The breath streamed from Muveil's lips, making tiny wisps of vapor that reflected the pale moonlight, before it merged with the tendrils of fog that crept between the black tree-trunks. The autumn night was cold, and Camilla pulled her heavy coat more tightly around herself. It would be an uncomfortable vigil, particularly if nothing happened and they were forced to wait out until dawn.
By night, the crazed wings and steep gables of Schloss Frankenstein resembled nothing so much as a great black beast rearing up against the treeline, the glow of lights behind scattered windows like a random pattern of eyes across its body. The house itself seemed to have taken on the aspect of a fiend, the legacy of Frankenstein's sins assuming a form of their own. For an instant, Camilla was possessed by a mad urge to yank out her gun and fire it into the looming bulk, to score the first blow in what would be as nightmarish a battle as the fall of Eurulm.
"Tch," she growled at herself, suppressing the nonsense thought. I'm starting to react like Sister Sara.
"Yes, it is a problem," Muveil said. She didn't whisper; both women were well aware that whispering actually carried further than a regular spoken voice in low tones. Doubtless it was a basic part of an agent's training, for cases in which fiend-hunting was just that, stalking an enemy through the shadows of its own Night.
"Oh?"
"Watching this building with only the two of us. It would be bad enough if we had one of us in front and one in back, but the construction of the manor makes even that simple plan impossible. There are so many wings added on in slapdash fashion that there could be any number of doors for Dr. Victor to leave through. We can't keep them all under observation with only the two of us."
Camilla smiled, a wry twist of her lips. Trust Muveil to concern herself with the practical aspects and assume Camilla was doing the same.
Then again, the practical details of stalking and surveillance were the agent's forte. This was something she'd been trained for, while Camilla had largely focused on combat skills when it came to fieldwork, only having so much available time outside of her primary studies.
"Ah!" She barely kept from snapping her fingers.
"Did you have an idea?"
"If Dr. Victor sneaks out, it's because he's pursuing his scientific studies, right? So if he does leave the building, he'll come and go by a door that has easy access to his laboratory. That's where he would store equipment and tools, and it's the place where he'd bring anything—like a body—that he retrieves. And if his sister or the servants don't know what he's doing, it gives the best chances of avoiding their notice, as well."
"I see. He's not going to march a corpse through the front door and past his dining room even if the household does know about his activities."
"Right, so all we need to do is to watch the one part of the schloss where his laboratory is located. We two should be able to do that, I think."
"Except for the fact that we don't know where his laboratory is."
"Yes, we do. It's in the northeast wing."
Muveil let out her breath with a sigh.
"Dr. Camilla, if you know something relevant to what we're doing, you should tell me so that I can take it into account when I plan our activities."
"I'm sorry; I didn't think of it as being something important until right now."
"So how is it that you know? Inside the house, we've only seen the hall and the one parlor where we were received."
"It wasn't inside that I saw it, it was outside. Specifically, the lightning-rods. There's one off the northeast wing where there shouldn't be one according to a rational plan; it's put there to direct the lightning down into the house rather than to ground. And do you remember Sister Sara's story, about how Heinrich Frankenstein's crimes came to an end with a massive lightning strike? If his experiments involved channeling the raw energy of the lightning, a mishap would explain the destruction."
"Yes, but what if Dr. Victor is innocent of the charges?"
"Even if he didn't use Frankenstein's methods, he'd still most likely set up his laboratory in the same space. Why waste time on remodeling the house when a room would already be pre-prepared for his use? And besides," she added with logic that was more humorous than practical, "if he's innocent, he won't be sneaking out of anywhere and we still wouldn't miss him."
From Muveil's expression, she found the fact that she couldn't actively argue Camilla's point intensely frustrating.
"All right, the northeast wing it'll be."
They circled the manor until they faced the wing in question, a long block of stone that jutted away from the main pile at a sharp angle. Muveil placed Camilla at the treeline off the north corner while she herself took the matching position to the east. That way, if Victor came out from either side or the end alike, he would be in clear view of at least one of them. Each woman had a dark-lantern, and could flash a simple signal to the other if they saw the doctor without risk of being seen.
Or if they saw a fiend.
This was the World Without Night, and mad scientists were the least of the risks they could expect to face. The weight of Camilla's gun against her hip was comforting, but she hoped that she didn't have to use it: gunshots outside the house could hardly be missed by the inhabitants and Victor would surely know at once what they meant. Of course, he already knew that he was suspected, but he'd also know that he wasn't under active surveillance from the gendarmes owing to the fiends. He might deduce it anyway, that the Curia's emissaries would risk the fiends, but it wasn't guaranteed, while the noise of a fight outside his window would make it absolute and entirely eliminate any chance of catching him in the act.
Of course, if it came down to it, Camilla would readily draw her weapon and fire. This mission wasn't anything she felt worth dying over, after all. But the thought brought her back to a sticking point in the case against Victor: if he was guilty, how had he evaded the fiends en route to and from the churchyard? Vaseria wasn't mysteriously fiend-free, as the wounded gendarmes could testify. And knightly training to battle fiends wasn't just a question of weapon skill.
They'd been over the point before, as had Chief Nadia, and it needed answering. Did Dr. Victor have hidden talents? Or some scientific means of avoiding fiends—one that the Curia would be rather interested to see? Or was he simply innocent, and that was that? But if that was the case, it still didn't answer the question of how the true grave-robber managed to escape fiendish attention and make off with their prizes.
Camilla didn't have an answer, and that was never a circumstance that she enjoyed.
Thinking about the situation at least occupied her thoughts while she stood vigil. Patience, obviously, was a major part of this job. And there was no guarantee that anything would happen that night even if Victor Davenant was the guilty man. There was no pattern, at least no obvious one, to the earlier crimes. Camilla and Muveil's presence, too, was a wild card. Would they make the criminal lay low? Or would the grave-robber accelerate their activities, assuming that longer delay would just cause the Curia to advance to more extreme measures?
Pointless speculation, she decided, She needed facts, data, from which to draw conclusions. Otherwise all she was doing was blindly guessing.
But sometimes, luck was on their side.
Slowly, silently, a door opened in the side of the wing and two men emerged. They wore heavy coats with their collars up, slouch hats drawn down close over their foreheads, and scarves wrapped around their lower faces, but they had to be Victor and Andrews, unless Laura's maid could pass for a man if dressed as one.
Camilla turned her dark-lantern towards Muveil's position and manipulated the shutter, flashing the agreed signal. A moment later came the answering flashes of light, and Camilla turned her attention back to the men.
Both of them, she could see, were carrying packs or satchels, but what was signified by its absence was any sort of long digging tool like a pick or shovel. Whatever expedition they were on, unearthing a grave wasn't any part of it.
Which is even more curious.
More than a little puzzled, she made sure that her lantern was shuttered and started after the men, only to have to stifle a cry of surprise at the last second when Muveil came up beside her. The agent's steps had been utterly silent, showing that despite the way she presented herself as a "knight" with all that implied, she was also adept in the less chivalric side of her work.
Victor and Andrews headed into the woods, but rather than head towards town, their course took them in the opposite direction. With the sky obscured by the trees, Camilla couldn't be certain, but she had a good sense of direction and was fairly confident in their general course.
"They're going northeast?" Muveil murmured next to her, confirming her impression. "I don't understand."
"I don't, either."
"I wish we knew the ground better, so we'd have some idea of what we're heading towards."
Camilla nodded before realizing that of course in the dark it was pointless.
"I guess we'll just have to watch and see. Maybe he has another laboratory hidden out here, somewhere away from his house so that he can let the police search Schloss Frankenstein to their heart's content if need be?"
She liked that hypothesis; it made sense based on what they knew and explained away some of the apparent inconsistencies. Unfortunately for Camilla's satisfaction it was almost immediately proven false when the two men stopped in a small clearing, barely thirty feet across, and set down their bags. The servant stepped back and drew out a firearm from underneath his coat, something large but with a ridiculously short barrel like a cut-down shotgun or howdah pistol. Victor, meanwhile, knelt down and opened both bags, starting to unpack equipment.
"I wish we'd thought to bring a low-light telescope to Vaseria," Camilla said. "I can't tell what it is that he's doing."
"Setting up some kind of device, it looks like."
"Yes, but what kind? What is he up to? I wish I could get a better look."
"We could try to move closer."
"You could, but I'm not sure I trust myself to be that quiet."
"But it wouldn't matter if I did; I wouldn't have any idea what he was doing, anyway."
Camilla hadn't wanted to say that herself, but apparently Muveil didn't have that kind of brittle pride. I probably should have expected that, she admitted to herself.
Victor seemed to have finished setting up his device, whatever it was—the whole thing looked like a flat square with vertical prongs at the four corners—and dipped into the servant's bag. From there he took a cylindrical object about a foot high and set it down to one side of the first device, between it and the watching Curia operatives. He manipulated switches in some way that Camilla couldn't quite make out, and blue sparks crackled along its sides, showing that it was drawing a galvanic charge. After a couple of seconds, a spreading beam of pale green light shot out of the device, its path crossing over the first piece and vanishing out into the trees.
"What on earth?" It came out as a kind of strangled yelp as Camilla was so startled that she had to inhale mid-word to keep from raising her voice.
"What is it?"
"That lamp. I recognize the light it's emitting."
"Green?"
Camilla gave Muveil a disgusted look.
"Seriously, Agent Muveil?"
"I just don't understand what you mean. It looks like an ordinary green light to me."
"I suppose it would if you weren't familiar with it. I recognized the shade because I created it."
"You did?"
"Not the color itself, of course. I recognize it because it's the light projected by a specific kind of electrically-generated energy that attracts fiends. We deployed a few prototype lamps of its type during the fall of Eurulm to draw fiends into channels where they could be attacked from an advantageous position, or to draw them away from escape routes. It doesn't exert any kind of absolute control, but acts like extremely attractive bait, particularly for those fiends with little intellect or sense of self."
"I see."
Muveil reacted to the information with an elegant simplicity, suitable for a Holy Knight who believed what her researcher was telling her: she drew her sword.
"Do you think he stole the device from the Curia?"
"Not necessarily. I reported the underlying principles in a scientific paper that has circulated in the community. If he's competent in galvanic work he could have built his own, or designed it and had a skilled technician put it together. I'm less concerned with the question of 'how' as much as I am with 'why.'"
Muveil shook her head, a shadow moving in the night.
"That question, I think you'll soon have answered on its own."
She had a point. Fiend appearances weren't inevitable, outside of high-density places like the fallen capital, but with the attraction device shining into the darkness, something was bound to show up.
And so it did.
The things came out of the woods in a rush, a pair of buzzing, darting insects two feet long, with black bodies and iridescent blue wings that shone with more light than there was to reflect. They rushed towards the lamp, bathed in its radiance—and then the four spear-points at the corners of the first device snapped up, impaling the pair of them together like they'd been spitted on Muveil's sword. Blue Blood exploded from the crumpled bodies, but instead of splattering onto the ground it swirled down in a conical vortex, disappearing into the broad plate of the spear-trap.
Camilla glanced at Muveil, who was watching the scene intently.
"A trap for fiends, to collect Blue Blood," she marveled. "Like our Rosier Clocks that we use as agents. But what's it to be used for?"
"I don't know. But like I said before, it's almost certain that if the Frankenstein stories are true, the Blue Blood was involved. So we can't rule out that this is just another part of the same overall experiments, just a different kind of materials collection."
The two fiends had apparently provided enough Blood, because Victor shut off the lamp and started to disassemble the equipment.
"If that's the case, he should have saved the grave-robbing for last," Muveil said. "This kind of thing he can do without stirring up fear and suspicion in the public."
"True. Maybe he didn't want to keep volatile Blue Blood around any longer than he had to? Though preserving the bodies against natural decay then starts to become a problem…"
"Whatever it is, we can ask him directly," Muveil said, cutting right to the heart of the matter. "This is evidence of something, and tampering with the Blue Blood is enough reason for us to step in directly."
"All right. Shall we do it now or follow them back to Schloss Frankenstein?"
"Follow. I don't think a fiend-haunted forest is any place for a nighttime conversation. Plus, we don't know that this is their last stop. Dr. Victor has already lied, and he may keep on lying about anything he can, so getting as much evidence as possible with our own eyes would be more useful than talk."
"For someone who doesn't have much experience with investigation, you're certainly catching on to the fine points."
Sensible as Muveil's plan was, though, the women didn't get the chance to act on it. Victor was just stowing away the last of his gear when he was startled by a rustling in the bushes on the far side of the clearing. He looked up that way, and nearly fell over backwards when what looked to be nothing more than a gnarled, rotting tree pushed its way out of the forest.
Camilla had encountered wood golem fiends in the past, trees that had come to life with the Blue Blood. Though alien in their perception of the world—they had been plants, after all—and defensive of their territory, they were not particularly aggressive or even actively hostile most of the time. Her grandfather, the late Professor Alucard, had even done some more in-depth research on them and their behavior when they believed themselves to be alone.
This was an entirely different type of creature.
Perhaps the forest that had created it had been the scene of old crimes, or the fear that haunted Vaseria in the wake of the Frankenstein horrors had seeped into the very environment, polluting it with the force which was then picked up by the Blue Blood; there were so many ways in which lingering grudges were given form by the Nightlord's spilled essence. But whatever the cause, this monster was no wood golem. A nest of roots at its base slithered like serpentine tentacles, reaching out one or two at a time to pull the creature forward. Branches, bare of leaves, made for three skeletal arms, twigs at their tips curling like fingers. Boles in the gnarled trunk made the shape of rough faces, pairs of small ones like eyes above larger mouths edged in jagged chunks of bark; Camilla could make out at least three such faces, and she suspected there would be more.
Hamadryad, she thought. One of the most violent and wicked of plant-based fiends, even more so than the common dryads.
Even as the thoughts were racing through her, her partner was already in motion, rushing from cover and charging at the fiend. By the time Andrews's pistol discharged one of its three barrels into one of the hamadryad's faces, Muveil was no more than ten feet behind him, and she rushed past him in the next instant, her sword throwing back the struggling hints of moonlight like it held its own inner light.
Camilla raised her own gun to her shoulder; she'd reattached the stock and barrel as soon as they'd left the village. She was about to fire, but Muveil cut to her left to clear Andrews and in turn cut off Camilla's line. Cursing under her breath, Camilla darted forward as well, circling to her left as soon as she entered the clearing proper in order to get a clear line of sight.
The hamadryad swung one of its branch-arms at Muveil as she drew near, but she cleanly ducked the swipe and slashed back, hacking into its body and sending chunks of bark flying. Steel on wood alone couldn't have enabled it to cut so deeply, but the spiritual enhancements that were part of its crafting acted against the Blue Blood. The alchemy that went into forging the Curia's weapons was one reason the organization devoted so many resources to the work of researchers like Camilla, and their effectiveness was a testament to its worth.
The injury, though, was still relatively minor, and Muveil was forced to leap to avoid a tentacle-root whipping at her ankles. Getting into the air, though, left her vulnerable, and unable to avoid another branch. Somehow, though, she saw it coming and got her sword around to parry, so that even though the impact knocked her sprawling the force of the blow against her blade struck another gouge into the fiend.
Muveil being knocked down also cleared Camilla's firing lines, and she took immediate advantage, firing twice with quick pulls of the trigger. Her ammunition was silver, hollowed and filled with alchemically-treated holy oil that blew holes in the hamadryad's trunk. Andrews, likewise, emptied the last two barrels from his pistol into the thing; they didn't inflict the same kind of injury as Camilla's but still made an impact.
Looks like Victor's done some work in crafting specialized ammunition as well.
Victor, too, had drawn a pistol from under his coat, if a smaller weapon than his servant carried, but Muveil had pushed herself up before he could get off a shot himself. Circling to her left as Muveil charged back in, Camilla yanked a vial free from a loop on the inside of her coat and hurled it at the fiend. The glass shattered when it his the hamadryad, splattering crimson fluid that reacted at once with the air, bursting into a searing flame that clung to the tree fiend, making it screech like a wounded beast.
The sudden injury left the hamadryad vulnerable as Muveil struck, stabbing deep into one of its "eyes" and shattering the rim of the bole. Limbs and roots flailed wildly, and she was hit again, but only a glancing blow on the hip.
Camilla and Andrews, meanwhile, had broken open their weapons and were rapidly feeding fresh shells into the breech. I need greater ammunition capacity, she thought. If I can't keep up a steady pace of fire, then I'll get overwhelmed if I'm fighting alone against multiple small fiends or a strong one like this. And I can't help Muveil, either!
She gave the lie almost immediately to that last thought by yanking out a couple of silver throwing spikes, not unlike arrowheads or Japanese kunai, and hurling them at the fiend. They did little damage, though; even Victor's revolver shots seemed to do more, sending up tiny gouts of wood on impact, but neither attack prevented the hamadryad from regaining its senses.
What they did do was distract the fiend from Muveil. With little conscious thought, it didn't tactically process that the agent was its most serious threat, and just reacted to whatever was the last thing that had hurt it.
Which in this case was Victor, whose revolver clicked empty after he fired its last shot.
One of the fiend's roots all but launched itself at him, wrapping around his leg below the knee and yanking it out from under him.
"Master Victor!" Andrews cried as his employer was slammed into the ground, revealing that he'd likely been with the Davenants since Victor was a child—no wonder he's willing to help with shady experiments! He fumbled to close the howdah pistol, fingers clumsy with his fear for Victor's life, then missed as he fired at the binding root when it flexed to pull Victor up into the air.
"Muveil!" Camilla shouted. The fiend's limb rippled, as if it was about to snap like a whip and smash its victim down to the ground again, but the agent reacted faster. Muveil wrenched her sword out of the hamadryad's eye, pivoted, and sliced down with a massive two-handed overhead swing that chopped clean through the tendril, sending Blue Blood spraying from the stump.
Victor grunted in pain when he hit the ground, but the fall carried far less force than it would have if the fiend had hurled him down. But the hamadryad itself lashed out and smashed a clubbing blow with an arm across Muveil's back that sent her sprawling.
Andrews shot the fiend again, as did Camilla, but the scientist knew bullets alone weren't going to bring it down, not at this rate. She only had two more fire flasks with her, but she also knew her other chemicals weren't likely to be as effective, and they had to deal with the current problem before she could worry about the future. Without any further hesitation, she flung the vial into the fiend's largest maw, where it exploded into flames, making the hamadryad look even more demonic than before.
The fire raged at it from within, and for the first time the fiend reeled back, retreating from the surprisingly stubborn humans. As it did, Muveil pushed herself to her feet, took her sword in both hands, and—
"Haaaah!"
She spun around, lashing in a massive horizontal cut that slammed the edge of the sword's four-foot blade square across the hamadryad's flaming maw, where it was not only injured but had the least amount of solid wood in its cross-section anywhere in its body. The edge bit in, kept on going, and exploded out the back as Muveil finished the cut by cleaving right through the fiend's form. Blue Blood fountained into the air, but rather than falling to earth it swirled together as if caught in a vortex and was pulled into the Rosier Clock around the agent's neck.
The top half of the fiend's body toppled off to crash into the ground, and the bottom fell almost as fast. Unlike some more ephemeral fiends, the corpse did not fade into Blue Blood or begin to crumble, but instead seemed to stiffen, as if it was reverting into its natural state, popping and cracking until all that was left was the dry, dead wood of a fallen tree.
"And now that that little sideshow is taken care of, Doctor," Camilla said, "may I suggest that we all return to Schloss Frankenstein so that you can tell us exactly what you intend to do with all this Blue Blood that you're collecting?"
Victor looked from Camilla to Muveil and back again from his position on the ground.
"I wonder if I could expect greater mercy from the fiend."