Black Knight - Chapter 9 (Patreon)

“Oh!” says Acacia, lightly holding her fingers over her mouth. “How terribly clumsy of me!” she says in a high tone, watching the white fabric handkerchief drop down off of the edge of the railing of the high balcony. It lands down, several floors below on top of a snow-laden, leafless hedge that is growing near the wall of the grand house in a very difficult to reach position given the fully blooming growths all around it. The garden of the significant estate is, in essence, a forest in and of itself. But given the winter season, most of it is currently nothing more than bramble, briers, and thick, deep mud.

A count is a lesser tier of nobility, the least noble of all nobles, in fact. However, compared to the wealth possessed by even the merchant class of the city, they live in decadent opulence. So much so that even their distant family benefits generously from that wealth.

Acacia turns her head, looking at the blue haired, elf maid and servant to the master of the house, who is standing there very stiffly with her hands folded together at her front and her eyes as closed as her tightly locked fingers and pursed lips. “Oh, be an absolute dear and help me with that, would you please?” asks Acacia in a tone that could be understood as being incredibly and almost otherworldly pleasant.

Junis, the elf, curtsies with a rather strained look on her face, her pursed lips almost trembling as she quietly shuffles off down toward the very large flight of stairs that they’ve just walked up a moment ago to the third floor.

“Do pardon me. You were saying?” she asks, looking at the well dressed man next to them. It isn’t the Count or the Count’s cousin. Rather, it’s the security advisor of the former, who is in charge of this particular estate’s affairs. He’s an older gentleman, with a neatly trimmed and groomed white beard and a golden buttoned, well fitted, dark overcoat that makes him look more like a captain of the seas than a man of the finer things in life.

“All of our security measures were bypassed,” he explains, looking out over the courtyard. He gestures out from the top of the balcony, over to the wrought iron fence that surrounds the property. “The fence itself is closely watched at all times by several patrols,” he explains. “Additionally, it's enchanted. If anybody had tried to climb it, we would know immediately.”

“I see,” replies Acacia. They’re here at the estate of the Count in order to assist in finding and capturing an unknown thief or thieves who had stolen something of personal value to the Count and his family. After their success with the local den of thieves in the city, word of her and Sir Knight found its way here to this particular man — the security advisor of the estate — who had sent for them in particular. “How many entrances are there to the grounds?”

“Two,” he replies, gesturing to the large front gate that they had driven in through with their carriage. It’s an ornate spectacle in and of itself; the iron bars are woven together in a display of exquisite craftsmanship that likely itself cost more than most of the homes in the city do as full structures. “The front gate and the servants’ entrance are in the back,” he explains. “Both are closely guarded at all times, and all servants are routinely inspected before leaving.”

Acacia nods. “Was the thief someone from inside?” she asks. “Or do you suspect outsiders?”

The implication here is, of course, that this system of theirs is easy to circumvent. If a guard were bribed to let a servant leave, say, with a piece of the stolen loot, then there isn’t much security at all. But this was just a very polite way of asking the man if he has rats in his nest. Nobles love to talk around the point.

He shakes his head, reading her message loud and clear. “The inspections take place with random teams every night. Four on each gate and always within eyesight of each other,” he explains.

Acacia nods. A good system. Set up like this with a random element and a large number of witnesses, corruption can’t take place as it is deeply unlikely for all eight courtyard guards to be bought off and also keep silent about it. Even if one fails in their morality, there’s no way to be sure that this guard would be the one to search you if you left the premises with stolen goods. More so, even if, by sheer luck, the thief and the bribed guard aligned, they'd still have to undergo the inspection in sight of the others.

— At least, that is, if the thief is a servant.

“The guard team is all your own hand-picked people?” she asks.

Again, a polite question. She’s really asking if the thief couldn’t be one of his men rather than a servant. It would be much easier for a guard to steal something, than a servant.

He shakes his head. “The guards live on the premises six days a week,” he explains. “On their seventh day, they’re checked before they leave.”

Acacia nods. So it can’t have been a guard or a servant. That means whoever stole whatever is missing is an outsider to the premises.

“I see,” replies Acacia, looking down over the edge of the balcony. A smug, cold smile crosses her closed lips as she rests her elbows down on the railing, folding her fingers together loosely and resting her chin on them as she watches the maid down below lift her dress up with both hands to wade through the muck so she can get to the hedge all the way in the back. “May I ask what in particular is missing?” asks Acacia, her eyes never leaving Junis. “And where was it located?”

The man is quiet for a time, standing there with his hands behind his back.

— Junis the elf snags her now mud coated boot on a root, flailing with her arms wildly for a time in an effort to catch her balance. Yelping, she falls over down onto her knees, her hands and legs sinking deeply into the mud. Acacia smiles.

The security advisor clears his throat.

“The act took place in the master bedroom of the state,” explains the chief of security.

Acacia nods, thinking that she understands. “A sensitive item?” she guesses.

It isn’t uncommon for there to be certain… proclivities within the noble families. Having money allows for a lot of free time, and free time allows for a lot of free spirited ideas. However, the culture is often far behind what happens behind locked doors in places like this. These things are socially delicate. Reputation is, after all, what matters most to the noble class.

That would explain why they’ve been called rather than a team of professional investigators from other noble houses. Sure, they did well in their first real job. But they’re still total nobodies by the standards of the world. For a count to have noticed them is very improbable.

That is, of course, unless he needs some forgettable people to solve his unusual problem without risking his reputation being tarnished.

The stolen item might not have been stolen because of its monetary value. It might have been stolen for the purposes of blackmail. Acacia fights herself to look away from Junis, who has managed to crawl back up to her feet by bracing herself against the cold stone walls of the building with her filthy hands, and looks at the officer.

“In a manner of speaking,” replies the man. He looks her way. “I trust that you understand the nature of this information that I am sharing with you?” he asks.

“I understand,” replies Acacia, her shoulder overhanging black cloak billowing. “I will take it to my family’s mausoleum.”

— A slight twist of a common phrase. ‘Graves’ are for the poors.

The cold wind coats the estate for a time, as the man then nods, apparently satisfied with her. “The Count,” he explains.

“Yes?” asks Acacia. “What of him?”

The man shakes his head. “He is what has been stolen,” explains the chief of security. Acacia’s eyes go wide. “He’s been kidnapped.”

________________________________

~ [Junis] ~

She hates this. It stinks so badly down here. Is it the mud? The dead plants?

The elf stares down at the mud she had fallen into, looking at the animal paw prints there next to her own imprint. It looks like some kind of fox or something was here before her.

Junis, being a professional, does not cry at work. Professionals cry when they get home from work.

But she is pretty close to breaking. This is the worst. Out of all the rotten luck, how in the world did Acacia end up here out of all people? Did she really read the girl wrong entirely this entire time? She would have bet her life’s savings that she was just some poor girl with poor luck from some poor family. But…

Sniffling, the elf with very cold ears, holds her mud covered dress as she sloshes through the hedges near the wall and reaches up through the spiky bramble that cuts her fingers and snags on her wet sleeves to grab the handkerchief.

Worse still is that he’s here — that man, Sir Knight. After everything she’s tried to do to get him away from Acacia.

After everything she’s been trying to do for that girl, everything has just gone entirely wrong. Why? She’s not a bad person. She doesn’t deserve this.

She stretches herself up onto the tips of her now soaked and cold toes, icy water having long since pressed in through her shoes that are very much not made for the outdoors. Her just as cold fingers grab the edge of the handkerchief and pull it down, perhaps a little too harshly.

— Something rustles in the dead bushes nearby.

The delicate fabric square catches on a thorn and rips.

Junis the elf stares at it and at the large hole running straight through its center, her lip trembling now, and not just because it’s cold. She really is about to cry.

Doing her best to compose herself, the mess of a maid quietly folds the torn handkerchief neatly together, running her fingers over the expensive embroidery as she begins on her return journey. Maybe she can just say that it was ripped when she found it?

Ugh, it stinks here. Was it like this in the summer?

With everything that’s happened here now, the last thing she needs is to get into trouble. This job is everything. She can’t afford to lose it.

Taking a deep breath through her nose, she straightens her back and recomposes herself.

This is fine.

It’s just a little mud and dirt. She’ll wash herself off, sew the handkerchief, and put on some clean socks. In an hour or so, Acacia and that man will be gone, and she, despite the embarrassment of the situation, will continue to live life like always. The future is going to come, and Acacia isn’t in the academy anymore, so she’ll never hear anything about this ever again once today is over. Everything will go back to how it was tomorrow.

Nodding to herself and feeling freshly confident, Junis begins to trudge out of the dark corner. The bush next to her rustles, and the girl loses her balance again as her foot is snagged a second time. She falls, thick, heavy mud splashing only inches away as it constrains her to her wrists as if it were trying to swallow her. Her knees sink in, and her foot is bent somewhat. A flash of hot pain shoots through her body in an instant as something gives way by her ankle.

Her green eyes turn to look as the smell intensifies — the smell of something foul and rotting.

A sunken in, soggy human face with pale, too soft skin that seems to be falling from the bones pushes out of the dead bushes and underbrush toward her, its tone the exact shade as the milky off-white of its eyes. Junis screams, her shrill cry carrying far through the still winter air.

She kicks, crawls, cries, and screams all at the same time. The thing that had snagged her boot wasn’t a root. It was a hand.

Flopping through the mud in horror, her fingers reaching outward, she scrambles. Dry wood crackles and breaks inches from her as the thing crawls and tries to drag her back toward it. Her soaked through shoe is pulled off by the grabbing hand as soft, soggy fingernails rip loose as they try to grab her leg, the dulled and snagged edges cutting halfway through her stocking before they fall off. The fabric breaks just as much as the nails do, the softened things fully ripping off of the wet, waterlogged hands and embedding themselves into the half torn fabric.

Turning onto her back, Junis tries to crawl back, kicking its face violently with the sole of her other shoe, getting it to let go for a brief second as she pulls her caught leg away and finally manages to get up to her feet. She tries to run, but the thick, dense slush of mud and dead plant matter seems to be gripping her, holding her in place and making every step harder than it should be. It’s like running in a dream. Her body isn’t moving as fast as she wants it to, and all the while, dead wood crackles and breaks just behind her. The first ‘step’ she takes, putting weight on the hurt leg, causes her to drop again. It hurts. Something’s wrong with it. Something groans behind her, its breathless voice carrying up to her long ears past the sounds of her own screaming.

— The light of the day vanishes as something towers over her. Junis barely has time to look away from the frothing undead as a large, hulking shadow roughly grabs her from the front. Her legs pull free from the mud that had seemingly gone out of its way to hold her there, her shins and ankles pulling free with a wet schlock as she rises into the air, kicking and yelling up a storm, her legs and arms flailing against metal in her desperate fight for life.

A second later, they lurch. A massive sword, held in a single hand of equal size, plunges down through the skull of the zombie, splitting it down to its neck.

“Sir Knight!” calls a voice from far above. Junis, loosely slumped over a large shoulder like a sack of tubers, looks up and behind them at the balcony above. Acacia and the Chief of the Guard are there, looking down. “Look out!” she yells, pointing into the gardens.

All around the area, the mud and the plants begin to shift and move. Dead roots are ripping free from the underground, as fingers press up through the soil. Rotting bones and dead tissue break out from below, all across the courtyard. Dozens of zombies in varying states of decay begin to rise to motion.

Whistles sharply cry through the air as an alarm is raised. Guards run around the estate, collecting together in small groups of twos and threes. Servants scream and run for shelter.

Junis yelps as she is, rather gracelessly, rearranged. “You’d have been in better shape if you did the rest of those laps around the city,” says Sir Knight dryly as he turns back toward the courtyard.

“Put me down!” yells Junis, receiving her wish immediately and without a moment’s hesitation. The elf grimaces, tightly clenching her teeth together with a pained hiss, as she braces herself on a nearby banister, looking down at her leg. It’s honestly impossible to really see anything. She’s covered in a thick layer of caked mud. “- I think something’s wrong with my foot. It might be -” she hisses in distress, looking up then only to see a large, heavy hand moving toward her body.

Her own heart strikes audibly in her ears. Assuming the worst as the despicably shady man reaches for her in her moment of distress, she gets ready to scream again.

— Sir Knight takes Acacia’s dropped handkerchief out of her apron pocket, looking it over before quietly tucking it away inside his cloak. “Oh. That’s rough,” he remarks dryly to her. “Bye,” says Sir Knight, turning around and then just walking away.

Junis stares blankly after him as he goes. He stops only for a second during his exit to crush the rising skull of a zombie with his heavy boot.

“…Wait!” she calls after him. Sir Knight turns his head around. “Are you just going to leave me here?” asks Junis. “I’ll die!” she explains, pointing down to her bad leg.

He stares at her from a few steps away, tilting his head. He holds his hands out at his side in a sort of half-hearted pseudo shrug. “You sounded pretty confident with that ‘put me down’ thing,” he replies. “I figured you were fine.”

She purses her lips, gulping as she looks around the garden as more and more undead begin to pull themselves free. Several of them are already on their way to them or the other guardsmen.

— The hedge behind her rustles.

Junis sharply screams and does her best to escape by herself in order to spare the last, tiny shred of dignity she has left, hobbling away a few steps.

___________________________________________

“Please never tell anyone about this,” says Junis, her arms wrapped around his neck from behind. “My life will be over.”

Her escape attempt did not go well. She made it three more steps before she fell against him, her face smushing right into his armor. As Acacia’s guardian and representative, he can’t just leave her to die while they’re here at work. It would be terrible for her image, even if Acacia does deeply loathe Junis. The elf had regularly gone out of her way to be very cruel to her during their time together at the academy.

Sir Knight, holding an undead at arm’s length to look it over, turns his head to look at Junis, who has her arms wrapped around his neck and her legs around his chest as she clings onto him, presumably not too happy about the fact that his armor is ice cold. Metal armor is always unfortunate in the depths of winter, and it's even worse if one doesn’t have a body inside of it to radiate warmth.

But a cold ride beats getting eaten.

“Yeah,” replies Sir Knight. “You’re really going to lose a lot if this ever gets out,” he replies sarcastically, looking at the elf in a muddy, tattered maid’s dress, not even sure what the point she is making here is. He can only assume that she doesn’t want to lose the reputation she’s built for herself at the academy as the queen of the social elite there. That position wouldn’t be hers anymore if any of the other students ever found out that she had to work, like some kind of poor person. Let alone as someone else’s servant.

Sure, the students at the academy aren’t all rich. But the popular ones all are.

This is a clear contrast in mindsets.

For a person from the lower class or even the merchant class to be allowed to work as a servant for a true noble is essentially what ‘making it in life’ can be defined as. It’s the pinnacle, the highest aspiration. These people will live lives that the rest of the working class can only dream of.

Yet on the exact other side of that same coin, for someone from the noble side of society to be working in such a position is a true diminishment of their status.

“Wait, are you even a noble?” he asks.

“— Will you please do something about that!” she screams, pointing over his shoulder and looking away from the zombie that he’s been holding in the air for this entire time.

“Oh.” Sir Knight looks at it, trying to figure it out. “Do you usually have undead here?”

“I assure you that we do not!” argues Junis, practically screaming again as the zombie reaches out for her. Her arms both tightly wrap themselves around his neck as if she were trying to choke him out, her legs causing the metal of his armor to buckle a little from the pressure of her latching on to him in terror. “There have never been any monsters here! KILL IT!”

Shadows leak out of his gauntlet, and long, whispering tendrils snake along his fingers toward the hollow skull of the person who has long since been dead. They creep and reach into it, joining the many worms present within it already. Caked soil and rot fall from its jawless face.

Sir Knight uses his abilities to sense the nature of the monster.

This isn’t just some undead spawned into the world through the magic of a dungeon, some imaginary, fake construct.

This is a real corpse, belonging to a real person, that has really been brought back to unlife and there is something familiar about it. Something that he recognizes but can’t quite place.

“Does the Count have any enemies?” he asks. His other hand rises up, grabbing the zombie’s head and then breaking it off to the side with a twist. Junis screams. “What? You told me to kill it.”

“What are you?!” she yells, looking at him in horror.

Sir Knight leans away. “Deaf, now,” he replies, walking over the other ten zombies he has already re-killed.

“The Count?” asks Sir Knight, grabbing his sword as he walks into the estate from the outside. Mud and blood line the floors, with messy footprints and streaks leading in all directions. The undead have flooded the building.

“His Grace is a noble,” replies Junis hesitantly. “He has thousands of enemies.”

“Sure, and what about the count’s weird cousin?” asks Sir Knight.

“Cousin?” asks Junis, thinking for a moment. “Oh, you mean Marok Ersteig?” she asks. “He hasn’t been here for years now,” she explains.

“What?” Sir Knight looks at her. “Are you sure?” he asks. “We got an invitation from him personally.”

Junis looks at his turned helmet with a confused expression. She shakes her head, her short blue hair moving. “I’m sure. I’ve been working here for two years now,” she explains. “I’ve never seen him before.”

Shit.

Sir Knight lifts his gaze up toward the upper floors. They’ve been set up. This was a trap.

The magic, the paw print in the mud, the fake invitation.

— It’s the enemy. They’ve come for Acacia again.

“Hold on,” says Sir Knight, grabbing the elf and prying her free to her horror with an easy yank, before then, to her even greater horror, shoving her down below his arm and into his cloak. His body fades away into a cloud of black mist in an instant, quickly shooting up toward the distant floor above as he begins sensing where Acacia is.

___________________________

~[Acacia]~

“But we had… a deal…”

The engraved shortsword falls to the floor, clattering away with a loud rattle as the chief of security of the estate wraps his hands around the other blade, which is plunged through his chest. He splutters, as his opponent lets go of his own weapon and allows him to fall over and die by himself.

Turning to look her way, the tall man with sharp, wolfish features looks at her. His hand, covered in a white glove, lowers itself in a twirling flourish toward his heart as he bows himself to her with noble etiquette.

“Good evening,” says the gracefully lanky man, who is clearly from the other continent. His blond hair in sharp tufts, his vivid eyes, and the features of his body are all undeniable markers of his lineage. That’s ignoring the more obvious statement of his sleek, dark uniform. “It is my honor to meet you again, Your Majesty,” he starts. He lifts his gaze. “- Princess Acacia Odofreudos Krone.” His other hand extends itself outward toward her. “If you would be so kind as to accompany me?” he requests politely.

A small, bony finger is pointed his way.

Acacia, her nose lifted, looks at him and replies as is proper form with tact, elegance, and the wondrous simplicity that is most befitting of her ownership of one of the most gracious titles of the nation — Princess.

“Die.”

(Acacia) has FAILED to cast: [Minor Bolt]

Her finger sparks for a moment, but does nothing more than that. The man’s smile never loses its charm as he watches her, having enough manners to not laugh at her good attempt.

— Metal rattles all around them in a ring.

Sir Knight’s soldiers enter into the room from the many doors, creating a circle around him.

“My name is Fee Videlius Kaisersgrab,” he says, introducing himself. “It will my greatest honor to escort you back to the fatherland, Your Majesty.”

Acacia looks his way as the soldiers ready their weapons.

“Mr. Kaisersgrab,” says Acacia, her finger still pointing his way. “I believe you did not hear my prior request,” she says, narrowing her eyes. The man still smiles like a polite butler would at a bad joke. “- Die.”

The soldiers move in all at once as she starts to charge another spell.

(Acacia) has begun channeling: [Minor Summon]