Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1884: Rampaging Through Ravenshade

Iris Ravenclaw stood in the burned record-house exactly where the night had left her.

The stones lay whole and unmarked beneath her feet. Under them, in a separate dimension, Count Corvane was climbing.

She could feel him doing it.

That was new. Her hell hung off her like a second heartbeat now that she’d gotten a bit acclimated to it, and every push of the count’s ruined hands arrived in her chest as a warm coal.

’One,’ she thought. ’One is not enough.’

Boots crossed the scorched floor behind her, careful of the ash, and she knew them without turning.

"Iris. Before you start." Felicity had the king’s seal out of its case and a fresh warrant flat on the reading table, and she was dripping the wax onto it herself. "We need this on paper."

"Corvane was sentenced in front of a royal commission," Iris said. "It’s done."

"It’s done for Corvane." The princess pressed the seal down with both gauntlets and held it there until the wax took the impression. "It isn’t done for the next one, or the fifty after him. Because you’re not done just yet, are you?" she smiled.

"I’m not."

"Good!" Felicity beamed. "Then let’s do it like this. I’m not having some lawyer in the capital stand up and call it murder."

Stormlord read the warrant over her shoulder without a word, and whatever the commander of the Aegis Vanguard thought of the thing he was reading, he passed it down to the clerks and kept it behind his teeth.

"Every man your evidence convicts," Felicity said. "My seal, my father’s name on it, the whole commission watching. And you get to do it however you want!"

Iris looked at the wax. It was still soft.

"...You thought things through."

"Hehe! I did!" Felicity admitted, joyous.

A short breath left Iris’s nose. From anyone else it would have been a laugh.

Against the broken doorframe, arms folded, the Primordial Villain watched his justicar take the paper and left the night to her.

"Let’s begin," said the Demon of Vengeance. "We have a long night ahead."

...

The seam opened in the middle of the record-house floor, wide as a grave, and heat rolled out of it with the smell of cooked iron.

The scream arrived a heartbeat later.

"Corvane," Iris called.

His body stopped climbing.

The sound he made around the metal was a plea worn down to its gums.

"No," she said. "Talk."

In the world above, men hid things in ciphers, in cousins, in bought silence. Down there, in a land made of her promise, his whole life lay open like a gutted fish, and she simply looked.

The names came up through the heat. He didn’t even need to part his lips.

"Write," Iris said, and behind her the crown’s clerks bent over their boards. "The tax farmer of the eastern crossing is called Odam. The assessors above him answer to a cipher, a wheel with nine spokes. The wheel collects at the Silver Hollow granary on the first frost of every month."

The Mediator unrolled his map with great serenity and set a bony finger on Silver Hollow. "Fascinating. We had that granary listed as a smuggler’s rest. It seems we undersold it."

Corvane was weeping now, wet and doubled around the point, and she read him anyway, item by item, brick by brick, name by name.

His machine had one great cleverness. No man in it could name the man above him. Every thread ran upward into a cipher, and every cipher into smoke.

Every man in that machine knew almost everything below himself and some things beside himself, and the moment one of them fell into her domain, all of it was hers.

’They built a ladder no one could climb,’ Iris thought, rising from the crouch. ’Fine by me.’

’I’ll drag them down it instead.’

...

What followed was a harvest.

Quinlan opened gate after gate, and the duchy stopped being a distance.

The eastern crossing, an hour past full dark: the doors came off the strongroom, and the tax farmer Odam stood on his own false floor with a shovel.

"I only counted!" he screamed, backing into his own hidden silver. "Coin, only coin, I swear on my mother’s grave, I never touched a soul, the count made us..."

"You did more than that," Iris said. "You can keep counting for the rest of time."

The floor opened.

[Resident: 7.]

Her domain had grown a new district while she walked to his door, and it took him screaming.

A counting-house of black iron stood roofless under the ember sky, and at the middle of it a crucible the size of a coffin tipped molten silver down into the open hands of him and his cronies.

Odam’s palms went first. The metal ate through them, kept going, and cooled somewhere past the wrist, leaving him two fistfuls of glowing slag in a cage made of his own finger bones. He could feel every coin of it.

He had to count them.

The domain wanted columns, neat ones, and it would not let his arms stop until the tally came out right. So he stacked. The silver welded his fingers shut around the stack, the stack went over into his lap, and it opened both his thighs to the bone in two straight hissing lines on the way down.

"Forty-one!" Odam shrieked up at the sky of that place. "FORTY-ONE, IT’S FORTY-ONE, I COUNTED IT, I-"

It wasn’t. Something in the pile ran, or fused, or cooled wrong, so the tally came up one short, and the crucible tipped again.

His hands grew back around the metal still inside them. That was the kindness of the district. New skin, new nerves, old silver cooking underneath, and a fresh pour already coming.

By the fourth tally he had stopped making words and was only making a number-shaped noise, wet at the edges, because his own screaming had torn something loose in his chest and the domain had not seen fit to mend that part.

...

Silver Hollow in the small hours: the chief clerk of the circuit had written nineteen years of dissolution orders in a fine, patient hand.

"I wrote what they gave me!" he wept onto the crown’s warrant. "Word for word! That was all of it, that was my whole crime, I never chose a single name..."

"No."

Iris didn’t even entertain the claim, for she knew the truth. The count himself had shown her that these people were more than forced hands.

The deep district took him at the desks, and it began skinning him alive.

His back came off first. It lifted away in long cured sheets with the meat steaming underneath, and each sheet was trimmed square, smoothed flat, and hung to dry on a line strung above his own head, where he could watch his skin stiffen.

He screamed the whole time he watched it dry.

"I wrote what they gave me!" It came out of him wet and torn, over and over, at a sky that had no interest in it. "I ONLY WROTE WHAT THEY GAVE ME!"

He was awake through all of it. The domain kept his heart beating, held his eyes open, and left him nothing to do with any of it except make noise. The noise went on so long it stopped sounding like a man and started sounding like a hinge.

Then the domain sat what was left of him upright at a desk, laid a length of white-hot wire in his fist, and closed his own fingers around it.

"Ledger the first," said his voice, out of a mouth that had not agreed to open. "True entries."

The domain took one sheet down off the line and flattened it on the desk, and his hand began to write on his own skin.

The wire burned the letters black through the page and cooked his palm shut around itself with every stroke. What it wrote were the entries he had been paid to leave out: the names, the ages, the children, the baronies, the dates.

He wrote until the sheet was full. Then the domain reviewed his work, found one error, peeled him fresh, and put the wire back in his hand.

[Resident: 16.]

...

The assessors of nine crossings followed.

Then the handler with the wheel-of-nine-spokes signet, dug out of a granary cellar, and the collectors, taken on the roads with their satchels still full.

Every one of them was innocent, by their own screaming account, of everything except the one small piece they had personally signed.

Iris let each of them talk, wondering if any of them would do anything other than lie.

They didn’t.