Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Count Corvane knew that face.

The knowledge was written all over him, and every soul in the torchlit courtyard could read it.

Stormlord took the case from the old man’s hands.

"NO!" The word tore out of the count before wisdom could catch it. "I will not... This is outrageous! Stolen ledgers! Forgeries, peddled by cutthroats and poison-merchants! Your Highness, this... this creature offers you criminal contraband and calls it evidence! No court in Vraven would seat the word of the Vesper Consortium against a peer of the realm!"

Ash drifted between the lanterns. On the wall, one of the count’s own men shifted his grip, armor creaking in the hush.

Felicity tilted her head. "The Vesper Consortium?"

"Count." Her voice came out small and clear, and it carried to every corner of the yard. "I get the impression that you knew him on sight."

Corvane’s mouth stopped working.

"Care to explain yourself?" The princess took one step forward, gauntlets loose at her sides.

Silence.

"Do answer, my lord." The old man leaned on nothing in particular, grey eyes politely interested, hands folded into his sleeves. "I confess I am curious myself."

"B-Black Fang called him! She’s well known-"

"Black Fang can call in favors with many people. I asked where you know his face from."

The count’s answer began three separate times, and each attempt died faster than the one before it, because every road out of that question ran through the same gate, and the gate was a confession.

Felicity watched him drown for exactly as long as he deserved, then turned her head and looked at Stormlord.

She did not say a word. She had spent every courtesy she had on this courtyard, every form observed, and the count had swallowed all of them. The look she gave her father’s commander was the end of that patience, a princess of Vraven done asking.

Stormlord met her gaze for a moment before he opened the case.

He read standing, unhurried, while the count found his voice again and spent it at volume on jurisdiction, on statute, on the indignity of a royal commission entertaining gutter documents on noble stone. Stormlord turned pages through all of it without lifting his eyes once.

"Investigator." He held out one gauntleted hand, still reading. "The third holding’s books."

Iris pulled the rope off her shoulders one-handed, sword still naked in the other, and threw the whole bundle across the courtyard.

Stormlord caught it without looking up from the page.

He set the crown’s seized ledger beside the Consortium’s copy on the flat of the case. His eyes went left, right, left again, down thirty years of parallel columns written by different hands, agreeing with each other to the coin.

Corvane ran out of statute somewhere in the middle of it. Nobody in the courtyard breathed especially well after that.

Then Stormlord closed the case and looked at the count, and delivered his verdict with the same iron flatness he had used to block a drawn sword.

"I said a court or damning evidence." He handed the case to the sergeant at his shoulder. "This is damning evidence."

Somewhere behind him, Ayame grinned. "Finally."

"You cannot..." Corvane began.

"Count Corvane. On suspicion of levying an unlicensed toll upon crown roads across thirty years, on suspicion of commanding criminal enterprises in your lands, and of burning records demanded under royal seal." Stormlord’s voice rose to fill the yard, pitched for fields far larger than this one. "By the authority of the commission of audit, you are detained for the crown’s judgment. Take him."

The courtyard moved, and it moved away from him.

His honor guard, the polished men in polished ring mail who had lined his approach with lanterns, stepped backward out of the light in ones and twos, hands finding their way off their hilts. They left a wide, respectful, empty lane between their lord and the commission’s soldiers.

His steward had already vanished somewhere between one shout and the next.

By the time the crown’s men reached him, Count Corvane stood entirely alone in the middle of his own courtyard.

"Hands off me! HANDS OFF!" The composure that had survived a princess, an investigator, and two drawn blades came apart all at once. "I am a COUNT of VRAVEN! My house has held these borders for generations! You are arresting the WRONG..."

They took his arms. His boots furrowed the gravel.

"I have friends! You have no idea what you are touching! There are people who will... who..."

"What friends?" Felicity asked sweetly. "Are any of them named Ravenshade?"

The count’s sentence went nowhere, at full volume, in front of everyone.

"Corvane’s holding stands with the crown!" someone called from the wall, quite loudly, twice.

"COWARDS! TRAITORS!" The count’s head whipped toward his own walls, and somewhere in the whipping, the understanding finally landed: nobody was coming.

His face went from red to grey in the space of one breath, and the sweat at his collar turned cold.

The fright, when it took him, took him completely.

"Wait." His voice came out at half its size, cracking in the middle. "Wait, wait, WAIT! I can pay. Whatever the crown believes it is owed, my vaults... I will open my vaults! I am an old man, I have served, I have served..."

His legs stopped carrying their share of him, and the two soldiers adjusted their grips without breaking stride. His rings rattled against their vambraces like dice in a cup.

He found Felicity’s face and aimed everything he had left at it. "Your Highness! I appeal to the crown! Mercy! I demand... I BEG the crown’s mercy!"

Felicity didn’t even reply, merely watching with a soft smile as the man was taken away.

The guardsmen half-carried him through the gate arch of his own keep. The screaming thinned into begging, and the begging got smaller and smaller until the night took it entirely.

*Shink.*

Iris’s sword went home for the first time since the parley began. She rolled the shoulder the ledgers had been chewing on all day, unimpressed, as if the evening had merely finished catching up to her schedule.

Beside her, a centimeter of steel clicked back into Ayame’s sheath.

"Mm~" was all the samurai said, deeply satisfied.

Stormlord turned to his sergeant and issued orders past the arrest without pausing for breath. "Send word to the capital; I want this seat logged as commission ground before dawn. Every servant confined to quarters, every fire crew under escort, and nobody touches a page without the investigator’s leave."

The yard broke into motion around him, and the commission poured inward.

Quinlan fell in with the flow, then peeled out of it at the east wall, where Black Fang had reclaimed her patch of shadow.

His hand settled on her waist, warm and easy.

"Thanks for the save."

Black Fang looked at the middle distance. "It was nothing." She walked on, robes whispering, and took up a new post ten paces deeper in.

Quinlan grinned at her back, looking entirely too pleased with himself.

By the gate arch, the Mediator observed the entire exchange without appearing to observe anything at all.

’...She let him keep the hand after that?’

He had watched the greatest assassin on the continent end men for standing in her light. The Consortium kept a great many incident reports on its sharpest blade, and as of tonight, every last one of them required revision.

’This continent is doomed,’ the old man concluded serenely. ’Truly, thoroughly doomed.’

Then he gathered his sleeves and turned for the arch, because the case was delivered, the crown had what it needed, and the yard was filling with royal soldiers who would shortly run out of urgent tasks.

He offered the nearest sergeant a small bow on his way past. "My compliments to your commander. The Consortium’s business here is concluded."

The sergeant, who had no instruction covering any part of this evening, saluted the old man back.

"Aren’t you curious?"

Quinlan had stopped at the inner doors, holding one open, firelight from the bailey beyond catching the edge of his grin. He tipped his head toward the keep’s interior, the invitation aimed at the old man by the gate arch.

The Mediator regarded him.

A count’s inner holding stood open past that door.

Crown soldiers guarded its thresholds, a princess of the blood walked its corridors, and the most wanted man alive stood holding its door, inviting him in to watch the evidence get read.

He had entered noble houses before, a long lifetime of them. Through servant doors, through coin-bought windows, through tunnels dug under treasuries by men whose names no record kept.

His people had entered such houses the same way for generations, because front doors were not built for people of their blood.

’Thank the Goddess,’ the Mediator thought, adjusting his sleeves with great dignity, ’that we are on the right side. For once.’

"Curiosity," he said aloud, shuffling forward with his beard preceding him, "is the one appetite age has left me. Lead on, young man."

...

The inner bailey was snowing.

Paper ash came down in fat grey flakes, thicker with every courtyard they crossed, catching in hair and dulling the lantern light. Ahead of the commission, the record-houses of the Corvane seat glowed against the night sky like four open hearths.

They felt the heat a full courtyard before the doors.

Iris walked at the front of it all, ash gathering on her shoulders, red eyes fixed on the nearest of the burning archives. Suffering and a continent of scum had stood between her and this place.

She was one door away now.

The doors were iron, and they were hot, and behind them lay whatever the count had considered worth burning last.

’Damian... Mother... It’ll end soon.’

...

A mile beneath the dwarven capital, Brokk, First Hammer of the royal smithy, came into her hall on the morning shift and found her smiths crowded around the gallery mouth. A notice had been nailed up there in the night.

The paper bore the seals of four claimant lords who agreed on nothing else in this world.

They had agreed on this.

"Read it out!" someone called from the back tiers. "Not all of us have eyes to read the gibberish in these council letters!"

Young Vorn was already standing on a bench with the thing in both hands, and his voice cracked twice getting through it.

"By joint order of the council of claims, for the defense of the mountain." He swallowed. "First. Every forge in the capital is turned to the pattern-book. Axes, helm blanks, mail links, warhammers, to quotas the council will set and revise at need."

"...Standing commissions are suspended," Vorn read on. "Masterwork is suspended. Apprentice trials are suspended for the duration."

"The pattern-book." The master with the copper wire braided through his beard said it slowly, and put his weight on it. "Forty years at that anvil. And they want me to instead make mass-produced axes."

"Second."

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