The situation room was situated on the second floor, above the tailor shop, and like everything else on the second floor was exceptionally busy in its decoration. Not unorganized: everything had its place and had been put there deliberately, but there was just so much of it. Glass trinkets, framed photographs, design sketches, bits of artwork in fifty contrasting styles, everything was everywhere. Only the table itself remained bare.
“Wesley,” Gilead asked, “are these all your doing?”
Wes made a huff of bemusement. “No. This is Juniper’s place, she owns the store and she owns the loft, too.”
“Wesley’s just a friend,” Juniper explained. “He just about knows his way around a needle and thread well enough to sew a patch on his overalls, but that’s it. I’m the savant here.”
Wes rolled his eyes, but said nothing. Gilead had the feeling that he didn’t approve of such hubris, but accepted it as one of Juniper’s many, many quirks. Gilead found her irksome. For one thing, her clothing held entirely too many colors in one piece of cloth, every shade and hue all mingled together. She moved around the room like a lost dragonfly, always flitting and twitching in a way that triggered Gilead’s fighting instincts. Though he knew that Sara and Wesley both trusted her, he kept feeling like she was trying to attack him.
The most irritating part about Juniper, though, was not anything she had said herself, but rather how Gilead knew of her. This was the pseudo-fairy which Sara had spoken of, but she was absolutely nothing like the real fey, the ones Gilead had known and called kinfolk. There was no grace to her, aside from the dexterity required to move around her abode without breaking anything, no sense of purpose or age. There was more of a forest-dwelling squirrel about her than a fairy.
Juniper sat down at the end of the table, with Sara and Wesley at her flanks. Gilead took a seat past Sara, as far from Juniper as possible. That done, Juniper snapped her fingers and worked some magic: a large ceramic bottle and a collection of cups levitated over from a side-table.
“I hope you can tolerate iced tea,” she said. “The hot stuff doesn’t keep as long and I do not have the time or energy to make some more when Zahra’s safety is in question.”
Gilead, despite everything, held to his politeness and drank the iced tea. It was cool and tasted bad, bitter, lifeless. While they drank, Sara relayed the story, starting with her arrival in Carlisle and continuing through to the battle that had taken place at Castle Carbennic and what had happened to Zahra there.
Most interesting was what she omitted, that being almost anything about Gilead himself. The way she told the story, he was but a side character, a friendly face with whom Sara had agreed to a mutually beneficial defensive alliance. She didn’t mention that he was one of King Arthur’s men, nor that he recognized the Black Knight’s sigil, nor that he had fought and slain the Black Knight in combat. The way she told it, he had simply wanted to see Carbennic’s ruins out of an idle curiosity, to confirm with his eyes how long it had been since his death.
Gilead was of two minds about this. On the one hand, it was entirely reasonable, when explaining everything to two people Gilead did not know, to leave out as much as possible. It was Gilead’s right to decide how much Juniper and Wesley learned, not Sara’s. On the other hand, to hear Duranore’s presence be so ignored was to hear his name be wiped from the records of history within days of his death.
While Sara staggered through her account of Zahra’s kidnapping, pity prevented Gilead from interrupting. But as the tale wound down, Sara trailing off into traumatized silence, Gilead butted in.
“One part of the tale hast thou omitted, Sara. The cause for my weakness, so great that I could not flee without thine aid. Minutes before, I had slain the Black Knight in a duel to the death.”
“The Black Knight?” Wesley said, raising an eyebrow.
“Ooh, no, I’ve heard of this one: a mysterious apparition haunting Leedsrealm, an armored knight atop a great steed, who appears and disappears like a ghost and challenges all who cross his path to mortal combat. That the one?”
“Aye, the description is matched. His name was Duranore, a man dead not quite as long as I, and he was of my kin. I sought him out in recognition of the sign across his breast, and in giving him an honorable death, allowed his ghost peace.”
Juniper gasped, though Gilead knew she was exaggerating it. Wesley’s reaction was far more understated, and in Gilead’s estimation, far more truthful. “Sounds like it hurt. But just think: it’s not often we get to put ghost to rest with our own two hands.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
Gilead opened his mouth. “Never mind it. Sara, are you alright?”
Sara nodded. “No. My sister is being held captive by a fucking vampire, and I don’t know why he’s keeping her, or even if she’s still alive. We need to rescue her as soon as possible.”
“I have to agree,” said Juniper. “There’s a few different reasons why a vampire might be keeping a little girl, and none of them imply that it’s a permanent arrangement. And that’s not even getting into what I know about this specific vampire.”
“He called himself… Gilead, what did he call himself?”
"Galanan Mac Cináeda,” Gilead said. “A Pictish name, I think.”
“Which would line up with the rumors I’ve been hearing that he’s somewhere in the ballpark of a thousand years old, if not older. Everyone just calls him Ruthven, though; I’ve never heard him called anything different.”
“He’s ruling over a population of English people,” said Sara. “I doubt they could even pronounce that name.”
Juniper nodded by way of admitting the point. “He knows a thing or two about leadership, commanding the allegiance of thugs and deathmongers. Admitting he’s foreign would make them less likely to fall in line with every single thing he says and does. Not all of his people are those… lesser vampire things that are lethally addicted to his blood, as much as he’d probably love that sort of thing.”
“Four times you used the word ‘thing’ in only three sentences,” Gilead said.
The table was silent. Gilead wasn’t sure why he’d said that, and instead of interrogating the question, he took a deep breath and noted that the chamber, on top of everything else, smelled thickly of lilacs. That, too, was irritating.
“Well what the shit does that have to do with anything, Sir Sucks-A-Lot?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You think I haven’t noticed you having a bug up your ass about me since the second we met? You’re not half as subtle as you think you are.”
“Nay, not about that. Suxalot?”
“You know, like—”
Sara hammered her fist into the table so hard that it rattled against the floor, leaving her rubbing a sore hand.
“My sister could be dead or dying right now! So both of you shut the fuck up! No arguing until Zahra is safe, not a fucking word!”
Juniper immediately fixed her gaze on Gilead. Gilead returned it coolly. Her eyes were so wide that, even through the ruby glasses, he could still see the whites of them daring him to say something.
Wes said quietly, “I agree with Sara.”
Gilead folded his arms across his chest. “I shall limit myself to speaking only those words which are relevant to the possibility of rescue.”
The air went out of Sara, and she slowly settled back into her seat. “Juniper?”
“I’ll be nice.” She shook her head like a dog drying itself off, making her long, dirty-blonde hair form waves in the air. “Right. Let’s go down the checklist, shall we? Objective definition:”
“Get to where Zahra is and extract her, then escape from retribution without anybody dying.”
“Right, fairly easy. Obstacle identification:”
And that was where things got complicated. Juniper, Sara, and Wes all agreed on one thing more or less immediately: that if Ruthven cared about Zahra enough to take her captive himself and keep her alive, she was almost certainly being held inside of Ruthven’s personal palace in Leeds itself. Juniper didn’t explain how she knew anything about that palace’s layout and the defenses it held, but she was able to lay them out in some degree of detail.
The first ring of defense was the detail of Leedsrealmer soldiers assigned to the palace’s defense. Exact numbers were unknown, but the team was almost certainly outnumbered fifteen to one at a bare minimum. Worse, the outside of the palace was ringed with things called “machine gun emplacements”, defensive structures whose functioning Sara had to spend five minutes explaining. In a word: being spotted once meant they were all dead.
There were likely more soldiers patrolling inside, though the tight confines of an indoor space meant the fighting was somewhat more even. However, even one such encounter would also be unavoidably loud, immediately drawing attention from the real danger: Ruthven’s wives. He had six of them, at last counting, each of them true vampires much like himself. While none of them possessed his ageless mastery of combat or vast well of entirely unpredictable sorcery, they were all roughly even in physical strength, speed, and resilience. And in the very heart of Ruthven’s domain, there would not be just one: any serious alarm would likely mean having to confront or evade at least two vampires, if not three or four.
And then there was Ruthven himself. Little needed be said there: nobody present at that table could even begin to quantify the danger he posed. If they were going to escape alive, let alone with Zahra, he needed to be out of the picture.
Then, just for flavor, a few more difficulties added themselves onto the pile. Firstly, Juniper didn’t even have a full floorplan of the palace, let alone a definitive idea of where Ruthven would have had Zahra held. Somewhere secret and well-defended, clearly, but that still meant that they would be walking through the woods in the dark. And one wrong step could mean bringing hell down on top of their heads.
And, last but not least, there was the question of extraction. Once they had Zahra, and once they had made it out of the palace, they needed to get outside of the reach of Ruthven’s grasp as fast as possible. Considering vampires could fly, that basically meant that they either needed to go underground in such a way that Ruthven couldn’t find them, or get out of the entire shard faster than he could fly.
“Anything else?” Juniper looked exhausted just from having to list out all of the potential challenges.
“No,” Sara replied. “I think that’s everything.”
“In that case, Presentation of Solutions.”
“Let’s go in reverse order,” Wes said immediately. “I can be getaway driver.”
“Can you get that machine of yours going faster than a vampire can fly?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know how fast a vampire can fly, but if you give me a few days to tune her up I can get Shati up to, maybe ninety miles per hour sustained?”
Juniper blinked. “You’ve gotten better.”
“What can I say? Lots of time to experiment.”
“Alright, that’s our exit strategy handled,” Sara said. “If we’re going backwards, then… Juniper, I think you’re our best hope for intelligence gathering. When you’re that little light-ball, you could probably scan the entire place in a few minutes.”
Juniper looked grave about it for a few seconds. “That relies on people not raising an alarm about a little ball of light flitting around.”
“A lot of them probably won’t,” Sara replied. “And you’re small enough that you can keep out of line of sight more easily than any of us.”
“The rune-light,” Gilead said.
Juniper raised an eyebrow at him. “What about it?”
“You and it are the same color, or thereabouts. Placed one against other, you might fade into invisibility.”
“You’re suggesting that I fly in over the walls, through a window, and then find out where Zahra is being held?”
Gilead nodded.
“That is… not a terrible plan. But with Wes handling the getaway car, that still means that you and Sara have to get into the building, and I can’t take people with me when I’m small, so I couldn’t get Zahra out on my own either.”
“I wouldn’t trust you to get her out anyways. No offense, Juniper, but you’re not good in a fight.”
“None taken. But then, if I can’t do it, how are you and Gilead going to get through… everything. The machine guns on the walls, the guards on the inside, Ruthven’s wives, they’re all kind of the same problem once you get down to it and I don’t see a solution here.”
As one, the four people sitting around the situation room table leaned back and sank into their own individual thoughts, searching blindly for a solution. If only things were as simple as they had been in Gilead’s time; back then, any problem that couldn’t be solved with a frontal charge was the result of some kind of magic, and that could be resolved through the aid of a holy man or an enchantress. But now this was a world of guns and metal, where strength was nothing against the power of the bullet.
“We have to stage a distraction,” Gilead said.
“Thanks, Einstein.” Wesley didn’t even turn his eyes away from his favorite spot on the ceiling. “How are we going to arrange that, though? And make it big enough to keep the eyes of Ruthven’s entire security apparatus for long enough to get Zahra out. Without anybody dying?”
Sara gave Gilead a very meaningful look. “And even if anyone did die, that just means the distraction is cut short.”
Juniper bent over the table, her long hair forming a curtain between her face and the rest of the group. “Sara.”
“Yes?”
“Can you wait two weeks?”
There was a scratching sound as Sara’s hands clenched. Gilead almost expected to have to hold her back from violence.
“Say. That. Again?”
“Can you wait two weeks before we rescue your sister?”
“Are you fucking insane? She’s been trapped there for three days and it’s already too long!”
“I understand that so, so, so much, Sara. But you have to think about this: if we try this and fuck it up, we’ll all be dead. We have one shot, and it needs to be done perfectly.”
“Why two weeks, then? Why not wait six months and show up with every single Pretender we can find from all across the whole of Scrapyard? I’m sure we’ll be able to nurse Zahra’s husk back to health!”
Wes suddenly leaned forward. “The ball.”
Sara glared at him, looking for a second like she was going to snap, until the softness of realization came over her face all at once. “The ball. Mother of God…”
Juniper pushed her curtain of hair aside so that she could look at the others. “You see my reasoning, though.”
“Ball?” Gilead asked. “What ball?”
Sara folded her arms grimly across her chest, looking down at her own lap rather than having to make eye contact. “I’ve already told you about the ball. Ruthven is holding one in two weeks at his palace. The rumors are that he plans to select a new wife.”
To his credit, Gilead soon understood the implications. “With an invitation, we walk by the outermost guards without a word, and many of the ones indoors besides. If Juniper can tell us where Zahra is to be found…”
“We’ve just cut out half of the difficulty, easily,” said Sara.
“And,” Juniper added, “Ruthven and his wives will all be incredibly busy. They won’t have a chance to find us if they’re too busy brownnosing and making sure the hors d’oeuvres get to the right tables on time. Might even let us get away with some amount of suspicious behavior, depending on what they decide is high priority.”
“Is the ball open to the public?” Gilead asked.
Sara and Juniper looked at one another, in that way where Gilead immediately knew he was in for some bad news.
“If not, then by what means shall we acquire invitation?”
“Well, the whole point of this ball is to… filter feed, if you will. Ruthven exclusively consumes the blood of women, as do some of his wives if I remember correctly. So there is a long-standing policy that any lady can… show up at the front gates and be judged by the staff. And if she’s Ruthven’s type…”
Gilead grimaced. “How knavish.”
“We already knew he was a piece of work, Gilead.”
He shot Sara a glance, for just a moment, to remind her not to underestimate him. Then he returned to focusing his attention on Juniper.
“Is it only the ladies who are allowed inside?”
“Well, no, they’re allowed a +1,” Juniper said. “For servants and such.”
“Then in that case, I shall have to put myself in the guise of a manservant. I am not so prideful that I cannot act the part of a lower station.”
“There’s just one problem,” Juniper said. “Ruthven might be racist.”
“Might be?” Wes and Sara said in unison.
“Amendment: we know he’s racist, but we don’t know whether he’s the type of racist who hates brown women or the type who is really into brown women.”
“Ah. And if he’s the former, then that means one of the three of us gets kicked to the curb.”
“There’s also the fact,” Wes added, “that he’s seen both of you. And I don’t think those fancy dress clothes are enough of a disguise to keep him from noticing.”
Gilead knew that they were close to a complete plan of action, and he felt that the others saw it as well. Juniper scouting with her Pretension form, Shati—whatever that was—ready to help them escape, the ball providing them easy access. All that needed to be resolved was the matter of invitations, and the risk of being recognized.
That Juniper had figured it out was written all across her face. Not with the warmth of a surprise revelation though, but in a sudden pallor.
“I… oh no, nobody is going to like this one, I can tell. But… I have a suggestion.”