Lady Wilhelmina strode into her room. Once luxuriously appointed by her Ancestor for his forays into the Hamlet, then occupied by her cousin, she had stripped away the velvet and lace, the rich hangings and sensual paintings. In their place were the stark landscapes and bare wood she preferred.
The teapot was hot, and she poured slowly, mixing honey and brandy to soothe her tired limbs.
It had been a terrible fight, but it was over. The last and greatest evil she had faced down to secure this wretched land that she had inherited, put to rest in a pool of gore and misery.
Her soldiers had filed into the Hamlet slowly, spattered with mud and blood, each consumed by their own thoughts.
Couer, hawk-faced, foreign, strange and cruel, walked like a reanimated corpse to his quarters, eyes turned inwards on nothing. Iris's madness blazed out of her grinning face as she approached her penitent cell in the Abbey. Vatteville, quiet and subdued, idly stroking the polished wood of her crossbow as she composed a letter to her daughter in her mind. Brèvedent trembling, choking back laughter, as she turned aside to the barn in which she worked and lived.
The Heiress sighed, looking dully down at her filthy boots, considering the fluids splashed across the guard of her sword – the effluvia of an ancient evil mixed with her own blood and vomit.
"Job well done, for all that," she said, leaning back in her overstuffed chair, the only real bit of luxury she'd left in the room.
There was a knock at the door.
"Milady?"
The Heiress raised her eyebrows. She recognized Mathan's gravelly voice, the undercurrent of mingled reverence and suspicion that he seemed to share with the Hamlet's natives.
"Enter."
He stepped in, lamplight glowing on the darkness of his skin, and she saw the way his eyes flicked quickly around the room, looking for anything out of place.
"I've found something that you should see."
"Gods damn it all," Lady Wilhelmina spat, pushing a femur around with the toe of her boot. "Any idea how many are here?"
"I imagine it's most of the recent disappearances, milady," Mathan said quietly. His fingers were tight on his truncheon. "I haven't counted the skulls yet."
"Get Dismas and the doctor. I assume they're together, wherever they are. And whoever else is readily available," the Heiress said. "There's something unwholesome going on, and that woman is dangerous."
She looked up at Brèvedent's barn, at the boards bulging and creaking despite the lack of wind.
"Hurry."
Success! Success! The smoking crimson blood of that great, tempting evil will catalyze my union, and then – Endless knowledge, endless change, and the glory of immortality.
I have held myself back for hours because even the anticipation is like a drug. My hands shake, my heart throbs, my skin tingles. I hold the bottle to my cheek and feel it warm me, I breathe in the fumes and collapse in ecstatic dreams.
There are realms of the mind where the laws of nature bend and mingle with the laws of the outer spheres. I will know them.
I will become one with the Flesh, and I will live forever.
The scratching of Brèvedent's quill ceased at the hard knock on her door.
"Brèvedent! Open up! Heiress wants to talk with you."
Brèvedent's eyes glittered, and the quill dropped from her fingers as she slowly lowered her mask over the twitching grin she couldn't quite suppress.
The door opened, and the Heiress walked inside, hands clasped behind her back. Brèvedent could see the dark silhouettes of more people behind her. Her gaze flicked quickly over the battered greatcoat, still filthy from the Courtyard muck, the sword and pistol at the Heiress's hip.
"Brèvedent."
The plague doctor flexed her fingers, leather creaking, as she stood up from the little table she was writing at.
The Heiress took two long strides forward, lifted her right hand, and slammed the skull she was holding into the side of Brèvedent's mask. Teeth, bits of dark glass from Brèvedent's goggles, and scraps of bone flew across the room.
"You betrayed me," the Heiress said in an icy voice. Behind her, Mathan stepped into the room, his dog growling and straining at her leash.
Through the broken glass of her mask, Brèvedent's left eye rolled crazily around the room, fixing on one face, then another as Dismas and Bosc moved in.
A tremor passed up her body, and as it hit her head she screamed like a demon crow and stood ramrod straight. Her right hand moved like a machine, lifting a smoking orange potion and pouring the entire contents over her mask.
"Brèvedent, you stupid –!" Bosc hissed. "I'd prefer not to knife a colleague, but I'm not above it, believe me!"
A hollow, hitching laugh echoed out of Brèvedent's ruined and steaming mask. "None of you can see! This is a night of apotheosis!"
"Get her, girl!" Mathan growled, and Lulubelle sprang forward like a bolt of lightning, crashing into Brèvedent and throwing her hard against the wall as Mathan leaped after her, cudgel ready. The hound went for Brèvedent's throat but caught her mask instead, tearing it away, and the maddened plague doctor's bulging eyes and skeletal grin gave even the Heiress pause for just an instant.
Then Brèvedent lifted her hand and plunged her knife into Lulubelle's side, and Mathan gave a choking cry of rage and swung his club, the impact sending Brèvedent's lank hair flying around her head.
As Brèvedent raised herself up from the floor, Dismas pointed his pistol, but she slipped sideways like a horrid, robed crab and the pistol ball thumped into the floor. Upstairs, a terrible creaking came, a sound of something moving, and Brèvedent raised her eyes, ecstasy blazing from her face.
"Come to me! Be mine! Be my god and my Flesh!" she shrieked.
The metallic click as the Heiress cocked her pistol was loud in a brief stillness. Brèvedent's mouth went dry and her eyes slid past the black muzzle of the gun to the red potion she had not yet consumed. She opened her mouth, and the Heiress pulled the trigger.
The flash and crackle of gunpowder seemed to take a peculiarly long time. Then the explosion mingling with a flat, wet crunch as the ball tore through Brèvedent's skull and brain.
The Heiress let out a breath, automatically beginning to reload as the plague doctor slumped to the floor, her empty eyes still staring up towards whatever was in the attic.
"Get out of here," she said, her voice businesslike. "Mathan, see to your hound. Doctor, Dismas, burn this building immediately."
It was the work of minutes to set Brèvedent's chemical-soaked laboratory ablaze. The Heiress stood watching as Bosc tended to Lulubelle and Dismas spoke in low tones with Mathan.
Fire raced upwards toward the moon, crackling and roaring, and the Heiress' grip on her pistol tightened as another, stranger roar joined the inferno's voice.
There was a splintering sound as the roof fell inwards. The second roar ceased.
"Let's get away from here," the Heiress said. "Carry the dog. I don't want to breathe that smoke."
They moved away, quiet, shaken, into the night.
Eventually, the fire died down to embers. The ruins shifted, little collapses making it seem that something was moving.
A great beam that had covered much of Brèvedent's corpse groaned as it was pushed aside. Beneath it, a crushed, mangled, half-burned body lay, dry blood streaming away from a skull smashed by lead.
A strange, burnt, fire-melted mouth lifted and screamed in endless agony to the sky. The ruined, shapeless thing that had been in the attic hunched low over the only meat available, and began to feed.