Biribo led me around the side of the house, where we immediately found—naturally—more zombies. I skidded to a halt as the next horde turned their slack jaws and glowing green eyes on me, but this was a whole different situation. I had the hang of this now.

Storm, Storm, Storm, Storm, Storm, Storm, Storm…

I could more or less place the canopies where I wanted them, and this time rather than lashing out in all directions made a methodical sweep, covering the entire space of packed zombies from the corner of the house to the far wall. Due to the erratic formation of the clouds from which Storm launched its attack, it didn’t provide full coverage of the area, leaving me a few stragglers to clean up.

Strike, Strike, Strike, Arc, Strike, Arc, Strike.

“Holy shit,” Biribo whispered in awe. “When the hell did you—”

“Biribo, I promise I’ll catch you up on everything, but we’re on the clock, remember?”

“Right! This way!”

He zipped ahead and I followed more carefully, having to step with circumspection around the smoking limbs of fallen zombies and patches of ground where the gravel was cooling but still slightly molten.

The smell was truly incredible.

I had no trouble finding the side entrance, at least. When this had been built however many centuries ago the kitchen door had undoubtedly been rather discreet, but currently there was a big, organic-looking buildup around it of that amber stuff—and this sample was more like the windows upstairs, in that it contained those white filaments. Drawing closer, I paused for a second to study them, which was easy as they glowed vividly in the sunlight. Their position within the amber was somewhat erratic, but the two patterns in evidence were definitely honeycombs and spider webs, jumbled together.

Like the stuff which had been sealing up the Void Altar, the substance was lathered and layered on in a built-up formation like a wasp’s nest. Could Khariss actually be using giant insects to build these things?

Or spiders?

At any rate, it did leave a tunnel-like passageway through to the actual door, which seemed incongruous within the glowing amber all around it. I grasped the handle, turned and pulled, finding it unlocked—and noting that amber had been carefully and strategically carved away in the right spots so it had room to open.

Inside was what had clearly been the kitchen originally, and was currently a mad science nightmare.

I didn’t let my focus linger on the massive racks of bubbling alchemy equipment occupying the kitchen counters, instead turning to the other side of the room, where huge bins and barrels were being drip-fed solutions from some of that equipment and were themselves full of squirming…things. Enormous grubs, crawns, worms, a veritable buffet of creepy-crawlies, and I don’t choose that word for no reason. What directed my focus in this direction was the huge fuzzy spider currently at work mashing up a selection of grubs and worms in a large mixing bowl.

We stared at each other for a second.

Hesitantly, the spider set down its bowl of creamed spider chow and, visibly trembling, brandished its goo-dripping pestle at me.

I pointed aggressively at its eight luminous green eyes.

“Don’t start none, won’t be none.”

The spider reared up on its back four legs in what I first took for a threat display. Fortunately, even as I readied to cast Current at it, the creature dropped its pestle, about-faced and scurried away, trying to stuff itself into a corner between the cabinets and the wall. That did not work, it was just too huge; I was left staring at its huge fuzzy spider butt, sticking out into the room and quivering in terror.

Well, great. Now I felt bad.

“Biribo?”

“I’ve got eyes on Aster, boss! The others are…right out at the edge of my senses, but she’s on the floor above us. This way!”

“Sorry!” I called back at the spider cook as I followed him out into the corridor beyond.

Here we were back on familiar ground; these bottom-floor corridors all looked the same. Biribo led me through a couple of turns and straight runs to the same staircase the party had taken to get down here, narrating as he flew.

“She’s moving at a walking pace through a corridor above, currently away from us. Dunno what her destination is. Boss, there’s one of those giant spiders with her.”

“What do you mean, with her?”

“I mean in immediate proximity! Close enough she could pet it. I dunno what they’re doing together, they don’t seem hostile, just…walking. Oh, they’re heading for the front, I think. Just turned into a passage that’ll take ‘em out into the great hall.”

I huffed in frustration, vaulting up the steps three at a time. So far the big servant spiders seemed pretty timid, but I wasn’t about to make assumptions. If Aster had been taken hostage or something…

“Khariss is above us,” Biribo reported as we tore down the hall. “Two floors up. Dhinell’s on that floor, I think she’s going after her.”

Aw, shit. Okay, Dhinell was a sorceress, she wasn’t helpless. And if she got eaten by a vampire…well, I would feel guilty if I could have stopped that and didn’t, but honestly it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. The woman was as useless as she was unbearable.

First things first.

I burst out of the passageway into the great hall again, and relief flooded me at the sight of Aster, striding calmly toward me.

Beside her was, yep, another giant spider. It flung up its four front legs in surprise just like the one down below, and again that made the animal part of my brain recoil in instinctive fear, but the creature actually shuffled back a couple of steps.

“There he is!” Aster let out a sigh of relief on her own, and then, to my amazement, turned to the spider and folded down her hands. “Thank you very much, I can take it from here. I won’t keep you from your work any longer.”

It did a peculiar little dance, shuffling back and forth for a couple of steps while waving its two foremost legs at her, then turned and scuttled off back into the dark hallways at top speed. Yep, the sound that made was still nightmare-inducing.

“Making friends?” I demanded.

“Hey, I know something about what it’s like to work for a powerful and unreasonable boss with absolute authority over your life,” Aster retorted. “So do you, as I recall. I hope you didn’t Immolate any of the bugs, they seem pretty harmless.”

“I had a run-in, but yeah, it was quick to back down. Anyway, thank god you’re all right.”

“You, too,” she said fervently, striding forward and giving me a quick, surprising hug. “After that damn devil scattered us all over the place, I heard the most godawful noise outside. It was like an entire day’s worth of thunderstorms going off in a five-minute period. Somehow I suspected you were in the middle of that, but…here you are.”

“Oh, yeah…that was me, actually. Ozyraph put me out front, with the zombies. I got rid of them.”

She squinted. “What the hell do you mean, you got rid of them?”

“I mean they’re gone now. No more zombies. I may have lost my temper a little bit.”

“You? I find that hard to believe. You’re so even-natured and serene.”

“Okay, if you’re feeling up to being an asshole, you can move. C’mon, we need to get upstairs. Biribo thinks Khariss is cornering Dhinell as we speak.”

“I guess we probably shouldn’t let her get eaten, huh,” Aster agreed, falling into step beside me as I turned and began bounding up the stairs. Biribo affixed himself to my neck en route, squirming back under my scarf and rearranging it to hide himself. That was not what I’d call a pleasant sensation, but I kept quiet as it was the correct action; we were heading back toward people who weren’t supposed to know about him.

And not a moment too soon. Biribo just barely had time to mutter a quick heads up to me on the next landing before pounding boots on the carpet announced new arrivals, and in the next second Rhydion and Harker came careening around the corner at us.

“There you are,” the paladin said with clear relief. “Good, I hoped the rest of the group had begun to find each other, as well. No sign of Sister Dhinell yet?”

“I hope she’s not outside,” Harker grunted. “Something that sounded apocalyptic went down out there.”

“Oh, that was me. Nothing to worry about, I just wiped out most of the zombies.”

They stared at me.

“You…did what?” Harker finally asked warily.

“I’m a sorcerer, remember?” I shrugged. “That fucking devil set me down in the middle of them, and we are clearly past the point of trying to sneak up on Khariss. So I used my good spells.”

Stolen novel; please report.

Just as I was racking my brain for a way to segue into searching upstairs without revealing how I knew to, Rhydion suddenly hissed and held up one armored hand. “Shh!”

In the ensuing silence, the noise was clear. Faint, distant, but obvious. Pounding feet, scuffling, a female voice raised in a muffled shriek and then the sharp crackle of some kind of spell going off.

“Come!” Rhydion set off up the stairs at a dead run, the rest of us drawing weapons as we followed.

Altogether it was a pretty easy hunt; Dhinell was clearly not going gently into that good night. We just had to follow the sounds of yelling, scuffling and spells.

“Sanctify! Holy Light! Burn Abomination!”

“You tell ‘er, Sister,” Harker growled in an uncommon show of solidarity.

We turned at an intersection and found we had the pair of them cornered in a little sitting area where the hallway itself terminated in a semicircular protrusion walled entirely by windows, with an astonishing view out over the khora forest beyond. Dhinell was slumped against a wall, bedraggled and bleeding, but she had clearly been holding her own; Khariss was literally smoking from spell impacts. Regardless of her objective strength in spellcasting, the priestess’s particular magical arsenal was fine-tuned toward countering monsters, and had been extremely effective against the undead on the way up here.

In trying to pick us off one by one, Khariss had been wise not to go for me or Rhydion first, but of the remaining three she had chosen her worst possible mismatch.

Now, though, the board was flipped yet again as our arrival distracted the beleaguered Sister, who gasped aloud in relief, turning her face toward Rhydion. It gave Khariss the opening she needed to swoop in behind her, swiftly seizing Dhinell in a headlock and twisting her about to face us.

“No closer!” the vampire hissed.

Dhinell drew in a ragged gasp. “Consec—”

She broke off with a strangled croak as Khariss sank her fingers cruelly into her throat.

“Silence from you now, Goddess bitch!”

“Stop.” Rhydion planted himself in the center of the hallway, staring the vampire down. “Release her, and let us have a reasonable discussion about this.”

Khariss laughed derisively at him. “Just how stupid do you think I am, boy?”

“No one thinks you’re stupid,” I said soothingly. “We have seen enough in here to recognize you are a genius of the highest caliber. We think you’re crazy.”

“Lord Seiji, enough,” Rhydion said, the merest tinge of annoyance creeping into his tone.

The vampire’s red eyes fixed on me. “You.”

“Me? What did I do?”

“Weren’t you just saying you killed a lot of her zombies?” Aster suggested.

“And you did break her window,” Harker added.

“And,” Aster continued, “I bet you were unnecessarily rude to the spiders.”

“This is not how this ends, Hero,” Khariss snarled, squeezing harder on Dhinell’s neck and making the priestess gasp painfully to breathe. I guess she couldn’t cast without vocalizing, or at least not while under this kind of pressure. “I survived the last one, I will survive you, and the next!”

Shit. Didn’t take her long to spit out exactly what I did not want her to say. I had practically no time to deflect.

“Hero? I can see why you’d think that, but he’s not the Hero. Wait…” I turned toward Rhydion, suddenly frowning suspiciously. “Are you?”

The vampire’s eyes darted to the paladin, back to me, and then across the rest of the group. Blessedly, she said nothing else for a moment, and we had a brief pause in which to size one another up.

Khariss Gwylhaithe was recognizable from her big, ostentatious self-portrait, but she had clearly been generous in her depiction. She was hollow-cheeked, her red eyes sunken deep in dark circles, and her pale blonde hair trailed about in frizzy disarray almost as bad as Nazralind’s. The woman looked painfully underfed and sleep-deprived. That black dress of hers was not artfully designed to look ragged as in the painting; it was legitimately faded and torn, covered in stains and burn marks which suggested she wore it while doing her painting and alchemy both.

“You should take his offer,” I said, breaking the silence in the hope of seizing control of this conversation before it went sideways on me again. “Look at the situation you’re in, now. Nowhere else to run. Talking is the only way you get out of this, and harming Dhinell will put an end to that chance.”

The vampire laughed bitterly. “Oh, please. You think you’re the first Goddess lackeys I’ve had to deal with? There is no talk with you except as an excuse for more murder and destruction.”

“You broke the truce, Khariss,” I said quietly. “You were obviously keeping that Void altar sealed up; we’d have helped you, knowing about that. Using it against us, though? That’s—”

“Damnation take your truce and all parties to it!” she shrieked, re-tightening her grip on Dhinell’s throat just as it had begun to relax slightly. “Virya, Sanora, Devil King, you beasts are all the same! Monsters and the collection of dupes and villains stupid enough or contemptible enough to serve them! May your bitch goddesses and that evil piece of work in the Void slaughter each other and leave me in peace!”

“If you do not serve Virya,” Rhydion said in his best diplomatic tone, “we need not be enemies. Given that we entered your home uninvited, I am inclined to overlook your various actions against us as at least partially justifiable. Please, release her, and let us talk.”

“Talk, talk,” she sneered in a mocking singsong tone. “Of course, you’ll definitely talk once I give up my leverage and not resume the mindless violence that is the only thing you’re good for. No. First, we’ll see whether you actually have any regard for your friend’s life. I’m guessing not, goddess followers that you are, but you may prove me wrong.”

I was done. If we let her weasel her way out of here we’d just be back to running around this maze of halls and doors like an old British slapstick but with undead.

“Yeah, about that,” I said, raising my hand.

“Lord Seiji,” Rhydion warned.

“Sorry about this, Dhinell.”

“Stop him,” Dhinell gurgled frantically with what little air she had left.

“Shock!”

Both women shrieked—one more quietly given her relative lack of available air—and stumbled apart on suddenly boneless limbs as electricity coursed through them.

Rhydion instantly took advantage, lunging forward—but not with his sword, which he actually dropped. Instead, he grabbed Dhinell by the first thing he could reach—her hair, unfortunately—and yanked her out of Khariss’s range.

If only it were that simple.

Having taken only half a stun spell, and also being a vampire, Khariss recovered almost immediately. I barely had time to register the throwing motion with which she smashed something into the floor at our feet before white fog as impenetrably thick as a Hokkaido blizzard filled the entire hall with a powerful hiss.

Oh, not on my watch, you smarmy leech.

“Windburst!”

Ah, right, there was a reason I didn’t use that in close quarters.

There were several loud curses as most of the party were knocked down and I was slammed painfully into the wall by the blowback of my own spell. It was probably lucky I hadn’t accidentally flung myself through the plate glass windows.

It had worked, at least. Raising my head, I beheld the rest of my team struggling back to their feet, except Rhydion, who had managed to keep his. The smoke was gone, though.

So was Khariss.

“How many times in one day can one elf wench fight us to a draw?” Harker complained.

“Dhinell!” Heal, I cast without vocalizing it. They’d already seen me use the spell; no need to tell them it was actually the apex healing spell. Most likely this group would assume it was something weaker. “Sorry about that. You okay?”

“Y-you…thug,” she wheezed, scrabbling upright against the opposite wall.

“He saved your life, Sister,” Rhydion said soothingly. “It was a clever use of a stun spell. I am also sorry for handling you so roughly.”

“I…that’s…you’re right.” Amazingly, she actually looked abashed. “I apologize, Lord Seiji. Thank you for your quick thinking.”

“Hey, no worries, you’re having a rough day. I can relate. More importantly, here we are again!” I shrugged, turning back to Rhydion. “She’s gone. We’ve learned a lot, aggravated the witch, and done some miscellaneous damage to her home. Are you about ready to call this a day?”

“You are the one familiar with that devil, Ozyraph. In your estimation, is it likely she has a relationship with the vampire?”

“Khariss seemed to feel the same way about the Devil King and both goddesses,” Aster pointed out.

I narrowed my eyes, staring at his blank visor. “I’ve become accustomed to a more sophisticated caliber of deflection from you, Rhydion. I guess even the best of us aren’t in top form after getting this kind of runaround all day.”

“I hope I needn’t emphasize that the presence of devils fundamentally alters every equation. It is immediately relevant to our purposes, and our very odds of survival. One incidental brush with the Void we can put behind us; if this is going to become a recurring pattern we must withdraw, at least for now. This group is not equipped to contend with that.”

“I think you know this very damn well, but I have no idea and no way of acquiring any idea. I’ve met Ozyraph once before, and it wasn’t exactly convivial. She is definitely sly enough to feign enmity to throw us off Khariss’s scent, but I do not get that vibe from Khariss herself. That altar wouldn’t have been sealed up that thoroughly if she actually planned on using it. That seemed to me like a panic reaction.”

“I tend to concur. I am impressed, Lord Seiji, that Ozyraph considers you enough of a threat to show herself in front of me.”

“I…uh, what?”

“Devils prize their secrecy,” he explained. “If someone they consider a formidable foe interacts with a devil even once, any future efforts against the Void will be met by that same devil, if they can at all arrange it. They do this to focus all your attention and awareness on a single target, which can then be denied you at need. To have a designated devil nemesis, you must have done significant damage to one of their schemes. In the future if you attempt to interfere with the Devil King’s activities, Ozyraph will be the one to sabotage and dissuade you, so that you are unable to acquire direct information about any of her comrades. I have pressed against the Devil King’s plots often over the years, and several times struck deeply enough to warrant a response. This is the first time I have ever been met by any devil other than Niaphrax. You must have left a truly great impression.”

“Oh, come on,” I groaned, covering my eyes with a hand. “You mean I’m stuck with Ozyraph? I’ve gotta tell you, I do not care for that woman.”

“I would be rather concerned if you did,” Rhydion said gravely.

“You know what I mean, I’m talking quite apart from her being a soul-stealing thing who needs to die. She’s also, just…uptight, and full of herself. I’ve got a feeling we wouldn’t get along even if she was a real person.”

He sighed softly from within his helmet. “Well, that is hopefully a concern for another time. If we are not to be pressed by the Void, friends, then we must ourselves press on. Difficult and halting as it has been, this is still progress. A little more persistence and I am certain the witch will yield to us, at least insofar as to engage in a relatively civil discussion.”

“I really…don’t think so,” Aster said with some hesitation. “She’s wound up awful tight. It sounded like her base assumption was that the only reason we’d be here was to kill her and destroy her stuff, and let’s face it, we haven’t exactly done anything to alter that impression.”

“Come on, you’ve surely dealt with paranoid people before,” Harker added. “Bitch has been stewing on it for a century and a half. There is not a reasonable discussion to be had here. There just isn’t.”

“Regardless,” the paladin stated, “we have come this far, and we must try. Come, we will pursue her and try again.”

Both of them went blank in the face and stiff in the body language in that way lowborn did when a highborn was being completely unreasonable. Dhinell…actually looked miserable. I knew she couldn’t still be feeling any physical pain after I’d Healed her, but her hand went to her neck and for just a second before she regained control, it seemed like she was about to cry.

So, stepping between them and Rhydion, I made the call.

“Yeah…no. We’re done. I’m out. Come on, Aster.”