"Evil is everywhere in the world. The slightest awareness of the state of affairs, the merest awareness of history is enough to make this abundantly clear. The royal family swings between righteous purity and foulest depravity like a metronome, my dear husband's forefathers – including his mother and his father – were blackest villains, and even the Church seems to embrace corruption with distressing ease. Evil is how you act, and there is no excuse for Evil deeds. One is not Evil by nature; one is Evil by action, and no matter one's parentage or inclination, Evil does not enter the heart until Evil deeds are performed which taint the heart and soul. Everyone can be good, if only they hold onto a righteous will of steel and conduct themselves in the proper manner."
– Karina de la Vallière
...
The light of the blue moon streamed in through the long glass windows of the hallway. In her soft shoes, ears open for the least noise, Louise de la Vallière padded through her ancestral home. A statue of a pointy-faced woman with her nose glowered at her as she passed, while beside her an oil-painted knight in black armour stood on a field of corpses. The busts and portraits of various ancestors stared down at her, judging her, watching her.
Of course, given some of the reputation her family seemed to have, they were probably approving in their judgement. They were not very nice people.
"Hey, is that tower?" Fettid said, pointing at the painting of a blonde woman wearing... uh, not much, standing in front of a black stone fortress topped by a pyre. "Nah, wrong stone. We used to have fire, though, before tower got knocked down. And she got gauntlet."
Louise examined that picture closer. Indeed, this woman – the name had been scored off – had a silver glove with prominent emeralds on it, which had been painted crackling with power. Louise's heart sunk as she compared her own face to the woman. They had the same button nose, she thought, feeling her own. And something about the eyes looked similar, too. Of course, she was fairly sure she never wore that expression of distant, imperious and somewhat sultry arrogance.
She also wore more clothing. Much more. She sincerely hoped this probably-an-ancestor of hers had died from a stab to the heart. Tassels were not protective!
"I'm not you," she whispered to the painting, before turning her back on it and continuing her way along to her parents' bedroom. It was up another flight of stairs, and she nearly stumbled into an annoyingly silent guard along the way. Only the small pool of light from his candle was enough to alert her, and she managed to dart back around the corner and hold her breath.
Her heart sounded like a drum in her ears.
He moved on, though, and she could breathe again.
"Should let me kill him. As warning," Fettid muttered.
"No killing," she commanded as quietly as she could manage.
"Aww. But I smell blood already," the minion whined. "Why can I no kill when other kill happen?"
"It's probably just the kitchens," she said, pacing over to her parents' bedroom and squeezing through the crack she opened up. Fettid made a small whimper of fear as he stepped over the threshold.
"I no can believe I am in the bedroom of the Karin and I is not dead," he breathed.
"Keep talking and you might be," Louise said, waving her hand around the room hoping for some response. "Gnarl? How should it feel if the fragment is nearby?"
"Ah, your evilness. You're still alive," Gnarl said, with a little too much surprise for Louise's happiness. "You should certainly be getting a warm vibration if the gauntlet is within twenty or so yards of the fragment. The stronger the closer, of course."
"What's a yard?" Louise hissed, and blinked. "Oh yes, your silly thing that is almost a metre, but not as big. So... nothing in here... so it's probably not here. I'll look around a bit in here, and then head to the library. Touch nothing," she warned Fettid.
The minion folded its hands behind its back. "I get it," it said. "Also, the bear rug not here, so I need to watch out for it wandering around. I protect you from it."
Louise exhaled, and busied herself with looking for things which might inform her where a magical evil crystal might be. Sadly, although she found her father's diary on his bedside table, it was written in code. It was probably something he did just to keep some privacy in a room shared with her mother. And it was only the most recent one, and she had no idea where his older ones might be kept.
"Gnarl," she whispered, holding her gauntlet over the first page. "Can you decode this?"
"Not quickly, your evilness," the voice said back, after a little humming to itself. "And possibly not at all. Just at a glance, it does not look like it's a simple substation cipher; I can't see any pattern to recurring letters. And that vampire sold off all my decryption artefacts, curse his soul. You were too fast killing him."
"Fine," Louise sighed, putting the diary back where she had found it. There was no point taking it. If it had been one from ten years ago... but not his most recent one. Also it was probably wrong to take your father's secret diary and read it. So she was being a good girl by not doing so.
So caught up in her thoughts and her search was she that she nearly missed the trail of footsteps outside and the candlelight painting a trail of orange light into the blue-lit room.
"Hello?" someone called from outside. "Is someone in there?" A snuffling. "What's that smell?"
Mercifully, Fettid did not answer 'yes' and had instead vanished to... somewhere. Which just left Louise standing in the middle of the room, desperately looking for somewhere to hide when the door swung all the way open to reveal a dark-haired, wide-eyed maid carrying a candle.
Louise stared at the maid.
The maid stared back at her.
"Woooo," Louise tried desperately.
The other woman squeaked.
"Uaargharh," the overlady added, in a fit of creativity. "Oooooo. Woooooooooo."
There was a scream in the dead of the night which echoed through the house, and the woman ran off. The building stirred to life, as people were drawn to it. Poking her head out the door, Louise could already see another maid with a candle who must have been close by, comforting the first. She couldn't get out that way. The wardrobe? No, that'd be silly. The other side rooms? No, they'd look there.
Her gaze drifted over towards the bed, illuminated in the blue light of the moon streaming in through the window.
...
"You must be seeing things!" the housekeeper said, holding a poker in one hand and a candle aloft in the other
"I know what I saw!" the dark-haired maid retorted, shivering like a leaf. "It... it was a girl! With pink hair! But pale like a corpse and… hazy and... and dressed in white and... it... sh-she moaned at me!"
"A pink-haired girl?" the other woman asked sceptically. "Are you sure it wasn't, you know... Miss Cattleya? Given that she is the pink-haired girl currently in residence?"
"No, no! Trust me, Miss Cattleya is bust... has larger... the girl was fl... it certainly wasn't Miss Cattleya! And she's retired for the evening, anyway."
The housekeeper stepped briskly around the room, checking the smaller rooms connecting to the main chamber and the cupboards. She even looked under the bed. "There's no one here," she said.
"I know what I saw," the maid insisted. "I feel the cold! It's... it's like icy fingers running up and down my spine!"
"It is cold in here," the housekeeper admitted, "but..."
There was a rasp of breath, as the butler – who had somehow managed to enter the room without being noticed - spoke. "What's all this then?" he asked, causing both the housekeeper and the maid to flinch.
"The chit thought she saw a figure in here and screamed, Monsieur Blanc, but I have looked around and found not one sign that..."
The maid looked uneasy. "I thought it looked like… like Mistress Louise" she breathed. "But... she's dead. So… it moaned at me... and..."
The butler cleared his throat. "Oh, don't worry then," he said kindly in his dry voice. "It'll just be a perfectly normal haunting then."
"Uh…" the maid said nervously.
"Oh, of course, you're too young," the old man said. "We used to have a fine collection of ghasts, spectres, haunts, geister, and pretty much any form of ghost you care to mention here. We got to know them, you know. The old master cultivated them, you know. Made sure his victims formed ghosts. And his wife… oh, she was a cousin and she was a wonder with them. Really knew how to work those torture chambers. Those were the times." The butler's face hardened. "Then his Good-for-everything son inherited along with that dreadful wife of his, packed the old mistress off to a monastery-jail and they went and wiped the entire collection out! It was dreadful!"
He nodded confidently. "Feel the chill in here? Sign of a good honest haunting. Oh, I've missed the feeling. Though," he added darkly, "Liza, you should probably clean this place up tomorrow morning. The ghast might have left blood or ectoplasm on the walls or slashed all the paintings or something like that, and it'd be a frightful shame if the master or the mistress went and hunted down the first ghost we've had in years. Smell the foul stench. A real sign of proper dark forces, that is."
"I'll get on it," the housekeeper said, peering through the darkness with her handle aloft. She seemed oddly cheerful at the news, and her earlier opprobrium towards the maid had entirely vanished. "Oh, my mother passed tales down to me of been ravished in the night by Don Juanito, that Iberian ghost who one of the family had horribly killed after she found him sleeping with her husband when he was meant to be her boy-toy. I was so looking forwards to that when I started working here. Shame."
"You know what they say about the family," the butler said, his voice dropping. "Don't trust 'em to stay dead, and don't think they're dead until you've got the corpse." The man grinned perhaps a little too widely. "Oh, the current duke's a softy who's letting down the family, but my father and grandfather and his father have all been in service here, and bein' haunted by a dead daughter is perfectly normal for the de la Vallières. I mean, this's Mistress Louise we're talking about. She broke things and blew things up in life; we're probably going to be seeing a rash of poltergeist activity! Good times, good times." He pulled out a key from around his neck. "Just to be sure, I'll lock the door and you can see to this in the morning."
The door scraped closed and there was a click as the lock was turned. And clinging onto the outside of the building next to the window, gripping onto one of the gargoyles for dear life, Louise gave a moan of frustration. They weren't meant to lock the door!
She was also rather irate that the da... the dratted idea of the minions that she should wear a sheet and pretend to be a ghost had worked, but that was a much lower priority to her than the prospect of a fatal fall. Oh, and when she had worry to spare about things, she'd need to remember to get angry at the butler for being an utterly horrible man and bad-mouthing her parents. When she got back home properly, she'd need to have him fired.
Without references!
But again, imminent death was more important. So. If she pulled herself up slightly and tried to reach the next gargoyle up, she could manage to slip on the icy surface, scream, grab the ears of the stone figure with both hands and then furiously scrabble with her feet as she tried to get a grip, any grip at all, to avoid her falling all the way to the ground.
That didn't help matters at all. In fact, it made them rather worse.
Oh, why wasn't she a proper mage who could use levitation spells? Why... why hadn't she thought to try to see if she could learn levitation spells instead of spending all her time practicing with fire and lightning? Maybe... maybe if she shot fire down at the ground when she fell, she might be able to slow her fall?
No, that was a stupid idea.
Founder. This was just an embarrassing way to die.
"Mistress!" Her pungent knight in shining... uh, an old dress of hers leant down from over the top of the gargoyle, ape-like arms reaching out. "Take hand! I get you out of this!"
Pathetically gratefully, Louise took its hand. Never before had she quite appreciated just how casually strong the little goblinoids were, because with one hand Fettid dragged her up, leaving her sprawling on the room. Quivering and panting, Louise clung to it, gripping onto the thankful solidity.
"Overlady not good at climbing," Fettid said cheerfully, dangling his legs over the side of the ledge.
"No," Louise gasped. "Overlady not." Raising herself up slightly, she pulled herself along the roof, away from the edge. "And overlady... I mean, and I think I need a way down."
"It a puzzler," the green-skinned minion said. "Normally, if I too lazy to climb, I jump off and let blue rez me at bottom, but blue no around and anyway the overlady no can come back from dead place without big Evil ritual and chanting and such things and humies start to rot when they come back from dead. Unlike minions. Well, unless we get nasty sickness. Usually best way to get over icky sickness is to die and come back. Much faster."
Louise could not help but contrast this nonchalance with the fear of death which was still filling her blood with fire and her mind with ice-cold spikes. "You know, I wonder what it's like being you," she said, idly. She thought. "It's probably a very stupid existence." She thought some more. "Yes, very stupid indeed... Fettid, stop trying to lever up my parents' roof tiles this instant!"
"I smell blood," Fettid sang, childishly. "It prob'bly because bear got loose and killed servants, so I get weapon to fight it with."
She sighed. Her heart was no longer pounding in her ears, and to the east, the red moon was rising. It was just as well, because the blue moon was moving behind a patch of cloud. She should probably get off the roof before it went away, because the red light was rather dimmer than the blue. How to get down? She pursed her lips. Yes... Cattleya always slept with the window open, because she needed fresh air because of her condition. And she had a balcony – which Louise had always been so jealous of, but now came in handy. If she made her way across the roofs to there... Cattleya should probably be asleep by now, and so she could sneak through her sister's room.
The fact that she would get to see her again, even if she was asleep at the time was not a contributing factor to why she had thought of it. Not at all.
"Come on," she ordered, beginning to work her way along the roof on all fours. "And catch me if I fall!"
It was a hair-raising trip over the top of the de la Vallière estate, made worse by the clouds which blotted out the blue moon entirely, leaving only the crimson light to make her way across the icy surface. It was not a moment too soon when she recognised the ivy-covered chimney which connected up to Cattleya's room. In the cold, its smoke was a welcome sight.
"Blood, bloodity blood blood," the green-skinned minion next to her sang happily. "Blood blood bloody, blood-blood, blood-bloodity. Blood, blood, blood blood blood, bloodity bloodity blood bloody bloody blood, bloody blood bloodity..."
"Shut it," she hissed. After enough repetition, the word 'blood' even stopped being a word and started just being background noise. Annoying background noise. "Do you want to wake her?"
"Oh, she awake," the minion said innocently. "Or at least there two women in room. I hears them."
"Drat," Louise muttered. That was that shot. Silly older sisters, staying up late. That was bad for her health! Why, if she wasn't technically breaking into her own house to steal an artefact, she'd give Cattleya a right telling off for putting her health in danger like this. "Well, there are rose trellises growing up to her balcony," she said, after a moment's thought. "It's winter, so the roses'll be dead, and I should be able to climb down. I'll... drat, drat, probably have to work my way around the building and go back in through my room, but it should be doable."
"Want me to help you down?" Fettid asked her.
"..." Louise did not say. "... fine."
Yes, she was definitely going to need to wash her hands, she thought, as the minion lowered her down onto the balcony by the simple expediency of taking her hand and leaning over the edge. It was just as well she was thinking that, because otherwise she might go quite mad because a smelly goblin had her life in its hands. She was remarkably happy to get down to the balcony, and in fact clutched onto the wall for a good few seconds.
She could hear voices from inside the room. Low and muttered; one of them was clearly Cattleya's, while the other was softer and rather less talkative. Louise just listened for a moment, warring with the temptation inside her. How long would Cattleya and... whoever it was, possible her maid... be in there? If it was the maid, maybe Cattleya was going to bed and she could sneak through in a short while.
Lord and Founder, she really wanted to see her sister.
Just a peek then.
Louise took her peek, and screamed.
"M-mother!" Cattleya stammered, whirling around to stare at the pink-haired figure in the window as the other girl on the bed squeaked. "It's not what it looks like!"
Louise severely doubted that. She was almost certain it was exactly what it looked like. Her sister had her head between the wide-open legs of another girl, who had her skirt rolled up to her waist. The girl – a maid by the looks of it – was slack-jawed and vacant-eyed. And there were fluids smearing her sister's jaw.
No, whatever Cattleya might say, it was exactly what it looked like.
Her sister had certainly sunk her fangs into the thigh of the other woman and had been drinking her blood.
"Cattleya!" she shrieked in horror and rage. "You're... you're... you're a..."
Her red-mouthed, sharp-fanged older sister stared back in fear and shock which almost equalled her own. "L-L-Louise!" Cattleya stammered, pointing at her sister with a quavering finger. "Y-you... are you a ghost? You're dead!"
"So are you!" Louise snapped back. "And I'm not a ghost! I'm just wearing a sheet! That's not important! You're the dead one here, not me! Undead is still dead! You're a bloody vampire!"
Her sister's eyes widened. "I am?" she asked. Hurriedly, she rummaged through her pockets, and pulled out a handkerchief, dabbing at her mouth. "Is it gone?" she asked, nervously. "I really can't tell. Sorry, but mirrors don't work for me and…"
The sheer surreality of the situation managed to momentarily quench Louise's wrath. "It's gone," she conceded. "But… but you're still a vampire!"
…
