.
For months, up until the encounter with Jurmat in the cavern near Cara Ita, the Hero’s Party chased the shadows of demons from the Dragonsbacks to the North, looking for an explanation for the demonic attacks happening across the kingdom. It was surely a job for the intelligence forces of the Royal Knights, but the leadership of the Knights believed the demons were coming by the most obvious route, via ships from ports in or near the Regaritan Empire into the ports of the Eastern and Southern coasts.
They believed it for good reason. The bulk of demonic activities were in the heavily populated center and south, in short range of the major seaports. And the Great Wall is a barrier with absolutely no known mountain passes for sixteen hundred miles from Hamalgaar to Relador.
But a certain curvy, gorgeous priestess had sacrificed her pride and virginity to convince Ryuu to believe an oracle from her senior priestess that the Royal Knights had ignored, and thus, while the Knights looked to the sea, the Hero’s Party headed into the mountains to look for secret passages through the Great Wall from the Demonic Wastes.
The party found enough to keep going, but they kept hitting dead ends.
Eventually, the others in the party convinced Ryuu to give up on the mountain route and the oracle, but decided that the clues were pointing to an actual threat on the northern coast. As a result, the Hero’s Party made the trek across the north from Bray Seaport to Hamagaar and Cara Ita, and you know the rest.
The readers back on Earth, including me, had thought the priestess had misled Ryuu, and might even be working for the demons. Sex had not exactly been an upright, wholesome way to coax him, especially for a priestess. Of course, none of the Hero’s Party was bothered by it, since they didn’t know about the sex part. I only knew about it thanks to the novel.
As I watched Lucy flitter around, now out of the stealth area and inspecting the Wind spirit, I was confronting Dilorè’s evidence that we readers had sorely maligned that poor priestess. And that I should be slapped silly for feeling she had gotten her comeuppance when she discovered that she was pregnant (a fact that Ryuu didn’t know about yet. Of course, I didn’t know for certain that the pregnancy was real and not a dramatic license by the author.) I made a mental note to ‘accidentally’ discover her condition and Ryuu’s responsibility when I could. After so many readers had thought wrongly of her, she deserved at least that much.
No, that wasn’t the issue I should have been thinking about at that moment. I made myself focus on the current issues at hand. There were a large number of demons, enough for Dilorè to be talking about a ‘base’ at the end of this tunnel down to Ilim Below.
Dilorè had been letting the implications of the Wind spirit’s discovery sink in for a bit. Now, she declared, “So, our next move ought to be obvious.”
Brigitte frowned at her and said, “If you’re saying we should run, I say no. It’s even more important now to hurry down there to get the princess.”
My cousin held up a cautioning hand. “I agree with you, Miss Brigitte. She may in fact be in the Demons’ clutches right this very moment. However, we cannot all go. It is equally vital that someone get back to Allia and report. The demons may be lurking out where our comrades are, as well. So, we must decide who goes where.”
“Both of you should go back to the party,” I answered immediately. “I have the best chance on my own.”
“I don’t agree,” Dilorè countered. “No matter which direction the groups go, the groupings will have to be you and Miss Brigitte going together, and myself on my own.”
Both Brigitte and I blinked in confusion at her, and Brigitte’s ears went through some odd contortions.
“Why?” she demanded.
“We have demons above us and demons below us. And I do not believe your stealth will hide you from demons at the level of imps, my dear. Perhaps you might get lucky and pass them by evading their direct line of sight, but if one of them chances to look in your direction, you will be seen.”
“It doesn’t require luck!” the fox-kin shot back.
“No, Miss Brigitte,” I answered, as I grew to understand both Dilorè’s issue and an even bigger one. “She’s right. All demons have a strong Darkness affinity, and your stealth is pure darkness. At the level of an imp, even if they don’t see you, they’ll sense the magic being used and know something’s up. They’ll be looking around for you.”
“Your stealth uses Darkness too, doesn’t it?” she challenged
“That’s a guess, I assume,” I said. “You don’t know anything about my stealth. Although you’re right that it uses Darkness, but, unlike yours, mine is a vampire racial skill. It adds a non-elemental mana to hide the Darkness mana, a stealth to disguise the stealth.”
Dilorè looked at me with an odd expression.
I frowned at her. “What?”
She quoted, “‘A non-elemental mana’?”
My ears burned a little. I had just let a little Senhion knowledge slip into my explanation. “What you and I have discussed before. The undetectable extra element to racial magics like fairy and vampire magics.”
“Mm,” she nodded as she understood it. “That makes sense, to call it that.”
“So, what you are saying is, Miss Brigitte cannot go by herself,” I summarized. “But why can’t she go with you rather than me?”
Dilorè shook her head. “The spell I’m using now can successfully hide her in a fixed location, but for stealth in motion, the only magic I have that would defeat demon sight at the level of imps can hide only myself. Only you are capable of hiding Miss Brigitte on the move.”
She tipped her head, crossed her arms, and declared, “That’s why I should go down into the cavern and look for her. I have a rough understanding of her location from the spot you’ve shown me up on the surface.”
I struggled with two very conflicting issues, but the one that carried the most weight was indicating that Dilorè could not be the one to go into Ilim Below.
“My Lady, you don’t have Lord Moram’s permission to use Lucy, through which I have contact with his flock of contracted spirits which are searching for Amelia.”
My cousin immediately pounced on the counter-argument that was already in my brain. “But, Your Highness, if you had Miss Brigitte along and found Princess Amelia, you couldn’t carry both of them out of danger. Miss Brigitte would become a liability rather than an asset.”
“Excuse me?” Brigitte flared. “Who you calling a liability?”
Dilorè was about to start arguing with her. I held up my hand. “Stop it. There are no liabilities here, My Lady. Brigitte and I are heading down. You head back and report, and Allia can sort it out from there. She’ll need you to help deal with demons, so don’t report and then come running back looking for us.”
With her arms crossing a second time, Dilorè declared, “His Majesty ordered my master and I to protect you. I can’t let you face a danger on that level alone!”
“Your master?” Brigitte asked, confused.
“I’m the apprentice of a royal knight of His Majesty the Fairy King,” Dilorè declared. “And Her Highness is our charge.”
I crossed my arms too. “The thing is, when His Majesty King Owen accoladed me as his royal knight, I swore to protect his crown and his family against all enemies. The woman we are looking to rescue is precisely that. I cannot leave that job to someone who stands a poorer chance of locating and rescuing her than I do!”
“You are our king’s princess! You can’t say one is more important than the other!”
“If you are bound by a royal knight’s oath, then why are you defying this princess’s order?”
“Your grandfather’s order takes precedence!”
I raised my chin. “How would running off into danger by yourself without a plan constitute defending me?”
Dilorè stared at me, exasperated. “You really are my grandmother’s cousin, aren’t you? This is just like arguing with her!”
I almost slipped into a giggle, but fortunately kept my face straight. I don’t know Princess Somire very well, so I had no reply for her complaint, but it certainly was a signal that she was out of counters. And I still had my closing argument. “You know next to nothing about Ilim Below. I have knowledge of it, better resources for finding Her Highness, and no imp or fiend is my match. The ones who need your protection right now are our comrades who don’t know they are in danger. Miss Brigitte and I are going down to get Amelia back. You will return to the party. That’s final.”
Her mouth set for a bit and I thought she might continue, but her shoulders dropped and she nodded. “Fine.”
“We’ll get going then,” I declared, about to turn and head to the staircase down.
“Wait,” my cousin said. She tapped her chin as she mused, “It’s really too bad that we don’t have that pair of talking stones from Sidis. We could use them right now.”
I had one in my wallet at that moment, but she meant it was too bad she didn’t have the other.
“You want some sort of communication tool to keep in touch?” I asked. When she nodded, I pointed at Lucy’s pouch. “You can talk to spirits. She can talk to spirits at a long distance. Can the two of you talk?”
“Hm,” she considered it. “I’m not sure how I would rig that directly. She can’t contract with me since she’s contracted with Lord Moram.”
“What about using that?” I asked, pointing at the space above the magic circle still glowing on the floor.
She looked over at the Wind spirit who was still floating there, as she hadn’t dismissed it yet. It probably wasn’t bothered by being trapped there while we argued. Spirits don’t have the same sense of time as living creatures. But it was indeed trapped until she dismissed the circle.
“That’s a thought. Lucy, can you come here?” she called over to the spirit clone flittering around the room.
Lucy came flying over to us. “Here!”
Dilorè held up her hand and began the lip-motion non-speech again. It carried on for some time.
Brigitte asked me quietly, “Do spirits really understand that?”
In a low voice, I told her my theory, “I think she just does that subconsciously while her brain is focused on whatever she’s really doing to communicate.”
Brigitte gave me a quizzical look that told me that what I was trying to explain hadn’t gotten across, then shrugged.
Dilorè nodded, then produced her wand and chanted an incantation in a language I wasn’t familiar with. A large magic circle appeared in the air, perpendicular to the circle on the ground. A second one appeared around the same center as the first, horizontal to the floor. The original circle vanished and the two new ones began slowly rotating around the spirit. It looked like a huge gyroscope, centered on the Wind spirit.
She looked over at me. “It wanted more Healing mana. I think it was spooked when it saw all the demons down there. Since I can’t channel it, I can’t use Healing mana for a continuing contract, so it’s accepting elemental mana from me instead. Would you be willing to gift him some more Healing anyway, as assistance to an ally?”
“Why does a spirit need Healing?” I wondered, although I drew Durandal and coated him with Healing anyway.
“[Purification] is their best defense against demons,” she explained. “It’s extremely valuable to them.”
“And what exactly is it you and the spirits are planning?” I asked. I saw the thin stream of mana start again, from sword to stone to Wind spirit.
“That’s right,” she nodded. “I didn’t tell you yet. I’m setting up a communication method that spirit trainers use between each other. It occurred to me that Lucy is similar to a contracted spirit for you. He agreed to enter a self-bound contract with me. We’ll pass messages through the two.”
