Now, when you think about a [Spy], what comes to mind? Why, of course, Harriet Tubman, Josephine Baker, Sterling Hayden (better known as John Hamilton. I’m certain that one sparks something in your minds) or even Ian Fleming!
…
What do you mean most people won’t know about them old chap? What? James Bond? But he’s a fictional character! Sigh, why did you even go through all the trouble of gathering these names? Ah, because you didn’t know too? A librarian had to tell you? Well, bless that woman. As for the other names, well, no one ever died of too much culture.
Anyways, when you imagine a spy at work you expect a shadowy individual who wouldn’t be noticed for anything in the world.
Just like Isse was right then.
What you wouldn’t expect is them doing their job with a soundtrack.
Just like Isse right then.
Would you please stop Siidi?
Nope! This is too funny. And I’m also watching your back, so you don’t have to worry.
Apparently Siidi had decided that infiltrating the house of a noblewoman required some music to ‘build the atmosphere’ and had spent the whole time they’d skulked in the garden in an attempt to find a way into the home proper switching between songs that had remained in her memories. It had been fun in the beginning, but as Isse had found a way into the house through a door left unlocked by a probably stupid [Guard] she’d found her repository of Jazz and Swing songs that her father had loved to listen to.
And now she was playing all of them while she tried to find the broom closet Kaminskyi had told her about the day prior.
It’s not an appropriate soundtrack! At least put the one from the Mission Impossible films!
Which one? Oh, this? Nah, I don’t think I will. It’s boring and serious.
That’s the point!
The point, dear Isse, is that the music you’re listening to is very similar to the one we arachne once played.
Isse stopped in her tracks for a moment at that.
You mean to tell me arachne played jazz over ten thousand years ago?
Yes, we did! And girl o’ girl did we love that music. You haven’t seen hedonism and drunken dancing until you’ve seen arachne doing it. Those were the days.
Isse couldn’t contain herself and snorted, immediately freezing in place and looking around in the corridor, fearing that someone had heard her. There were only shadows around her. For a minute she just sat there and activated her [Mana Sight], making sure that there were no threads coming out of them.
There were none.
Let me guess, she started, trying to lighten her nerves, those parties always ended in orgies.
How did you guess?
Again, Isse had to resist the impulse to snort (and this time succeeded).
My family would’ve loved the arachne.
…For the orgies?
No! Well, my mother probably for the orgies. Apparently in her younger days she was the definition of ‘wild’. My father would’ve loved you for the jazz.
She heard Siidi in her mind huff proudly and saw her cross her arms.
As I always say, arachne are superior!
What they were doing looked like bantering, and in some ways it was, but at the same time it wasn’t. It was a sort of mutual accord to help keep each other together, to keep their nerves at bay. Because both of them were only a few steps away from having a mental breakdown.
And if not having a mental breakdown required them to listen to jazz songs from the 1920s then they would damn well keep listening. They also had the added benefit of actually sounding good.
Where in Airm are we? asked Siidi as they turned into another corridor. In the dark they all looked the same. Same paintings, same tables with the same flowers in the same pots. It all looked the same to her.
I don’t know.
Something kept on nagging at the back of her mind.
She stopped skittering and looked up at a painting in the room. A painting of a white dog with his tongue lolled out and a smile on his cute face, a field of colorful flowers around it.
Siidi, didn’t we already see this one?
…I’m not sure.
Also, it doesn’t fit the style of the house. Too many colors in those flowers.
Serafia could’ve added it later on.
Yes, she could’ve. But then, why a dog? She never talked to me about a dog, and I think that more than once she was one step away from telling me what was her husband’s favorite position in bed. She would’ve told me about a dog. And then, she wouldn’t have left a painting of an animal she liked in some random hallway.
Maybe it’s not random. Isse, you’re making an awful lot of assumptions here. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.
She shook her head: Master always said to follow my gut, and right now my gut says that something’s up.
Skittering slowly towards the painting she looked up into the dog’s deep black eyes.
And realized she could see the color of the eyes. And of everything around her. She hadn’t given it much thought, but the colors weren’t muted or dark as they should be when standing in a lightless room. They were… normal. As if the place was being lit by an ethereal light emanating from everything.
With caution now she placed her hand on a nearby table under the out-of-place-painting and, immediately, felt dust in her grip.
You needed proof that this place wasn’t visited?
Alright alright, you were right.
Oh if only I had my phone I’d ask you to let me record you saying it.
Don’t get cocky now!
Bantering done, she concentrated back on the painting, her eyes looking straight into the dog’s deep black eyes.
The darkness in them was so deep she could feel it sucking her in, sucking the light out of the room around it, and then letting it flow out all around them, giving off that ethereal glow that was and wasn’t there. The more she looked the more she felt like looking, like staring into an abyss and hoping that it would stare back, to challenge it to a staring contest. She knew she would win, because she’d already done it once, when she’d stared into the eyes of her Anda and, for once, won. This? This was nothing. A fake copy that couldn’t hold a candle to the real thing.
But it was also just a painting, there was quite literally nothing that could actually stare back at her, right?
Slowly, in that unsettling way typical of the arachne, she cocked her head to the side and activated her [Mana Sight].
Immediately, her vision was filled with threads, like always, but she didn’t care about those, because even in that world of threads she could still see the black eyes of the painting looking straight at her, through her, into her.
And still she stared right back, feeling herself and Siidi join into one as they both looked, her certainty and her soul half’s doubt mixing together, the former overpowering the latter, for they were a [Soul Shaper] and they knew that something was up.
Then they saw it: through both eyes, all around them, mixing with the ethereal light in the dark, nearly invisible, were off-white threads, knitting and crossing and winding together and forming a great web that spanned the whole length of the room. A web without a spider, abandoned long ago and taken by someone, no, something else, to be reused, recycled, for nothing could go to waste, nothing ever should, nothing great or strange or simple.
And the web? The web laughed, for someone had seen it, or a side of it, and it laughed and laughed and suddenly a face appeared in the white, a memory of the creator looking right at her with a mischievous little grin. A figure as ethereal as the light and the threads, small, like a pixie or a fairy from the stories she’d read as a child, with ice in her (his?) hair and eyes a piercing blue completely unlike those of the dog.
The little fairy looked at her, then chuckled silently, no sound coming out of her mouth, and then she made a shushing noise and pointed at a single thread that, when followed, seemed to lead away from the web, into a deeper darkness Isse hadn’t noticed until that very moment.
When she looked back up to thank the fairy it was gone.
Only the painting remained, and it had changed. Now the dog was no longer sitting, but lying on the ground, his tongue licking his nose as his mouth now formed a slightly bigger smile showing a few more snow-white teeth, his eyes no longer looking at her but at something in the frame, near the bottom.
A brown, little jumping spider, nearly invisible in the field of grass and flowers, that she noticed only because she saw a thread coming out of it and touching her.
What in Airm just happened? asked Siidi as the minute of her Skill passed and she broke the religious silence.
I… I have no idea.
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The System looked at the young arachne and frowned.
It had just remembered why the arachne were one of its… saying ‘least favorite species’ would be wrong, but only because It was incapable of feeling things such as dislike. It felt nothing, but It also felt like a headache was forming in the back of its processes.
That was the thing about their species: they never followed the Rules. Their very nature seemed to bend and twist them, forcing It to adapt and create new Rules, new adaptations, new upgrades to existing Skills or outright new Skills in general. The Era of Hunts had been an age of great work for It and It dearly hoped that nothing like that would ever happen because that period had been an actual headache, and when a being such as It had a headache it hurt a lot.
The System observed the individual Serafia Ribia, [Lady of Winter], Level 38, and, in particular, looked at one of her capstone Skills: [The Winter Fae’s Trickery Kept my Haven Safe]. The Skill fell under the tags
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And yet this young arachne had, completely by accident, subverted the Skill and broken it by acting in an unprecedented way that had amused the copy of the fae, which had rebelled against its purpose and shown the way out to the girl.
That was also when it remembered why It had created so few Skills based on the Faefolk’s nature.
Sighing, the System added a few points to Issekina Silksoul’s progress bar and watched her Levels rise. That, at least, was good, acceptable and desired. It felt always… satisfied, yes, that was the word, when someone gained Levels. Less so when they did it with Red Classes, sure, but that was another matter altogether.
Her last two exploits had gained her the right to an evolved Class and quite a few Levels. Now, it was time to wait and see if she would survive the night and, even better, succeed in her objective. That would give her more Levels, after all!
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Got any idea of what that thing in the painting was? asked Isse.
None whatsoever.
Well fuck. Maybe Albert knows?
Maybe Kaminskyi knows.
Oh, right, had forgotten we could ask him. Where is he by the way?
I think he’s not going to help us anymore Isse. He is here to protect the house after all. Helping us was just a way to repay the kindness of telling his tale.
She sighed… internally, because she didn’t want to make any noise.
Whatever, let’s go find that damn closet.
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They found it in the end.
The closet, that is. The one Kaminskyi had told them about.
It was empty.
Except for a few brooms and a single page left right at the center of the room carelessly and, she could tell, purposefully, as a way to tell whoever would find it that they’d been too slow.
She felt like cursing and shouting obscenities, but that would certainly reveal her location. So instead she did it internally, to Siidi’s great dismay.
Whoa, that’s… a lot to unpack. I didn’t know you knew so many different swears.
Yeah, well, Italians have a dictionary of insults with a section dedicated to insulting God, and I had a lot of free time in the hospital to translate it as best as I could.
…Respect for the Italians, whoever they are. Oh, wait, you’ve got some stuff… why do they move their hands so much whenever they talk? They’re funny. And loud. And obnoxious, but in a sorta good way.
They’re a living paradox is what they are.
They kept on talking to each other, trying to calm down, the jazz music momentarily put on hold, in its place some relaxing elevator music playing as a background. Isse was pretty certain it would become insufferable soon enough.
After a few moments of silence filled only with the background noise of the house and the music they both sighed.
So, what’s our next move?
We track them down, that’s what we do.
And they started doing just that. How? Simple: with Isse’s [Mana Sight]. It had helped her so far, surely it would keep being useful, right?
Wrong.
There’s nothing coming from that closet, said Isse as she frustratedly stomped her feet on the carpet.
Well, it was just paper. Not much of a mana signature from stuff like that.
Fuck!
She allowed herself to fall to the ground, her spidery legs curling around her thorax, contracting and relaxing and, this way, giving her a little massage. It had become one of her favorite ways to destress these days.
What now?
…We could go looking for the secret place Kamiskyi told us about. The one that felt similar to the Last Stand.
…Maybe. We don’t have that many leads, we don’t have much time and they’re looking for us. Sigh, hopefully there’ll be something worth bringing back.
She paused, remembering a detail: Oh, wait, we can’t take anything. Can’t leave proof that we were here. Fuck!
Meh, I’m sure they won’t miss a page or two.
Master said…
Master said a lot of shit and he was a piece of shit. You can take a page or two. I’m allowing it.
That’s not how it works Siidi.
Really? Well, too bad, you’re stuck with me and I’m real, unlike this Master you saw in the scroll.
Siidi! This is serious! I can’t leave behind proof that I was here.
But you thought it yourself: they know someone’s here, or they wouldn’t have moved all the documents. They expect it. Which means that even if you take something they’ll just confirm their suspicions. And then what? They won’t even know it was you.
They remained in silence for a while afterwards as Isse’s mind went into overdrive as she considered the situation.
Finally, she sighed: Alright, let’s do this.
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Kaminskyi had shown her the location of the vault… more or less. He’d just made her feel as if there was something underneath the mansion calling out to her. Something cold and warm and inviting, friendly, like a distant memory of a smile from someone you cared about.
Other than that though she knew nothing.
But that was enough. Master had taught how to find something from knowing nothing, or close to nothing.
The first thing to do was try to know what she was looking for, and to that she already had the answer: a vault, keeping some kind of artifact probably, underground, well beneath the mansion.
After that she had to ask herself the second question: where could the entrance be? For that she had no answer, but she could already exclude at least one alternative: the entrance wasn’t in the garden. She would’ve noticed people walking around the gardens considering just how much time she’d had to spend walking around them looking for a way into the mansion.
Which left a few likely places: the office and, surprisingly enough, the living room. Of course there was also the option of the bedroom, but in Master’s words, ‘Only idiots put hidden passages that lead to secret rooms in their bedroom. That’s a good way to take the wrong secret passage when they try to escape through the one meant to leave unseen’.
It had been oddly specific, but who was she to care about that if it worked?
She began with the closest room: the office.
Currently, it was empty, the room dark and a lot creepier than she remembered, what with the white walls being now a dull gray that sucked the life out of everything around it, the libraries now no longer homely but imposing, giving the impression that they were trying to overtake the room, while the desk stood ominously empty at the back, the chair behind it looking like a fallen king’s throne in an abandoned castle.
This is fucking creepy, thought Isse
Can you see anything?
She looked around the room, uncertain and, deep down, slightly disturbed, but couldn’t see anything. Activating her [Mana Sight] and losing a few minutes in an attempt to see if there were any threads of magic that could lead her to the vault was also useless.
If there was a passage in this room, she’d have to find it the old fashioned way, which meant: trying each and every book in the library and hoping it would open a door.
Or…
Siidi, how does your Skill work? The one that lets you see without having to look through my eyes. Are you, like, bound to my body? Or can you move around a bit?
Her soul half was silent for a few moment, then she heard her giggle: Oh, I see what you want. Sure, we can try: technically my spider half is still bound to yours, but the human half? I can still move around a fair bit with it. Now go and mash your face against those walls, I’ll see what I can find.
She did just that.
At least the walls weren’t coarse.
----------------------------------------
Other than a lot of bricks and stone and some wood I saw nothing in there.
Well, that leaves the living room.
How can you be so sure it’s going to be in the living room? Couldn’t it be anywhere else in the house? If Serafia was keeping the documents in a broom closet she could very well have put a secret passage in the toilet.
She could’ve… if she’d built the place. But I think this was built by her family.
So you suppose they were idiots?
I hope they were idiots, corrected her Isse.
Still, as they passed by the broom closet, she had Siidi check out the inside of the walls. Just to be sure.
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There’s more people down here, she said as she hid in the shadows of the ceiling.
What was it that her online friends always said? Gamers don’t look up? Something like that. Even an entire world away, that rule still held true, because none of the servants and guards passing below them noticed them.
Gotta be careful, intoned Siidi.
No shit Sherlock.
To say that the place was bustling with activity would be excessive, but there were still far too many awake people for this hour of the night.
A chitter of displeasure escaped her lips, which she then slapped closed in surprise and confusion. Where had that come from?
Oh, you learned to chitter!
What the fuck? Spiders don’t even make noise!
Yeah, but we’re only part spider, so we get chittering because Death said ‘Why not?’ I always thought it was kind of cute. It’s out version of purring!
…Every day that passes I get more and more confirmation that arachne are just oversized cats.
Hey, don’t you da -
They stopped as Isse came to an arch that led into the living room. The place was deserted and dark, although more than once in the next few minutes she saw guards pass by the room and stop to check inside. She let this happen a few times, checking the time between each passage of the [Guards] on a clocks he’d taken from the shop. Exactly two minutes. Not a lot, but very probably enough.
Ok, same thing as always. I go around the room, you check inside the walls.
Roger!
The moment the next man had passed Isse skittered into the room and mashed her face against the wall with the fireplace, because really? If you had to put a secret passage somewhere it would be the fireplace.
And immediately after she heard Siidi agree with her: Ah-ha! Found it! That was faster than I thought.
It was fucking obvious is what it was. I’ve seen enough films to know.
Yeah, you’re right. Anyways, get closer, I need to see if I can find the thing that opens the secret door.
I’m sure it’s the candleholders. Watch.
She reached out to the closest candleholder and, with a self assured smile, tugged at it.
It didn’t budge.
Ha!
Fuck off Siidi. It must be the other.
She moved, checking her watch: one minute and fifteen seconds left.
Reaching her hand to the other candleholder she tugged… and again nothing happened.
Hahahahaha.
Oh would you stop Siidi?
I’m sorry - Hahaha - I really am, she took a deep breath, but you were so certain, and your irritated face when it didn’t work made it so much funnier.
Well, do your job then and look inside the wall.
She huffed a bit and got as close as she could to the wall, waiting for Siidi to find something, anything, while she stared at the seconds hand on her clock ticking away their time.
When thirty seconds were left Siidi finally spoke: Ok, there’s a button hidden in the decorations of the fireplace. Press it and it should open the door.
Should?
Hey, I’m new to this. I was a [Warrior], not some mad [Architect].
Ok.
She moved to press the button that, in the back of her mind, Siidi was showing her, then thought better of it and skittered back up the wall and into a dark corner of the room on the same side as the entry.
After the [Guard] had passed she went back to the fireplace and pressed the secret button.
She wasn’t an idiot.
Even Master had agreed to that in the end, before allowing her to leave the Scroll.
Without a sound, the stone of the fireplace’s back moved, revealing a well maintained and not-at-all dusty passage that was… too small.
Fuck, this is going to be uncomfortable. Why did Death give us such big backsides?
Nothing like a bit of jiggling to make everything better.
Siidi, for the love of all that is unholy, keep the sexual innuendos to a minimum while on mission.
Never!
Then she skittered in, finding a lever to close the passage behind her and doing so.
Only realizing a moment later that there were no sources of light whatsoever in here.
Sighing, she activated a [Light] Spell, summoning a little ball of light in her hand, and began moving way too slowly for her tastes down the secret passage.
Let’s see what we’ll find.