They reached the threshold on the afternoon of the second day. One moment their coach was rattling along the road through the quiet darkness, and in the next the brilliance of sunlight was stabbing into Camilla's eyes. She actually gasped and flinched away, for it had been weeks since she'd seen the sun, and not even the brilliance of the hotel's lobby could compare to the absolute saturation of heat and light.
Arnice, too, held up a hand to shield her eyes from the sudden brightness, though she made no sound. Camilla found it mildly annoying—and embarrassing—that the avatar of Eternal Night more easily adapted to the daylight than she did.
"I guess now we know how far Malvasia's night spread," Arnice said.
"I really should have read the Curia's survey reports," Camilla said, her eyes still watering as they tried to adjust.
"It must be a relief for you to see the sun again, though."
"Well, I won't say that I didn't miss it. Humans are creatures of the light, both spiritually and in a biological sense." She pulled down the shade covering the window. "But I also won't say that it's something that I have a strong attachment to, either. Maybe it's because I spend so much of my time concerned with things of the night, researching fiends, demons, the Blue Blood, and so on. There's not a lot in my life that revolves around the daylight."
"If you don't mind me saying so, that sounds kind of dangerous."
"Oh?"
"I mean, there's value in being human. You shouldn't just let that go."
Given what Camilla knew of Arnice's history as a half-demon, she didn't think it was surprising that she would say that.
"Don't worry. I have no intention of forgetting who I am or where my heart belongs. But for the same reason, I think ultimately what matters is who we are as individuals, not labels like human or demon, pureblood or fiend. What's in our hearts matters much more than whether our blood is red, blue, or purple."
Arnice chuckled.
"You sound like Lilysse now."
"She sounds like a very intelligent woman."
This time, Arnice out-and-out laughed.
"Because she agrees with you?"
"I can't think of a better standard," Camilla said. "Though in all seriousness, that does seem to be any person's outlook on someone else's religion, politics, or philosophy."
"You may be right at that. But on a totally different topic, take a look out the back window."
Camilla turned to see what had caught Arnice's attention. Behind the carriage, the road stretched out, drenched in afternoon sunlight.
Her eyebrows shot up.
"You can't see the Night from outside it? Does the same apply looking out? And why would that happen?"
"You're asking me?"
"No, of course I'm not." Scientific analysis was not one of the Nightlord's areas of expertise. By considerable orders of magnitude. "I'm just babbling out loud because the phenomenon is so surprising. We know that Malvasia is attempting to bring about Eternal Night through merging the human and demon worlds, but does this mean that Eurulm is actually within the demon world now, or is it just that perception is shifted? Is there another Eurulm there in our world still if we could ignore the border and look at it through some kind of high-powered telescope? Of course, time is involved, too, which is why the Moon Queen needed Liliana, but I never considered the impact on the physical world. The mechanics could be the key to stopping the process entirely, or at least isolating the area; we need to get a team working on this. No, probably they already are; I can't see the Curia just twiddling its thumbs, particularly after I gave Pope Espheria my report on the outcome of our confrontation with the Moon Queen, but…"
She trailed off into a heavy sigh.
"If there's one thing I've learned, it's that there are always more things to learn," she said, calming herself. A glance at Arnice revealed that the Nightlord was barely containing her amusement; it reminded Camilla nothing so much as of Loergwlith in their academy days, when they'd been in their room and Camilla would get carried away, expounding on some point that she'd run across in her studies. Loer would sit, perched demurely on the edge of her bed, a little catlike smile of amusement on her face that would grow wider and wider, until at last her laughter would break free.
Camilla found her lips twitching at the memory and her own realization. Arnice saw how she, too, was threatening to start laughing, and the mutual feeling made it too much to hold back for both of them, until almost at once they broke down into gales of hilarity, one feeding off the other until their sides ached.
Red-faced, Camilla took greedy, gulping breaths of air, hoping that she wouldn't give herself the hiccups.
How long has it been since I laughed like that? she wondered. It seemed like those moments had grown increasingly few and far between as the years went by. Her sense of humor had devolved steadily into wry amusement and outright snark.
These past weeks, the whole business with the Moon Queen, had changed her, and she thought for the better.
Maybe that was the real impact of people like Aluche. Their honest, good-natured enthusiasm urged those around them to react in kind, without hesitation or fear. And wasn't it a better world when people could just be their true selves?
Of course, the world was what it was, and simply exposing her thoughts and feelings to everyone wasn't something Camilla could just do, not realistically. But finding people one could comfortably be herself with was hugely valuable, and Camilla had suddenly found herself with many, many more such people in her life.
It was…fulfilling.
"Geez, I'm kind of sorry about that," Arnice said, getting her own breath back. "I mean, I didn't mean to be laughing at your ideas or anything like that. It's just…"
Camilla waved it off.
"Don't worry about it. It's funny for me, too. Though if I'm ever there to watch you and Lilysse being all lovey-dovey like a couple of schoolgirls, I reserve the right to find your passionate enthusiasm hilarious."
"Deal!"
They spent the rest of the ride chatting pleasantly for a while, until Arnice's yawning reminded them both that mid-afternoon was not a demon's natural time to rise and shine. She curled up on the seat and was napping within minutes, while Camilla pulled a book out of her satchel and began to read.
Several hours passed quietly, and twilight was falling when the carriage slowed to a stop and Camilla reached over and shook Arnice awake.
"We're here."
Arnice came awake quickly, as suited someone who'd spent a lot of her life in one risky situation or another. "Sleep easily and lightly" was the motto taught to most of the Curia's agents.
"What was this place called, again?"
"Torqual. It's the last settlement standing on this side of the tower. There was a closer town, Arvoy, that my grandfather would go to regularly for supplies, but it was overrun in the chaos following Eurulm's fall."
They got down from the carriage and both women stretched, relieving muscles cramped by hours of travel. Torqual was a simple village of stone and slate, not too different in appearance from the mountain village west of Eurulm in the Saint's Forest. Lamplight gleamed from behind windows while the inn in front of them was marked not only by the painted signboard of two tipsy waterfowl but the torch lights burning in iron sconces fixed on either side of the door.
"The laboratory is only about a half-day's travel out of town. If we go tomorrow morning, we shouldn't have to worry about fiends until we reach the actual building."
"Works for me. I like a good fight, but given how infested buildings tend to get, I don't think I'm going to get bored."
Camilla grinned.
"I'll try to make it so you don't have too much nap time on this trip."
Arnice blew a raspberry at her, then opened the door.
The Duck & Drake was exactly what it looked like from the outside: a rustic country inn in the classic style, with massive beams overhead, stained black by years of smoke. A reception desk next to the stairs leading up was directly opposite the door, while off to the right was a large common room with a bar and dining tables, dominated by a massive hearth at the far end, big enough that Camilla imagined that it had used to be where cauldrons of stew or joints of spit-roasted meat would be cooked and kept heated in medieval days.
"Welcome, ladies," the innkeeper greeted them cheerily. She was a stout, apple-cheeked woman in a plain dress and white kerchief. "How can I help you?"
"We'd like two rooms for the night, plus dinner and breakfast. Our carriage is outside, too, so the horses will need stabling and fodder. We'll be traveling on foot tomorrow, so if we can have the horses boarded here until we get back as well, that would be appreciated. I believe you have arrangements with the Curia about that."
"And what about your driver, then?"
There was a chiding tone in the woman's voice, belying her genial appearance.
"I don't think an animated block of wood will require much in the way of food or sleep. As I indicated, we're with the Curia." While Camilla could appreciate distaste at the kind of upper-crust arrogance that ignored the welfare of their servants, she had no intention of tolerating it when it was rooted in ignorance.
"What? Oh. I'm…I'm sorry; are you here to meet with the rest of your party?"
Camilla raised an eyebrow over her monocle.
"Our party?"
The innkeeper nodded towards the common room, at a group of three women and two men seated at one of the long tables.
"That group from the Survey Corps. Are you here to meet up with them?"
Camilla shared a glance with Arnice. This could get touchy if they handled it wrong.
"No, but I suppose we should stop and say hello once we're signed in and refreshed ourselves from the trip."
The innkeeper opened the register, and Camilla signed them in, then accepted the two small iron keys and handed one to Arnice.
"Your stablehands probably know this already, but don't touch any of the boxes and equipment stowed in our carriage. Some of it could be dangerous if tampered with by someone who doesn't know what they're doing."
"Of course, Doctor."
"Then we'll just be taking our personal bags up to our room and be down for dinner."
Arnice waited until they got to the top of the stairs before she asked the obvious question, keeping her voice low in case the thin walls had ears.
"What are we going to do about those people from the Survey Corps? It'd look weird if we didn't stop and say hello, at least."
"Plus, I'm genuinely interested in what they're doing here. The Corps doesn't directly report to the district supervisor, but they're included in all operations briefings, and I didn't think they had anything planned in this area."
"So what do you want me to do? Stay in my room and make out like I'm not feeling well from the ride?"
Camilla shook her head.
"No, let's take it head-on. You can pass for human well enough, so long as you don't smile broadly enough to show off your fangs or start openly using demon powers. The heterochromia is eye-catching, but not inherently inhuman. I hope you don't mind playing 'Agent Arnice' again for a while?"
"While escorting an Alucard, too; you're going to give me flashbacks, Dr. Camilla. What about weapons, though? I can't just pull out Jorth without giving the game away."
"The carriage is one of the Curia's standard travel coaches. They're equipped with an emergency case of agent's gear under the seat, including an ordinary knight's silver greatsword. Can you use that so long as the situation doesn't get out of hand?"
"Wow, that takes me back. It should be fine—but don't expect me to hold back if someone's life is genuinely in danger."
"Save people first, let me worry about the political fallout later, eh?"
"Well, I do have a history of 'do the right thing and damn the secondary consequences.'"
Camilla patted her on the shoulder.
"Well, you won't find me complaining too much, particularly as the neck you save might be my own. Just…try not to complicate things until we absolutely have to."
The inn-rooms were small but at least clean, so Camilla and Arnice left their bags, locked their doors (they could always blame Curia regulations if anyone got fussy over the implied slur to their honesty), and headed down stairs to face their first test.
"Good evening," Camilla called, walking briskly over to the table. "I understand from our hostess that you're with the Survey Corps?"
Five faces turned up from their meal to assess the newcomers. Two showed curiosity, two something not too far from a leer, and the fifth a sullen resentment. The woman who spoke belonged to the final expression.
"That's right. Why are you asking?" It was the exact tone Camilla used when someone interrupted her when she was trying to work, or even just read. The difference here was that the woman plainly wasn't in the middle of anything.
"Common courtesy? I thought that co-workers ought to say hello upon a chance meeting."
"Oh, you ladies are with the Curia, too?" it was one of the leerers, a man whose Survey Corps badge was bronze instead of steel, marking him as a captain.
"That's right. Do you mind if we join you?"
"Go ahead. The more the merrier, right?"
"I've always said that," chimed in the woman to his right, adding a suggestive grin. She'd been the other leerer.
"We know, Elsie; trust me, we know," sighed the other woman. To Camilla, she added, "Don't mind them; they're still operating in down-time mode."
Arnice chuckled at that as she took her seat.
"I know that feeling. A fiend once attacked me the first night out on a job and the priestess I was working with swore that I was cussing the thing out for being rude enough to jump me while my body was still used to being asleep."
"One of these days I really must get Lilysse to share some of her stories about you," Camilla remarked. She had no hesitation in using the name of Arnice's lover, since that wasn't a detail that would mean anything to the rank-and-file Curia members. Even she, who'd studied Arnice's file extensively when she'd been working on the half-demon project, hadn't noted the name as anything more than the priestess Arnice had been escorting at the time of her final mission. And it made the conversation flow more naturally, as was her intent.
Arnice helped the "natural conversation" impression along by blushing with embarrassment. Idly, Camilla wondered why the blue-blooded demon still blushed pink.
"Ah! Don't you dare, Doctor!"
"Doctor?" the Corps captain asked.
"Dr. Camilla Alucard," Camilla introduced herself, "and this is my escort, Agent Arnice."
"Nice to meet you. Hey, Dr. Camilla, I've heard that name. You're pretty famous in the scientific staff."
"Thank you."
"I'm Captain Glen Vargas, Survey Corps. The rest of my team are Elsie, Rafe, and Tara," he continued, continuing with the Curia's custom of using first names rather than family names, a custom grown out of the fact that the Curia was an international organization where people of different cultures used family names in a wide variety of different ways, and for some didn't use them at all.
"It's nice to meet you."
"Arnice," Tara mused aloud. She was a slim, dark girl with braids. "That name sounds—oh, I know. That's the legendary half-demon who defeated the Nightlord, isn't it?"
"Guess your parents had high hopes for you," Glen joked. "Though since you're an agent, maybe they knew something, huh?"
"Dr. Camilla can judge whether I live up to the stories of the original Arnice," the Nightlord said, somehow managing to suppress a wink.
"Well, you haven't defeated any Nightlords since I've been working with you," Camilla quipped back, making the others laugh, all except the sullen woman facing her. She'd been conspicuous by her absence from Glen's introduction, as well. Nor was she wearing a Survey Corps badge, for that matter.
"You hear that, Agent Alyce?" Glen answered the mystery even before it had begun. "At least you don't have to measure up to that standard!"
Alyce, a tawny blonde who might be barely out of her teens—maybe—shot the captain a quelling look.
No love lost there, Camilla thought. Her sympathies naturally went to the agent, as a fellow introvert besieged by the more gregarious types who were certain chatter was exactly what a person needed, but at the same time there seemed to be more to it than just that—especially since Alyce hadn't been in the middle of anything more engrossing than a bowl of stew.
"So you're another agent," Camilla addressed the woman, and was given a sharp nod.
"Alyce Myrddin," she confirmed.
"I suppose that you're providing support for Captain Glen's unit, then?"
"That's right."
"Have to hand the bosses that," Glen said. "We Survey Corps troops are happy to go where sane folks would be better staying home, and dodging fiends while doing it to boot, but you agents are on another level entirely."
"I'll say," Elsie agreed. "If it hadn't been for Alyce, I bet we'd have lost at least one of us to that wolf pack yesterday."
"So there are shadow wolves in this area?" Camilla said. "It fits with the forested terrain."
"Not just them," Glen said. "There were the kind that look almost like normal wolves as well. One of the big ones nearly had Elsie, here, before Alyce jumped in and took it on one-on-one."
Alyce looked away, obviously uncomfortable.
"It wasn't anything special."
"Yeah, right. The thing was so close to me you almost had to stand on me to get footing to fight it."
"I'm sure Arnice, here, could have done the same thing as easily."
"Agents did used to be called Holy Knights for a reason," Camilla agreed. "A dire wolf or an Anubis is a tough challenge, but one an agent would be expected to be able to face."
"R-right," Alyce said. "Beating fiends of that level is my job, what I've been trained for as a warrior of the Curia. If I wasn't able to do that much, it'd be an embarrassment to my teachers and the seniors who trained me."
"Well, I'm just glad that if the Curia's going to send us out into a place like this, they've at least sent you along with us from the start instead of making us get our behinds kicked, then go running off begging for help from the district supervisor."
Arnice smirked at that.
"Why, Captain, I'd have thought you'd have hated breaking with a long-standing Survey Corps tradition."
"Oooh, this one's feisty," Elsie laughed.
"The truth hurts," Rafe added, also chortling.
"Of course, there's always the equally old Agent tradition of getting lost trying to find whatever it is you're sent to fight when you don't have our report data to guide you," Glen riposted.
"Well, it may be true that I once got into a hotel elevator and ended up lost in a dream dimension," Arnice said, grinning, though she was careful not to smile widely enough to expose her fangs.
"So what is your mission, then, Captain?" Camilla asked. "Or is it something hush-hush?"
"Nah, it's pretty ordinary work, just a survey of the area around this village and the forest to the southeast. I guess someone wants to see if there's a way to redevelop trade in the area, maybe? There used to be a village there, that got overrun around the time Eurulm fell."
"That doesn't seem like a likely proposition," Tara said. "Not unless we can retake the capital itself."
Camilla nodded.
"That's the problem. Without Eurulm as a population center driving the need for resources, there aren't good economic reasons to invest in the surrounding areas. Even Curia resources like Espheria Academy were abandoned."
Glen picked up his mug and took a long draft, leaving flecks of foam clinging to his moustache.
"That's why I leave the decision-making to the folks who know better. Do my job, try not to get my head chopped off, and move on to the next assignment. I've got my unit, here, to look out for, and that's responsibility enough for me."
"Amen to that," Tara agreed.
"It's important to keep the larger picture in mind," Camilla said, "but yes, ultimately we all have things and people that we want to protect, and we need to give our fullest efforts there at the end of the day."
She met Arnice's eyes, felt the shared understanding pass between them. But there was a look on Alyce's face, combined with an unconscious nod of agreement, that told Camilla that she, too, had felt the sting of fighting for something more than just her own life.
"So then," Rafe asked, "what brings the two of you out this way? Just traveling, or has the Curia got you out here on some big research project? Always assuming it's not too secret to talk about, of course!" This drew laughter from Elsie, Glen, and even Arnice.
I suppose with all her years as an agent, she had more than her share of jobs where she was dancing on puppet strings without knowing the script.
Especially given what she'd said about the First Saint.
Camilla kept coming back to Arnice's revelation in quiet moments, finding it sneaking up on her thoughts when she didn't have something else to command them. She hadn't been overwhelmed by it at first, but it was a huge shift in her understanding of the world and how it worked. She'd always thought of the Curia as corrupt, in the way of any political organization, but she'd thought that corruption came from individual people, the power-hungry, the bigoted, the dogmatic, the obsessed. Human beings fallen to human weaknesses and failings. It had never occurred to her that the rot went all the way to the organization's very inception, that the corruption she saw was the product of deeper sources.
And even if it was no longer true that the Curia was pursuing Ludegert's agenda (and could she really say that for certain?), there were centuries' worth of attitudes, procedures, institutions, traditions put into place unthinkingly in service to that hidden purpose. How deeply embedded in the organization's structure were the threads of its corruption? How could they ever be traced and extracted?
The distracting thoughts left Camilla quiet for long enough that Arnice stepped in to answer Rafe's question.
"We're going the same way that you are. Dr. Camilla needs to retrieve some research materials from her grandfather's laboratory for one of her projects."
"Her grandfather?"
"He was a fiend researcher with the Curia, too," Camilla said. "His laboratory was in the area that was overrun in the fall of Eurulm four years ago."
"I'm sorry to hear it," Tara said. "Was he…able to get away in time?"
Camilla shook her head.
"He'd already passed on naturally before that."
"That's good. I mean, no, sorry, it's not good, but—"
"Don't worry; I understand what you meant."
"Thanks." With a sheepish grin, the woman added, "I get a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease every so often."
"Since we're starting out in the same direction," Glen said, "we ought to travel together. Strength in numbers, and all that."
"We…we'd probably just hold up Dr. Camilla and Arnice," Alyce said. "They're going there directly, while you're performing survey work."
"Not until we get to our target area, which if I recall my maps correctly ought to be right in the general vicinity of the Alucard property."
"Is it, now?" Camilla mused. She might have said more, but the serving girl chose that moment to bring food and drink for Camilla and Arnice, and the doctor found that the prospect of a hot dinner and cold beer after the long day's drive was more than enough to drive out other, darker thoughts.
