service.”

She raised her hands in a gesture preparatory to casting a spell, and I raised a foot preparatory to kicking the back of her knee.

“Stop!” Rhydion said sharply, holding up his own hand in a warding gesture at Dhinell, then only belatedly moderated his tone. “Please.”

“I cannot believe this,” the priestess hissed, and it was a real testament to her frustration that she was speaking to Rhydion of all people this way. “You are that determined to have some kind of civil discussion with this…this vile abomination? So much that you would leave this abhorrent perfidy intact?!”

“I love how literate your culture is,” I commented. “You know more synonyms for ‘bad’ than anyone I’ve ever heard of.”

For a second I really thought she was going to take a swing at me, but unfortunately Harker chimed in before the real entertainment could unfold.

“You wanna smash an enormous room full of alchemy that you don’t understand? Sure, Sister, knock yourself out. Just kindly wait until I’m out of the house, and ideally half a limn away.”

“Yes, exactly,” Rhydion said more soothingly. “It is not that I disagree with you, Sister Dhinell. But the destruction of volatile alchemy is a thing which must be undertaken carefully, by specialists. Applying brute force to the contents of this room would likely result in nothing but innovative new ways for each of us to die. Remember that ours is, first and foremost, an exploratory mission; a satisfactory conclusion to this entire affair was never our objective. Anything we are unable to fully settle still gives us priceless information. Already we have learned more about the kind of resources that must be brought to bear when forming a full expedition to pacify this site.”

Dhinell subsided, looking embarrassed, while Harker wandered over to examine some of the sample jars. While I was mentally adding “doesn’t handle stress well” and “not too bright” to my ever-expanding list of Dhinell’s shortcomings, Biribo suddenly whispered to me.

“The witch is nearby, boss. End of the hallway on the other side of this room, right at the edge of my senses. If you go out the opposite door, though, it’s a straight shot to her. And, uh, she’s got an axe now.”

Oh, that couldn’t be good. Rationally, I knew adding a melee weapon to the kit of an immortal alchemist with vampire powers probably didn’t buff her appreciably, but there was also the matter that I had no idea what the real extent of her powers was, and she’d apparently felt it worthwhile to pick up that axe in the first place.

“Hey, Lord Seiji, can you figure out anything useful about these?” Harker called. “You’re the slime expert.”

I ambled over to him, playing it cool because that was my only viable move in this situation. “Slime expert? I can summon them and tame them with magic, that’s it. Only thing I know how to do with slimes is sell them to an alchemist. Which, uh, I am not. So no, I have no idea what—”

The crashing was distant, being through a still-closed door and down a long hall, exactly where Biribo had warned me Khariss was. It was crashing, though. Even at that range, it’s hard to miss the sound of someone taking an axe to a wall.

“Come!” Rhydion ordered, striding toward the door opposite the one we’d come in. “Be alert, and stay close. I believe this is it.”

He pulled it open and stepped through, and the rest of us followed. Charging off to corner an angry vampire. With an axe.

Yeah, this was certain to end well.