The mob froze, the sudden explosion of the gunshot cutting through their cries, their forward momentum, as if a bomb had gone off in the space before them. Which was, in essence, exactly what had occurred: Camilla had flipped a phial into the air about five feet in front of the crowd and shattered it with a bullet from Andrews's pistol. The shot itself continued harmlessly over the crowd, but the shockwave triggered by the concussion slammed into the mob.
The phial had held a special concoction of Camilla's, one the Curia had put to good effect during the flight from Eurulm. The shockwave momentarily disrupted the flow of the Blue Blood, leaving fiends dazed and stunned. The humans, it only momentarily staggered, but together with the noise of the shot it halted them in place, caught as they were at the tipping point where fear compels action, fight or flight.
Into that frozen moment Muveil stepped forward, drawing her massive knight sword and leveling it at the crowd. It shone where the other weapons had been only dull steel, reacting to the spiritual force of its wielder.
"Stand down, by order of the Curia!" Muveil barked. "If the law has business here, then let it be done lawfully. Otherwise, take yourselves off."
The entire front rank of the mob actually shrank back before her just as if they were an academy class falling in line with their president. Murmurs of "The Curia?" and "Who are they?" rose from the back ranks.
"Chief Nadia, tell these people who we are?" Camilla said, figuring that some actual authority might be called for if Muveil's rather impressive manner couldn't entirely overcome whatever mission had brought the people here in the first place. She didn't see Krogh, his daughter, or anyone else from the inn in the crowd, so there wasn't anyone else who knew them on sight.
Nadia pushed her way forward, angrily shoving two men aside by main force. Her face was as angry as the mob's had been, but it was a tight, controlled fury, one she turned on her own people rather than Victor Davenant.
"They're Agent Folin Lou and Dr. Alucard, sent by the Curia at Sister Sara's request to investigate the grave-robbing incidents. You lot can thank your lucky stars that they're here or else you'd be facing charges for rioting!"
Or worse, Camilla thought.
The gendarmes worked their way through the mob and resumed their place at the front, turned sideways so they could keep an eye on the throng and on their chief and Victor at the same time. At least superficially it was a restoration of order.
"We're here to see justice done!" someone cried out from the middle of the pack.
"Justice for what?" Victor cried. "What's happened?"
Camilla clenched her jaw, suppressing any further open show of frustration with effort. Of all things, she didn't need Victor openly speaking up, challenging matters. His question was the right one; he was just the wrong person to be asking it.
"Something did bring you here," she said at once, deflecting the immediate response from him to herself, "something new that we don't know about, I assume. Muveil, Dr. Victor, and I are the only ones still in the dark, Chief, so you had best tell us."
"You remember that since the latest atrocity, I've had a watch placed at the cemetery, in case the grave-robber returns." She didn't phrase it as a question, which Camilla decided to take as a compliment.
"The same protections that keep the churchyard itself safe from fiends would protect anyone keeping watch if they waited inside the boundary," Muveil said, "and as we believe the body-snatcher to be human, armed police should be a match for them."
"Correct. Two gendarmes have kept watch each night. Last night, they had an encounter."
"Someone tried to get into the churchyard?"
"They forced their way through the hedge. The men had been watching in shifts, one sleeping and one waking. Holst, the waking man, heard a rustling in the back and at once nudged his companion, Mueller, awake, rousing him just in time to see a figure burst through the hedge. Holst shone their lantern on him, and the prowler at once flung up his hands and dove back into the hedge. The gendarmes gave chase at once, but when they got through the would-be grave-robber was already quite some distance away down the road heading north, towards the direction of this schloss.
"Holst and Mueller pursued, but after about fifty yards had grown no closer to their quarry. Hesitating to pursue any further through the night without sufficient arms to protect them from fiends, they retreated to the churchyard, and in the morning came back to the village to make their report."
"That explains why Sister Sara knew none of this when we took breakfast at the church," Camilla said.
"I wish I'd been there. I could have kept going after the grave-robber and run him down," Muveil said.
"If you had," Camilla pointed out, "Dr. Victor, Andrews, and I would likely have been hurt or killed by the hamadryad."
"After that. While you and Dr. Victor were caught up in talking science, I could have gone to the cemetery to keep watch with the gendarmes."
"Actually, that's a good point. Chief Nadia, what time did all of this happen?"
"Mueller looked at his watch when they got back to the graveyard after abandoning pursuit. It was just turning quarter to eleven."
"In that case, Chief Nadia, then I'm afraid that you and these…enthusiastic citizens of Vaseria have wasted your trip up here. At quarter to eleven, Dr. Victor was in his laboratory, talking to us about the experiments in galvanism he's been performing."
"To you?"
"In light of the suspicions against him, we kept his house under observation. When we saw that he was doing something in his lab during the late evening, we confronted him directly, and he showed us what he'd been involved in." Which is essentially the truth, Camilla thought, even if it leaves out all the meaningful details.
A murmur rose from the crowd, voices hushed with bewilderment. The surprise was shared by Nadia and her gendarmes.
"You're sure of this?"
It was Muveil's turn to answer. Flat, definitive statements were definitely one of her strong points.
"We took up watch over the house shortly after nightfall, and we did not leave his presence until some time after midnight as the discussions were both lengthy and complex. Our examination of his laboratory last night led us to believe that your grave-robber was not Dr. Victor Davenant, and this incident now confirms it."
She punctuated her statement by resheathing her sword, an act Camilla found surprisingly powerful. It was as if Muveil's gesture had been a formal proclamation that there would be no violence that day. Tools and weapons sagged, and more than one gendarme actually holstered her pistol or sheathed his saber. The energy drained out of the crowd, righteous fury replaced by confusion and, yes, a sense of disappointment and fear of the unknown.
"But what about—" one woman started to say, but it lacked any vigor, more of a lame attempt to preserve her own energy, her sense of taking action to protect herself, than anything else. Chief Nadia was having none even of that, and cut her off.
"You heard the Agent. There's nothing happening here. Take yourselves off and try to remember this for the next time you get it into your heads to step outside the law."
There was much sullen mumbling and muttering, but the crowd of villagers turned and began stumping back down the road towards town, moving at no more than half the speed of their vigorous march in the opposite direction.
"Go follow along," Nadia told her gendarmes. "Give them an escort just in case someone decides to get clever. I'll fill in our friends from the Curia on the rest of last night's incident."
"Thank you," Camilla said. "You can tell us on our way back to the village, if you don't mind. I stayed up all night reading through scientific documents and verifying that indeed Dr. Victor is doing no more than he claims, and I need to get some sleep if I'm to be of any use to anyone tonight."
"That suits me; I need to get back to work myself, especially since this entire incident has been a huge waste of police time."
Camilla handed Victor the borrowed gun.
"You can give this back to Andrews. Oh, and about your own research," she added, and offered a smile, "it looks like the Curia now has two jobs in Vaseria instead of one. It'll be a pleasure to work with you."
He understood what she was saying at once, and his face lit up like a child's on Christmas morning.
"Thank you, Doctor. You can't know what this means to me." He reached out impulsively and clasped her hand. Nadia took this in with narrowed gaze, sure that there was subtext there but not sure of what it was that was going unsaid.
If it worried her, she still didn't press the point as Victor headed back towards the manor and Muveil took the first few steps towards town. Camilla supposed that given what had almost just happened, she didn't want to tempt fate by prying into Curia business.
"So tell me more about this would-be grave-robber," she invited a change of subject. "You said that your man Holst turned a light on them, so he must have gotten some kind of look. I assume there was some kind of mask or other way to conceal the face?"
She set off after Muveil, and Nadia swiftly fell into step with them. The three of them were about two hundred feet behind the crowd, and Muveil was deliberately setting a pace slower than her usual swift, striding walk so that they didn't overtake the others.
"Holst and Mueller both reported that he wore a loose, full-length coat, dark trousers, and gloves. The impression they got was that the clothes' fit was loose on a slim body, which would fit Dr. Davenant, but then again they admit that they only got a quick glimpse and they may have gotten that impression because it fits Dr. Davenant's appearance and that's who they expected to see. They definitely said the prowler was of no more than average height or a little less, an impression that I have more faith in and which would also fit Dr. Davenant. And yes, he wore a mask, a kind of bag or sack cut with eyeholes."
"I see. Did he carry anything?"
"A shovel was the only thing that they noticed."
"Of course."
Nadia gave Camilla a sharp glance.
"Dr. Alucard, that was a very loaded comment."
"I'll respond with a loaded question. Did the gendarmes manning the nightwatch post on the road see this figure pass them in either direction?"
She didn't answer for several long seconds. At first Camilla thought it was because Nadia didn't know the answer, but she soon realized it was because she was thinking over the implications.
"No. No, they didn't. Meaning that they approached the church by some path other than the road, and left by the same way, taking a detour once the gendarmes had given up pursuit. And if that's the case, then why did they flee on the open road at all?"
"Open terrain is easier to run away on," Muveil said. "Or they were just running back the way they came and their route through the forest begins further along?"
"Or they deliberately wanted Holst and Mueller to see them fleeing in a specific direction," Camilla said. "Just as they deliberately wanted to be seen openly barging through the hedge when in all their previous attempts they'd entered the cemetery without leaving any traces for the police to find. Not to mention that unless I'm confusing my stories, there haven't been any recent deaths so that there aren't any new, fresh bodies to steal."
Muveil swiveled her head around.
"Dr. Camilla, what are you talking about?"
"She thinks we're being played," Nadia growled. "And I don't think she's wrong. Some joker is having a very unfunny laugh." She waved at the crowd walking ahead of them. "The kind that could have gotten a man killed."
"Which raises another question, doesn't it?" Camilla asked.
"Aren't the ones we have so far enough?" Nadia grumbled, and the doctor felt her lips flicker into a smile for just a moment. She could appreciate a well-placed grumble.
"I'm just wondering," she said, "for whose benefit was that little pantomime meant?"
This time, Muveil followed her train of thought.
"You mean, was it for the police, or for the villagers?"
"That's it exactly. It's one thing if the purpose was to invite police attention more forcefully towards the Davenant household, maybe to prompt the kind of active searches and questioning Chief Nadia has held off from thus far. In that case, the word getting out and the villagers getting stirred up was an accident, spurred on by whatever questions might have been asked of potential witnesses around town and by loose lips generally, particularly Holst or Mueller."
Muveil added her agreement.
"It's hard to get people to keep quiet. I've seen my squad members gossip like schoolgirls—which, in fairness, they are, since the squad is made up of knight candidates from the Academy—over matters that are supposed to remain confidential."
"But on the other hand, a village mob might have been exactly what our ersatz body-snatcher wanted. A large group, driven by fear and anger to violent action, with no leader or structure to hold them back."
"If that's the case," said Nadia, "then they won't have left it up to chance. They'll have made sure the story spread, put rumors about that we were asking questions about last night, that kind of thing."
"If you can trace the rumors, you might learn something," Muveil suggested. "Find out who said what to whom, until you get to the starting point."
"Unfortunately, I doubt that anyone will remember, not with the state they were in, but we'll ask. Who knows; we might even get lucky."
"Do you think it was actually the grave-robber last night, or someone else out to make trouble?"
"I certainly hope it's the actual one, Agent. Having two different people running around at night, popping in and out of the forests without apparent regard to fiends, would be a little beyond the pale for our small down, don't you think?"
Three people, Camilla corrected mentally, including Victor's nighttime activities that Nadia didn't know about. That actually made the Chief of Police's point even more, to her way of thinking.
"It probably is the grave-robber," she said aloud, "if only because of what we were discussing with Sister Sara this morning."
"Ah, you mean about the timing of the grave robberies. Yes, this does sound like more of the same."
"You're going to have to forgive me," Nadia said, "but what are you talking about?"
"It was Muveil's observation," Camilla said. "A scientist moved into the notorious Schloss Frankenstein. Then he ordered equipment shipped in to outfit a laboratory. And only then did the grave-robberies start happening. The connection is too obvious to be coincidence. The Davenants are the only strangers in Vaseria, and yet only upon their arrival did any of this happen."
"It has to be a blind," Muveil said. "Dr. Victor is a perfectly tailor-made suspect, someone to distract the police and the public. The body-snatcher waited for their opportunity, then struck when they knew everyone would jump to the conclusion that it was the 'new Frankenstein' who was guilty. Only now, they've moved on to deliberate provocation."
Nadia exhaled sharply.
"And they nearly succeeded. If the two of you hadn't been able to testify to Davenant's innocence…"
She gave Camilla a sidealong glance.
"No, Chief, we were not lying to stave off mob violence. Dr. Victor Davenant is not your grave-robber, and his research is of distinct interest to the Curia in helping us to find new and better methods to stand against the fiends."
"That's quite a statement." Nadia didn't even bother denying the direction of her thoughts.
"An accurate one, though. The bottom line is that you don't need to worry about Dr. Victor's research. The real problem is your body-snatcher, especially now."
"Why now?"
"If they're ready to have Dr. Victor be arrested—or worse—for these crimes, then they don't need him for cover any longer. Which means that they're done stealing bodies, and ready to move on to the next phase of whatever experiments needed all those corpses."
A soft rumble of thunder from overhead made it seem like the elements themselves agreed with her worry.
~X X X~
Camilla missed the moment that the storm finally broke, because she crawled into bed the moment she got back to the inn, pausing only long enough to rid herself of coat, boots, monocle, and anything fragile, explosive, or sharp before falling into the exhausted sleep of one who'd been awake for thirty hours with considerable physical and mental exercise both, to say nothing of one life-or-death battle. The restorative effects of her earlier short nap had completely worn off, and between her weariness and her naturally heavy slumber she probably could have slept through it if another mob had come for her.
By the time Muveil shook her awake at seven, the storm was in full fury. Great crashes of lightning turned the windowpanes white and lit the suite like a photographic negative, while a driving rain rattled the glass, streaming in torrent down the panes, and the explosive force of the thunder seemed to shake the building.
"How long has that been going on?" she asked, impressed, as she fit her monocle into place.
"Since half past five," Muveil said. "I'd thought to take a short nap myself, since it's hopeless to try to continue the investigation in this weather, but it woke me."
"I suppose that being a light sleeper is one of an agent's skills, so you can catch what rest you can in the field without being vulnerable to approaching fiends?"
"We try to teach knight-cadets to be aware of their surroundings, even in their sleep."
Camilla ran her fingers through her hair to put it into some kind of order, then gave her head a toss, letting the hair settle naturally into place.
"Given my sleep schedule, I think if I woke up that easily I'd be dead of exhaustion within a week," she decided, then reached for her boots.
"Shall I ring for the maid? I didn't request dinner earlier since I wasn't sure how late you would sleep."
"Do you know, Muveil, tonight I feel like braving the common room. On a night like this, I can't imagine that there will be much custom for my advanced degrees to scare off."
For just an instant, a smile flickered across Muveil's face.
"Aha! You do have a sense of humor!"
Muveil drew herself up, head pulled back.
"Of course I have a sense of humor!"
"It isn't obvious," Camilla said.
"There's a time to relax and joke around."
"I suppose it is a little hard when trying to lead a group of girls barely out of childhood into battle against the fiends."
Shod, Camilla pushed herself to her feet.
"Come on; we should see about getting ourselves some dinner. Or maybe I should ask for breakfast, since I may not sleep again until after sunrise."
Ernst Krogh was surprised to see his guests descend from their suite together, since there was no sane reason to be out on a night like this one. That they turned and went into the common room merely changed the direction of the surprise rather than replaced it.
"Ladies, what is this?"
"This night's not fit for man or beast," Camilla said, "so we thought we'd find what comfort we could and take our dinner at a proper table, with proper service."
Lightning flashed outside the front windows of the inn, casting Krogh's face in an eerie white light, his broad moustache like a bar of iridescent silver.
"I cannot argue with that," he murmured. "On a night such as this, one wants human company of any kind if one can get it." He shook his head. "Even the fiends, I think, would hide from weather like this, or so they say. A time for evil things that scare even the Night."
"They're not wrong," Muveil said. The flat statement, coming from the agent, made Krogh flinch.
Strange, Camilla thought. He repeated the superstition to us casually enough, but hearing it treated like a fact actually surprised him.
"A few fiends thrive in stormy weather like this, but most simply seek cover from the elements the way people or animals do, especially the sort with ordinary physical bodies," she supplied by way of explanation.
"It would be a time humans could reclaim some of the darkness," Muveil went on softly, looking out at the storm, "but instead it's just another way for the night to be stolen from us."
She glanced back at Camilla, and then, as if she'd revealed too much of herself, turned and went into the common room, Camilla following. As they'd expected, the room was empty of custom, though the fire in the massive hearth of rough stone mortared in place had been built up heavily, and cast back a warm glow from leaping, crackling flames. Everything looked old and well-used, down to the very floorboards that seemed to have paths worn into them from the tramp of feet, but there was not a speck of dust anywhere, and brass ornaments threw back the light from over the bar, as did a large mirror behind it from between the racks of bottles.
Mina Krogh came out to greet them almost as soon as they sat down. Her manner seemed distracted and nervous, and at first Camilla thought she was the culprit behind that, what with the reactions to her medical title compounded by the most recent incident, but she soon realized that Mina's fears were more elemental, from the way that she flinched with every rumble of thunder. Indeed, far from shunning the two women, she hung around the common room, polishing glasses, wiping tables, and otherwise doing meaningless chores that seemed more an excuse to stay rather than anything that needed doing. She'd just brought out their meals when her father, too, came in and took a seat at his own bar, helping himself to a glass of some dark-hued spirit.
Even distrusted human contact, it seemed, was better than none on a devil's night like this.
The food was good, though, a hearty stew with plenty of meat and fresh vegetables, a hearty black bread, red cabbage that crunched nicely under the teeth, and hot mulled cider (or in Muveil's case, tea) to wash it down. Camilla dug in eagerly, every bite making her feel more human again, the food finishing the job the sleep had started.
She needed to take better care of herself, she though, particularly when she started to work seriously with Victor Davenant on the prospect of his sister's cure. It would be all too easy to get carried away with making new discoveries, combining Frankenstein's breakthroughs with her own knowledge to push human understanding of the Blue Blood ever further. She didn't have Loer there any more to tell her not to push herself beyond her capacity, after all.
I wonder what you're doing now, Loer, she thought. It was frustrating in the extreme, in one way. Where Frankenstein's great flaw had been to, again and again, shun responsibility for his creation until the very last, Camilla had set up Loergwlith's escape and faked death, only to be forced to stay away entirely from the edifice she'd created and trust it to function on its own, lest she bring the whole thing down.
She tried to shove aside the thought; she had enough to worry about as it was. On a night like this, anything could happen. For all she knew, the body-snatcher's experiments were reaching their culmination, and she had no idea what it was they were doing, let alone who they were. Whatever it was that was going on, there could soon be worse things out there than the hamadryad.
Then, as if echoing her own thoughts, a loud pounding rang out, coming from the inn's front foyer. All four people jerked bolt upright in surprise.
"Please!" a voice called. "Please help me!"
"My God!" Krogh gasped. Muveil and Camilla were already leaping to their feetl they rushed into the foyer, where the pounding on the door continued.
"Can you see who it is?" Muveil asked.
Camilla looked through one of the front windows, trying to see as best she could around the edge of the windowframe.
"No, but I don't see any sign of fiends, at least."
"All right; I'm opening it up."
Muveil grabbed for the heavy bar holding the door sealed against any fiends and pulled it out of its brackets, then yanked open the door.
"Dr. Victor!" she exclaimed, as his rain-sodden figure was all but pushed into the inn foyer by the raging wind.
~X X X~
A/N: This is, of course, Camilla using her "Stun" special ability from the game to slow the mob.