While Gilead of Carbennic, Sara Ajami, and Zahra Ajami escaped south from Carlisle, a hot wind blew in the opposite direction, sweeping upwards from Leeds toward that realm’s border with the Deluge. Carried on that wind was an unusual cloud, small and ephemeral, faintly yellowish in coloration. The cloud moved in swift spiral patterns, always collapsing in on itself in order to maintain the most aerodynamic shape in its long aerial journey.
Once the cloud reached Carlisle, it fell out of the air-stream, rapidly descending towards Carlisle Citadel, the home of the Marquess of Carlisle himself. It pressed tightly to the corner where a wall met the roof, and paused there, hovering in place for a second to regain its strength. Then, clinging to the pinkish stones, the cloud circled around the citadel’s edge, slowly descending until it was level with one specific window: the window which was the primary source of fresh air and natural light for the Marquess’s personal office.
As soon as the cloud was all the way through the window, it collapsed in on itself, resolving in a matter of seconds into a humanoid figure. Merely humanoid, of course. Even if one had not just seen her slip between a form of dissociated fog and a form of flesh, it was rather obvious that the woman suddenly standing in the Marquess’s office was not a human.
Her name was Vilena Sofiyevna Ruthven, née Krasnova, a woman of greater than average height and broader than average build, with her whole body composed of only three colors: coal-black, milk-white, and ruby-red. Even her dress, a diaphanous gown that reminded more of an ancient greek statue than anything that had been in style within the last half century, was composed entirely of the purest white muslin. Were it not for the fangs and the expression of profound hatred, she would be considered the height of beauty.
“Marquess. You called for aid?”
She had been living in Leedsrealm for eight years by then, but Vilena’s Russian accent had done little fading. She liked to think that it made her sound more intimidating.
Not that she needed much more help; the Marquess of Carlisle already looked ready to soil his pressed black pants. He dropped into a low bow, showing off the wispy remnants of his hair and the jaundiced tint to his skin. Fifteen years ago he had been the second son of one of the largest land-holding families in all of Cumbria. The fact of his being second-rank had not changed since then.
“Madam Ruthven, a pleasure to see you.”
“Call me Vilena,” she said. “I may be here on behalf of my husband, but I assure you I am more than enough for you to put on your plate.”
The Marquess rose from his bow, nodding vigorously. “Of course, of course. As you wish, Vilena. I assume, then, that you read the contents of the dispatch?”
“Viscount Rutter is dead, yes. He was the…Pretender, you had working for you, yes?”
“Yes, yes, precisely. And they killed him, the ruthless bastards!”
Vilena paced slowly across the room, forcing the Marquess to fade before her, like reeds bending around the feet of a lioness. “Wasn’t the purpose of hiring Pretenders supposed to be their combat capabilities? As a counterbalance for their record of unreliability?”
“He was killed by two Pretenders,” the Marquess said. “A physically imposing man and a woman wearing Furati attire.”
Vilena leaned forward onto the Marquess’s desk. His eyes trailed downward, to the smooth flesh of Vilena’s wrists, the veins so very near to the surface. She barely tried to conceal her disdain for men like him, men who fell to their knees and begged for even a fraction of Lord Ruthven’s power, supping from his wrists like infants at their mother’s teat. Certainly, it was they who won out in the end, of course; when Lord Ruthven established his government as the sole remaining power in the shard, those who did not agree to drink… simply did not find themselves in his favor.
But the sheer cowardice of it all. How the bourgeoisie proclaim themselves the storehouse of all dignity, until the very instant when they must expose themselves to a single modicum of risk. At least when Vilena gave in to coercion, it was in exchange for true power, not merely the chance to rent it from someone higher up the ladder.
“When was the last time you were fed?” Vilena asked, as though it were merely a passing thought.
“Four months.”
The Marquess licked his lips, suddenly awash with jitters.
“That is quite a long while. You must be desperately thirsty.”
Vilena stalked across towards the Marquess, forcing him to back away step by step until at last there was no more space for him. He was pinned against the wall, and still she advanced, until she was close enough that, were he suicidally foolish, he could have reached out and grabbed her wrist for himself.
“Indeed,” he said. “I know, of course, that Lord Ruthven and his wives are all quite busy people, what with the threat from the Theo-technicals on the southern front, but I hope I have not been forgotten. You know what happens to those of us who have been granted this power, and I should hope that such a sorry fate befalling the commander of the northern front is not part of your plan.”
“Precisely. I am glad to see that you have considered, if nothing else, that angle,” Vilena said. “Now consider this: if you wish to take onto yourself the benefits of service to the glorious Lord Ruthven, then perhaps you should take on the responsibilities of that role as well, Marquess.”
Vilena’s voice dropped into a growl, and her lips peeled back to bare her needle-like fangs. The Marquess quailed back, whimpering and throwing up his hands in a futile defensive gesture. The accursed blood which he had consumed had granted him vigor, a commanding will, even vast longevity; but compared to the power of a true vampire such as Vilena, he was still helpless.
But after several seconds, The Marquess realized that she was not here to kill him. He lowered his hands, clenching them into fists at his side, and stood up straighter by a degree.
“It was Rutter’s recklessness that got him killed, Vilena, b-b-but it was my negligence that allowed that recklessness to f-fester. I have weakened the defenses of the realm. If you wish to demote me, then it is a just punishment which I must accept… but please, please don’t cut me off, I don’t want to become like—”
“You are not being demoted, Marquess,” Vilena said, finally giving the man the space to relax away from the wall. “I simply wanted to remind you of the magnitude of your error. Now, tell me about the Pretenders.”
“A man and a woman,” The Marquess repeated. “The man was some kind of sword-Pretender, who could use any weapon with thrice the speed and acuity of a champion fencer. He looked, ah, European. Fair-haired, smooth features, an athletic build. The woman, she had some kind of power over dynamite, the ability to make it go off with a thought and only destroy certain targets and not others.”
Vilena frowned at The Marquess. He was spilling surface-level details like a barrel that had taken a bullet, but had clearly failed to do any proper investigation. He didn’t even know their names!
Recognizing her expression, The Marquess continued, “The woman was, ah, foreign, dark, medium length hair kept down, wearing what looked like a Furati soldier’s armor…”
“And where are they right now?” Vilena asked.
“What?”
“These Pretenders who killed one of your best enforcers. Where are they. Right. Now?”
Vilena dug her nails into her palms. She should have saved her anger; making the same threat a second time, even in response to a far greater act of incompetence, would be a waste.
“They fled into the crowd not long after the killing. I’ve had my patrol officers looking for them, but they’re Pretenders, it isn’t—”
“Where did they come from?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What are their names? Do they have any past record of activity in the area? What are their Pretensions? Do you even know why they killed Rutter, or how they were able to overcome him?”
The Marquess was left in a state of guilty silence, breathing anxiously through his half-open mouth.
“Two Pretenders walked into your city, killed your best enforcer, and then vanished. As far as we know—because you have failed to do even the most basic investigation—these people could be seeking to overthrow Lord Ruthven himself!”
“It’s two Pretenders, Vilena! And they haven’t made any kind of public appearance, no statements of their mission, they aren’t even well enough known to be recognized!”
Vilena sneered. “Don’t be an idiot, Marquess. You know as well as I do what two Pretenders are capable of. Shut the city down, begin active patrols, begin making mass sweeps. Treat this as if two bloodfiends had started causing havoc within your walls and you will only be underestimating the severity of the situation slightly, as opposed to catastrophically. Am I understood?”
“Yes, my lady.”
It pained Vilena to be referred to by such a title. But that was simply how Englishmen showed respect, so she tolerated it in the moment.
“Now, one final thing. Where was Rutter killed?”
The Marquess scrambled over to his desk and ruffled through missives and notes until he found the address. He read it out to Vilena. Once she had memorized it, she was gone, melting once more into a spiral of fog.
Once she was near to the site of the battle, Vilena descended, passing below roof-level so that she could read the signs as they went by. This gave her a brief window of time with which to think and ponder her situation. This had been meant to be a quick trip; she would go to Carlisle, speak to the Marquess, and if there was any business that called for the strength of a vampire, the Marquess could request it from her. But of course it had turned out that the situation was worse than she had expected, and the Marquess far more incompetent than she had imagined.
Why, oh why, could it have not been one of the other wives sent in her place? Why could she not simply lie to him and say that all was well, or that the Marquess had not required her assistance?
Vilena knew why. There were two reasons: one was her own pride. If she was going to be forced into the service of a predator, a blood-drinker, an aristocrat, the very thing she was born to oppose, then at the very least she would serve well and do her duty efficiently. The second reason was the simple calculus of risk. If this situation did escalate, if it did turn out that the two Pretenders were far more powerful than it seemed, if they did end up becoming a threat to the stability of Carlisle and of Ruthven’s domain as a whole, then Vilena wanted to be able to point out that she had taken the threat seriously from the start. To do otherwise…well, when catastrophe strikes, the second question after “how do we fix this” is “who can we blame”. She may have been one of Ruthven’s wives, but Vilena was not immune from blame.
She finally found what she was looking for: a dressmaker’s shop. She slipped in through the window in the shape of mist, navigating to the storage room in the back. Then and only then did she assume material shape. She needed a disguise, which meant dressing in fashion from the modern day, not Ruthven’s time a century ago. She stripped off her display of neoclassicalism and stowed it in the corner, switching it out for a practical walking dress in maroon cotton.
The owner of the shop had questions, of course, when a woman he had never seen before suddenly walked out of one of his back rooms; one flash of her fangs and he suddenly went quiet. Vilena did have a purse on her, though; she left a crown on the countertop and promised to be back.
Once she was outside, though, flashing her teeth was the exact opposite of what Vilena needed. She needed to be unremarkable, an ordinary woman going for a walk by the river to treat her illness and who is just so very curious about what all the hubbub is and why there’s a section of the street that’s ruined.
The illness served three purposes as part of the story. Firstly, it excused her pale complexion. Secondly, it made her more sympathetic: a woman of good character who is mildly ill is the very height of British respectability. And third, it wasn’t even a lie: Vilena was extremely ill, on account of the fact that the sun hadn’t finished setting yet. The light rendered her half-blind, shaky and weak, with a pounding headache. Ruthven would never expose himself to sunlight like this; but that’s what his wives were for.
And so, bit by bit, piece by piece, gritting her fangs against the seething waves of discomfort, Vilena canvassed the area, starting right at the place where Rutter had died, as marked by the collapse in the city’s sewer. Most of the witnesses to the fight itself had been transient, folks moving from one place to another who just so happened to be in the wrong place when it all went down. After a quarter of an hour, though, Vilena found somebody who knew something useful: the local apple seller, whose cart had been parked at that street corner since ten o’clock in the morning. He’d seen everything.
A proper application of Vilena’s well-practiced local accent—she could never pass herself as truly English, but she could make herself sound faintly French—and a generous dash of gasping and exclamations, and he told her the whole story, not only from start to finish, but in exacting and explicit detail, all the better to awe the lady. For the most part, what he said were things that even the Marquess had known: the man was a knife-user, and the woman had a power over bombs. The descriptions were more complete, though: the man was not merely blonde, but exceedingly handsome, smooth-shaven, with visibly ill-fitting clothes and a large scar on his right cheek. The woman spoke with an accent, and the two of them had to coordinate to take down Rutter, which made sense.
Most important, however, was one detail which the Marquess had never managed to learn. Apparently, the man had, in the middle of the battle, shouted his name very loudly, as a sort of challenge to Rutter. Vilena had an all-important name. Sir Gilead du Carbennic.
The name of a backarounder, clearly, which neatly explained the preference for bladed weapons. Vilena felt the slightest pulse of pity for the man: dying and coming back was bad enough for her, but at least she was sent six decades into the past; from what it sounded like, he had been thrown untold centuries into the future, a far more disorienting change. That pity had to be crushed, and Vilena did so with only a small amount of mental effort. Pity would do no good, neither for her or for him.
But even that modicum of information—tall, blonde, exceedingly muscular and handsome, no doubt in possession of a very strange manner of speaking—gave Vilena enough of a description to go off of for the next step. She asked the apple seller which direction Gilead had come from, and he pointed one way down the street. Vilena then thanked him and, once she was out of sight, went that-a-way.
The methodology from there was simple. Everywhere she went, Vilena asked about Gilead, claiming that she urgently needed to find him. The explanation varied from place to place based on what she believed would earn her the most sympathy. Usually it was that he had lost something important without realizing it, an important letter fallen out of his pocket or something to that effect. Other times it was that Vilena’s husband needed to speak to Gilead urgently and didn’t trust any of the servants to do it for him. Either way, a man so distinctive, having passed by so recently, was easily remembered. Vilena could be assured that if the shopkeepers to whom she spoke didn’t know about him, he hadn’t been there.
Once they did remember Gilead, she asked which way he’d went after leaving, supposedly so that she could find him. But she always went the other direction. She knew where he’d ended up; what she wanted to know was where he’d come from. The pattern continued throughout the afternoon, Vilena growing less sickly with each passing minute as the sooty atmosphere and the surrounding buildings gradually blotted out more and more of the sun’s light. Vilena wasn’t entirely certain what she was looking for or when her search would end. It came upon her by surprise.
The place was a jeweler’s store, clean and proper, the clientele universally members of Carlisle’s upper crust, as much as such people still existed since the day of the red sky. A newspaper vendor across the street had mentioned seeing Gilead emerge from this place, a fact which he found quite odd considering his lowly apparel. The owner of the shop was a black man in a black suit, a top hat sitting a few degrees off-vertical atop his delicately coiffeured head.
“Greetings, madam. How may I be of service today?”
“I regret to inform you that I’m not here to buy anything. Rather, I’m looking for someone. I run a tea parlor a few blocks from here, and I am looking for a stranger who left some of his belongings in my place. He was, erm, very tall, exceedingly muscular and athletic in his build, fair-haired, had a very strange manner of speaking?”
“Oh, the backarounder?” said the man.
“Quite possibly?” Vilena hedged, not wanting to make it look as though she were searching too hard. “He did seem to have a poor grasp of social custom, now that you mention it. Did he come in here, then?”
The jeweler nodded. “That he did, that he did. Him and his friend were here to sell me…”
The jeweler spent a few seconds searching through his shop’s many cabinets and displays until he found the item in question. “This beautiful crucifix. Twenty-karat gold, this, with a bit of silver for hardness. I have it on sale for fifty pounds.”
“His friend?” said Vilena.
“Yeah, he had a friend with him, they argued for a bit over how they were going to split the cash. Older fellow, big beard. He’s one of the men the Marquess has stationed out at all the old catacombs and such to help keep freshly-awakened backarounders safe and such. I think I heard his name was… Bill something? Bobby? Ben? Definitely started with a ‘B’.”
Vilena hurriedly thanked the man and rushed out of the shop, forgetting even to ask her usual question about where Gilead had gone. This changed the situation entirely, for two reasons.
One was that Gilead was not just a backarounder, but a very freshly awakened backarounder, still accompanied by the gravekeeper. He had only been in Scrapyard for a few days, maybe up to a week or two if he was particularly slow to adjust. Was it possible for someone to become a Pretender so quickly? Vilena didn’t know, but it seemed unlikely, which raised a frightening possibility: that Gilead wasn’t a Pretender at all.
She raked her memory of the apple-seller’s description for anything that seemed outwardly supernatural. There was nothing. The woman, certainly, but the man? All that he had done was be exceptionally good with his fists and a knife. So good that Pretension seemed a more likely explanation, but maybe it wasn’t impossible after all…
The question of Gilead’s status as a Pretender or not was a confusing question, but it wasn’t what Vilena had been looking for. The same could not be said for the matter of the other man, Bill Or Whomever. A gravekeeper with a large beard who had just gone into town, and would definitely know something useful about Gilead. And, as an employee of Ruthven’s government, someone whose name would be almost certainly found in the Marquess’s records.
Vilena set off for the tailor’s where she’d acquired her disguise, hoping to get there before it closed. She’d return the dress either way. And after that, she had to return to the Citadel to start researching for real.