(Sorry for the delay, folks! Chapter took a little longer to put together than I'd planned, but I think it turned out well. quickascanbe dot com is down for the time being, but you can still follow me on Facebook and Twitter if you're looking for more content)
Chapter 109: The Guests of Limberry
"That's not possible," muttered Mustadio, for perhaps the third time.
"Possible and impossible stopped mattering when the Lucavi started showing up," Alicia grumbled. "It doesn't matter if it's possible. It is."
"But..." Mustadio shook his head, frowning at the spacious, gaudy expanse of the Limberry Palace, its neat array of grid-like wings around a massive domed ballroom that glittered like a jewel in the morning sun. "But we haven't seen a single soul enter or leave in...how long now?"
"Two days," Lavian replied.
"What do you think?" Malak asked. He was looking at Meliadoul Tengille, who stood among them unarmed, not quite looking at any of them.
"It...doesn't look like it's ready for a siege," she said at last, her mouth twisted to one side. "And I would...I would expect there to be...servants, or guards, or..." She shook her head. "I've...been here before," she said at last. "And it doesn't...seem...right."
They remained where they were, far from the Palace's luxurious edge. Then Agrias scoffed. "Alicia already said it. If Lucavi are involved, we cannot expect things to stay within the realm of what is right or even possible." She had Wiegraf's sword on her belt, and her grip tightened on its hilt. "We will retrieve Lady Alma." She looked over at Ramza. "Will we not?"
Ramza nodded. "We will."
Their camp was about half a mile to the north, well back from the broad expanse of flatland that surrounded the Limberry Palace. Most of the tents had already been packed away, but one remained half-collapsed. Radia stood in front of it with her arms crossed.
"Still quiet?" she asked, without looking up at him.
"Still quiet."
"So?"
"So we wait until nightfall," Ramza said. "Through the servant's door Lavian and Alicia scouted out yesterday."
Radia nodded, though she still didn't look at him. Ramza waited.
"And what do we do about Meliadoul?" Radia asked at last.
Ramza hesitated. "Malak...Malak says we can..." He trailed off. He had listened to Malak, when he had asked them not to kill her. He had not exchanged more than a few words with Izlude Tengille, but he hadn't hated the man, even if he'd kidnapped Alma. He still didn't understand why Malak felt so obligated to honor his legacy...but then, how many dead men did Ramza still feel obligated to?
"I don't like it, Ramza," Radia whispered.
"I know."
"It feels...it feels just like Teta."
Ramza paused thoughtfully. "In fairness, Teta didn't try to kill anyone first."
"You know what I mean."
Ramza nodded. "I know," he said again. They couldn't escape the echoes of the Death Corps, no matter how much time passed or how far they traveled. Maybe its ghosts would always be with them.
"I never wanted to be...like this," Radia said. "Holding captives, threatening them, it all feels..."
Ramza didn't quite manage to smile. "If you've any alternatives, I'm open to suggestions."
Radia didn't quite manage to laugh. "If I did, I'd have told you already." She looked at Ramza. "Are you..." She trailed off.
Ramza shook his head. "No." He didn't believe they would really hurt Alma...but he was still terrified for his sister, in the clutches of dead men and demons, whose purposes he still didn't understand.
So much he didn't understand. So much that felt dim, distant, and out of reach. He wasn't alone anymore, and simply having his friends around him made this strange, mad journey feel much more bearable than the weary trudge to Yardrow had felt. But he still didn't know what they were supposed to do.
"Are you going to trade them the Stones?" Radia asked.
"Not if I can help it," Ramza said, but doubt wiggled at the back of his mind. If they tortured Alma in front of him...he tried to banish the nightmarish images and dim echoes of her screaming from his imagination.
"Ramza!" Rafa cried, leaping over the hill. "Someone's coming!"
Ramza's head jerked up. "Towards us?"
She nodded, and Ramza cursed under his breath and hurried up the hill. Rafa was right: two slender figures approached from the Palace, as though they were on a casual stroll. "Elmdor's women?" Ramza asked, squinting to try and better see their features.
"Looks like," Rafa grunted. "What should we..."
"Meliadoul," Malak said quietly.
Ramza turned. Melia, unbound, was staring up at Ramza with cold intensity. He knew that look, because he had often worn it himself. That was the look of a warrior weighing their odds.
"Meliadoul," Malak said again, from his place a little ways behind her. "If we're lying to you, then you'll see that in the Palace, and have your chance at us."
Melia's mouth twisted to one side, and she looked to Malak. "What would you have me do?"
"Hide in the caravan," Malak said. "Unbound and armed."
Ramza's gaze twitched towards Malak now. Melia had tried to kill them once before, and nearly succeeded in felling half their number. Now he wanted to put her, armed and angry, at their back, where she might strike at them at any time?
But if it were Alma who had died, and Ramza believed Meliadoul responsible...would he not have moved heaven and earth to seek revenge? Look what he'd done in the hopes of rescuing her. Just as Delita had done, in hopes of rescuing Teta.
Teta died, and so will Alma.
The thought physically hurt: a sharp, deep pain, cracking in his chest.
"I didn't kill your brother," Ramza said. "I'm just trying to save my sister."
Meliadoul's flint grey eyes flickered towards him. "My sword and his gauntlets," she said at last, and clambered into the caravan.
"This is a mistake!" Agrias growled.
"I'm not executing a woman who's been manipulated and lied to," Ramza retorted. "And whatever the Marquis is, we can use all the help we can get."
"Captain, he's right," Lavian said quietly.
Agrias scowled. Radia sidled up next to her, and added, in a soft undertone. "You, Malak, and Mustadio should guard the caravan. If she joins us, you can direct her. And if she doesn't..."
Malak was already following Meliadoul into the caravan. Agrias, still scowling, nodded, and strode angrily after him.
"Why do I need to go?" Mustadio asked.
"To drive the damn thing," Radia said.
Mustadio shrugged, and followed Agrias. Ramza turned back around. The two women—the same twins he had fought upon Riovanes burning roof, elegant and powerful and deadly—were much closer now.
"Ah, our guests arrive at last!" called Celia (or perhaps it was Lettie? No: Ramza decided that the girl in the red top was Ceila, and the girl in blue was Lettie, and he'd assume that was the case until told otherwise).
"All these festivities planned for them, and they have the gall to tarry at the entrance," sighed Lettie, rolling her eyes. Ramza felt another flicker of unease: in his brief interaction with them at Riovanes, they had seemed unfeeling, barely human. Why did they seem so easygoing now?
"Of course," Lettie continued, as they came to a stop at the base of the hill. "We've only entertainment for those who come bearing gifts."
"The Gospel and the Stones?" Celia asked.
Ramza inclined his head a fraction of an inch. "We have them."
"Good. Surrender them to our care-" Celia began.
"Not before I see my sister."
The twins frowned up at him. "You're in no position to bargain."
"Strong words," Lavian growled. "Especially from two women who were defeated so soundly the last time they challenged us."
"Defeated?" Celia replied, amused. "Fought to a draw, perhaps." She held up her hands in mock surrender. "But far be it from us to ruin our parley. Bring the whole party, and the caravan too."
"After all," Lettie agreed, nodding. "It's not a proper celebration without the guests of honor."
It was a trap. It was obviously a trap: the two women were somehow tied to whatever demon now puppeteered the Marquis, had held their swords to Rafa's throat, had fought to kill almost everyone standing in front of them mere weeks ago. Even now, they held his sister ransom for evil power and evil intent.
But the thought of Alma steadied him. It was an obvious trap, and what of it? Ramza had sprung obvious traps before, and bested them. He would do it again now. For Alma.
"We trust you had a safe journey?" Celia asked, as Ramza started to follow them, and his friends spread out around him. Rafa and Alicia shadowed Lettie, while Radia and Lavian shadowed Celia, and the caravan rumbled in the rear, with the pack chocobo trotting agreeably beside it.
"Across a wartorn land?" Radia replied dryly. "How could we not?"
"A pity, isn't it?" Lettie sighed. "How many people must die for the ambitions of the powerful to be satisfied?"
"Ambitions like yours?" Ramza asked.
Lettie shook her head. "Come, Ramza Beoulve. Our objectives are not so meager as a throne."
"Do you mean the Church's goals?" Ramza asked. "Or the Lucavi's?"
"For the moment, they're one and the same," Celia said.
"For the moment," Alicia repeated. "But not forever."
"That rather depends on the Church," Lettie said.
"So who are you?" Rafa asked.
Lettie turned her head slightly, and smiled. "We're glad you're feeling better, Rafa of Galthena." Her smile faded. "We regret your brother's death."
Rafa's face went still as stone. Ramza felt a similar frosty stillness settle in over his own face, to mask a thrill of glee. Did they not know Malak had been saved? Was that a power the Stones held that even they didn't know about? And if they didn't know about Malak...was it possible they didn't know about Melia?
"I am not quick to forgive those who press blades to my throat," Rafa said, her voice as cold as her face. "And you didn't answer my question."
"We will not discard any means to our glorious end," Lettie replied, with a shrug.
"And what end is that?" Ramza asked.
"The salvation of Ivalice, and then the world."
Lavian laughed. "You organize kidnappings, you order assassinations, you perpetrate massacres, and you have the gall to claim you're trying to save us?"
"We believe you have heard some version of this claim before," Celia said. "Belias might have been recalcitrant, but we doubt Cuchulainn would have been so."
"Why would demons want to save Ivalice?" Alicia asked.
"We are not demons," Celia replied.
"We are human," Lettie said. "Just like you."
Ramza stumbled, his head jerking between the twins and Radia. Her eyes were as wide as his. How would they have known to say that? To quote the words he and Miluda had exchanged three years ago?
"Is something the matter, Ramza Beoulve?" Celia asked.
"It's nothing," Ramza said shortly, finding his stride again, even as the back of his neck crawled. So much he didn't understand. How could these two women be both Lucavi and human? What were the Lucavi? What did they know, and what were they after?
Bommmm...
Bommmm...
Bommmm...
Ramza's head jerked up: from the corner of his gaze, he saw his friends staring, too. The bells of Limberry Palace, utterly still these past two days, were ringing.
"No need to look so surprised," Celia said. "Limberrians are well-known for their courtesy."
"We should hate for you to tell anyone you were not given a most hospitable welcome."
They had come onto the main Ydoran road leading straight to the Palace. In front of them, mighty oaken doors creaked open like thunder, punctuated by the ringing of the Palace bells.
Bommmm...
Bommmm...
Bommmm...
Within stood a dozen men, six to each side framing the hedge-girded path that connected the front doors with the grand stone staircase weaving up. The men were in dress uniform of shocking scarlet, wide shoulders and flaring pantaloons, shining spears pointing towards their counterpart across the road.
And there was music.
It was faint, a haunting undertone to the fading echoes of the bells, ghostly and insubstantial. Notes reached them as dimly and distantly as heat thunder on the summer horizon, so you could almost think you had imagined it if it didn't keep repeating itself, and if it didn't grow louder with every step down the guarded path to the once-silent palace.
Louder, louder, louder with every step and Ramza began to make out the individual instruments: the low thrum of a cello, the sonorous notes of a viola, the high cry of a violin. As his ears struggles to make sense of the music, his eyes watched the guards around them, and found that their scarlet dress uniforms had a most-peculiar feature: every one of their faces were covered with elaborate smiling masks, the jeering mouths and mocking eyes black holes in which nothing could be seen.
Still the music swelled, louder, louder, louder with every step, and the wooden doors began to groan closed behind them. Ramza fought the urge to turn his head, stepped from the path to the cobblestone entryway. Carriages and two caravans were parked, dark and lifeless along its periphery.
"Now, what were your terms again?" Celia asked. "Proof of Alma's life, and then the Stones and Gospel?"
"Then come, dear guests," Lettie said, and she and her twin began to ascend the two staircases, step by matching step.
"One of you, or all," Celia said. "It makes no difference to us."
Ramza hesitated, looking back over the group. Their eyes were firm, and they met his gaze without fear, and part of him quailed beneath their confidence. He didn't know if he'd earned that trust. There had been so much death on the long, strange road that had led from the Gariland Military Academy to this demon-ruled palace...
But they had chosen to stand beside him, one and all, as he had chosen to stand beside them, and his sister was in trouble and he was not going to hesitate now.
He ascended the stairs, slow and steady, leaving Agrias, Mustadio, Malak, and Melia in the caravan. In front of him, the twins pushed the door to the ballroom open
They stood at the top of a red-carpeted stairwell, leading down into a wide, polished floor of gleaming hardwood. But the floor could not be seen, for the ballroom was thick with dancers.
It was a ball. A proper ball, the kind Ramza had always heard of but never been to, first too young to attend such events and then to poor in station when he'd left the Beoulves. He'd seen his father and mother off to one a few months before she had caught the Choking Plague, dressed in gorgeous finery, and seen Dycedarg pack for another: he knew what to expect in terms of the lustrous quality of clothing. At least, he thought he did, but the sight of the whirling fabric took his breath away. Even though he'd known of the long, elegant coats his father and Dycedarg had for such occasions, he had not anticipated the endless variety of them: here, a long silver piece, more cloak then coat, which flared about as its dancer spun: here a shorter, rigid, military affair, with shoulders like epaulets; here red, here blue, here velvet green.
And the dresses! Ramza only had brief, fuzzy memories of his mother's dark blue hoop-skirted ballgown as her father helped her up into the chocobo-drawn carriage. But that dress was but a single cloud in a stormy sky: dresses in every color, slender gowns almost as short as shifts, or grand hooped skirts that spun about them like stars wheeling about the sky, or slinking fabrics that rustled and rippled like grass in the wind. Male and female alike wore the same elaborate masks the guards out front had worn, with faces as wide and strange as the outfits they wore.
The masked dancers, in their gaudy finery, wheeled with sleek precision, ethereal beneath the golden glow of the chandeliers dangling from the crisp white ceiling. On the stage at the far end, the band played their instruments with the same easy grace as the dancers. The air was sweet as honey, flowery with perfume...and underneath that sweetness, another smell, that made Ramza clench his teeth. He knew that smell from his time serving at Gariland. He knew the smell of rot.
"Ah, Ramza Beoulve!" called Marquis Messam Elmdor, raising a glass of red wine from his table at the foot of the stage where the masked musicians played "So glad you could finally join us!" He beckoned towards them. "Come, come."
Ramza shook his head. "I think we're fine here." The dancers kept dancing, seemingly ignorant of the heretic who had walked into their midst, or the dead lord presiding over their revelry. Or...not just ignorant. Insensate. No one had visibly reacted. No one had even looked up. They spun, pirouetted, dipped, and stepped, like mechanical figurines in some clock.
"Then I shall come to you!" The Marquis stood up, wearing a luxurious black doublet with red trim. From the table behind him, he plucked two objects—his long, sheathed katana, and a white bow that gleamed and glimmered with the telltale shimmer of Ydoran microrunes.
"I trust you traveled safely?" the Marquis asked.
"I am not here to bandy words with demons," Ramza said. "I am here to see my sister."
"Quite right, quite right," the Marquis chuckled. "Celia, Lettie? Find her, won't you?" He searched around the ballroom. "She's somewhere in here..."
Ramza laughed, as Celia and Lettie descended the stairs, and headed through the room. "You expect me to believe she's dancing in your captivity?"
"And why not?" the Marquis asked. "You of all people should know how gracious I can be." He came to a stop at the foot of the stairs, and held up the bow. "This is the bow Perseus, named after its famous owner, who by his heroic deeds was granted peerage here in Limberry in the time of the Ydorans." He paused, smiled brightly. "Perseus Thadolfas."
A wave of cold down Ramza's back. He tried to let none of that show on his face. "What of it?"
"It was taken the corpse of Alister Thadolfas," the Marquis continued. "You may not know the name. He was Argus' grandfather. The one who sold out the entire Nanten battlelines for a taste of personal glory."
Dim memories of a dim barrom in Igros, when the world had not felt quite so daunting or so hopeless. The cold thickened on Ramza's spine. "I did not come here to hear history lessons."
"No history lesson!" the Marquis objected. "I wish you to understand my generosity! This bow is a rare treasure: Ydoran bows were rare at the height of the Empire!" He had reattached his sheathed sword to his hip, and held up the bow for Ramza and the others to look at more closely. "The string itself is a kind of...alloy, so the bow functions more like a gun, charging even the most ordinary arrow loosed from it with terrific magic." He smiled nostalgically at the bow. "I purchased it years before Argus Thadolfas came into my service. I intended to reward him with it when the campaign against the Death Corps was over." He looked up at Ramza. "You put paid to that plan."
Ramza's jaw clenched. "Present my sister," he said. "Or we're leaving."
"Yes, yes...where did she get off to..." He trailed off, searching the ballroom again, as the dancers whirled and the music climbed. "Ah, there she is!"
He pointed, and after a moment's careful inspection of the Marquis, Ramza looked. The dancers were parting for Celia and Lettie, ever-moving, not seeming to look up or look away, yet everywhere they stepped the dancers parted like a sea, wider and wider with every moment. Behind Celia and Lettie were two masked figures, at odds with the others in the room. First their clothes: the first wore the Marquis' demonic armor, black with red trim, and trim blond hair framed his black mask with its glaring white face. Behind him, in a simple white dress with food-stained sleeves, walked a shorter, willowy woman, with her honey-colored hair falling around a mask with a weeping face. She held the armored figure's arm in a delicate grip.
They came to a stop just behind the Marquis, as Celia and Lettie stepped to his side. The Marquis was still smiling. The cold on Ramza's spine was deepening.
"Alma?" he asked, his voice too soft through the music still playing in the room.
The woman in the weeping mask did not answer. Ramza gave the Marquis a withering look. "What's wrong with her?"
"Ah, well." The Marquis looked regretful. "She's dead, of course."
The woman reached up with her free hand, and pulled off her mask. There was no face beneath: only a mangled ruin of rotting flesh, dominated by a deformed mouth of jutting teeth. Ramza screamed, was already halfway down the steps with his sword drawn before he knew what he was doing, and his blade crashed against the Marquis' drawn katana.
"What did you do!" Ramza howled, as his friends moved behind him, and Celia and Lettie raced up the stairs to meet them.
"I am a demon, Ramza Beoulve," the Marquis said, and the music had stopped, and the dancers had stopped their dancing, and their hands lifted to their masks and plucked them loose, to reveal a sea of horrors: melted eyes, gleaming bone, putrid cheeks where maggots crawled, a thousand other horros besides. Ramza felt his mind cracking, a deep cold emptiness sinking into his bones as black walls seemed to close in around his gaze. The only man still masked was the blonde, armored thing that stood beside his dead sister.
"I'll kill you!" Ramza screamed, because if he could not cling to vengeance he thought he might go mad.
"Kill me, and I cannot bring your sister back," the Marquis answered.
"Liar!" Ramza shrieked.
"Come now, Ramza Beoulve," the Marquis said. "I am always quick to reward the good service done to me. I have always been a most gracious lord. Is that not so, Argus?"
"Most gracious, my lord," Argus answered, and the air was sucked from Ramza's lungs as his head jerked up. The man standing beside wearing the glaring mask pulled it off with his free hand, and the pallid, glowing face of Argus Thadolfas grinned out at him. "Hello, Ramza."