Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

They didn’t.

So the floor opened, mid-plea, every time. The fabricated tales cut off like a snuffed wick, and the woman in black was already walking to the next door.

Her domain only took the proven, as she found out. She couldn’t just decide to judge a man for being guilty; she needed the proof of it. But every man she caught carried the proof of the next four, so the deeper she went the faster she moved, and the machine fed her its own arrests.

And as more and more scum was sentenced under her judgment, Iris felt her class slowly, relentlessly increasing her strength.

That’s how the Demon of Vengeance worked.

Terror ran ahead of her up the duchy’s roads all night, and mercy came behind her exactly never.

The counts came an hour before dawn.

Ostrev tried to buy passage with his own vaults through the shrine door he was hiding behind, and the floor drank him mid-offer.

Orvath of the Weirs, whose family name sat on eleven salvage deeds, was dragged in bellowing about peerage, saw her eyes, and went down howling that he could give them the others if they let him off the hook.

Unluckily for him, he could do that perfectly from hell.

Below, at a long iron table laid out with the terrible courtesy of a lord’s own study, the counts of the inner circle were being collected.

Each of them sat in a high-backed chair with a pen in his fist, and the pen fed itself. The nib went into the wrist and stayed there, drawing up through the vein until the whole arm went the color of tallow. Then the hand signed, whether or not the man attached to it wanted it to.

What it signed was an inventory of himself.

"Lot the first," said the auctioneer, warm and unhurried, in the seller’s own recorded scream. "The right hand. Sound. Well-used."

The hand came off at the wrist with the pen still in its fingers. The stump was sealed against the table’s edge with a hiss and a smell, and a new hand was growing before the old one finished twitching.

"Sold."

"Lot the second. The skin of the back. One piece, unmarked."

Ostrev came out of his chair screaming, and it made no difference at all. The sheet was taken off him whole, rolled while it still steamed, and stamped with his own signet. Then the count went face-down onto the iron with everything under his shoulder blades open to an air that ran hot.

"Sold."

"Lot the third. The tongue."

They screamed through every lot, all of them, all night, and it changed nothing, because the auction only wanted the signature, and it owned their hands.

One man very nearly came back out of that night alive: a ferry clerk with two pages against his name, maybe a rat, maybe a man with a knife at his neck. The residents of hell didn’t know, so neither did she.

Quinlan’s Subjugation helped solve the case.

He wasn’t innocent.

[Resident: 38.]

As the sun began to come up, Quinlan turned the finished master list around with two fingers.

Long years of this shadowy syndicate’s history had a shape now: the wheel of nine spokes, the granary, the salvage deeds, the fee for tidy administration.

Every line of coin walked up out of the counties and vanished, in writing, into one house on the northern border.

Iris read the last line twice.

She had spent years working up through syndicate scum, every rung swearing the next one up was the answer, and every rung had run out into smoke. Now the smoke had an address. The address sat in a clerk’s tidy hand, under a king’s seal.

Paperwork. She had hated every hour of it.

It had just handed her a duke.

Quinlan felt the heat of her from three steps away, and her eyes still carried some of that other sky home with her. Neither thing worried him in the slightest.

"Every trail, the same landlord," he said. "I’d call that enough."

"Yes," Iris agreed.

Felicity looked up from the wax she was dripping, the king’s seal heavy in her gauntleted fist, and asked the question the whole night had been building toward.

"Then we have enough to summon the duke?"

"No, Your Highness," Stormlord corrected. "You have enough to summon the defendant."

...

Six hundred miles north, in a study warmed against the frost, Duke Tharion Ravenshade was listening to silence.

It had a texture, this particular silence. He had spent every hour mapping it. The eastern crossing had not reported. The Weirs had not reported. Silver Hollow, which had never once in generations missed the first frost of the month, had let the frost come and go.

They were being taken in for questioning, according to the official response he received through the correct channels.

What kept him at the map was a conclusion he refused to phrase, even inwardly.

Old instruments had one duty when caught, which was to be caught slowly: to bury the commission in statute for a season, to cough, to stall, to demand daylight and certified inventories.

Corvane had gone silent between one sunset and the next.

Nothing about that was slow.

’The old arrangement is quiet,’ he allowed himself, at last. ’This isn’t one bit how an investigation of this magnitude should be unfolding... Things are moving far too quickly.’

His teeth bared. "Alexios, you treacherous bastard... you’re forgoing procedure to appeal to a man called Primordial Villain?!"

Behind him, his secretary cleared her throat from the door. She had been standing there for a while, holding a scroll case at arm’s length, visibly hoping not to be remembered as the one who carried it in.

The wax was royal, and the seal in it was the king’s personal ring, pressed by his own hand.

Tharion read it once.

The language was flawless, which he expected, and brief, which he did not.

The crown requests and requires the attendance of its beloved Duke of Ravenshade at the royal palace, before the assembled peerage, to answer matters touching the governance of his duchy.

Answer, before the assembled peerage. The verb did the whole letter’s work by itself, and the venue did the rest. They had invited an audience.

His outrage arrived properly then, clean and well-made, with the masonry of a founding house under it.

A duke of the realm had been summoned like a granary clerk caught with his thumb in the scale. His blood sat on the throne beside Alexios. His blood ran in every royal child.

A founding house of Vraven, whistled to heel in front of counts and merchants. On the strength of what? A season of suspicion?

"Ready the column," he said. "Full colors. The good carriage."

The secretary blinked. "Your Grace will... attend?"

"A summons is a stage," Tharion said, already choosing the rings for his hands. "They have built mine at the crown’s expense. It would be rude to leave it empty."

And under the outrage, in the place where he did his real thinking, the duke touched the one seal in Vraven that outranked any writ the old man could wave.

A promise, sworn on blood, years before the world had heard the word Villain.

Alexios had bought Ravenshade’s peace with it, and had apparently forgotten that a leash like that has two ends.

’Come, then,’ Tharion thought, calm again, watching his banners come down off the wall. ’Convene your peers, old friend. Stand me before every noble eye in the kingdom.’

’Let us see which of us can afford the audience.’

...

The great hall of the Vraven palace had not held the full peerage in living memory, and the full peerage had come anyway.

Every banner in the kingdom hung from the gallery rails. Below them, packed shoulder to shoulder in winter velvet, stood the counts and barons of five duchies, and the question they had all arrived with moved through the hall in a low, endless murmur.

"A closed summons, under the personal seal..."

"They say the commission took thirty men in just an hour... They’re wrecking Ravenshade lands like pillagers."

"Where? Which cells? My cousin rode past the Corvane seat and swears the gibbets are empty..."

On the high throne, above all of it, sat Alexios Valorian, and he had not spoken one word in an hour.

The old king wore full regalia for the first time in years. He didn’t even wear it for his thousandth birthday.

The great crown of Vraven sat on his grey head, the sword of state lay naked across his knees, and his face was carved out of the same stone as the hall.

Princess Felicity stood at the dais’s right hand in her polished armor, visor up, the royal seal hanging over her breastplate. Stormlord stood at her shoulder.

At the dais’s left, alone, in plain black, stood a red-eyed woman that not one noble in that hall could name.

The murmur broke on her like water on a rock. Everyone had heard of the crown’s new investigator. Nobody had a name, a house, or an explanation, and the not-knowing had grown teeth of its own.

"And the Villain..." a baroness whispered, tilting her head at the western gallery. "Why is the Villain here?!?!"

The western gallery had been given, without one written word of explanation, to the Primordial Villain and his family.

Quinlan Elysiar lounged on the rail like a man at a horse race, arms around his gorgeous women’s shoulders.

Ayame sat at his right with her katana across her lap, and Jasmine on his left. Black Fang stood behind him in the shadow of a pillar.

Kitsara had taken the rail and brought a ledger to a murder trial, visibly invested in the drama. Lucille sat beside her, entirely at home under six hundred banners.

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