Noting that she was not hearing anything unusual near her, Ranko passed immediately into the shadows, stepping out in her apartment. She checked quickly, but Sraelee was not present. She moved out into the hallway, listening for the sounds of combat. Hearing nothing, she slid through the shadows to the hall outside of Distanfae's quarters.
Instantly she was on the move towards the sounds of combat, forming a sword matching the appearance she had previously presented to the Matron. She called up her quicksilver energy as she raced down the hall, both to have it ready, and sending it to her legs in an attempt to speed her movement as she was used to doing when working with her ki.
She caught up with the fighting at the end of the corridor, took in the combatants in an instant, and just as quickly had her blade sliding into a ribcage, unerringly finding the space between two ribs with the slender edge of her blade at the precise angle that led her straight to the drow's heart.
It took a significant and unexpected effort to keep from stopping and gagging at the unanticipated and slightly disgusting consequence of using a sword that was a part of her own body. She actually felt the skin and blood as her blade slid in, just as though she were sliding her arm into his chest, like one of the old kung-fu masters snatching someone's heart in a Hong Kong serial. With the end of her blade hidden in his flesh, she pushed her prepared quicksilver energy out through the tip, forming a concussive blast similar to her Moko Takabisha, sending the dying drow flying off the end of her blade and into another drow, this one a female, that she picked as being in the opposition. The drow was knocked off balance long enough for Ranko's blade to slide smoothly across her throat, opening it into a wide gash and cleanly severing a blood vessel, to judge from the pulsing flow of blood upward.
Ranko slid past the startled defender, who had gone in an instant from being in a two-against-one deathmatch to being the only survivor, as a dark figure swept past him. Ranko did not realize it, but she had instinctively suppressed the enchantment that gave her a convincing infrared signature, allowing her to appear normal to the drow infravision. In its absence, she was as cold as the stone walls, and so nearly invisible against them.
Since the drow generally did not bother with lighting in their halls, aside from the gentle glow of faerie fire, the magical lights which were easy on the eyes whether looking with heat sensitive vision or light receptors, she passed down the hall towards the next knot of fighters very like a moving shadow, though she was not actively using the shadow cloak to conceal herself.
She was still not used to taking magic into account, and might have been caught off guard by the healing magic the female drow whose throat she had slit possessed, but the defender she had left behind saw the drow's throat wound sealing, and promptly slid his sword into her, before stripping the body of rings and necklaces in the hopes of finding that healing magic for himself.
Her quicksilver energy was still pooling in her legs, and she was upon the next group in only three impossibly swift and long strides, her excessive mass, well beyond that of a normal human, much less a slender and light drow, took her into and through the first opponent in this group, a massive hulking figure that filled much of the corridor before she encountered him. He was wearing an emblem that was not that of House Vitrue, and when she plowed into him, he crumpled in on one side and split in half as she moved through unimpeded, the two not quite fully separated halves being sent down the hall and rising up towards the ceiling.
The shock of her arrival was such that two more of the enemy slumped dead to the floor before the last one broke and ran. Ranko raced after him, catching up in an instant and lopping off his head as she passed him at a run, her senses reaching out ahead, looking for more targets. She was quickly growing accustomed to the feel of flesh sliding across her blade, though the feel of that huge man-thing actually coming apart as she impacted it was horrifying. She was sure that if she had still had a normal body, she would have been promptly crouched in that corridor, decorating it with the contents of her stomach.
Of course, if she had possessed a normal body, it would never have happened like that in the first place.
Coming to an intersection, she cast a quick glance down the three paths. Seeing a group charging toward her down one of them, she chose it and raced to meet them. One of them hung back as the others met her charge. As with the last group, this one was not purely drow, being apparently led by two female drow, priestesses to judge by their snake-headed whips, and three large furry though otherwise man-like beings, heavily muscled though smaller than the hulk she had encountered, and then the one male drow hanging back.
What little light there was suddenly vanished, as if a bag had been drawn over her head, but Ranko was unperturbed, continuing forward until she made contact with someone, then knocking their arms wide and spearing her blade through them and pushing through another concussive blast, while drawing her quicksilver itself, rather than merely the energy of it, to the surface. She suspected the darkness was a magical effect cast by one of the drow, and if it was, she might be able to draw it in.
Snake heads skittered across her shoulder, fangs sliding uselessly across her impervious surface, and she lashed out, catching the whip in her palm and crushing the snake strands in her grip even as the hand closing into a fist snapped up to where she expected a face to be, and she heard a satisfying crack. A surge of pleasurable energy flooded into her from the whip, which crumbled within her grasp.
When that same hand, quicksilver at the ready, lashed forward to grasp the throat beneath the jaw she had struck, her other hand bringing her sword around to strike, she felt a rush of uncontrollable lust and heat race through her. An unearthly scream wailed out, vibrating her palm through the very throat she was clutching, the body slumping in death before her sword could come to bear.
An angry presence surged within her, as if part of herself had risen in rebellion, but her iron will pressed it down with the power of her infinite confidence in herself. She cast the body aside, using the momentum of the exchange to spin her the other way. Her sword having passed the halfway mark overhead and beginning to descend, she forced its course back towards the right, away from the now dead body, and she felt it bite into flesh.
She fired off a concussive blast through the sword, then pushed her energy out into the air, seeking the source of the darkness and drawing it in, unraveling the spell as she consumed the energy. The aftershocks of pleasure were still ricocheting around within her, and her eyes were burning with a fiery red glow as she leapt onto one of the strange man-things, bearing it down even as her sword sank into the chest of the one beside him, sliding down between the clavicle and the ribs, into the chest cavity. Her left hand, gleaming silver in the light, flared suddenly as her fingers closed on the chest of the man she was bearing down, extending into claws as they sank into his flesh and another rush of wild pleasure surged through her, as light and strength fled his eyes.
Flame washed over her, the panicked mage who had hung back having shot a fireball into the tight confines of the corridor, risking his own life from the concussion wave racing down the hall, in his fear at seeing her destroy the group of fighters before him. Red energy filtered in amongst the others, as her quicksilver drank in the thin threads of magic within the otherwise normal flames. A frustrated cry sounded behind her, and she spun to see the last female drow, her face blistered from the mage's panicked attack, throwing something at the floor. A wave of spiders seemed to bubble up from it, expanding to fill the width of the hall and flowing towards them.
Ranko smirked, tugged her sword free, incidentally breaking the dying being's clavicle and top rib, took two running steps, and leaped over the mass of spiders to smash into the angry priestess, leading with her left hand. Again an unfamiliar wave of pleasure spread through her, and she groaned at the sensation, noting at the same time the pleasant softness of the breast she had grabbed, pierced though it was by her taloned fingertips. The body grew quickly chill beneath her hands as the drow died, and a forest of massive ice crystals suddenly surrounded them both, piercing through the drow's body and constricting Ranko's movement. Embracing the shadows, Ranko fell through them to appear behind the frantically casting mage, and slid her arm easily around his throat, cutting off his words, and slipping a finger almost casually through his skin to soak again in the exquisite pleasure. She was not sure where the pleasure was coming from, or what was happening, just that getting her quicksilver into someone while trying to draw in magic was enough to draw out a rush of pleasure like nothing she had ever felt, while killing them nearly instantly. She barely even noticed the screams, after the fourth time.
With this group finished, she went back on the hunt, prowling down the halls. She found one lonesome drow concealed in the shadows attempting to pick a lock, and she slipped silently up behind him, then reached out and spun him about, pinning him with her arms as she examined him looking for House markings.
He stared at her with frightened eyes, tugging fruitlessly on his trapped hands, then cringing in pain when an attempted kick hit what felt like a steel post. Finding nothing that would reveal one way or the other whether he was an invader, or merely a thief, or a member of the house trying to take advantage of the commotion, and she growled in frustration, but remembering Distanfae's demand that she focus on the powerful, she threw herself off of him and down the hall, searching for other targets.
Finding a hall with windows, she sprang to one and looked outside, and grinned widely. There was quite the melee going on in the courtyard below, and she bounced easily out the window and off of a ledge, coming down with a smashing blow that took her straight through the largest target, a man that towered two and a half times higher than most of those around him, bearing the mark of the enemy house. She entered his back just above his left shoulder, shattering his shoulder bones, in a diving punch, and exited through his abdomen, clutching the shredded remains of his heart in her hands like a prize, even as she found herself crying out at the magnificent intensity of the pleasure and lust roaring through her body like an inferno.
The rushing flood of energy crashed upon her like a tidal wave, and it had no time to die before she was in amongst the fighters, her sword wrapped in gleaming quicksilver as she charged through the throng, hungrily drinking in their lives. Poisoned blades and crossbow bolts shattered harmlessly on her skin as she tore her way through their ranks, her entire being now surrounded by a rising glow of magic, manifesting here as a flat plane of amethyst, here as hungry red flames, and there as sickly green, as she began to draw in the leftover energies of the magical battles that had been raging prior to her arrival. Combined with the energies she was drinking in through her quicksilver, whether it was their ki, or lifeforce, or magic, or whatever she was drawing in from those she killed, she was overflowing with it all.
Though the enemy quailed before her and sought to flee, she was too fast, too relentless, and while here and there someone who had been close enough to the periphery managed to slip unseen into a corridor or gate and get out of sight, the vast majority fell at her hands. Her own side stared in dumbfounded awe and fear, too overcome by the terror of what they were seeing, and the fear that she might do the same to them, to cheer at the sudden turning of the tide.
Bereft of enemies to slaughter, Ranko ran through the three main outer courtyards, but the other two were free of violence, being further out and have been already passed by the mob she had fought, so she returned to the inner halls, searching out more combat. As the last vestiges of the feelings the stolen energies sent through her faded, Ranko slowed and finally stopped, pulling into the shelter of a closed door to think. What had just happened?
"Was it bloodlust? Something Distanfae did? Or just a side effect of . . . pulling whatever it was out of them?" She found she did not want to think too deeply about what it might have been, and realizing in retrospect the connection between drawing energy in through her quicksilver and the intense feelings, she promptly submerged all of her quicksilver, and took advantage of the pause to draw several balls of stone from the wall, then headed back out on the hunt.
She would kill, but she did not want to like it, much less love it. That was a sure route to madness. Now she prowled the halls with cold purpose, finding that she had to not only suppress her quicksilver and the urge to drink from those she killed, she also had to restrain her own love for the fight. The joy she felt in fighting, in using her skill and demonstrating her prowess, had generally been tempered in battle by her training to resist the mind-clouding effects of adrenaline. The training she had been put through to keep her from devolving into a mindless brawler once the body's hormones and chemical fight-or-flight responses kicked in were not being triggered. This body had no hormones, no chemical reactions, it did not change as she fought.
Her muscles did not loosen up a few minutes in, nor begin to tense up and stiffen as the fight dragged on and on. Her fists did not begin to ache from being clenched, nor her calves start to burn as she tried to keep up her footwork. She had been killing now for several minutes, and as she killed yet another drow, this one by a shot stone that passed through her head, she was noticing the absence of fatigue. She was almost instinctively cycling her quicksilver energies in the way she would with ki, to refresh her muscles and clear them of the buildup of acids, and now she forcibly clamped down on that. There was no need to waste her energy and focus on something that could not happen.
Every now and again she would pass dead bodies she had not killed, and she spared them a glance only to see which House's seals and marks they bore.
A thunderous boom echoed down the corridors, and Ranko, by now much more accustomed to navigating using sound, and identifying the direction of a sound, immediately shifted her direction to target the source of the sound. Anything that could make that loud a sound, whether it was an explosion, or a giant's hammer, was a legitimate target by the guidelines Distanfae had given her.
She passed through a pair of door that had been shattered, and found herself in a large amphitheatre, with stadium type seating leading down to a central dais. This was indeed the focus of the strongest fighters, for the Matron and Kliza were both on the central dais, a cluster of defensive fighters around them, mostly sword wielders.
There were three mages, Distanfae among them, holding up some form of glowing shieldwall against an advancing group that was hurling obviously magical attacks at them. Ranko was surprised that her House had chosen such a poor defensive position as the bottom of an amphitheatre. Did they not understand the value of high ground in combat?
At any rate, that was not a problem she suffered at the moment, being probably twenty feet above the attacking group and behind them, though at about a twenty degree angle to one side. They were well focused, and while she was momentarily tempted to keep the high ground and rain spells down on them from above, she suspected that they were probably equally capable of throwing up a spell wall.
So she ghosted down the levels instead, racing up behind and diving into their midst, letting her full force smash into the rear of the group.
As they broke up and scattered, one quick witted wizard cast down a small figurine, and a muscular horned demon appeared, wielding a flaming sword in one hand, and a black shield with stylized points not unlike his horns adorning it in the other.
Instantly she marked that wizard as her primary target, ignoring the demon for the moment. Bad as the presence of the demon might be, getting focused on him would simply allow the other wizard to summon more. Spell fire was starting to land around them from lower down where they had been able to drop the shield they had held up against incoming fire, after she had disrupted said fire, and were now back on the attack themselves.
She lunged at the remaining non-target, the female spell caster, as a means of getting a better angle on her target while diverting his expectations, even as she palmed the spheres she had drawn from the walls earlier. More prepared now, the female drow drifted up and back through the air, getting out of the range of Ranko's lunge. That mattered little, since she had not intended to actually reach her yet anyway.
Instead, she pivoted the moment her foot caught the ground again, and fired several spheres, rapidly one after the other, at the mage she was targeting. To her frustration, the spheres pinged off a suddenly visible bubble around him, that faded out of view again a moment later.
Abandoning her attempt at misdirection, she shot towards him, now having an angle to get past the demon, whose swing at her had shattered a stone bench behind her, and who was even now spinning to strike again. Quicksilver energy surged into her as she drew it up again, to boost her speed, and into her sword, focusing on the idea of breaking that shield. Her hands came together in front of her, sword point leading the way, as she focused all the energy of her lunge into the unbreakable tip of her blade, and her own strength on preventing it from moving from one side to the other.
Unfortunately for Ranko, magic can be capricious in the rules it follows. Her attempt to break the shield failed utterly, as she had no real clue what the shield was, nor what it would mean to break it. The shield held up beautifully, and attempted to redirect the entire kinetic force of her attack into her. Here it too failed, not particularly because of her unbreakability, as in fact it would have done her no physical harm, but because of her innate resistance to magic cast on her, something of which she as yet knew nothing.
Her only real experience with foreign magic, aside from the ineffectual efforts of the demons in her brief extra-planar sojourn, was from Distanfae, and as her creator and by the design of her very self, she had no resistance to his power so long as he wore the control mesh. So at this point, she was wholly unaware of the anti-magic effect, but that made no difference to its operation, and the attempted rebounding of the kinetic energy was a magical effect that she unknowingly resisted. In doing so, the entire kinetic energy of her leap ended up dumped into the shell itself, and the wizard was sent rocketing across the chamber like a rifle bullet while Ranko stopped dead, having dumped every drop of kinetic energy into the strike.
A heavy blow from a flaming sword struck sparks across her back in her brief moment of shocked astonishment, even as a strange swirling blackness filled the center of the room, and a horrific being like a misshapen lump of melted wax appeared, long blobs of wax like tentacles waving about it.
Feeling that the wizard would at least be shaken up by his high speed flight, Ranko ignored the demon again and targeted the remaining enemy, only to find that she had already fallen.
"Ranko, get out of the way, let the servant past!"
Distanfae's voice echoed in her head, and when the disgusting wax lump charged towards her and the demon, Ranko scrambled out of the way and let the two collide.
Glancing back down at the group below, who had apparently summoned the disgusting thing, she saw Distanfae wave at her. "Go on, there are sure to be more of them. Find any that remain and end them, then search all the fallen you find for any items that appear magical and collect them."
Nodding, she sped over to where the first wizard slumped against a wall. His shield had apparently not protected him from the kinetic force of the impact against the wall, and he was either dead or out cold.
Glancing about, she saw that the demon was apparently gone, whether slain, or banished back to his source, though the other attackers still clustered together, fewer now in number, with the molten wax thing still there amongst them.
Coldly snapping his neck to be certain he was dead, she despoiled the body, collecting a much larger variety of items than from most of those she had killed. Two of these she set aside as of especial interest. They bore markedly similar patterns on first glance to the planar traveling artifact she had not yet begun to master, and so probably had similar extra-planar magics.
Finishing with him, she returned to the site of her last conflict, and returned to processing the bodies, then moved on. As she sped through the halls, often coming upon unsuspecting members of her own House and giving them a sudden shock when she appeared from the darkness to scrutinize them before racing on, or rising from the shadows behind their opponent to slay them, she pondered her unnerving loss of control, and the strange and addicting sensations of pleasure.
Even now she could feel the desire to send her quicksilver to the surface again and drink in the life of those she slew, as though she was wasting them, as if she were casting good food on to the ground uneaten, and it disturbed her. Aside from the Soul of Ice training she had learned, her training had not focused overmuch on the ways of emotional control. Primarily, she had been trained by the insults of her father to ignore his jibes as best she could, but she had never been terribly successful at this at the best of times. He knew her far too well.
At the same time, he had fairly well inured her to the insults of most others, as they knew far fewer of her weak points than he had, and he had trained her well at spotting and using their own weaknesses against them to cause them to lose their own emotional control, and so maintain hers. That had fallen by the wayside with the shift to killing attacks.
When you could kill someone within moments of laying eyes on them, having the ability to rouse their temper to a fever pitch was a useless ability, and she had said hardly a word since the battle began. As such, she had not had her usual outlet of spewing her emotions at her enemy, throwing them into the insults and epithets she hurled at them along with her fists, and so her concern simply festered, as she fretted over what she had done, and what she still desired to do.
It was one thing to kill when you were ordered to do so by your lord, when honor demanded it of you. The tweaks that Distanfae had made to her mind had kept that from bothering her overmuch, unnecessary as they might have been, even though she did not know of them. Now though, she wanted to kill, desired to kill.
Even when she recognized that someone was from her House, it still took an actual effort of will to hold back her strike. She wanted to kill them, and more than that, she wanted to drink in their death, to consume them and revel in the pleasure it gave her. It made her queasy to think on it, this bloodlust, it left her feeling evil and dirty and ashamed, but that was not enough to kill the hunger that grew inside her.
Finally she remembered what Distanfae had said to her about telling him if she felt hungry, and she wondered whether this was what he meant. Had he intended for her to do this? Would he guess what she had done if she told him? Still, now that she connected his words, his orders, to her state of being, she could not hold back from telling him, except to decide that it would have to wait until after the crisis, lest she distract him at a critical moment.
Feeling more self-assured now that she at least had a plan regarding her unnatural hunger, and with the hope that Distanfae would be able to do something about it, she continued clearing the compound. Her mop-up had not lasted very long before she was recalled to the amphitheatre by Distanfae, where she found the wax thing blessedly gone.
Before Kliza and the Matron, she was ordered to give an account of all that she had slain, and she spent the next several minutes going over every kill. It was only now, as she continued to tell of those she had killed, that she realized that when she thought of some of those she had killed, the ones she had so reveled in, she could remember their names. It sent a chill of terror through her.
It was impossible, but she could not dwell on it, having to continue explaining those she had killed, though she did not say anything about relieving them of their magical items, and when all was complete, the Matron had bent her wrinkled lips upwards in a pleased smile, of all things!
That what she had done had made the old crone happy made Ranko feel dirtier still, as if it somehow made every kill a little worse, a heavier weight on her soul. She still remembered the child's body embraced by flames, flames that had come from her body, from her spirit.
She knew that if the old lady knew that she had taken pleasure in causing them such horrendous pain, it would have pleased her even more, and she considered again whether it was possible she could keep what had happened from Distanfae, but she knew it could not be.
Group leaders began coming to report, and soon it was confirmed that the House was once more clear of invaders.
There was a brief period of discussion as they examined various tokens the group leaders brought with them, and whether they were actually representative of the House that had attacked, or if they might not be false tokens meant to cause them to attack a stronger House and so be destroyed.
Ranko listened in mild interest as the numbers of the attackers were tallied and compared to the reported force levels of the various primary threats, the Houses that would be most likely to attempt such a move.
Finally they were released, and she followed Distanfae as he made his way back to their training chamber.
"We only have a short time. They will be monitoring us as soon as they get some privacy themselves."
Understanding his implicit command, Ranko quickly explained how events had suddenly moved out of control when exposed quicksilver through which she was attempted to drain magic had for the first time pierced living flesh, and the rush of pleasure and power that had resulted.
Distanfae considered her words briefly, then a smile slid across his face and Ranko shivered as she realized the implication. Far from being shocked or worried, Distanfae was excited by this new ability she had demonstrated, and would almost certainly want to test it out.
He had time for only a few quick questions before they sensed the scrying begin, and they had to shift to a less revealing discussion, but she understood the thrust of his question. Though she had been attempting to draw magical power, the fact that she got the same rush of pleasure from killing the slaves and fighters as from the wizards confirmed that it was not magic that she was draining from them, but something more universal.
Was it their ki? Ranko could hope so, but she rather feared that it was more fundamental still, that she had somehow consumed their very souls. As one who had been ensnared as an incorporeal soul after death herself, she had no room for philosophizing about the existence or absence thereof of souls. She knew that they were real, knew they could be intercepted on their way to an afterlife, if there was such a thing, by means of magic, and she had a dreadful certainty that this is precisely what she had done.
Certainly the fact that she knew their names was evidence in favor of her having consumed their memories, and while Happosai and Hinako had both sucked the ki from their victims, she had never heard them mention capturing any memories in that way.
When she finally returned to the relative privacy of her room, she found herself simultaneously relieved, dismayed, and appalled at her dismay at realizing that Sraelee had survived the attack. Though it was disturbing, it was nothing to the turmoil she was already experiencing about her actions during the conflict, so she forced herself past it.
Allowing Sraelee to draw her a bath, she slid into the water and slid into meditation, and began exploring what she had absorbed, mostly going into items that lacked an obvious elemental focus.
Looking at her powers in meditation was like looking at a pool of water into which someone had been dropping bits of other liquids, like dyes or food colorings. Some mixed readily, others less so, and beneath it all swirled the immense amethyst waters of her neutralized power. Unlike when she had merely absorbed a few spells, the droplets were far more varied and intricate, lacking the simple attributes that had made the association of spell and resultant energy so obvious before. More critically and disturbingly, there were chunks of color that looked nearly solid, that seemed to float on the surface, dimpling it in but not mixing.
As she slipped between these pooled energies, and sampled those which had no strands being drawn into the amethyst energy to be neutralized, she found herself experiencing brief flashes of memories that were not her own. It was made especially peculiar, however, in that each memory would bring up related memories, not for direct experience, but simply as relevant facts and events, that made it clear that even the memories she had not yet directly experienced had nonetheless made it into her form's memory storage.
Were their souls mixing with hers? That she might become as evil as so many of them had been was a sickening thought, and she wondered for some time whether she had any hope of reaching the end of her servitude as a person who would even seek to achieve the goals she currently held, as a person who would give everything, do everything, to save those she had loved, even if she then had to lose them.
She vainly sought to expunge some of these memories by drawing up the energy of them and putting it through her wand of water and hence into the waters of her bath, swirling the waters about in a passable imitation of a Western spa, something she had only had the opportunity to experience a few times before, while constraining them to remain within the tub.
Unfortunately, she found that even this usage of the energy brought the memories they contained to the forefront, though in this case it was somewhat felicitous, as she was treated to the memories of an early training session of a wizard struggling to learn the basics of manipulating the elements.
That was sufficient for her to recognize that this was a situation that could improve her ability to serve her lord. She exited the bath and made ready for bed. The necessity to feign sleep, at least for a reasonable period, was one of the more annoying aspects of Sraelee's presence most of the time, but at this time it served her purposes well.
Lying in the bed, she resumed her meditations, and proceeded to work her way through the memories, gaining experience both in what they had learned, and in manipulating the memories, finding related ones, and particularly in sorting them out into coherent threads of a single direction in time and a single individual, and so spent the night reliving the more notable and salient memories of those she had slain, along with quite a collection of less useful dross.
She came out of it in the morning with a nice collection of ideas to apply to her own weaving of the amethyst energy. While for the most part, the memories were not directly applicable to using her wands, since they were pre-formed spells and not subject to much in the way of changes, manipulating her amethyst energies to recreate spells was both excellent practice, and in the long term, would hopefully allow her to directly cast and thereby manipulate and alter, copies of the spell matrices in her wands and rings.
It was also akin to cleaning her room, as she separated and integrated the knotted masses of memories, they flattened and smoothed, and she was able to slowly clear away the lumps and unpleasant blobs that were clogging her core.
Though it felt wrong to her, to be stealing knowledge in this way, too much like the cheap tricks her fiancees and rivals would pull back in Nerima, her honor was in serving Distanfae well now, not in appeasing her own conscience. She had committed herself to doing what it took to fulfill her vows to him.
She realized that it was almost inevitable at this point that he would have her consume several more people in tests to determine what she was getting from them, so working out all the details she could now would hopefully minimize the number of such tests that needed to be done.
Of course, if the Matron found out what she could do, it would be just like her to demand that all future kills be done in this way to maximize the benefit to the House. Ranko was not sure what she would do if it came to such an end. She hated the Matron, but Kliza was no better as an alternative, and Houses simply were not ruled by men in this city, so plotting an overthrow to put Distanfae in as the Head of the House would only end in the House being a target for every other House in the city, and even she could not defend against such an enemy as a new weaponsmaster rather than a powerful magical artifact.
After confirming through the shadows that Distanfae was up and active and not currently being scryed, she slid through the shadows to him. Before they began, Distanfae warned her that she would be involved in a retributive attack, once they had confirmed which House had been involved. A failed strike against another House, one which did not succeed in eliminating the members of the House's blood, the members of the central family, would result in a protest before the Council of Heads, and the Houses would band together to destroy the failing House, as punishment for the failed attack, and House Distanfae would be expected to lead the strike.
The attack would probably not happen until the next day, or possibly the day after, so they had some time today to go over what she had collected.
Ranko began to explain in more detail, now that they were not expecting to be spied on at any moment, what had occurred the day before. She also began explaining what she had learned while processing their memories the night before, and with Distanfae's coaching, she attempted to cast some simple spells for the first time by replicating the methods of the casters in her memories.
She had a little success with the simplest cantrips, ones that needed nothing more than words or gestures. Beyond that, however, she found herself hampered by the limited senses of the people in her memories. They could not see the threads of the spells they cast, nor did they need to understand the forms the magic took when they cast them.
The shaping was done, at least in part, by ritual and physical components, and there were no simple clear analogs for her to follow. Replicating rote physical motions was certainly no hardship to one who had trained for so long as a martial artist. She might be able to do something with the physical components at some point in the future, but they were esoteric and highly varied, and apparently most wizards memorized a subset of their spells each day, and so knew which material items they would need for the casting, and could carry them.
For her to carry items she would have to abandon her ability to travel through stone, which was the only travel method she had that stood a significant chance of eluding detection, so duplicating the spells in that fashion did not seem to be a productive use of her time compared to mastering her internal weaves.
Not only were her wands inbuilt and easily triggered, but she could see their weaves, and as she got used to them, she could potentially duplicate the weave, and in the longer term, hopefully begin creating weaves herself, using the knowledge she learned from the wands, without the need for external components, gestures, words, and the like.
If she was right and all these things served to structure the magical weaves, and she could weave the strands of magic herself using her long developed skills in the use of ki, she should be able to bypass those crutches entirely.
This was somewhat confirmed when Distanfae revealed that it was not uncommon for the truly powerful older mages to have some spells known so well and so thoroughly understood that they could cast them on the fly, with no obvious external actions at all. Indeed, it was rumored that a certain infamous surface mage had protective spells that he kept up all day long, or at least, they always seemed to be active in the moment they were needed. Whether he could actually maintain them without end, or could cast them without the slightest bit of delay was a matter of some argument, albeit one that Distanfae did not care much about.
So they returned to the study and development of her wand skills. This time, he actually let her step up to summoning a more powerful elemental, starting with her earth wand, since as he said the more powerful elementals were among the few beings that could slow down even a powerful demon, such as the one she had seen summoned in the amphitheatre.
He also told her a little about the servant of the spider-goddess she had also observed, the melted wax thing that had gone up against the demon. None of her wands were for summoning demons or deific servants, but there was no guarantee that a weave in something she had picked up might not be.
Finally, after that bit of practice, they began going through the loot she had collected the day before, and hidden in his quarters. Even now she did not retrieve all of it, lest they be suddenly scryed and their loot observed and despoiled. Instead, she would draw a few things at a time through the shadows, and he would examine them.
Some he was able to identify, such as clothing that bore little more than what might be termed seamstressing spells, spellwork that caused it to adjust to fit the person that was waring it, or to repair minor rips and tears, or weapons enchanted for sharpness and strength. These were relatively useless to her, and he directed her to attempt to use these to practice using her quicksilver to consume the magic from them without absorbing them. She noted as she did so that it was not nearly as pleasurable an experience as drinking the souls of the attackers had been the day before.
The items she had held especial hope for Distanfae confirmed to be likely related to summoning, indeed, one of them was probably the very item that had summoned the demon the night before, though he could not be sure which, and these he set aside with the intent that she should absorb them, but at a later time, after he had set up to monitor the process more closely.
She had captured one of the snake-headed whips as well, and he looked at it for a long time, before shaking his head.
"I am deeply curious to find out if you can consume a divinely enchanted item, but I am afraid that it might tie you somehow to the service of that god or goddess, so if we ever try it, I will have to consider very carefully what token it should be. It certainly will not be hers. This will have to go to the Matron to be disposed of properly."
Other items of her collection were less easy to identify, amulets and rings, hair ornaments, daggers and swords and hammers with less obvious enchantments, and these were returned to their hiding place until they could be gone over in more detail.
There were also seven wands and three rods in the collection, and after a brief check to see if any were the sort that Distanfae wanted to hold back for himself, he had her absorb them directly, giving her a new collection of spell weaves to study. The rings would probably end up going the same way, but rings were trickier to identify than the wands, and while wands were generally purely wizarding, being effectively a means of storing and casting spells, rings and amulets were as often of religious significance as mystical, and could as easily hold a divine blessing or curse as a stored set of spells.
She conducted a quick examination, scanning the weaves. One, she was disappointed to note, appeared to be substantially similar to the fireball spell from the Elemental Wand of Fire, and was the only weave in that wand, so absorbing it had probably been a waste. She made a note to work on trying to find a way to see the weaves in an item without needing to absorb it.
The others were less obvious, though one bore some vague similarities to the summoning weaves in the elemental wands, and another had a portion that resembled the weave from his Ring of Flight, but not closely enough to expect that it was specifically flight related.
The rods were even more unfamiliar in the form of their weaves, and Distanfae informed her that they might have to be wielded like maces to activate some of their powers, or cast to the ground for others. If they needed to be cast to the ground, then it was likely that this power would only be available if Ranko was in the form of the rod and being wielded by someone else, since she could not cast part of herself down, and even then it might well fail, if it tried to change her form.
She practiced drawing the rods out a few times, reshaping them as closely as she could match her memory of them, trying to use only the substance that was originally part of them, something that had not been an issue with the wands. Generally, triggering a wand's effect caused it to come from whatever part of her was being pointed at something, drawing on her or her wielder's intent. If the rod's magic activated when it was used to attack, she was not sure if any attack would suffice, or only an attack that actually used part of the rod's original material. She was a little perturbed that he had revealed this complication only after having her absorb them, as she was a little worried that she might now trigger some magical effect anytime she punched or kicked something or someone.
She was certainly not going to attempt it on him, and while she could summon those snakes and scorpions, she suspected they might not appreciate being summoned just to get beaten up, so unless Distanfae actually ordered her to, she was not likely to do that. She was also not going to suggest testing it on someone else, since as weapons the effects would likely be harmful, she would probably end up killing or maiming someone who was already unlucky enough to be a slave of the House. If she could not attempt to free them, she could at least not act to make their lives worse.
She described them as best she could to him, explaining what they resembled, and what they did not.
"Set aside the one that looks like a fireball, as that is most likely what it is. A bit of a waste, really, but if you can perceive any differences, it may help you learn the spells a bit better. Bring out one of the others." He provided her with a wooden target, before going to stand behind her, setting up a shield for himself.
She drew out one of the wands, and finding it had only one weave in it, pointed it at the target and triggered the effect. A brilliantly white light shone forth in a beam from the tip of the wand to the target, obliterating the target into a mass of shards and splinters.
Distanfae groaned, covering his eyes as they burned at the sudden brightness, but gestured at the target, and it reassembled. "Painful," he commented. "Even if the damage was not significant, it could be useful against a large group, blinding them all, but do not use it when we go to crush the invading house. Too much chance it would blind our own troops. No good for quiet infiltration, either."
Ranko nodded. It had not been exactly loud, though it had not been silent. The shattering of the target had made more noise than the beam itself, and the sound of the beam was hard to put to words, almost a hissing sound, but not quite. As if it was boiling the air as it passed, maybe. Definitely not a tool for stealth. She spent a moment examining the weave, making sure that she would recognize it in the future so as to avoid using it unintentionally, then withdrew the wand and brought out another, glancing at Distanfae for agreement.
He nodded, and she felt the weave of it. She tried to activate the weave, but though she poured power into it, it did nothing, the power just swirling in the weave. "It is not working." She shook the wand experimentally, but there was no change.
"Unusual," Distanfae commented, his eyes narrowing in thought. He pressed his fingers together, then snapped his fingers suddenly. "Ah, I might have it." He conjured a rat. "Try touching the wand to the rat."
The rat glowed with a much softer white light than the searing beam of the last one, but there was no other apparent effect. "Wands of touch spells are much less common," he explained, "but they are sometimes made. From the white light, maybe a healing effect?" He cast a bolt of energy at the rat, shattering its leg and mangling its side. "Try it again," he instructed her, as the broken animal lay still, nearly dead.
She refilled the weave, and touched the rat again. The damage visibly reversed, the rat squeaking as its leg straightened, and the skin along its side came back together. The hair that had been burned away did not return, leaving it with a bare patch, but it was clearly healthy again.
She withdrew the wand, and pulled out another. This one caused the target to lift into the air slightly, and she found she could raise and lower it, though she could not direct it in any other direction.
Distanfae looked vaguely disgusted. "Levitation," he commented, "a banal spell of little value, it is hard to believe the idiocy that resulted in someone commissioning a wand of it. It only works on willing targets, so don't bother trying to use it in a fight. Not nearly as useful as a flight spell or mount, and only lasts a few minutes anyway. A waste of good materials, that wand."
The next wand refused to cast against the target, but when cast on the rat, a light struck the rat, but to no apparent effect. Distanfae had her try again several times, in case it was just a fluke failure, but the spell continued to have no noticeable effect.
The wand after that sent the rat squealing and running away to scrabble at the door as if in terror, while Distanfae grimaced uncomfortably. "Fear effect," he said shortly. "Indiscriminate, useful to break up pursuit, but don't use it in a fight with allies. It won't necessarily affect everyone the same way."
Distanfae dismissed the rat and conjured another one for her to test her last wand on, after it also failed to cast against the target. To her minor relief, it had no apparent effect on the rat either.
"Are the weaves of those two wands that will not cast on wood, but do nothing to rats the same?" Distanfae watched curiously as she compared them. She shook her head.
"They don't look the same at all."
"Well, one or the other might be something with a targeted creature, but that only affects a particular sub-type, such as the undead, or demons, devils, that type of limitation is not unknown."
She shrugged. "Maybe. It did not feel like it was not working, though." Inside, she was wondering about what he meant by undead. Was that not sort of what she was? Did he mean that some of them might work on things like her? Or did he mean movie undead, zombies and vampires and such? Were they real?
She did not ask, preferring not to know. After all, even if he told her they were, until she saw them for herself, it could still be that he was mistaken, or was just credulous of claims other people had made in encountering them.
"Try one of the rods on the rat," he ordered, and Ranko cast the levitation weave at the rat from her outstretched finger, not bothering to produce the wand, and lifted it to where she did not need to kneel to strike it. A rod formed in her grasp, and she struck the rat lightly with it.
As it turned out, the lightness did not matter. The rat visibly withered, its muscles shrinking away. It struggled weakly for air for a moment, not even strong enough to fill its lungs, and expired.
"That looked like, hmm... either withering, or life drain," he said, prodding at the floating dead rat before vanishing it. Another one appeared before her, but the next two rods did nothing. Well, not truly nothing - they killed the rats, since it apparently demanded a true strike to activate effects and not merely a tap, so Distanfae was not satisfied with a gentle prod. But there were no other visible effects from them.
He looked ready to dismiss her, then paused. "I gave you the ring of Flight to emulate a Drow noble's ability to levitate. Your new wand of levitation is more suited to duplicating that without revealing additional abilities; see if you can cast the weave on yourself."
Ranko nodded, and focusing on the weave, touched her fingers against her body, and cast through it. She lifted smoothly, easily from the ground, rose to touch the ceiling, and descended again.
"Excellent. Use that in future when pretending to be Drow. Go on now, I need to think about this, and which of these you should be safe to reveal in the next fight."
Ranko slid back through the shadows to her room, lurking in them for a moment to determine where Sraelee was. Finding her in the room tidying up, Ranko slid into the corridor and up it until she found a well shadowed alcove, into which she stepped, and continued down the corridor where she entered her rooms through the door.
She felt a little bad again, seeing the girl with her woven necklace and remembering how she had felt on discovering that she had survived the battle. It was not honorable to wish ill on others, and she made up her mind to think of something nice to do for Sraelee and to do it.
"Good day, Sraelee," she said as she closed the door behind her. Sralee sprang up from the floor, a dusting rag in her hand and bobbed her head nervously. "Good day, mistress."
Ranko moved on into the room, paying attention to Sraelee from the corner of her eye. As she expected, much of Sraelee's nervousness eased when she was not the focus of Ranko's attention, presumably because she was not as likely to be punished when no-one was watching her. That might indicate that she had not actually served under the two elder Vitrue, who had that scrying magic that bugged Distanfae so much. Or it might just indicate they did not bother using it against menial staff.
Ranko settled on to the bed and returned to her meditation. She was particularly curious about the two white lights she had produced, one that was healing, and the other destructive. She drew up a strand of her magic and fed it through the healing wand, trying to let it color it the way her elemental wands did. It took a bit of playing around before she found a path she could send magic on through the weave and out again, but she was finally able to draw out the white energy.
Holding the white aloof from the others in her pool for the time being, she went through the adjustment process with the destructive white beam. When she finished, she found she could not tell the difference in the two pools of white energy, and when allowed to mix, they merged into one blob with no sign of swirls of mixing color, nor when pulled apart was there any overriding tendency to separate into two of the same size. Whatever the underlying element or concept was, it was apparently identical. Interesting.
She pulled up some fire magic and plucked off a bit of the white magic and mixed the two to see what would happen. The blob of fire magic, normally a fiery red-orange, rather than mellowing to a pink or light red, simply became brighter, gleaming rather like the point of fiery light that was the compressed form of the fireball spell before it detonated.
When she tried the same thing with magic from the earth wand, she got a brilliant green magic that surged and frothed, swirling, expanding in little tendrils and then relaxing again. She drew it and the red spark down into her purple quicksilver energy, subsuming and consuming them rather than leaving them free in her pool. She kept the pool of white energy, though, planning on playing with it later.
Much like her ring of magic missiles, running magic through the wand of levitation caused no change at all. The wand of fear produced a disgusting, oily black magic that she wanted to expel rather than consume. Instead, she ran it through the healing wand, expecting that to turn it to the more comfortable white energy. Instead, it came out looking raw once more. Disturbed that she might have damaged her healing wand, she quickly poured more magic through the wand, which came out as white as when she had first done it.
Perhaps, then, they were some form of opposites? She ran some of the white energy through the wand of fear, and it too lost the white qualities, and looked like ordinary magic. Well, her ordinary magic, anyway, the purple stuff from her quicksilver. She did not know what truly ordinary magic looked like in this weird quicksilver view of pooling energies.
Tired of being static, Ranko rose from the bed, noted that Sraelee had retreated to her own room to give her peace as she lay, and slipped out the door. She returned to that alcove, and moved through the shadows to one of the rooms she had passed in her rampage through the halls, and had noted as being empty. It was not merely empty as in unoccupied, but empty as in nothing but bare walls.
The door was shut where it had been open when she had last passed it, but there was no other sign of activity there, and it remained empty, which suited her just fine.
Drawing out a katana-styled blade, and checking to be sure she was not being observed by scrying spells, Ranko began a kata. Quicksilver flowed up from her pool and down into her limbs, substituting for ki to allow her to move as she remembered, with crisp speed and flowing movements. Pulling at the white energy, she slid it into the blade, watching to see how it showed in normal sight. The blade did not glow, exactly, but it seemed to leave a shimmering white afterimage, a visually pleasing effect whether it did anything interesting or not.
She pumped in the red energy, only then noticing that somewhere along the line, she had started perceiving colors to the energies that at first she had only noted as being cool, or spicy and fast flowing, or sluggish. She was not sure what caused that, precisely, whether it was because she know knew what they were associated with and so her mind was applying that to interpreting the imagery, or whether they had gained colors that they had not previously had. The blade burst into red fire, leaving a trail of rising flames when she swished it about. Pushing the energy up until only the top half had red energy likewise limited the flames on the sword.
She drew back the flames and substituted the cool energy of the Wand of Elemental Water, and a watery seeming blueness surrounded the blade, though it was obviously not truly water, as nothing was dripping from the sword. She slid in air, as she had done once before, and the blade froze over as she stepped into the next move of the kata.
Back and forth she changed the energies, with this and that interesting effect, until she tried the combination of earth and white that had given her the green energies. The green energy that had surrounded the sword then had looked like tendrils of vines or roots wrapped about the blade, but the very next move of the kata, when she swung the blade down, literal roots had surged forth, anchoring into the walls as though an old tree had slowly grown there, working and worming its way in over centuries.
She pulled the energy back immediately, but the damage was done, and the root system and the stunted trunk of some sort of plant remained. As she watched in shock, a tiny bud swelled and burst, a flower bloomed and died in seconds, and tiny petals fell.