The laboratory air was cool and sterile, and after her climb, Vero spent several moments sucking in great gasps of it.

  When she had recovered, Vero explored the room around her. It was spacious, with a large dais in the center and a permanent magic circle carved into it.

  The only light came in through a large window of stained glass, it depicted a veiled woman in mourning attire. Vero thought it might be the Death Goddess, but in a corner of the pane she saw a dark circle to indicate the new moon. The figure must have been Luna, cloaked in mystery. The transitional state between death and birth. It was very beautiful, and Vero could only imagine it had been present before the arrival of the Black Palatine. She could not imagine him commissioning such a work, and there were no signs of heresy she could see.

  Flanking the window were two obscene pieces of statuary, which were much closer to what she expected from vampyric religion. To the left was the Veiled One, rendered in obsidian and offering an outstretch wrist towards her, watching Vero with bestial eyes. To the right was a white marble statue of the Lord of Medicine, with a fanged smile, and all the necessary barber’s implements to perform a bleeding.

  Against the other walls were tables and creche’s containing almost every imaginable piece of occult paraphernalia. It might even have been superior to the laboratory Jean kept for his court wizard. Examining the equipment carefully, much of it appeared to be old Imperial. Though she noticed many superstitious charms with no application for empirical wizardry she knew of.

  There were reagents requiring warm storage beside the large iron pipe, which continued ever further upwards. There were no other reagents though, besides small reserves of white salt and the other most basic staples, so there must have been a dedicated storage room nearby. There were also no bookcases, so she presumed there was a proper library somewhere on the premises.

  Vero made mental note of what was there. She might, after all, make use of the laboratory during her escape.

  There was only one door, and Vero approached it very carefully. There was another key locking system, but once again, it was positioned in the wrong direction. There were also many old rushes in front of the doorway, so many that they obscured the floor, but the rest of the laboratory was clear.

  She sucked in a great breath and blew the petals away to uncover a small clear space. Beneath them, there was a fine slit in the stone floor, containing something within. Vero followed the crevice, and uncovered a large square shape immediately in front of the door. As expected, there was a pressure plate in the center.

  Vero identified it as a man-trap. The principle was a simple one. Stepping on the plate would release the pressure holding two sets of metal bars apart. They would suddenly swing together and clamp shut; Vero judged at about knee height. This was a trap that certainly would not be fatal, and Vero did seriously consider putting herself into it, but it would have a very good chance of breaking one or both of her legs. If that happened this would become a suicidal task in earnest, and Vero was not prepared to give herself up for dead quite yet.

  After what she had learned from Adeana, Vero also wanted to uncover as much information about the Curia as she could before she was captured.

  The laboratory had many rods, wands, and staves of different material compositions. Imperial magic always made use of a phallic implement as the foci of power, even when it served no purpose, or even when it made a working needlessly more complex. It gave Vero some reassurance that even if this vampyre had lived a millennium, he still possessed prejudices she could turn against him.

  Looking through the wands, she found one which had been carved from the trees of the Whitewood, not far south from where she was born. She considered taking it. Sorceresses often had greater necessity for phallic implements, due to the natural bias towards the feminine in their spellcasting and lack of the genuine article.

  It was easy enough to fashion a simple rod from any fallen branch though. She decided it would be better to leave no traces of how she had infiltrated the castle in the first place.

  Placing the wand back down, she selected a sturdy metal staff. She returned to the man-trap with it, and firmly set it down right in the center. The metal teeth snapped together with a terrible clang. Vero examined where the iron jaws clamped around the staff and decided that she had made the correct choice not putting her leg into it.

  With the man-trap disabled, Vero could examine the doorway more closely. As she suspected, there were runes running all along it. They were certainly a ward, but there was no way to know if it was a simple alarum or something more complex. There were many symbols, but their purpose may have been to make the spell harder to unravel.

  The script was very strange. It was a form of Sylvan, or so Vero had thought at first. Sylvan script was pictorial, and roughly divided into three languages. One was from the southern continent; it was unique and easily identifiable due to the alphabetical ‘corruption’ introduced through close human contact to create a hybrid style. Of the two northern languages, one predominated in the costal fishing communities, and another with the nomadic groups further inland.

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  That simplistic explanation in no way described the incredible complexities and redundancies which Vero found when she had really begun her studies on the subject in earnest at the slayer library. Each language possessed multiple dialects, which the elves called ‘schools,’ tracing lineages back to the great ancient cities the elves ruled as god-kings before the coming of the Imperium.

  The long-lived elves were masters of all their own dialects, however, so they each began to be used in parallel. Thus, each word had multiple pronunciations and written variations. Each variation communicated a different emotional connotation, or was only used in certain social circumstances, and the whole muddle quickly became utterly incomprehensible to an outsider. This itself was a half-deliberate evolution, intended to divide the world into the ‘civilized’ and those who could be derided as the ‘un-civilized’.

  And if those were the only barriers she had to overcome, Vero might have already become a great expert of elven linguistics. However, each individual khan also kept his own personal flourish to his writing. Calligraphy was a great passion among the elven nobility, and they used their pictographic style the way humans used heraldry. Each of a khan’s men would largely emulate his style, while also deliberately altering minute details to create their own personal ‘handwriting.’

  An elven khan might beat, mutilate, rape, and put his slaves to death at a whim, yet still be judged generous. So long as his men were given the leniency to make the words they wrote all wildly divergent from each other. Many rulers therefore proudly trumpeted just how indecipherable they had successfully rendered their own language.

  Then, when a khan died, his sons each took an equal share of his power and created their own styles. The resulting morass was so complex one would need an elven lifetime to understand all of it.

  Rather than try to understand the whole spell, Vero searched for any single pieces which she could understand, to then use that leverage to dispel as much magic as she could safely. After that she would proceed and hope for the best. Magic flowed more easily through certain forms than others, and wards must always follow certain structures.

  Once she overcame her initial frustration, the work proceeded very quickly. She recognized some runes which resembled ancient Imperial, and realized this must be a very primitive proto-Imperial form of Sylvan. From there, she had a very lucky turn when she identified the central rune as an unusual variant of ‘to block, bar, or turn away.’ With only minor alterations to the stem of one figure, it could be altered and become ‘to extend hands in greeting, to offer hospitality.’

  Vero dug out her chisel and began to work. She felt the subtle vibrations of the magic beneath her fingers. As the chiseling continued, she felt the frequency of the vibration alter, only slightly. It did not prove that she was successful, but she had certainly changed something.

  If the ward was only directed outwards, her sabotage might go unnoticed, allowing her to use the same means for both infiltration and exfiltration. Or, if it was discovered, it would still require removing the doorway and replacing the entire ward.

  She unlocked the door and removed the smallest tumbler. The key would still turn, but it no longer controlled any locking mechanism. Then she reset the mantrap, after memorizing the position of the pressure plate, and returned the staff to where she had taken it. There were slight indents in the metal, but she hoped it would go unnoticed.

  She considered removing her boots to hide her footfalls, but the soft leather of the nymph’s footwear seemed to absorb all sound they should be making. Vero opened the door.

  Finally, it seemed she had reached the inner corridors of the castle. She was on a railed wooden balcony, which over looked a large dining hall with only a single extremely long table that ran the whole length of the room. The balcony went to her left past another door, and then down a set of stairs into the hall itself. To her right, the balcony continued in a horseshoe shape across three quarters of the room's perimeter, with many more doors.

  There were more doors on the first floor, as well as a roaring fire in a grand fireplace along the wall to Vero’s right. To her left, on the wall not covered by the balcony, there were a massive set of double doors with a triptarch painted over them.

  The left panel of the painting showed a woman rising from bed, and the right showed her returning to bed. In both images the sun and the moon were shown in transition on the horizon. The central panel was the most prominent, showing revelers under a dark moon, and prostrate servants offering the dancers their wrists.

  There was no one present, and Vero prepared to venture forwards when she heard voices beneath her. She quickly retreated into the shadows and listened to three men engaged in conversation, using old Imperial.

  “Will you be still?”

  “They should be punished.”

  “They will be, the master will see to that.”

  “Someone should lead a punitive expedition at once. Before matters get worse.”

  “And thith perthon ith you perhapth?” The third fellow spoke with a very pronounced lisp. It might have easily been comical under other circumstances, but there was something about the speech patterns of all three men Vero found unnerving. She tried to determine what it was.

  “Someone should. Things will get worse.”

  “The master is well in control of matters.”

  “You are newly elevated. Retht yourthelf. Be ready when the master callth.”

  The three men walked out from under the overhang. When she saw them, Vero realized why their calm measured voices gave her such a nagging sense of unease. They all walked stiffly with upright postures and no wasted movement. They each had regional accents, but no trace of emotion. They looked more like figures operated by clockwork than living men.

  It was unnerving to see, but Vero was already searching for weaknesses she could exploit in them. Their heads never turned from side to side with even the slightest movement, nor did they turn back or fidget while they waited for the door ahead of them to be opened by the lisping man. They each went through in a single file, and the last man closed the door behind him.

  Vero had seen the effects of a vampyre’s hypnotism before, and defended herself from them more than once. She had heard stories about cults formed around an undead master, but this was the most pervasive mental control she had ever witnessed. It was terrifying to think that their master was not even present.

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