Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1871: Black Fang’s Move

*Shing.*

The sound crossed the courtyard alone, small yet absolute.

Iris held the drawn sword low at her side, red eyes level on the man who had once commanded the outpost she walked out of.

"I don’t have time for you." Her tone stayed conversational. "I’ll kill you first."

The courtyard went wrong in stages. Hands found hilts along the honor guard, one after another. The escort discovered it had no idea where to point its spears, at her or for her, and settled on trembling in place.

Up on the walls the count’s men stopped pretending to be furniture, and a warning left one of them as a squeak. A dropped spear rang on the stone like a bell. It stayed where it fell.

"Now this is more like it~"

Ayame arrived at Iris’s shoulder with her thumb already resting on her katana’s guard, and gave Stormlord a smile with nothing polite left in it.

"You’re already embarrassing yourself by refusing to act. We all know what’s going on here. Stop being pathetic."

Her chin tipped at the four columns standing over the inner wall.

"A man with nothing to hide doesn’t light four buildings in one night. He’s already confessing, just doing it with chimneys instead of words."

Stormlord did not look at it. "It’s smoke. Fires happen. This is not damning evidence."

"I see." Steel whispered a centimeter out of Ayame’s sheath.

One drawn investigator had been a crisis. Two of the continent’s monsters standing shoulder to shoulder was a sentence, and every armed man present had just heard it read aloud.

Stormlord stayed exactly where he was.

"I’ll not forgo written protocol because some outsiders demand it. If he’s lying, he’ll be prosecuted, as the law demands."

His gauntlets creaked at his sides, and his feet did not move, a king’s captain planted between two women because his king had put him there.

Count Corvane had gone grey above his collar. "Gentle... honored guests, surely..."

Not one head turned his way. That, at least, was new.

Felicity had gone still in the middle of all of it, her prepared sentences dead in her mouth.

She had asked for this post. Begged her father for it, actually begged, hands folded, the whole performance. Iris was finally close to the thing she’d been hunting, and Felicity had wanted to be part of handing it to her, certain her presence would count for something as a royal who was on her side.

She knew what the answers meant to her friend. Iris had only ever given her pieces of it.

And she had done everything right, every form, every courtesy, and the count had eaten her words one bow at a time while his chimneys ate the truth.

Now Iris and Stormlord stood a centimeter of steel apart in the courtyard of the house they had come to audit, and Stormlord had been guarding Felicity since she was light enough to ride on his shield arm.

All of it was hers.

The stall, the standoff, the whole curdled evening, because a princess with a royal seal and a practiced speech hadn’t been able to buy Iris one open door.

The guilt landed all at once, hot, under her breastplate where the seal hung.

Her eyes began to sting, her throat working hard.

Then a hand settled on her shoulder.

It came down light, and half the courtyard flinched harder for it, because the whole yard knew who it belonged to.

The Primordial Villain stood beside the princess of Vraven in the falling ash.

"Hey," he said, only to her. "You did good helping Iris. You’re a great friend."

The shout died in her throat.

Felicity looked up at him. His hand stayed easy on her pauldron, and behind him a courtyard full of steel waited for somebody to move first, and he had turned away from every bit of it to say those words to her.

The sting went out of her eyes, and her fists came open at her sides.

She smiled instead, small and soft, as if she had known from the very start that everything was going to be fine.

But Quinlan had promised Alexios he’d do this the right way.

Was ignoring Stormlord, Alexios’s military representative, the right way?

’Hmm. Let’s do "that" then-’

Black Fang was already ahead of him.

The Venomborne Terror reached into her sleeve and drew out a communication artifact.

The crystal pulsed twice before a voice climbed out of it, thin with distance and thick with age.

"...This channel has not opened in a very long time."

"It’s me."

Silence.

Then the old man’s voice came back at a volume that made the artifact buzz against her palm.

"BLACK FANG?! You- after everything, after every message I sent, you finally-"

"I need you to tell me what our archives have on a Ravenshade noble."

"..."

Something creaked at the far end of the connection. Something else was set down on a workbench.

"Haaah... Not one word in months, and the first one is an order to your elder." A dry sound followed it. "You have not changed even slightly. Which noble."

"Corvane."

"...Ah." All the wryness in the world arrived at once. "Corvane. Of course it is Corvane."

"What do you have?"

"What do I have." The old man said it back to her slowly. "That man, and the operation he represents, is the reason we do not operate properly in Ravenshade. That, and the skellies. So yes. We have files on Corvane. We have files on Corvane’s files."

Quinlan leaned into range of the artifact.

"Can you bring it here?"

On the other end, whatever the old man had been doing stopped.

"...Is that Devil."

"Hello, boss."

Technically, Quinlan was still a Vesper Phenom.

"You shameless- Ehem. The Consortium’s pride, standing in a duchy that is not his, on an open channel, while Black Fang holds the-"

"Time is of the essence, old man."

"...Everything is of the essence, young man. Discretion matters. Preparation matters. A dossier of that weight, properly copied, properly bound, properly-" the old man slowed, reaching for a comfortable number, "-I could have it ready by tomorrow evening."

"Now."

The old man went quiet.

"... You’re making an impossible request of this old man."

"Corvane is burning his papers. We need proof of him being a criminal scumbag so Stormlord stops barking at us."

"Ah. You should’ve started with that. My weary knees suddenly feel alive again."

"I’ll help you bring it to us."

Count Corvane had prepared for a princess. He had prepared for an investigator. There was no statute anywhere in the kingdom that covered the third thing.

The [Warp Gate] bloomed in the middle of his courtyard.

What stepped through was an old man in dark robes, grey beard down his chest, back stooped from a millennium of work, a leather case held under one arm.

He took two steps onto Corvane stone and blinked at the lanterns, then looked around a yard where a whole column of exhausted soldiers was being held upright by the dead.

Then he found Stormlord, adjusted the case, and produced a bow of respectable depth.

"Stormlord of the Aegis Vanguard." He straightened and held the case out to him. "Our noble establishment’s documents on this county, and on that wonderful man over there. Most of them written by his own people and... ’acquired’ by mine."

Behind the honor guard, Count Corvane had gone completely motionless.

"Huh?"

He had come through the crown’s letter, the princess, the investigator, the drawn steel, and he had held his shape through every one of them.

He looked at the man in the dark robes, and his rings began to rattle against each other.

He knew that face.

"Huh???"