Matabar (Stubbing October 30th)

Chapter 29 - Before the long night

“So,” Milar’s voice was a low rumble, like stones shifting in a dry riverbed. “You saw some... in the Palace, then. In that... looking-glass world of yours?” In the rearview mirror, Ardi watched Milar’s fingers flutter through the air, a gesture of airy dismissal. “The reverse side, or whatever you call it... In short, it was some sort of Spider-like Fae. Who, as it turns out, was just a four-fingered man. And he has a little puppet for a lackey. But in reality, he, too, is just an ordinary man, with a face you’d forget before you even turned away.”“I never saw their faces,” Ardi was quick to remind him.

Wiping his sweaty brow with his sleeve, he gripped the steering wheel with the desperation of a drowning man clinging to a reed. With every turn, he offered a silent prayer to the Sleeping Spirits, begging them not to dream of his sputtering engine dying from a clumsy gear shift. He was really trying not to wrap the car around the nearest lamppost or send it plunging into the Niewa.

So far, he was succeeding.

Ardi hoped his success would continue.

After the incident at the warehouse, where he and Arkar had rescued Boris, Ardi had taken a few driving lessons from… well, from Arkar. They had been enough to get him and Peter Oglanov to the Irigov estate, but since then, Ardi had rarely been behind the wheel. Whenever he did drive, it was usually as part of a barter agreement with, you guessed it, Arkar. Ardi would drive to the butcher for supplies, and Arkar, in turn, would give him and Tess a few kilograms of meat.

“And, obviously, you don’t remember where exactly in the Palace this happened,” Milar exhaled sharply into the brim of his hat, which was pulled down low over his face. It jumped amusingly on his nose before settling back down. “Can’t hold that against you, though. Without a guide, you wouldn’t just be confused about what wing you’re in, but what country.”

“I already reported all of this to His Imperial Majesty,” Ardi reminded him.

After the events at the Central Branch of the Imperial Bank, when Edward had obliterated the Aean’Hane elf—who, it was now clear, had been serving the Puppeteers—Pavel IV had spoken with Ardi in the temple that had been under construction. It was there that Ardi had reported the incident in the Palace.

“Either they found nothing, or…” Milar trailed off.

“Or we don’t need to know about it, because…”

“It’s the job,” the captain finished for his partner.

They drove in silence for a time. Ardi had turned onto the embankment of the Crookedwater Canal, where the midday work break had made it impossible to push through, not only on the sidewalk, but also among the buzzing, rattling, and occasionally honking cars.

It was only by some miracle, perhaps by the will of the Eternal Angels, a dream of the Sleeping Spirits, or even the providence of the Old Gods, that Ardan managed not to crash into anyone. Even so, he was still honked at several times by drivers displeased with his unskilled “efforts,” he nearly hit another car’s fender or door twice, and he stalled three times.

“And how do you plan to get around on assignments?” Milar grumbled. “Are you going to run?”

“In most parts of the Empire, people travel on horseback,” Ardi retorted, not to be outdone. “And for the record, I’ve never once seen you in a saddle.”

“And I’ve never once been in one,” the captain said with another wave of his hand.

At first, Ard couldn’t tell if his partner was joking. As someone who’d been born in and lived most of his life in the Foothill Province, it was hard for him to imagine someone who couldn’t ride a horse. In Evergale and the steppes, a man without such a skill was worse off than dead. The dead, at least, did not suffer…

“Ah, no, I’m lying,” the captain corrected himself. “For the exams at the military academy, you had to demonstrate something or other in the saddle, but I handled it differently.”

“Differently… how?”

Milar chuckled and, adjusting the pillow under his head, pulled his hat back down to his chin.

“The instructor giving the exam invariably took his days off on the very same nights the base commander was delayed at the academy,” Milar’s voice was muffled by the fabric covering his mouth. “He never missed a single one of those nights, not without an exceptionally good reason. I thought that was strange, so I faked a bout of acute toothache.”

“Why a toothache specifically?”

Milar snapped his fingers.

“Oh, Ard, you’re making progress…” He yawned. “There was no tooth-puller on base, so they gave me a pass to go into town. I followed the instructor and, for the better part of the evening, watched him communicate with the base commander’s wife in a variety of positions, some of them quite far from an officer’s notions of honor, dignity and propriety. And let me tell you, Ard, I haven’t seen eyes as expressive as hers even on the most, shall we say, voluminous representatives of the dwarves.”

Ardi, with a trembling hand, shifted the car into neutral and leaned back against the seat. The story hadn’t really flustered him—he was simply relieved that they had finally turned off the embankment and into the New City, where the avenues were considerably wider and you didn’t feel like you were about to collide with someone at any moment.

“Eyes?” The young man asked, surprised.

“Well… she had enormous charisma. In all the right places.”

“Milar…” Ardi pleaded.

“Eternal Angels,” the captain ripped the hat from his face and used it to trace generous curves on his own torso. “Her chest wasn’t the size of a melon, Ard, it was the size of a watermelon! Firm, too! Like stone! You could poke an eye out with her nipples, and you could set a mug of beer on her ass and it wouldn’t even wobble, but despite that, her waist was like a sapling! She came so hard that a Banshee’s wail would seem quiet next to it, and he was fucking her like-”

“Milar!” Ardan barked. “It is more than just indecent to discuss such things!”

“Well then stop being so dense, partner!” The captain shouted back in the same tone. “Of course I wasn’t talking about her eyes… it was a figure of speech… Dammit, I keep forgetting you’re only eighteen… To make a long story short, I called in a few favors from the quartermasters and borrowed a portable camera. Like the ones journalists use. The next time I went into town, I took a few pictures and, in the end, I passed the equestrian exam without ever going near the stables.”

Somehow, Ardi was certain that Milar hadn’t embellished or exaggerated a single detail. Such things were not in his nature. But noticing inconsistencies, figuring out a situation, finding a target’s weak point, and then using all of the above for his own gain—that was very much him.

Under different circumstances, Milar Pnev would have made an excellent hunter… or a notorious bandit.

“Wait,” Ardi realized something. “That was just the exam. What about the classes?”

Milar snapped his fingers again.

“That, too, is a very entertaining and interesting story, Magister, but we’ll discuss it another time,” the captain dodged. “My own story just gave me another idea.”

“Milar…”

“Ard, first of all, I am a happily married man, and second, after my visit to the Crimson Lady, I doubt I’ll be able to think about anyone but Elvira for the foreseeable future,” the captain cut him off at once. “If what you saw in Inga’s mind wasn’t some delusion, then…”

Milar drew out the last word, hinting that Ardi should finish his sentence for him.

“The fates of Andrew, his brother Lusha, and his sister Zirka were being meddled with for several years,” Ardi’s quiet voice sounded hollow.

“I doubt it was really about the brother and sister, but Andrew was definitely placed in the Mages’ Guild on purpose,” Milar corrected his logic slightly.

“It’s too complex a solution for a simple… for the task at hand,” Ardi corrected himself instantly. “The shield schematic at Baliero could have been stolen another way.”

“Which means,” Milar encouraged him, “considering everything we know about the Puppeteers, that…”

“It was another smokescreen.”

“And a demonically effective one at that, Magister… Forgive the pun… Alright, sleep is just a dream anyway,” Milar, while the car was still moving, took off his hat, threw off his blanket, and, rocking the vehicle, grunting, and nearly planting his backside on his partner’s shoulder, climbed over the back of the front seat to land next to the driver. “Phew… Right. So. It turns out they placed Andrew. And they got rid of him. And the pretext was so elegant, too. The kid was playing both sides. The Baliero shield was breached. The statuette from Makingia was stolen. They even used it in the episode with Lorlov. But…”

“The statuette didn’t play a significant role,” Ardi was beginning to understand. “Nor did Lorlov herself.”

“No, as you’ll recall, she did play a role,” the captain disagreed, pulling a familiar, crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket. Milar used it instead of the cigarette case he often forgot at home. Though Ardi suspected it was actually Elvira, the captain’s wife, who “forgot” it for him. “Lorlov forced us to postpone the opening of the underground tram lines. Been on them yet, by the way?”

“No.”

“Me neither…” The captain flicked his lighter several times and took a drag. “Back to the topic at hand. Andrew, the statuette, Baliero, Lorlov—all of it made us forget about this for almost eight months, Ard. And we wouldn’t be thinking about it now, either, if it weren’t for what that sharp-toothed journalistic shark Taisia Shpritz told you.”

“And what does the Anomaly Hunters’ Guild have to do with this?” Ardan asked, recalling his conversation with the journalist.

“The Hunters’ Guild is inextricably linked to the Mages’ Guild, Ard,” Milar said, forcefully cranking the handle to lower the car window. “And now we’re certain that there’s either a corrupt fool in that Guild, or a mole just as clever as the one in the Black House.”

“But then… why use Andrew?”

“Because he was expendable,” Milar shrugged and made an obscene gesture at someone who had been leaning on their horn for several seconds, irritated that the once-again stalled Ardi couldn’t get the engine started. The driver, upon seeing the black jacket, black shirt, and black wristwatch, not to mention Milar’s very displeased face, glanced at the car itself, turned deathly pale, and… seemed to start crying. “Why put your major assets at risk when you can use them to help Andrew do all the dirty work, and then use them again later? It seems to me, my dear partner, like that’s entirely fitting for our counterparts and how they do things.”

“Milar.”

“What?”

“A mole in the Black House, the Emperor’s opposition, unsigned orders being issued to the Guard Corps and the Ministry of War, compromised Hunters’ and Mages’ Guilds…”

“Yeah, I know what you’re getting at, Ard,” the captain exhaled a cloud of smoke and propped his cheek on his fist. He didn’t look very encouraged. “Compared to something so monumental and ugly, our department looks like a tiny beetle, or, well, like the wife of that cuckolded base commander.”

“Somehow, I don’t get the sense you’re talking about her beauty right now.”

“Her beauty?” Milar gave him a terse chuckle. “Who said she was beautiful? Her face was uglier than a forty-millimeter shell explosion… Alright, let’s not go into details. But I see what you’re driving at. The Puppeteers, as we’ve repeatedly emphasized, are an organization. A serious one, with deep roots. And so we, as befits beetles, will gnaw at them gradually. Piece by piece. Until the tree is so sick that a single, well-aimed strike will be enough to topple it.”

Milar even spoke like a forest hunter at times. Maybe that was why he and Ardan had managed to find common ground.

“And we’ll proceed with what we know for certain,” the captain continued, taking another deep drag. “The Puppeteers were conducting experiments on a ship in neutral waters. Experiments so important and secret that they went to extreme measures to clean up all their loose ends.”

“Clean up loose ends—that means hide the evidence, right?” Ardi asked with a squint.

Milar snapped his fingers and returned to the topic.

“The experiments, as we know from Lea Mortimer, involved children and… ahem…” Milar was seized by a brief, dry cough, after which he took out a flask and took several deep swallows. He grimaced and screwed the cap back on.

Ardi was surprised to realize that he couldn’t smell anything. Not the familiar aroma of herbs, nor the cloying reek of medicine.

“Is that some new cough syrup?” Ardi’s curiosity got the better of him once again.

“Yes,” Milar answered, short and a little distant.

“And what’s in it that-”

“Listen, Magister, don’t take this the wrong way, but last time, you promised me an ointment for my wool allergy,” the captain interrupted a little more harshly than usual. “I’m still waiting for it. So, let’s get back to the topic at hand, alright?”

“Sorry,” Ardi apologized sincerely.

In the end, he wasn’t the only one constantly rushing around the bustling capital, risking his life and sanity time and again. Milar’s nervousness was understandable.

“Alright,” the captain continued. “The bottom line is that we have a connection between the Mages’ Guild and the mining equipment, which gives us a good reason to believe that Taisia Shpritz’s father also stumbled upon the Puppeteers. He likely found a thread of their sprawling, cursed plan. Can you spot the common denominator?”

“Several,” Ardi nodded and, nearly scraping the side of the car against the curb, turned toward the Black House.

A parking spot wasn’t easy to find, which once again prompted a fit of grumbling from Milar. Their department, being one of the smallest, was allotted exactly two parking spaces, but even those were constantly cradling someone else’s “Derks” within their painted embrace.

“Don’t be shy, Magister, list them out.”

Ardi turned the ignition key and handed it to Milar. He pulled the handbrake, took a notebook out of his inner pocket, and, tucking a pencil behind his ear, began to read.

“Four times in the last eight months, we’ve encountered children, or at least mentions of them.”

“You’re wrong,” Milar cut in immediately, not bothering with any niceties. “Think harder.”

Ardi looked at his underlined notes: What had he missed?

Ah, yes.

“At Baliero, where the shield was—there was a child who-”

“Didn’t look like a child,” Milar flicked his ash and turned to the window. “Remind you of anything?”

“Lusha.”

“Good,” the captain nodded. “Continue. Where’s one more episode?”

“In the house where Lorlov worked as a nanny?” Ardan guessed, but not very confidently. “A child was killed there. And the Aean’Hane elf also burned a little girl to ash.”

“Think harder, Magister. Use that head of yours for something other than calculating your Ley-thingamajigs,” Milar continued to smoke, looking at the dark building that loomed like an impassive overseer above the black river. “Get inside the minds of these bastards without magic. Remember. Remember, partner. Where’s the other one?”

Another episode? Another… Where had he gone wrong? Where had he missed…

Sleeping Spirits.

“Elena… Elena is pregnant…” Ardan went limp in his seat. “She’s having a daughter. The daughter of two gifted Star Mages, including the heir to two great families: the son of a Duke-General and the descendant of the last Grand Magister of Demonology, Lady Talia.” The young man turned sharply to his partner. “Milar, we have to-”

“A daughter, is it? Don’t worry, Ard, they’ve been under surveillance for almost a week now. Three teams of operatives are guarding their peace in shifts, just like our families, by the way. That includes a couple of Mshisty’s dogs,” Milar extinguished his cigarette and, with another flick of his finger, sent the butt into a trash can. “I still think it has nothing to do with the Puppeteers, but we can’t just dismiss the possibility.”

“You think it’s a coincidence?”

“What I’m about is how we can bite the Puppeteers harder, partner. Here I’m just speculating, and I’m speculating a lot,” Milar was the first to get out of the car. He helped pull out Ardi’s staff, then fumbled for a moment with the stubborn door lock until he finally secured his “Derks.”

It was more out of habit than necessity. There was hardly a more secure parking lot in the city than the one belonging to the Black House. Except, perhaps, the one near the Palace of the Kings of the Past…

“Let’s go, Magister. Alexander and Din are already here.”

And indeed, if you looked carefully, an even more decrepit “Derks” than the one Milar used to navigate the capital’s expanses was slumped miserably nearby, a little closer to the exit.

They entered the Black House, exchanged brief greetings with the guard at the entrance, and descended a staircase leading below street level, but didn’t go into the distant depths where the archive and, below even that, Dagdag’s laboratory were located.

On his last visit there, Ardi had mused to himself that it was likely designed that way on purpose, so that in case of extreme need, both the laboratory and the archive—which held secrets gathered over hundreds of years of the Second Chancery’s work—could be destroyed at once.

Alice Rovnev’s laboratory once more greeted them with a characteristic smell—a mixture of formalin, the faint, cloying notes of formaldehyde (), and alcohol. But instead of strong, tart tea, it now also smelled of spirits, and not the medicinal kind. It was cognac, he was pretty sure.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

The floor no longer gleamed with washed but still rough, diamond-patterned tiles, but rather shamefully hid dark stains and shoe prints, and along the dark gray walls stood numerous glass-fronted shelves and cabinets that held rows of cardboard folders of various thicknesses, which now lay in a chaotic jumble, with some of them even being open.

Against the far wall, next to a curtained window, was a desk where, besides a closed thermos and a cup with a dancing wisp of steam, there now stood a glass tumbler from which the smell of cheap cognac was emanating.

To the left, in the long, narrow hall, three more tables were spattered with blood. They were steel tables, with a complex mechanism that allowed their height to be raised and lowered with a foot pedal, and they huddled under the light of the lamps bent over them.

And then there was the gurney tucked away nearby, which, judging by the lingering scent imperceptible to a human nose, was sometimes used for sleeping, right there among the dead, the dissected, and the countless papers. And a little farther, hidden in the walls, were twelve square steel doors, each half a meter wide. They had cardboard nameplates in special slots. Right now, however, only a few tags were displayed:

“Inga — Last_Name_Unknown” and “Lusha Omreshtain.”

After exchanging greetings with Alexander and Din, Milar and Ard approached Alice, who was tapping away at a typewriter.

She looked nothing like she used to. The healthy fullness of her cheeks was gone, replaced by sunken hollows, and not just cute dimples, either, but entire ravines. Her dirty hair was pulled back in a messy bun, secured not with a pin or a barrette, but with a pencil. Her glasses were dirty, their lenses ready to compete in terms of cloudiness with Professor Kovertsky’s own.

Alice, like the last time Ardi had seen her, smelled of cheap alcohol, strong coffee, cigarettes, and men.

Ardi didn’t judge. If he had learned anything from his grandfather’s stories, it was that everyone had their own way of coping with heartache.

“What have you found?” Milar asked, lowering himself onto a chair from which he had first brushed away ash and crumbs.

Alice raised her gaze, her eyes still piercing and intelligent, but no longer warm and welcoming. She looked like… Cassara. Though her heart still beat steadily—Ardi could hear its rhythm perfectly—her gaze was dead and devoid of all emotion. She was like a fish. Or a person alive on the outside, but dead on the inside.

Alice pulled open a desk drawer and took out several folders. Untying the ribbons of the first, she laid out a stack of notes and photographs on the table, showing Inga’s body in various states of… dissection.

“This is a thirty-nine-year-old woman. She has given birth,” Alice began her report, her tone as clipped and metallic as a machine. “Several times, it seems. The first time naturally, the second time via a C-section followed by a hysterectomy.”

“I’m more interested in her brain.”

“There isn’t one, Milar,” Corporal Rovnev smirked, which was a rather unpleasant sight. “It melted, just like Irigov’s and, if my colleagues from Delpas are to be believed, the brain of that orc Rakrarz from the Shangra’Ar.”

“The same seal?”

“The Ley-patterns suggest that complex alchemy is more likely than a Malediction seal, but it’s still unclear,” Alice handed Milar a report, which he quickly scanned and returned. “There’s too few subjects to conduct a study on and almost no material. Their blood is clean, too, as much as blood can ever be.”

“It would be better if there were no more subjects,” Din Arnson remarked quietly… while chewing on a strudel. His beautiful wife, Plamena, loved to cook and bake only slightly less than she loved her talkative and guileless husband.

“That’s true,” Alexander Ursky rumbled in agreement.

Milar shot the pair a disapproving look and turned back to Alice.

“And what about the boy?”

“When it comes to the boy, Captain, it’s much more interesting, and much sadder. Come with me.”

Alice stood and walked toward the refrigerated drawers. Ardi and Milar exchanged a look and followed her. Alexander and Din stayed put. They weren’t investigators, after all. Operatives had their own line of work.

Without needing any help this time, Corporal Rovnev opened the latch on the steel door and rolled out the “tray” with what was left of Lusha.

If Ardi hadn’t already seen his share of horrors during his service, he certainly wouldn’t have been able to stand it for more than a few seconds.

“What they did to him, Milar…” For a brief moment, an emotion flickered across Alice’s face. It was that mixture of pity and rage that only women who know what it’s like to carry a new life under their own heart for nine months can feel at the sight of a mutilated child. “I don’t know how he didn’t die in the process.”

“Can you give me more details?”

“See this seam?”

“It’s hard to miss, Alice.”

“Well, yes…” The corporal wheeled over a lamp and aimed its beam at the body. “They stitched a body… to him. Or rather, their organs.”

Milar glanced back and forth between Lusha’s mutilated body and Alice.

“Whose?”

“The organs of anomalies,” the corporal answered, her tone clipped but far from gentle. “They did so at the time of the vivisection.”

“Vivi… what?” The captain asked.

“They cut him open while he was still alive,” Ardi and Alice explained in unison.

The young man felt Alice’s gaze on him, so cold and sharp that, for a moment, he imagined he’d been cut by a surgical scalpel.

“Bastards,” Milar hissed.

“Without a doubt,” Alice agreed and continued to trace the lines on Lusha’s body with a pointer. “The anomalies were also still alive at the time of the operation. And to preempt Corporal Egobar’s question,”—everyone in the lab was a little surprised by such a formal address, but Ardi wasn’t, not at all—“this only superficially resembles chimerization. The Ley-experts found some common features, which you can study in the report, but beyond that—this is something new. Something unique, something neither we nor the Mages’ and Anomaly Hunters’ Guilds have ever encountered before. It’s as if,” Alice put down the pointer and adjusted her grimy glasses, “they were trying to stabilize his body for a subsequent injection of the Ley. That is, of course, if you believe the Ley-experts. Eternal Angels, Milar! At what point did we get reclassified from the department for catching terrorists and psychopaths into this horror show of magic and sadism?”

“Believe me, Alice,” Milar moved away from the dead child’s body. “I’m already tired of asking myself that same question… Ard says he was possessed, but at the same time… not possessed.”

“Perhaps,” the young woman nodded, not even glancing in Ardan’s direction. “Maybe that was their goal. In any case, it will take my colleagues and me at least three months to figure out which organs and from which anomalies were used, not to mention the extensive alchemy and other things.”

Milar and Ard exchanged another look.

The organs of anomalies—it was hard to imagine a brighter signpost pointing them toward the Hunters’ Guild.

“Well then, you all… sort this out, and we’ll visit a few more places,” Milar nodded to Alice and turned to the operatives. “Let’s go, boys, we’ll be paying Dagdag a visit and shaking a few pleasant and useful trinkets out of him.”

They had almost left the lab when Alice called out to them.

“Corporal Egobar, may I have a word with you? Alone.”

Milar looked at Ardi and, after receiving a nod, stepped out of the room with Alexander and Din.

As soon as the door closed, Ardi tried to turn to Alice. . He was stopped from completing the turn by the icy, razor-sharp edge of a scalpel being pressed to his throat—no longer metaphorical, but very real.

His hunter’s instincts screamed, and Ardi almost struck the corporal in the stomach with his staff, intending to follow up by knocking the tool (not even a weapon) from her hand and, after forcing her to the floor, pinning her with his knee, but… he didn’t. A single glance at her face and eyes was enough for him to notice something he had seen before.

He’d seen it when he had shattered that glowing object in the temple of the Old Gods, where all the power that Lea Mortimer had never had a chance to use had accumulated.

Ardi saw a dark shadow, a greedy parasite gnawing at a soul, leaving only a sucking emptiness behind, an ache that throbbed with the persistence of a damaged tooth. It hissed with a distant echo, corroding consciousness and reason both.

Alice was in pain. And she was afraid. Every day. Every hour. Every second.

“I swear to you, Corporal,” she seethed through tightly-clenched teeth, “if you so much as about controlling me with your damn peepers ever again, I will spend the rest of my life cutting them out of your head. Is that clear?”

From a logical point of view, Alice was wrong. Ardi had saved her life. And not because he was some beacon of morality and goodness, but out of professional necessity. Even so, the fact remained. And perhaps Ardi could have flared up, said something defiant or even hurtful in return, but he remained silent instead.

He remained silent even when the scalpel lightly nicked his skin, sending a thin, hot trickle of scarlet blood down his neck.

The young man said nothing, and he certainly didn’t create any seals. Without even looking into the consciousness of the emaciated Alice who reeked of grief, he could feel her suffering. It dripped like burning acid onto his shoulders.

Alice was in pain. And, like any suffering human, beast, or Firstborn, she was looking for the cause of that pain. She was a scientist, after all. And a scientist, she believed, couldn’t find a cure without knowing the cause. Through dark nights and warm nights alike, lying on rumpled sheets, in the company of those who could not fill her emptiness, whose names she didn’t even remember, the scientist had stared at the ceiling. She’d searched for answers in the pattern of cracked plaster.

And she’d found none.

She didn’t find them at family gatherings either, where the other women could neither understand nor accept her pain. Because Alice lived on the border of two worlds. The world of men, and the world of women. She felt them both, but she was a stranger everywhere. And only in one place, for a brief period in such a long life, had she felt joy.

She’d felt it in a bright apartment, where the windows, unfortunately, hadn’t looked out onto the embankment, but into the courtyard. She’d felt it waking up in the morning to Ildar Nalimov’s smile, wrapped in his warmth and tenderness, feeling like a child again, with so many wonders still ahead.

Ardi had seen this before, reflected in puddles scattered across Ergar’s cave, when he’d woken up there alone, cold and wet, the images of a burning Evergale and a lifeless body lying among the flames refusing to fade from his memory.

He understood Alice.

He understood that she saw release only in sleep. But she couldn’t sleep. And if she did, she was often awoken by her own screams and tears. And time and again, the thought crept in that if only she didn’t have to wake up, if only tomorrow would never come, if only the dream would never end…

And the one responsible for her not being able to fall asleep was Ardan. So she had focused all the darkness that was eating her alive on him.

“Don’t look at me like you know everything!” Alice shouted and, dropping the scalpel, raised her hand to strike him, but couldn’t bring herself to do it.

She didn’t see a Firstborn in him, nor a man. Only the one who hadn’t let her sleep and the one who had witnessed the last moments of her beloved’s life.

Milar hadn’t been wrong to call them the “Puppeteers.” They truly were playing with their fates.

“The church where Din and Plamena had their wedding…”

“Shut up…” The corporal said with helpless anger.

“…they have a good priest there, Alice…”

“Just shut up,” her voice, like her gaze, was gradually fading away, losing all emotion.

“…go see him. Talk to him.”

“I don’t want to talk to anyone, Corporal,” Alice’s tone was once again as lifeless as the corpses she dissected on the steel tables of the laboratory. “I just want to hate someone, you understand? To blame someone. I want some bastard to be responsible for…” She clutched her chest and, twisting the fabric of her clothes in her fist, as if she were suffocating, she rasped. “For everything. You understand? Do you understand?!”

Ardi probably did.

But he also knew that even if he’d wanted to, he could’ve never found the right words. Because he didn’t know how. This was, as Milar had rightly pointed out, not about calculating seals, but about human souls. You couldn’t measure them, you couldn’t determine their parameters, you couldn’t create equations and functions for them.

“Leave.”

“Alice…”

“Leave!”

Ardi turned and headed for the door. Before leaving, he ran a hand over his neck—the bleeding had stopped, and by evening, the cut would be gone entirely. The blood of a Matabar…

As he touched the doorknob, Ardi saw in the reflection of one of the glass jars that Alice had sunk to the floor and, still twisting her clothes in her fist, was trying to breathe while quietly shedding sparse tears.

Ardan closed his eyes, took a few breaths in and out, and stepped into the corridor. The two operatives and Milar were already waiting for him. They had probably heard everything, but they pretended that nothing had happened. Ardi was grateful to them for that. He didn’t know if he had enough strength to discuss it all.

As they headed for the stairs, they were silent for a while, until Ardi decided to ask the question that had been tormenting him.

“This is definitely a trap, right, Milar?”

“Most likely,” the captain nodded. “At least everything concerning the vampire’s lair in the suburbs is.”

It hadn’t been hard to figure that out. Previously, the victims of alchemy, magic, or some other method of brain destruction were sent to meet the Eternal Angels or the Sleeping Spirits the moment they’d even thought about answering a question directly related to the Puppeteers’ activities.

But Inga had somehow managed to spill her guts, telling them everything about the vampire and the children. Why? Because, obviously, they were being lured there, like deer to the slaughter.

“As for the Night Folk, it’s far from certain,” they passed the turnoff leading to the archive and descended to the lowest part of the Black House. “The possibility that Inga could have just sold Astasya to them can’t be ruled out.”

“That sounds foul, Milar,” Alexander growled. “To sell someone is…”

Ardi’s gaze flickered over the tribal tattoos of the Armondo that, clearly against their owner’s will, now adorned Alexander’s head. Slavery had been eradicated back in Gales, as it was considered something inherent to the Firstborn. And besides, the only countries on the entire planet where slavery was still legal were the Brotherhood of Tazidahian and, as it just so happened, the Armondo Tribes.

Dagdag’s laboratory was a vast space encased in a cage of steel plates that covered the walls and, something that amazed Ardi all over again, the stone ceiling. It was as if the Black House stood over an old, manmade cave carved into the rock. Although, if you believed the legends and his great-grandfather’s stories, all the old buildings had even more ancient foundations made up of other, forgotten myths.

To the accompaniment of the metallic clanging of a hammer and in between nervous shouts of: “Come! On! Get! In! Place! Already!” The two investigator partners, along with Alexander and Din, approached the equipment rack.

Dagdag, who was halfway buried under a box with numerous toggles, levers and valves, was clearly trying to restore the original shape of a retaining clamp that would prevent the numerous Ley-cables from tangling into an unseemly knot of multicolored braiding.

The clamp finally obeyed and snapped into its groove, securely fastening the main line. Professor Convel had shown them something similar in his lectures, but they had not yet moved on to the direct study of complex Ley-connection diagrams, let alone the interaction of the various materials used in Ley-mechanics.

And, to be honest, they never would.

The General Faculty only covered the basic forms and principles of seal construction. The more complex subject of Ley-mechanics, as well as the construction of high-load, multi-component seals, was studied by the Faculty of Engineering and, in general, those who went on to conquer the heights of the Magisterium after their first six years at the Grand University.

Considering the fact that the Magisterium was located on the top floors of the Grand’s main tower, it was something of a pun.

“Lieutenant,” Milar, after approaching the legs that were sticking out, lightly tapped the sole of a shoe with his toe.

“Go to hell, Captain,” the half-blood dwarf hissed and, after climbing out from under the box, adjusted the complex system of technical goggles on his head.

On his forehead, a leather strap held a frame with several “arms,” each of them tipped with lenses that provided a different sort of focus, magnification, and light spectrum filtration. It was a very expensive device used by all Ley-mechanics. Only, in Dagdag’s case, it looked not just personally modified, but entirely built from scratch.

“Don’t I have anything better to do than supply your insatiable department?”

“Colonel’s orders…”

“That’s the only reason,” Dagdag, after rising to his feet and adjusting the vest covering his bulky, but not fat, stomach, threatened them with his hammer. “The only reason I tolerate you. Especially… Especially!” Dagdag pointed the tool at Ard. “This troglodyte.”

“Lieutenant Dagdag, I-”

“I’m about to say something unpleasant to you in rhyme, Corporal!” The chief engineer of the Black House barked. “Where are all the reports for those prematurely lost, spent, or destroyed accumulators, huh? The warehouse demons are going to chew my second bald spot raw soon. And all because of you, you monster. Even Mshisty’s dogs get their paperwork in without delay, but you…”

Dagdag waved his hand dismissively and hung his hammer back on his tool belt. Ardi only glanced sideways at Milar, who surreptitiously threw his hands up. It was indeed the captain who often filled out the reports and paperwork for his partner’s work. But at the same time, he knew absolutely nothing about anything related to the Ley. So he had no way of preparing the papers for Dagdag.

“I’ll bring them.”

“Yeah… when you bring them, I’ll believe it,” Dagdag snorted skeptically. He’d cooled down a bit, but was still greatly displeased. “Alright, fine, I’ve got a ton of work to do today. It’s right up to my neck.”

“You mean up to your waist?” Din, who towered over the half-blood lieutenant, quipped with a carefree smile.

“Well, I’ve got something else at my waist, Din, that’ll come right up to your tonsils,” Dagdag shot back, his retort much cruder. Ardi used to be surprised by these sorts of exchanges among the Second Chancery staff, but he had gotten used to it over time. “Alright, accept your gifts, gentlemen, and clear the premises.”

The half-blood dwarf flipped one of the toggles, causing a wide plate on the floor that was situated close to the control panel to move aside and, with a guttural roar of turning mechanisms, a platform rose up. On it lay several “inventions.”

“Alright, you first, you damned lummox,” Dagdag, approaching his creation, first handed Din two wide knives. Along the blades of both, just like on Milar’s saber, the patterns of several seals could be seen. “There’s an elemental interaction embedded here…”

Dagdag looked at Din’s childishly delighted face. He was examining his new knives with almost the same rapture shown by a child who had received a long-awaited gift on New Year’s.

“Press here,” the engineer instructed, massaging the bridge of his nose. “And it’ll go Blade on fire. For about twenty seconds. To turn it off, press that again. Got it?”

“Goooooot it,” Din drew out the word and was about to press the protrusion on the hilt when Dagdag kicked him behind the knee.

“Not now, you oaf!” He barked and turned to Milar. “You’ll keep an eye on him, Captain?”

Milar responded with a nod, his expression just as weary as Dagdag’s.

“Now you, baldie,” the half-blood returned to the platform, from which he took two revolvers. The only things that distinguished them from ordinary ones were the elongated barrel and an equally-unusual, long cylinder holding not six, but eight rounds. “Basically, they’re just ordinary revolvers, Alexander. But! See these little buggers?” Dagdag pointed to a small box lying nearby. “Those are modified Ley-cartridges, the kind the Daggers use.”

“Explosive ones?” Alexander asked curtly.

Ardi remembered how, last summer, when he and Yonatan Kornosskiy’s squad were crossing the prairies, Katerina the sharpshooter had sometimes used strange cartridges that exploded into a scarlet, fiery ball upon impact.

“Most of them, yes,” Dagdag confirmed. “But there are also four experimental ones,” he handed over a miniature box with four cartridges. “The last thing we managed to work on with the Grand Magister, may the Eternal Angels receive him.”

For a moment, silence hung in the laboratory, but soon, everything returned to normal.

“You’ll find instructions in the box—read them before you shoot, deal?”

“Yes,” Alexander replied in his usual, laconic manner.

He took both revolvers and deftly spun them on his fingers, then checked the grip, spun the cylinder against his sleeve, snapped the mechanism shut, and, raising them, quickly took aim at some target only he could see.

“Excellent,” he concluded.

“Look here, too,” Dagdag opened the next box. Apparently, out of their whole department, the dwarf liked Alexander the best. “Since you’re always getting tangled up with all sorts of scum, I’ve prepared a Scum-Smasher for you.”

Milar and Ardi managed to restrain their chuckles and comments, but Din nearly bent over double with laughter. After he finished laughing, he wiped away the tears that had formed and apologized, to which Dagdag responded with an obscene gesture.

Alexander, however, lifted the two brass knuckles off their cushion, slipped them onto his fingers, and let loose with several quick jabs. They were so fast that even Ardi could only see blurred gray flashes ripping through the air. He didn’t think he could have dodged Alexander’s punches.

It was amazing that such a stern, taciturn man had managed to create such a large and close-knit family… consisting almost entirely of women.

“These were made from an Ertalain alloy with some added impurities from processed anomaly cores,” Dagdag summarized proudly. “Has a special effect on all sorts of scum.”

“Vampires, werewolves?” Alexander asked.

“And anything with a high Ley-charge,” Dagdag confirmed.

Alexander just nodded.

“Alright, now for the small stuff,” the half-blood opened several more boxes. They contained vials, cartridges, several medallions, and a dozen small flasks. “This is water with a Ley-charge in fragile, I repeat, glass. Throw it at the feet of Night Folk or undead and you’re all set.”

“All set for what?” Din immediately interjected.

“Nothing too serious,” Dagdag replied without a hint of mockery. “It might stun them, might slow them down, but it won’t eliminate the target completely.”

“You’re not making me very happy here, Lieutenant,” Milar sighed.

“Have I sent you to hell today, Captain?”

“Yes.”

“Then go back and visit it again,” the half-blood flashed his almost square teeth. “Right. Here are the cartridges with cores of crystal nuclei and Ertalain. All standard stuff when going up against Night Folk. You know how to use them. Your saber, by the way, how is it? Have you tested it in action yet?”

Milar patted the hilt of the Ley-artifact.

“It did the job.”

“Excellent!” Dagdag himself was now beaming as brightly as Din, who was still admiring his knives. “Don’t forget to change out the accumulators. Nothing will work without them. And if you damage the hilt, everything will go to shit.”

“Why did you make it a copper hilt? And why use copper in general?” Ardi couldn’t help but ask.

Dagdag threw him a withering look and hissed:

“You’ll bring me the captain’s paperwork too!”

Ardan just sighed and shook his head. It seemed he wouldn’t be able to escape the paperwork this time.

“And finally, some alchemy,” Dagdag waved his hand over the flasks of multicolored liquid. “A hemostatic, some night vision, an adrenaline shot for strength and speed, one for enhanced sense of smell, and… you know the drill.”

“We know,” with those “elaborate words,” Alexander simply walked over and took the box.

“Then that’s all, gentlemen.”

Ardi cleared his throat and showed him his empty belt where the compartments meant to carry the accumulators now held only a weightless void.

“I ought to deny you new accumulators until you bring the papers, Corporal. It’d be by the book,” Dagdag growled and, with a kick, opened a hatch in the platform’s rack, from which he pulled out several steel boxes. “But then I’d have to waste time at your funerals. Take three for each Star.”

“Maybe five?” Ardi tried to bargain.

“Five? So you can obliterate another building? And don’t look at me like that. The whole House already knows we’ve got a miniature Mshisty on our hands,” Dagdag gave Ardi an appraising look and corrected himself. “Alright, you’re not so miniature, but that wasn’t the point and… Sleeping Spirits. Take four for the green and three for the red and get out.”

“Thank you.”

“Shove your thanks up your ass, Corporal. I need papers. Papers! Understand?”

“I understand,” Ardi placed the seven military-grade accumulators into the pouches on his belt.

Milar had been looking at Ardi’s bag with a smirk the whole time—the bag where Ardi had previously stored the accumulators that had been resting in his rings. The young man hadn’t done so because he had been infected with greed, but simply because he and Milar ended up in some kind of trouble so often that he didn’t want to find himself unarmed the next time they fought another otherworldly, or ordinary but still deadly creature.

“Alright, get going, scram,” Dagdag waved his hands, ushering his guests out. “I’ve seen enough of your impudent, intelligence-unburdened faces for one day. And if you break something, just know that you won’t get so much as underwear from me until the next budget approval!”

“We don’t need your underwear, Dagdag,” Din laughed again.

“And take this lummox with you before he drives me completely mad!”

***

Two old, black “Derks” stopped in the middle of what could best be described as a shantytown. Dilapidated and hunched over like destitute old men, the houses were not even stone or brick, but wood. They’d been built from felled and unhewn logs by the look of it. The windows had been boarded up with rotten wooden planks in places, the eaves were askew like the caps of carefree drunkards, and the narrow streets in the Night Folk quarter were drowning in filthy puddles, dust, and the squeaking of hungry rats that scurried about without any fear or shame.

The air, a heavy blanket of mustiness and damp, clogged their lungs, and an oppressive, tomb-like atmosphere settled on their shoulders.

The quarter resembled a consumptive desperately clinging with yellow, brittle nails to the last embers of a fading life. Or half-life, depending on how you looked at it.

Alexander cocked his revolvers’ hammers, Din unsheathed his knives, Milar drew his saber from its scabbard and checked his revolver’s cylinder, and Ardi opened his grimoire to the page with the modifications.

“Whoever dies is a…” Milar began.

“Fatian,” the other three finished the saying in unison, and together, they moved into the heart of the vampires’, werewolves’, mutants’, and everything else that hid in the night and old children’s horror stories’ domain.

The hunt was on.