Saithorthepyro
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Chapter 103 - Endgame VI
🕑 Added 2024-12-23 16:00:13 +0000 UTCLady Karsin took another sip of tea, visibly unconcerned even as man-handled Lord Montague back into his chair. He loudly protested, but that halted as soon as my hand squeezed tighter around his throat.
“Miss Harrow, if you wouldn’t mind checking him for any more weapons?” Voltar said.
“Teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” I said back, already riffling through his pockets. I turned nothing else up except a small knife, the blade smaller than my pinky but coated with something that made the blade’s surface glossy.
“Poison of some kind, I’d bet. Now, your lordship, shut up for a bit.”
He looked like smoke might pour out of his ears and nostrils, but a nervous glance at the knife I know held made me doubt he’d start anything. I couldn’t identify whatever it was, but it must be nasty for the mere threat of being stabbed with it to keep him from arguing.
He’d brought it with such a tiny knife too, one where a minor cut could be something else on his person with a sharp edge. Decent odds he’d planned on giving me and Voltar a pair of lethal cuts that could be blamed on accident, and if the poison was slow-acting enough, we would never have known.
“So, I am to answer questions, then?” Lady Karsin asked. “How do you plan on making me answer them, Miss Harrow?”
“We have your son,” I said bluntly. “I think his safety might be worth a few answers, especially since your scheme has been thoroughly exposed at this point.”
“You approve of this, Voltar?”
I didn’t look at Voltar. Trusting he’d know presenting a united front was worth more than having our disagreements on the morality of this made public.
One second passed, then two, both feeling like infinity till he spoke.
“In this case, I do Lady Karsin. One can hardly expect to threaten other’s children and that no one will threaten their own in return.”
Lady Karsin’s expression turned even more glacial. “So, then you’ll hold yourself to the same standards I do then?”
“Discussing morality will not get you anywhere,” I said. “We can have this conversation later, once the Watch has had you in custody for a while. It won’t be as pleasant.”
Actually, we would hande her over to the Drakes, but no need to mention that detail yet. They might be less willing to let us interrogate her after, but that would require her not to care about what would occur to Desmond. Was my guess wrong or right?
Her smile finally collapsed in on itself, her expression faltering, as she could no longer keep it up, and fell into a sullen, baleful glare at the two of us.
“You really are quite the devious little sadist when you want to be, aren’t you?” She said to me quietly.
I shrugged. “Next time, perhaps don’t drag me or the Black Flame into your schemes. Pick fall people who are less likely to be vicious when they find out, perhaps. But we can get to those events later. First, I want to talk about Dustin Tary.”
Lady Karsin muttered a few words under her breath in a language that I couldn’t understand but did not sound pleasant.
“A name I’ve had the joy of not needing to say for a long time,” she said. “What information about that sadistic moron do you want?”
Well, while it might be an act for now, I’d take this as an indicator of her feelings on her creator.
“The beginning,” Voltar said. “The ending. How we ended up in this situation. The broad details are discernable just from what happened. You and your fellows survived his failed attempt to replace all the nobles in his duchy with shape-changers and install himself as duke. You survived the attempt, came here, then laid low and built lives for yourselves, then found out about your creator’s notes surviving and then enacted this plan.”
She sighed in resignation. “I can’t speak much to what he wanted. He shared little more than orders with us. My life began in a lab. Initially, I was only vaguely aware of what was going on around me. My capacity to think was there, but I had no actual ability to learn yet. No sense but touch, and very little ability to determine what different things meant. I was one of the initial experiments that remained stable, so he tolerated my inability to grow just yet. I suppose that’s why he grew impatient and fed me the first human he could.”
No one bothered to interrupt as she stopped, looking at us, daring us to pass any kind of judgment.
“He’d fed me dead things before, animals and the like, to make me grow. To feed the core growing inside me. Perhaps he realized absorbing someone else’s intellect would enable me to think. Maybe he just needed to dispose of some victim of his schemes. He often would have breakthroughs by complete accident, then pretend he’d planned them all along. It was hard to tell. He hoarded secrets. I was the first to wake, but soon others joined me. Hawkins, who you’ve met. No one else from that first batch of changers survived his schemes. He tested to see if feeding us more would increase our capacities, but only the first corpse ever actually mattered.”
She paused, taking another sip of tea. I used the lull to ask a question.
“Did he ever say why he wanted the duchy? His claim was already weak, and being the sole survivor atop the throne would have looked suspicious at any point after they discovered shape-changers in the duchy.”
Lady Karsin scoffed. “The simple answer is he never expected to be caught. Or for us to be discovered. After that he decided he could be the power behind the throne, ruling behind one of his younger relatives from the main line, safe from suspicion. That lasted till an adventuring party broke into his lab, having traced one of us back to it. It may have even been deliberate, and I wouldn’t blame whichever of us it was. Constant experiments with no care if one of us died. He couldn’t even bother to track which of us was which. No names, no numbers, no anything. The only time he called us names were those of the people we were impersonating.”
Sounded like a rotten deal. I might have had a spot of sympathy, if not for everything that had happened over the last few weeks.
“Well, it took time for them to root him out. Time some of us took to escape, try to find a place to escape, live, stay. We made our way here, only a bit over a dozen and no idea how to make more of us. We set up rules quickly. No replacing anyone prominent. Fake your own death every half-century. Don’t let roots get set in to any identity. Don’t get attached.”
“Failed that last one, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied, glaring at me. “Yes, I did. And you didn’t hesitate to exploit that, did you? Still, things went well. We slowly accrued wealth enough to live comfortably, enough to pursue our own goals. Enough to forget the past we’d left behind.”
“Of course that’s when Iserand had to find our creator’s notes had survived. He worked briefly for the Archives, although not for long. Part of the rules was only to work places like that briefly, just to check for them. Otherwise, it was too dangerous. But this time they paid off, and we knew where they’d gone. And it meant the possibility of making more of us, and some of us would never let a possibility like that go. Hawkins chief among them.”
“He was part of the archives, but you went after Lord Montague’s heir instead of trying to have him grab them?” I asked.
“It took bribes to get a list of restricted books,” Lady Karsin explained, a little impatiently. “Bribes that had already drawn attention. He never made it far in their hierarchy. Besides, anyone but a pure human making it to the last layer undetected is impossible. So instead they hatched a scheme to eventually gain control of the archives. And breaking the code we’d set for ourselves to kill no one prominent.”
“Considering whose face you’re wearing, I find that hard to believe,” I said.
“When I found Lady Karsin, she was just an elf wandering through the woods. I followed her for a few days, and she seemed so…tired. I thought it would be better than previous times.”
“And so you attempt to put a pretty face on murder,” Voltar said.
Lady Karsin scoffed. “Like anyone at this table is any better. Oh, do not look at me like that, Montague!”
In all honesty, the look of disgust on Lord Montague’s face probably had more to do with her having killed a noble than the morality of murder.
“So you went forward with the plan to poison Lord Montague’s son,” Voltar continued. “Dragging Miss Harrow in. The decision to frame the Black Flame was-”
“A necessity,” Lady Karsin said. “Aartu would never have agreed to help if we couldn’t use it to hurt the Black Flame. At the time I thought it was an inconvenience but workable. The Flame would be a decent bogeyman to use. If it weren’t for one thing falling out of place, it might have even worked.”
“What you get for hiring shoddy henchmen,” I said. “Pure-bloods being used were also one of their demands?”
“No,” Lady Karsin said. “Far below her radar. We were hoping to find catspaws that would be easy to manipulate and not insightful enough to figure things out until it was too late.”
“How could you know the notes would help?” Voltar said.
Lady Karsin cocked her head to the side. “Sorry?”
“The notes. The Imperials have had them for years, but have made none more of your kind. Or if they have, they’ve been much more successful at hiding their existence. How could you know they’d contain what you looked for?”
“There’s a second half to the notes,” she answered. “Ones we rescued from his lab when everything was falling apart. Secrets of our flesh were written there, ones we used to stabilize, to assume forms for longer. Parts of our biology he wrote nowhere else.”
My eyes narrowed and my gaze darted over to Voltar. That….I’d assumed the Tarry notes couldn’t possibly contain the secrets to create more shape-changers. If they had, the Imperial family would have surely started making some of their own by now. Given Her Majesty’s ambitions and tendency to grasp everything in sight, they would have been exposed by now.
But if the secret lay in some combination of the notes….
“Interesting,” Voltar noted. “Do these notes survive?”
Lady Karsin's lips quirked, and she swallowed another laugh. “Burnt, last night, at my own hands. My race dies before it becomes slaves again.”
“You didn’t memorize the contents?” I asked.
“No,” she said, a hysterical giggle forcing its way from her throat. “No bargaining, no information, no anything. If they want to learn how to make more of us, they can start from scratch.”
The Imperial government wouldn’t be starting from scratch, not with living shape-changers in custody, but this would be a setback to any program to make ones loyal to them. Once I’d discovered the current method for detecting them, unsurprisingly, access to the experimental data from tests done on Hawkins had stopped arriving.
Lady Karsin managed to get her mirth under control. “I suppose the moment I leave, the Watch will take me into custody.”
“Yes,” Voltar said, not even a hint of a lie in his voice. “Or it might be Imperial Intelligence you eventually end up with. I suggest just telling the truth. It will go easier for all involved.”
She grinned, teeth lengthening in her mouth. I quietly reached into my pockets for the focus, but when she didn’t lunge at anyone I gave her a second.
“You left a detail out, Voltar. My son? What is going to happen to him?”
Voltar stared at her, face unmoving for a few seconds, before he answered.
“He’ll be returned to your estate and made the new Lord Karsin. You will die, probably said to be at a shape-changer’s hands, which will explain your disappearance. In actuality, taken into custody. Which is where things come to their end. Miss Harrow, could you please-?”
“On it,” I said, getting up. “Do me a favor and don’t let Lord Montague poison you while I’m gone.”
His Lordship still kept his mouth shut at that, but I kept a closer eye on Lady Karsin.
“Afraid I’ll try to kill you all and escape from the wreckage?” she asked as I lead her through the house.
“Always,” I replied. “But I don’t think it would work for you. Your secrets are too well known. I know where to stab with rot. Others know the tricks as well.”
We’d made it to the front door by then.
Lady Karsin paused.
“If I were to leave through this doorway, what would I really find?”
“Three drakes,” I answered frankly. “Same if you take any of the other ways out. They move rather quickly.”
“Ah,” she said, then chuckled mirthlessly. “I should have guessed something like that is how your arranged their help. I can’t imagine they were too happy with you.”
“They beat and drugged me,” I said. “I’ve endured worse. Honestly got lucky I didn’t lose any digits. Those are always a pain to regrow.”
She chuckled softly. “Definitely the wrong target. Curse you Aartu, for both you and your deities’ obsession. I thank you for the warning, Miss Harrow.”
I inclined my head slightly. “I sympathize. A little.”
Trying to hold one’s race together, finding a way to just survive in a world that feared and hated you? Oh, that resonated far too well with my own experiences. The story of Tarry and his creations was a little more removed, but at its core was it really any different?
“Enough for you to perhaps show me a more hidden way out?” she asked
My smile turned into a toothy grin, every pointed fang laid bare.
“Don’t push your luck.”
Sympathy, but she’d been one of those who’d ruined the life I’d built. Reluctantly, if you believed her story, but one of those ruiners all the same.
She smiled. “That’s fair. Well, I do appreciate the warnings. My son will be taken care of?”
That I did not know, but I had no reasons to doubt Voltar. “The Empire wants a clean ending. Having to deal with questions about if the Lady Karsin who fought Her Most Profane Majesty was-”
“It was,” she said firmly. “Some madness needs to be stopped, no matter the risk of discovery.”
“Well, I imagine they want as few inconvenient questions as possible. Having your house survive and you be one last victim of the shape-changers? That works.”
It did for me as well, as much as I wanted her to bleed over what she’d caused to me. But this was good enough. I had no doubt the drakes would catch her.
“I would have liked to talk to Desmond again,” she said, voice strained. “You cannot call off the dogs set after me for-“
“No.”
A mirthless giggle. “Well, I suppose I deserve that. Goodbye, Miss Harrow. May our paths never cross again.”
“I remain quite confident they won’t. Goodbye, Lady Karsin.”
After shutting the door, I returned to our little tea party, ignoring the sounds coming from the outside street. No matter what happened out there, I remained confident in one thing.
This mess was over. Now it was just the clean-up.
Author's Note: And this is the last regular chapter of Infernal Investigations for Book 1. I'll be releasing a few epilogues on the normal schedule, and then will take a two week hiatus before releasing the first chapter of book 2.
