Chapter 35: Volume 1- [ - 36]
I pulled the trigger.
The sound was — in a world without gunpowder, in a world of swords and spells and church-sanctioned purification — indescribable. A crack. A roar. A flat, percussive detonation that filled the receiving room and bounced off the stone walls and shattered the window behind Harwick’s chair. The bullet — a single, heavy, lead ball accelerated to a velocity that this world had never conceived — struck him in the center of the chest.
His velvet coat erupted. The gold chain beneath it shattered. The bullet passed through his sternum, through the great bolus of fat and muscle and bone, and exited his back in a spray of red that painted the wall behind him in a pattern that could have been mistaken for abstract art by someone with a morbid sense of aesthetics.
Harwick looked down at his chest. Looked at the hole. Looked at me.
’What — I cannot — my chest — there is — I cannot breathe — I—’
He slumped forward. His belly hit the table first, then his head, his gold rings clattering against the wood as his hands spasmed once, twice, and went still. The package he had brought — the imported wine — toppled from the table and shattered on the floor, the dark liquid spreading across the stone and mixing with the blood that was now pooling beneath the chair.
I stood. Reloaded the pistol — the action was simple, mechanical, the system providing the knowledge directly into my muscles as though I had done it a thousand times. Powder, ball, ram, prime. Five seconds. The Serpent’s Fang was ready again.
The door burst open.
Two knights — garrison men, capital-funded, wearing the half-armor of guards on routine duty — stood in the doorway. Their eyes went from me to the body on the table to the blood on the wall to the shattered window to the smoking thing in my hand.
They looked at each other. Their internal voices were a synchronized symphony of bewilderment:
’What — what happened — the sound — it was like thunder but there is no storm — the merchant is — his chest is — what killed him — I saw nothing — no blade — no spell — just that thing in the lord’s hand — what is that—’
"Take the body," I said. My voice was calm, level, the voice of a lord giving a routine order. "Throw it in the eastern ravine. Let the monsters have it."
The knights did not move. They stared at me, at the body, at the pistol in my hand. The taller one — a man named Pell, if the original Caelum’s memories served — opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it. His internal voice was a stammering mess of fear and confusion:
’He killed him — the lord killed a merchant — in his own house — with — what was that sound — I have never — is that an artifact — a relic — the Veyne family must have — but the lord is supposed to be useless — he is supposed to be pathetic — this is not—’
"Did I stutter?" I said. The pistol remained at my side. I did not raise it. I did not need to. The two holes in Harwick’s chest were argument enough.
Pell swallowed. Nodded. The other knight — younger, paler — was already moving toward the body.
"And prepare a carriage," I added. "I am heading to the eastern acres. The Harwick estate. Tonight."
"My lord," Pell said, and his voice cracked on the second word. He bowed — a real bow this time, not the perfunctory dip of a man humoring an inferior, but a genuine bend of the waist from a man who had just reassessed the threat level of the person he was speaking to.
They lifted the body between them — it was heavy, the dead weight of a fat man in a velvet coat, blood dripping from the exit wound onto their armored boots — and carried it from the room. I watched them go. Listened to their footsteps recede down the corridor, their internal voices a fading stream of ’what just happened’ and ’the lord killed him’ and ’what was that weapon’ and ’we need to report this’ and ’to whom’ and ’who would believe us’.
I looked at the contract on the table. The wax seal was intact. Harwick’s signature was dry. The document was legal, binding, and contained every loophole I needed.
Clause six: the contract transferred to his heirs upon his death.
Clause seven: I was obligated to provide shelter to his family.
Clause eight: his heirs had to present themselves to me within thirty days.
And the unwritten clause — the one that existed only in my mind and the cold geometry of the situation: two eighteen-year-old daughters, orphaned, alone, with a legal obligation to present themselves to the lord who now controlled their land, their income, and their safety.
I picked up the contract. Folded it. Placed it in my coat.
Then I walked out of the receiving room, past the bloodstain that was already soaking into the stone, past the broken wine bottle, past the shattered window where the sea wind now blew freely into the manor, and toward the courtyard where the carriage was being prepared.
The carriage moved through the afternoon, its wheels grinding against the unpaved road that wound down the cliff from the manor toward the inland territories. I sat in the back, the contract in one hand, the Serpent’s Fang in the other, the pistol disassembled on the seat beside me as I familiarized myself with its mechanism.
Through the window, I could see the manor receding — the grey stone, the crumbling towers, the empty flagpoles where the Veyne banner had once flown. Somewhere inside those walls, Elira was being tended by Martha, her pregnant body still trembling from the morning’s exertions, her mind still processing the revelation of her husband’s infidelity. Somewhere inside those walls, Martha was walking with a vibrator inside her, carrying out her orders, her body a ticking clock of arousal and obedience.
And I was leaving them. Walking out of my own house like a man who had set two fires and was walking away to light a third.
’Two more sluts,’ I thought, and the word was not cruel — it was practical, clinical, the vocabulary of a man who had learned that in this world, women were resources to be cultivated, and the Harwick daughters were a field I had not yet plowed.
The road descended from the cliffs into the coastal lowlands, then turned east, toward the agricultural territory that Harwick had spent his life exploiting.
The landscape changed as we moved — the grey stone and salt scrub of the coast giving way to darker soil, heavier vegetation, the remnants of farmland that had been productive before the corruption had seeped in from the eastern hills.
The fields we passed were stunted, the wheat growing in crooked, sickly rows, the grain heads thin and pale. Signs of the corruption were everywhere — dark patches in the soil where nothing grew, trees with blackened bark, a stream that ran the color of rust.
The sun was sinking toward the horizon by the time the Harwick estate came into view.
It was a compound — not a manor, not a mansion, but a fortified farmhouse complex surrounded by a stone wall and guarded by hired men.