In Defense of the House


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.