Bemused, Ranko stepped back to allow the girl to enter. She noted that the girl, whom she guessed to be a servant newly assigned to her, carried with her only a single small bag. The girl stepped nervously into the room, her gaze steadfastly bound to the floor.
After a quick look into the hall, which remained empty, Ranko closed the door, and turned to face the nervous servant girl. Reminding herself that the appearance of youth could well be misleading, Ranko reached out a hand, intending to tip the girl's face up. Perhaps a look into her eyes could give her a better gauge on her new servant's age and intentions.
She was startled when the girl visibly cringed, breath catching audibly, as her hand came up. Ranko followed the motion smoothly, catching the girl's chin and lifting her face. Her eyes held fear even more visibly than her demeanor, and to Ranko's surprise, she looked to be near Ranko's age in terms of maturity. Of course, that put her probably five or six decades beyond Ranko in terms of actual age, but that was largely irrelevant in Ranko's opinion.
For all that she might have several decades more experience in terms of time, as a servant, Ranko was willing to bet that her actual life experience paled in terms of breadth when compared to Ranko's, which encompassed multiple worlds, multiple cultures, multiple genders, even multiple states of being.
"What is your name?" Ranko queried, holding the girl's eyes with her own.
"Sraelee, Mistress," she replied.
"And why are you here?" Ranko asked, lifting an eyebrow and waiting to find out if she had guessed correctly.
"To serve you, Mistress," the girl answered meekly, her eyes still betraying her fearful resignation, and also thereby indicating a relative lack of skill in the dissimulation so vital to the drow.
Ranko contacted Distanfae mentally as she walked her new servant to the attached servant's quarters, and informed him of this development. He confirmed her suspicion, that this new servant was not a sign that someone in the household was gaining respect for her, but rather a spy, placed by someone seeking to garner advantage for themselves.
She could, of course, ask the girl who she had been sent by, but not only was there a better than even chance that she would be lied to, even if she was given the truth as the girl knew it, it would only mean that the girl herself was unaware of the true person behind the scenes.
Indeed, Distanfae had confirmed that if the person behind the action was one of the priestesses, the girl could have been prepared with rituals that would allow the priestess to see through her eyes and hear what she heard, and she could easily be completely unaware of the significance of the rituals she had participated in.
It was a given, however, that the girl could as easily be complicit in the whole affair. Just because it could have been done without her knowledge, cooperation, or assistance was no guarantee it had been.
To refuse her, Distanfae warned, might well mean her death. Distanfae was aware that while he had removed the inhibitions that would have blocked her from dealing death under any but the most stressful conditions, his weapon was still far from a cold-blooded murderess, and would definitely be disturbed to learn that an action she put no weight in had led to the death of an innocent.
As she watched the girl examine her new quarters, Ranko pondered what rumour must be saying about her to bring such fear into the eyes of her servant. Although she supposed it might be nothing more than being required to serve a drow noble that brought the fear. One of the aspects of this society that she had learned is that anyone who was not a noble was, whether in name or no, a slave, and subject to the whims of the nobles, up to and including summary execution.
Ranko might not want to be responsible for the girl's death, but she was also irritated at the loss of her privacy, at now having to maintain the facade of continued life even in her own rooms, and that irritation was sufficient that she made no move to ease her new servant's fear.
She would learn soon enough, by simply living it, that Ranko was not one to give harsh punishments, or to demand services unwillingly given.
Ranko waited until the girl began unpacking her small valise, then she turned away, swinging the door nearly, but not quite closed. She opened her hand, looking at the stones still glowing faintly purple. She passed her other hand over them, pushing magic through her earth wand. The stones sealed back together, cracks vanishing, dust congealing and hardening.
She stalked over to the dresser and carefully set the spheres down on the counter. She could not play more with her quicksilver where her unwanted new servant could see her, but she wanted a bowl to put the balls in. She considered the spheres, thinking about the magic she had used to reform them from the cracked and partially pulverized wrecks they had been.
Settling on the low couch that ran along the wall opposite the door to her bedchamber, she reached back and touched the wall. Inside, her magic swirled up and into her earth wand. She did not seek to activate any of its powers. She merely wanted the wand's influence on her quicksilver energy.
One of the key things she had discovered about this was that the untrained, unfiltered magic was difficult to shape without bringing it out. Filtered through one of her wands, she could generally accomplish external effects that matched the wand's field of influence without actually drawing the magic out where it might be seen.
Behind her, the wall groaned, then shifted, strands of stone flowing down and circling about. With a clatter, a smoothly formed stone bowl dropped from the wall and landed on the couch. She lifted her arm and the bowl flew to her hand.
Her fingers flicked, and the stones on the dresser shifted then leaped across the room to her waiting hand. A startled shriek turned her head, and she saw Sraelee standing in her doorway, her hand to her heart, her dark skin unusually light. Sraelee's eyes turned to Ranko as Ranko dropped the spheres in the bowl. Her eyes widened and her breath caught as Ranko reached back. The wall seemed to shrink away from her hand, forming an indented alcove upon which she set the bowl.
Ranko crooked her hand at Sraelee, and Sraelee ran to her side, dropping her eyes. She fell to her knees beside the bed, trembling. Ranko looked into her unwanted servant's eyes. Asking the girl to be silent would only be counterproductive, revealing that this was something she wanted kept silent. Threatening her would increase the tension between them, and she simply could not match the threat level of the torture these drow were willing to employ.
She spent only an instant contemplating. Making snap decisions under pressure was nothing new to Ranma, and though many of her instincts were tuned to physical combat, bluffs and mental games were also part of being a martial artist.
She held out her hand, and snapped her fingers sharply. Sraelee looked at her for a moment, uncertainly, then gingerly proffered her hand. Ranko held Sraelee's eyes with hers as she took Sraelee's wrist in her small hand, and twitched her fingers. A swirl of stone snaked out of the wall, drifting across the intervening space and spun into a complex mix of twisting strands around Sraelee's hand.
With Ranko's ability to shape the stone, the bracelet's surface became almost perfectly smooth, giving the strands an amazing shine. Ranko glanced down, releasing her servant's eyes. She suppressed her grin when Sraelee gasped involuntarily at the sight of the gorgeous bracelet encircling her wrist. Ranko's face was impassive when Sraelee's eyes reached her face again. Ranko dropped her hand, and with a short, sharp gesture, indicated that Sraelee should return to her room.
Ranko was not certain of the bet she had made, that Sraelee would be unwilling to reveal the real source of her bracelet, where a simple gift would be perfectly normal and acceptable, but a magically created bracelet, if admitted to, would surely be taken to be investigated. If she was wrong, then she had increased her exposure by revealing that she could manipulate and shape stone, as opposed to merely being able to move stones without touching them.
There was little she could do about it, at any rate, and she felt the risk was worth it, particularly since the gift should ease Sraelee's fears about Ranko's potential for cruelty.
She still wondered whether her secret had been blown to the point that there was no reason to try to avoid Sraelee seeing her practice with the stone, or whether she still should conceal the extent of her ability to shape the stone. There was no question that she would conceal her other abilities as much as possible. Certainly she was grateful she had not exposed her ability to alter her own shape.
Thinking back over the last few minutes, she realized that Sraelee had seen her summoning the stones, but based on the timing of her gasp, she had probably not seen her drawing the stone from the wall to form the bowl. Ranko felt a rush of embarrassment as she realized that in attempting to salvage the situation, she had inadvertently exposed even more of her abilities.
Standing, she strode across the room and through the doorway to her bedchamber. Only a few months had passed since she had succeeded in becoming the house's weaponmaster, but they had been filled with missions for both Distanfae and for the Matron, with tests and challenges from Kliza and Laermornan, with theft, fighting, and death. And now, on top of it all, she had to deal with a spy in her own rooms.
Ranko tried not to feel resentment at Sraelee for disturbing her privacy. There was no guarantee that she was an unwitting spy, but as long as the possibility was there, she should not take out her frustrations on the girl. Even if she knew why she had been placed there, chances would be good that was being coerced in some fashion, be it by fear of her own punishment or death, or a threat to her family or friends. Assuming, of course, that she had any friends. From what Ranko had observed, friendship was not something commonly understood or practiced in this city. There were simply too many incentives and advantages to back-stabbing.
By the same token, Ranko had to be careful not to feel too sympathetic towards her new spy, either. No matter that she might be being coerced, she was still a dark elf, and chances were good that when her fear wore away, she would be more than willing to stab Ranko in the back if she thought it would improve her standing.
---
"I am not pleased with the Matron's interference," Distanfae told Ranko, "and I've no doubt you like it no better, but we have no real options at the moment. The worst of it is her insisting on all of this silent assassination. You'll never develop the reputation that will cement my legacy if no-one knows what you have done."
Ranko nodded, well aware of Distanfae's intent that she should be his entree into the annals of history. "Perhaps a token?" she offered, thinking of Kodachi and her black roses. Not that she wanted anything to do with black roses, mind.
She and her master were in his chambers, far from her spy. Her master had grown steadily more agitated as the months passed, and Matron Vitrue co-opted her for mission after silent mission, but never in a way that would allow any glory or recognition to come to her, or by association, himself.
This was not the first time she had heard this complaint, but it was the first time that she had had anything resembling an answer.
"Explain," he commanded, looking at her intently.
In response, she held up a a rearing horse she had crafted from black stone. "I've been practicing my shaping. This is an animal from my world, and part of my name once translated to mean this animal. If I were to leave a token like this on each mission, it would tie them together, but not necessarily to me. Not until you reveal it, but then all of them would be associated with your work."
Distanfae reached out his dark hand, and Ranko handed him the small figurine. He turned it over in his hands, looking at the intricate detail. "How long does it take you to make one of these?"
"It took me a long time to make the first one," Ranko told him. "I had to work at it for a while, making little changes, to get it to look right, since I did not have any pictures to work off of. But now that I've got it . . ."
Ranko stood up, and stepped over to the stone wall, rested her hand against it for a moment, then passed him another stone horse. He examined it briefly, comparing it to the other one he held, then set it on the table beside his chair.
"Excellent. So you can form them from something at the mission site. That will keep them from being tied to us until the right time."
"Gotcha, make 'em all on-site. Not a problem."
"Then the only question is whether they should all be identical or not," he mused.
Ranma shrugged. "I could do different shapes with practice, I'm sure, or I could do all horses, but in different poses and patterns, or all the same rearing stallion."
Distanfae paused in thought, and Ranko remained silent, giving him time to think. In her opinion, it was all a matter of whether he wanted to chance people putting things together too early versus risking them not putting enough together later, and as such, was really a personal decision for her master, and had little to do with her.
To be sure, she would be the one leaving the tokens, unpleasant though it seemed to be deliberately associating herself with assassinations. She would certainly have preferred to at least face her lord's enemies in personal combat, or to have even been facing her lord's enemies, and not those of the Matron.
Either way, once she had realized the possibility inherent in her first little creation, which had looked more like a child's clay rendering of a horse, she had felt obligated to perfect it and present it as an option for her Lord. The happier he was with his eventual fame, the more likely he was to give her the help she needed to find her way home and change what had happened.
So now she waited quietly, with a patience unknown to her former self, while her Lord pondered.
Finally, he sighed. "Variations on a theme are fine, but keep it to this animal. Just different poses, and such. If we're lucky, someone with surface experience will recognize it and start some rumours. It looks vaguely familiar, as if I've seen it somewhere before, so I think it is something that exists here as well."
Ranko nodded in understanding.
"You should probably destroy these two. We don't want the Matron tying these to us too quickly." He handed the two figurines to her, and she nodded and quickly turned them into a single variegated sphere.
"Should I place them where they will be seen immediately? Or hide them, so that they won't be tied directly to the event?"
Distanfae considered that for a minute. "Hide them," he sighed finally, clearly wanting to say otherwise, but bowing to the necessity of avoiding direct suspicion, "and I think you should also go back to those sites you think you can safely revisit, and hide them there as well."
---
Ranko slipped quietly out of the shadows in an alley near the Vitrue compound. This was her first open-ended assignment, the first time she had not had a single definite goal to get to, accomplish, and return.
Instead, she was to return to those sites she felt she could safely gain entry to and leave one of her new calling cards without being seen or detected. She could do this in whatever order she chose, with little in the way of time constraints.
So for the first time, she actually had an opportunity to walk through the city while it was alive with activity, and her attention was not demanded elsewhere. No-one was watching through her eyes, nor watching her behavior, at least, no-one that knew who or what she was.
She was quite deliberately not wearing house colors or a house emblem. If accosted, she should be able to overcome and evade any who might seek to take her, and avoid anyone seeing the Vitrue symbols near the various places she had previously visited.
With more freedom to observe, she was quickly entranced with the amazing variety of near-human species walking the streets of the city. Without Distanfae's influence, she could gaze on each and consider them at her leisure.
This was unfortunately not as advantageous as she first felt, for she felt first angry, and then ill as she watched chained groups of different slaves marched past in the streets beyond the alley. She knew there was nothing she could do without risking her return, but equally she knew that Akane would never have stood by and allowed this to continue. To be sure, she would not have succeeded in any attempt to free them, at least, not for long, but she would have tried. And Ranma was in a far better position to act than Akane ever would have been, but to do so was to risk losing Akane a second time, and that she could not do.
So she swallowed her ire, and promised herself that when Distanfae would gone, she would do what she could to end this barbarism. In the meantime, she had fear to sow. Though she was still sickened by her part in the death of children, her anger now lead her to feel pleasure at the thought that she had already ended the lives of some of these cruel drow, though she knew that it was improbable that her acts had improved anyone's situation. A death in this dark city left a vacuum, soon filled by someone of equal or greater malice, for the soft did not survive, neither amongst the slaves, nor amongst the drow.
Her back straight and her eyes ablaze with pride and anger, she strode out of the alley and down the street, easily avoiding the mingled crowds. She might not have the full strength she once bore, but while Distanfae's spells linked her soul to her movement, she had all the grace of a supreme predator, and the slaves and lesser drow parted before her.
She was nearing one of her first targets, only two compounds away now, when a procession caught her attention. She moved out of the way of the passing matron and her escort of priestesses and warriors, and deepened the shadows about her face, but one of the priestesses, not liking her erect carriage and the defiant disdain in her still burning eyes, moved toward her.
In an instant Ranko had decided her course, and after quickly verifying that no scrying was directed specifically at her, though of course the Matron and her lackeys were being observed from multiple points, she focused her quicksilver, preparing to drink magic as fast as she possibly could.
"Bow before the matron, filthy commoner," ordered the priestess, her snake-headed whip already in motion to punish the unmarked drow regardless of her reaction. The first snake head impacted uselessly against Ranma's impervious flesh, but before it could slide down, she drew powerfully on its magic.
The priestess gasped and cried out in horror when the snake head shriveled and fell to ash. Ranko fell back into the shadows while the priestess' attention was on her damaged weapon. Distanfae had told her previously about the whip that Kliza carried, and the significance of the number of heads, how they showed Lolth's favor. Ranko giggled softly, then silenced abruptly, startled that she would make so feminine a sound, be she emulating a woman or no, but scarcely able to contain her mirth. She rather doubted that Lolth would look kindly on a priestess that so easily lost a sign of her favor.
The matron had not been watching, obviously well-used to her daughters' ways, and their habits of punishing anyone they got the chance to. Doubtless she had done the same in her day. At least one of the other priestesses had seen, she was sure, but she was not greatly concerned. They had not had a good chance to peruse her, seeing her prior to the strike as just one more of the faceless crowd waiting to be struck for the glory of Lolth, and the planes of her face would have been obscured by the shadows.
She quickly moved on, not wanting to wait for the matron to get involved and pull her out of hiding with some spell. She slipped out of the shadows in another alley, but kept them cloaked about her as, verifying that the alley was clear, she descended into the stone roadbed. Having inadvertently exposed her ability to manipulate stone to her personal spy, she had no worries about being observed from within, and she had ascertained that no scrying was observing her from afar.
Within the heart of the stone she began to move forward, passing unnoticed and undetected beneath the iron fence and the grounds of the great house. She had more difficulty upon reaching the house, as it extended beneath the cavern's floor, rather than giving her solid stone to pass through. Still the walls were thick and gave her plenty of room to manuever without having to expose herself beyond them.
Occasionally she paused and forming an eye concealed behind a plane of jade, she would locate a shadow and allow her hidden eye to reach the surface of the stone, and verify the room beyond matched her memories of her path.
Soon she found the room whose occupant she had slain. It did not appear to have been put to a new purpose, though the remains of the prior occupant's belongings had been removed, with the exception of the furniture.
Ranko examined the room for several minutes, looking at the room in different ways, and feeling out the magic, until she was sure that it was not warded to detect her presence, nor being observed. Satisfied, she then examined the room to decide what to use to make her stallion model.
Finally, she decided to use the stone of the walls, and the substance of the dresser, which looked from a distance like a well-polished marble. In each case she avoided leaving any identifiable gaps in the material, instead drawing the substances from many places, leaving areas with numerous tiny bubbles of nothing in the material.
After forming the model, she stepped forward, the wall rippling around her as she exited it, and examined the model in the light, so that she could correct the color locations.
Walking around the space, she considered where it would be best to place the small horse. Beneath the bed was an obvious choice, but she had no idea what the cleaning patterns were here. She would prefer not to leave it somewhere that would provide evidence that she had returned, when someone realized that they had already cleaned that area. Eventually she chose to lift the heavy wardrobe and check beneath it. As she had hoped, it had a gap between the actual flat bottom, and the bottom of the walls. It was not, however, large enough to leave the horse there. The wardrobe balanced on it, rocking oddly.
She considered her options for a minute, then reshaped the figurine into a shorter figure of three smaller horses in full gallop, tails and manes streaming, and once more placed it beneath the wardrobe. Verifying that the wardrobe was now properly seated and that there was no dust on the floor to show that the wardrobe had been moved, she nodded in approval.
Returning to the wall, she passed through the stone and out of the complex. She briefly considered stepping back out and traveling openly through the streets again, but decided against it. She had already caused one commotion. She did not want to have a whole series of incidents that would allow someone to put together a picture of her movements.
She could have stepped through the shadows to her next target, but shadow-cloaks and similar magics were well-known to the drow, and they would likely have protections against such a move. She might use the cloak merely to move quickly across the city, but even there she could not be sure that she would not trip some ward or spell that would call attention to her.
So instead she passed through the stone, using the opportunity as a learning experience, working on different ways to move beneath the streets. Moving through the stone in the shape of a woman was slow work, a fact she had learned previously. She had figured out a way that worked reasonably well, however, which involved extending a tendril of substance some distance ahead, and then shifting herself along that tendril, while transferring the stone in the opposite direction. It amused her, sometimes, to imagine what someone would think, when the stone in her target location was substantially different in appearance than that in her starting position, if they were excavating, and came across stone that had a feminine profile.
Now, however, she began experimenting with looser shapes, traveling in a shape more reminiscent of a worm or snake than a woman. She soon found that moving like a worm was more effective. Unless she actually excavated a fair area, she did not have enough room to move like a snake. Instead, it seemed most effective to stretch forward, absorbing the stone ahead of her while her lengthy body slimmed down in the channel, then to extrude that stone at the rear of the passage, restoring its solidity even as she shortened and thickened back to the width of the passage.
This mode of transportation still required caution, however, as she had to avoid extending herself out into any opening she might encounter, and she had to constantly detect magic that might be ahead of her, and route her way around it. Occasionally she was forced to go quite a bit out of a direct line, when a large complex lay athwart her path. She also had to pause regularly, to extend a probe up towards the surface, finding a wall, and rising up to about five and a half feet above street level, then forming an eye concealed behind a flat gemstone, to verify her location.
To an extent, the spells and wards she had to avoid were an aid to her navigation, as each compound of one of the ruling families would shine to her senses as a great beacon of complicated magic. Nonetheless, they were little more than massive blobs of magic to her senses at a distance, and while they helped confirm her position, they were not sufficiently identifiable from afar as to act as true landmarks. Therefore regular position checks were necessary.
She soon arrived at her next target. This time the room had clearly been put back into service, and it was occupied when she reached it, though to her surprise, it was clearly a slave that had taken place of the drow warrior she had slain there, the chains around the neck and arms making that clear enough.
She examined the room carefully from her vantage point, a concealed eye above the normal sight-line, on the wall opposite the main entrance to the suite. From what she could see, the furnishings were still far too rich to belong to the slave, so she guessed that the chained female surface elf was a body-slave, a pleasure toy to whomever had taken the room.
She considered whether there was anything that she could do for the slave, as she formed a small statue of a rearing horse, much as she had tried initially at her first stop, and slid it unnoticed onto a high shelf.
She had learned little about the transportation artifact, and though she could probably trigger it, she did not think the chained elf would fair any better in that demonic environment than she was here. Perhaps in time it could be used to return such a slave to the surface world, but not, certainly, until Ranko herself had chanced to visit there.
She could kill the slave, and free her thusly from her bondage, while at the same time inconveniencing one of her master's enemies. But this was an enemy of her master only in the sense that any drow not of her master's household was his enemy, and of course, at this point she could not even be certain that the slave's owner, or the normal occupant of this room, was a drow, though it was certainly the most likely possibility. Not to mention which, the slave might well prefer to cling to life, even in the face of her slavery.
She could steal the slave, but what then would she do with her? Freeing her in this city would only result in her recapture and torment for having escaped. Freeing her outside the city would likely only lead to an unpleasant demise. Taking her to House Vitrue would simply mean exchanging one dark master for another.
Showing herself to the elf and allowing her to choose whether to die was also out of the question, as if the elf chose to live, she would then be able to reveal Ranko's presence and appearance.
Lying in wait to slay the slave's master, if he or she should turn out to be cruel, would likely only get the slave killed, or if not, she would be turned over to yet another cruel master. Noble drow, she had observed, were more often cruel than not, to the degree that only her master had not shown cruelty when presented with the opportunity, and that was likely only because he saw her as a prized creation.
It had been hard enough facing the idea that other people were kept here as slaves, but somehow it was harder to see it right in front of her, and harder still that it was a single slave. It was oddly easier to look past the sympathetic horror she felt when she saw slaves in large groups than it was to face one single elf.
Ranko shook herself free of her musings about the surface elf's possible family and friends, and left the building quickly. She could not stand to face such a horror when she felt so helpless to change it, especially when she knew that Akane would never have stood for it. She would have fought it to the last, just as she fought against perceived perversion, and she would have either died or been taken a slave herself.
Ranko could take up her fight, but in doing so, she would be discarding her chance to save Akane, and that she could not face. She would prove herself by saving her life, and if they could then not accept her, she would find a way to move on, knowing that at the last, Akane lived. But she could not move on, could not live a life with honor, until she had reversed the failure that lead to her atonement.
She did promise to herself that she would watch for anything that would assist her in changing this society. Once Distanfae reached the end of his years, and kept his end of the bargain, perhaps then she could take the time to free the slaves. If she could reach the surface, she might be able to figure out how to use the amulet to transport slaves to the surface. She rather doubted that Distanfae, or even the Matron Vitrue, would much object to her stealing and freeing the slaves of other houses, as that would effectively weaken them. Of course, they would probably be equally pleased if she simply slaughtered them all. She would simply have to hope they never gave her such an order, because for Akane, she would do it.
As each death stained her hands with more blood, Ranko was slowly coming to the realization that she would either have to keep all that happened to her here a secret, the keeping of which would inevitably, given Akane's suspicious nature where she was concerned, lead to strife, or face the disgust, and likely hatred of those she loved. Still, she had no choice, if they were to live.
Though several of the sites she visited had boosted their wards, or added new defenses, including one where there was a vicious, bestial creature left chained in the room she had previously visited, she had no difficulties with them.
As on her initial missions, her ability to detect the spells, and to manipulate her own internal magics, as well as her ability to pass through the stone without having to move out-of-phase with it, got her past the additional magics with little trouble. Creatures such as the one in whose belly she had discovered her enigmatically glowing blue stone tended to either phase through the stone, passing through it like a ghost, which was readily detectable through magic, or to claw their way through it, as with the armored behemoths she had destroyed on that same mission, causing both noise and vibrations which could be detected.
Her own passage through the stone was silent, and as yet, no wards or spells had been devised against it. She had been warned by Distanfae that if she was not careful to keep her powers hidden and secret, it would not take long for the city's wizards and priestesses to devise defenses attuned to her, at which point her missions would become ones of brute force instead of stealth.
Ranko was of mixed minds about the possibilities, as she had little desire for skulking about and killing without a fight, but the sort of fights she would have in the open here would result in quite a bit of collateral damage, killing relative innocents. Her own indecision on the topic was irrelevant, however, as Distanfae's intentions were clear, and she had no desire to cross him and risk her eventual reward.
When she finally returned to her new home, it was with a genuine feeling of accomplishment. She had taken a concrete step towards furthering her Lord's goals, and had done so in a creative rather than a destructive fashion. In a small sense, this was almost a rebellion, a repudiation of the silent assassinations the Matron had ordered her on through her Lord.
It had been a bit of a challenge, thinking of enough different stances for the horses, as well as finding suitable substrates for them in each location, as well as suitable hiding places, but it was a challenge that she found undeniably preferable to figuring out how to silently kill someone before the Matron activated one of her area-effect destructive magics.
She was pleased, when she slipped into her apartment, to see that Sraelee was absent. Of course, she realized that the young girl was probably even now, wittingly or no, willingly or no, reporting her observations to someone.
This was not the first time that Ranko had dealt with an unwitting spy, in point of fact. Her own fiancee, her uncute tomboy, had all too often given over her secrets to her rival Ryouga, as he took advantage of his porcine Jusenkyou curse to pose as her pet.
It was not easy to deal with then, either.
Still, she decided, she should take advantage of this opportunity to bathe, and leave some evidence for Sraelee to clean up, both to give her something to do, and to ward off any potential rumours about her inhumanity. Not to mention, she mused, wandering into the bathroom and beginning to disrobe, it would avoid any possibility of Sraelee trying to help her bathe.
She was more than a bit worried about that. She could hope that it was not part of the drow custom to have a servant assist with bathing, but that would certainly run contrary to her usual luck. It would be quite difficult to retain the illusion that she was a living being with someone running their hands over her unyielding surface.
Unfortunately for Ranko, her luck ran true to form, and even as she lowered herself into the warm water, she heard the outer door of her chambers open and shut, followed by quiet footsteps.
Almost instantly the realization came upon her that even though the bathing room door had no obvious locking mechanism, she could have locked it. It would have been trivially easy, a bit of quicksilver absorption on the door and wall and she could have effectively joined them at several points, making the door and wall a single unit, bonded until she separated them.
She had made only the barest reach forward, however, before she had to forestall her motion. It was too late, if she reached out to do it now, the door would doubtless open with her halfway there, whether she moved herself, or reshaped herself.
She waited tensely, expecting the door to open at any moment. When it finally did swing inward, she had to stifle a gasp at the release of tension. Sraelee slipped in, her body language still that of a timid mouse as she crept to the side of the bath, holding a stack of towels and what Ranko guessed was a robe, which Sraelee promptly set to the side.
She knelt by the bath, and Ranko tensed for a moment, before relaxing as the girl moved no further. At least she was not apparently going to put herself at risk by touching Ranko uninvited, so she did not have to worry about the girl passing on news of the inhuman and ungiving feel of her skin just yet.
Ranko made a note to ask Distanfae if there was another level to the control he could give her, something that could imitate the give of flesh, the feel of skin sliding over hard muscle. She could emulate that visually when she was moving without any difficulty, but unfortunately, when she was not moving, she might as well have been a cast metal statue, as far as anyone else's hands were concerned.
Her current situation was safe enough, as she was already ensconced in the bath when Sraelee entered, and was not moving. What was to come next, however, was a puzzle. If she rose nude from the bath, there would simply be no way, if Sraelee looked at her at all, that she could possibly miss the absence of movement in her breasts.
When fully clothed they could be passed off as being well wrapped, though since they did not compress when being wrapped, she actually had to slightly reshape herself to get the reduced reach and separation that should result from the wrapping. Regardless, neither wrapping nor reshaping would work here.
She could wrap herself in a towel, assuming that she could get her hands on one without Sraelee lifting her eyes. That was doubtful though, considering that Sraelee was holding them. She could form a cloth from herself, but all her experience with fabrics, to this point, was of fine weaves, not the thick substance of a towel. If she simply formed her substance into something that thick, it would be solid and immovable, not flexible and mobile. Of course, that was also ignoring having to conceal the reshaping from the girl as well.
Ordering the girl to leave her was another possibility. Allowing her quicksilver to rise in the back of her left eye, Ranko glanced toward Sraelee without turning her head. She saw no noticeable sign of magic about her face or eyes, so she did not think that there was anyone watching through her eyes. Of course, there had not really been any tasks for Sraelee to do for her so far, refusing service now could trigger the darker consequences Distanfae had warned her about.
Ranko made a mental note to keep an eye out for a magical item focused around illusions, and to ask Distanfae if any of her current items had illusionary powers. A simple illusion would make this situation much more manageable.
Fed up with waiting, she made up her mind, and stood suddenly, twisting as she did, to place her back to Sraelee, drawing on her memories of Kodachi to stand as imperiously expectant as she could, and held out a hand.
Startled into awareness by the noise of water sheeting off of Ranko, Sraelee lurched to her feet, hurrying to get a towel into her new Mistress' outstretched hand.
Taking the towel and unfolding it in one quick motion, Ranko swirled the towel about herself, securing it with a thin tendril of her own substance all around, to ensure that no slippage could occur. She had all too much experience with the sort of incidents that life liked to throw at her in bathrooms.
A slight shift of her foot drew the stopper from the floor of the smooth stone basin, then she stepped out of the bath. To her surprise, Sraelee had managed to get another towel unfolded and onto the floor to accept her feet. She glanced at her unwanted servant once more, a hint of quicksilver still present in her eye showing no sign of magic about her.
The girl would expect to assist her in dressing . . . what to do about that? After a moment's thought, she sent Sraelee to her closet to draw out a set of leather fighting gear, and then, while Sraelee was effectively two rooms away, Ranko dropped the towel and quickly produced that portion of her substance that was drawn to the form of cloth and wrapped herself, not wasting any time with trying to form any of her metals into cloth. Speed was her goal, not appearance.
She would have preferred to have her entire clothing self-formed for this, since then it could not be damaged, exposing her, but at least this way, even if her clothing was torn, she would have an excuse for her lack of sway.
Distanfae had informed her that she had another training session, and she was not sure if it would be just the two of them, exploring more of her minor powers, or more weaponmaster testing with observers.
Decided that she had given Sraelee enough time, Ranko drew a quick breeze across herself from her wand of air, even as she used a momentary morph to reduce her hair to a solid block, forcing out all the water, before letting it relax back into innumerable strands, and stepped out into her bedroom.
Having someone assist her in dressing was a strange experience, that brought an unusual combination of reminiscence and longing over her. Aside from being dressed by her father when she was very young, her most clear memory of being dressed by someone else like this was when, during her first year at the Tendo home, all of her clothes had been dirtied. The Tendo sisters, Akane, Nabiki, and Kasumi had all banded together to dress her in Akane's old clothes, which she was forced to be a girl to wear.
Sraelee was far more timid and tentative in helping her than the forceful Tendo girls had been, so the nostalgia did not last long. It was also advantageous for her, as it made it easier to allow her to help without permitting skin contact. Soon she was well-attired, and left her servant in their rooms as she headed out to met Distanfae.
---
She was very pleased to find that it was to be a training session on her wand abilities, with just the two of them present. He was equally pleased to hear that she had finished her task of placing the statues at the sites she had previously visited, excepting only the mage's room where she had left a raging demon.
That building had suffered a partial collapse in defeating the demon, and was undergoing active reconstruction, making an approach too hazardous to attempt.
They were once more in the chamber where she had first experienced her new form. Distanfae sat on a chair set in an alcove in the wall, a spot where he had only a small area he would need to shield if she lost control.
Ranko was hopeful and excited. Though she had been able to make use of her wands in their first fighting, guided by her own instinct for combat and Distanfae's constant coaching, she had not been permitted to explore them further on her own.
She knew several higher techniques with her fire wand, as the Matron had forced her to use Fireball and Burning Hands more than once. The first sent out a tiny mote of light; when it reached its target or hit an obstruction, it exploded out in a massive rush of flame. The second could perhaps be best described as a personal flamethrower that shot out from her fingers.
She had also learned most of her minor wand powers, on the job, as it were, from Distanfae's coaching while she was in the field, and in training sessions like this one. These mostly consisted of cantrip level elemental control spells, such as lighting a fire, generating a shocking spark, producing a gentle breeze, or propagating a crack through stone, and minor attack spells, such as producing a flame that could be thrown, a powerful gust that could turn back arrows in flight, electrocuting anything she could touch, and similar minor effects.
She had managed more impressive feats than these in her first outing, by simply channeling her quicksilver energies through a wand and willing an effect, but she hoped that Distanfae was now going to touch on summoning, something that she was sure she would not manage by simple effort of will.
Ranko perked up when Distanfae shifted and began to speak. "Eventually, you'll be able to summon elementals of immense power, however, to begin with, you will need to practice with the smallest possible summonings, to avoid undue attention and damage. We will begin with air, as I have seen in your memories that you have a technique that produces a whirlwind. You may be better suited to communicating and appreciating air elements, as even the smallest air elemental can become a whirlwind."
"However," he continued, "we will not start with elementals. Each of your wands should have the smallest summoning spell capable of obtaining an elemental as the first spell that shows the attributes you've identified in the amulet you recovered. However, while it can procure an elemental, it can also draw weaker creatures, that will be merely aligned with the element. In this case, I want you to focus on summoning a snake. It will be a small but poisonous snake, useful for an assassination if the victim is not someone likely to be protected from poison. Later, we will discuss the other creatures you can summon, but I'll warn you up front, spiders are within the power of the spell, yet you should never summon them, lest you incur the wrath of the Spider-Queen, Lloth, the goddess we worship above all others."
"You will need to picture the snake in your mind."
Nodding, Ranko delved inward. Though the wands, dissolute amongst herself as they were, lacked any identifying physical features, they contained both magical weaves, and independent pools of magic, the flavor and feel of which made them easy to identify.
Focusing on the feel of her wand of air, she examined the weaves. There were a series of weaves that held strong similarities to the amulet, of steadily increasing complexity. Choosing the simplest, she examined it until she found the much smaller weave that should activate it, and fed it a trickle of energy while picturing a snake in her mind's eye.
With her focus turned inward, she saw a chunk of the magical energy in the pool associated with the air wand get drawn into the weave and vanish. She also noticed that a trickle of energy began to flow into that pool from her quicksilver energy, as if the pool was suddenly downhill from the much larger quicksilver pool.
Sending her focus back out, she stared in surprise at the three snakes she could now see flitting through the air just below her eye-height. "They're flying!" she exclaimed.
"Almost any air-aligned creature can fly," Distanfae confirmed in a lecturing tone, prompting focused attention from Ranko, "as most water-aligned creatures can swim without surfacing for air. Most earth aligned creatures will be able to burrow even if they have no obvious means of digging, and fire-aligned creatures will be immune to fire, but vulnerable to cold. Lightning-aligned creatures, though spectacularly rare, can travel almost instantaneously to any point in a body of water, and some can also travel through clouds."
"Cold-aligned creatures, should you ever gain an ability to summon them, are the inverse of fire, being immune to the cold but vulnerable to heat."
Ranko held out her hand, allowing one of the snakes to coil around it. She noticed that the scales along the back were lifted into two ridges, and the snake actually had tiny horns.
"With time and experience, you will be able to focus more tightly precisely which sort of snake you get, and what sort of effect its venom is likely to have. And of course, simply being able to summon one of an appropriate elemental alignment means you can get one adapted to flight, swimming, or fire, and so forth."
The snakes vanished suddenly, and Ranko glanced questioningly at Distanfae.
"How long they last will depend on how efficiently you fuel the spell, and possibly, whether you can manage to continue feeding the spell or not. That was about forty seconds or so, which puts you a bit above the minimum level of efficiency for casting the spell at all. At its most efficient, the spell can keep the creatures present for about two minutes; a long time in a fight, but not much use outside of one. Outside of a fight, an Unseen Servant is usually more effective, but I have no magical item imbued with that spell. If you find one, be sure to pick it up, they can be quite handy."
"As you learn more, you may be able to figure out how to extend the spell for more duration, or increase the number of creatures summoned, or the distance at which you summon them. For now, just know that the higher spells can all be used to summon snakes, but you won't get any benefit from it, as your minimum spell is already two steps above the spell to summon them."
"Keep an eye out for scrying spells, and I will leave you to practice. You may practice summoning snakes, centipedes, and scorpions. There are several other animals you can summon, but for now, those will do. Most of the others are more likely to make enough noise to draw attention."
With those words he left, and Ranko quickly focused her attention outward, making sure that there were no scrying effects focused on the room or her, then turned to her fire wand and cast its first level summoning, going for a scorpion this time. With her attention not entirely turned inward, she actually witnessed the appearance from thin air of five three to four foot long fiery red scorpions. There was a faint shimmer in the air about them, as of a heat haze. Unlike the snakes, these scorpions actually appeared and remained on the floor, milling about as if looking for something other than her to attack.
She turned her attention inward again, examining the summoning weave she had used until she found the ethereal tendrils of magic leading out from it to the summoned creatures. A brief, testing tug on the tendrils had instant effects, as the scorpions vanished.
Moving on, she summoned centipedes using her water wand, again getting five centipedes. Lacking a good means to keep count, but wanting to test whether she could make them stay longer, she also summoned snakes with her air wand again, getting only two this time. Leaving the snakes alone, she focused on her wand of water, found the threads of magic that led to the centipedes, and studied where it went into the summoning weave.
Attempting to push her quicksilver energy had the same effect as the tug had, returning the centipedes to wherever they had been summoned from, but she was undaunted. She proceeded to summon snakes using her earth wand, and to attempt to do so using her lightning wand. The lightning summons failed completely, and she remembered Distanfae's comment about lightning creatures. Had no snakes appeared, or were they just not obvious?
She examined the lightning weave, and concluded that it had in fact failed, as there were no tendrils of magic leading out of it.
Thinking back to her first real battle in this body, she was reminded that she had managed to seal the wall with ice, though she had no ice wand. Studying her memories, she was surprised to realize that the wand whose magic she had used for that was the one she now identified as her wand of fire.
Somehow, acting on instinct, she had managed to not only use that wand, but to alter its elemental nature. Feeling that this must have been tied to using her quicksilver energy in the attack, she carefully filled the fire wand's weakest summoning weave with quicksilver energy, letting the energy take the pattern of the weave, but not activating it yet.
After several frustrating minutes of failed attempts, she finally managed to draw the quicksilver away from the weave while keeping the pattern unchanged, and successfully activated it.
Apparently, it was not a direct effect of the quicksilver, as the snakes she summoned were clearly fire-aligned, bearing the reddish coloration and visible heat haze identical to those she had first summoned with the wand.
Repeating the procedure to get the weave again, she focused on it, not changing it in any detail, merely willing that it should act with elemental cold. After a moment she felt something had changed in the weave, though she could not identify it. Activating it confirmed her hopes, even without an ice wand, she had just summoned four cold-aligned snakes. They were an almost crystalline blue, as if coated in ice, and she could see delicate patterns of frost forming on the floor around them.
She tried a variant of it, attempting to get a fire-aligned summoning from her earth wand, but had no luck, even after six tries, so, reluctantly, she gave up on it.
Growling in frustration, she moved on to trying other combinations. Eventually, she came to the understanding that she could force any of her elemental wands to act as a wand of cold, though no other change had worked for her. The only explanation she could come up with was that it had something to do with the Soul of Ice training from the Amazons.
Feeling sufficiently practiced in the various summonings, she turned inward again, focusing on comparing the weaves, examining the differences, both between the weaves of the same spell on different wands, and between different levels of summoning on the same wand, probing for what changed, and what remained the same.
This was unfortunately not as easy as she had hoped. Although the spells she was looking at had been invented long before, each wizard that learned them inevitably placed their own stamp on a spell, and the wands she had, though similar in design and intent, had been made by different wizards. She did not know this, though she came to suspect it. The air and earth wands had weaves that were too similar, given the larger differences from the other wands, making it evident that much of the variances she was observing were not related to the change in element.
This was also demonstrated when she drew off a copy of the weave using her quicksilver energy, then forced it to shift to a cold-based weave. The changes in each case were more minor and less obvious than the differences between wands.
Comparing the various levels of summoning showing that the levels were more similar to each other than the spells were between wands, even as they substantially increased in complexity. From what she could see, it as really very similar to the difference between a drawing using a large child's brush, and one made by a fine brush. All of the weaves were of the same basic quality, as if it was not a child wielding the child's brush, but the same master as wielded the fine brush.
Rather, it was the tool the master had used and the intricacy of what he drew that varied, and as she slid her magic into them, she saw that the thicker, simpler weaves would be easier to cast by simply throwing power at them, with little finesse.
It was not merely that the higher levels required more power, although they did. It was that they needed more power, but provided more slowly, with more control. Tying it back to the arts, a desperate but otherwise normal person might be motivated into a feat of strength, moving a car off a loved one, or some other task that would normally be beyond them, powered by a surge of adrenaline and emotion. A master of the art could do the same thing, and would be able to apply that same power, with more control, and for a longer time, by virtue of having trained their strength and stamina.
At the same time, Ranko saw a distinct inefficiency, given that the spells were in wands, activated from stored power, power channeled in ways designed by the crafter of the wand, and not the wielder. Why was the simpler weave drawn with a large brush, when from what she could see, the same effect, if drawn and activated using the mastery implied by the highest spell, could be achieved with far less power?
Eager as she was to explore this question, Distanfae's sudden interruption was unexpected and startling, and would have set her heart racing, if the spells that moved it at all had allowed it.
"We are under attack! Kill anyone not bearing the house rune, focus on those that show skill, but waste no time with honor or fancy attacks. I'll call if I need you."