Raphael spared the count one last private assessnt, ten varieties of irredeemable, and walked around to the back of the statue.
Seven recesses, arranged left to right, each labeled with a day of the week, Monday through Sunday. All circular.
"Circular. Those paintings are circular too. Looks like so kind of lock design, but how do you move a painting that only exists inside a projection?"
He thought about it briefly, then went back down to the second floor dining hall and found the round clock-face paintings on the walls.
He kept the lantern beam on them with one hand and reached into the lit area with the other.
They ca away cleanly.
"Hm. That actually works."
He collected all seven and carried them back up to the stairwell, lantern still burning, and ca around to the back of the statue.
"Wine glass, that’s the old vampire scene. He compared the skull to a wine cup. 11 o’clock, Wednesday."
He worked through the rest: the pastry for Thursday’s afternoon tea, the bed for Friday’s liaison with the Marquess’s wife.
One by one he matched each painting’s symbol to the projection it represented and pressed it into the correct slot, Monday through Friday.
"Saturday has two hour hands, 6 and 7. The first scene is the gold coin, buying and selling children for money. The second is the skull, all those deaths on the battlefield."
That left Sunday, the one with the silver blade, and no hour hand.
He pressed it into the slot and waited.
Nothing happened.
"One day without a al. Sunday, no eating." He paused. "Every painting represents a feeding scene. If there’s no al, there’s no scene to represent."
He took the painting back out, peeled the thin canvas away from its backing, and exposed the base layer underneath, the sa grey-white as the statue itself.
"All those elaborate rules, and then the lock that opens everything requires breaking one of them. Interesting builder."
He pressed the bare backing into the slot.
The stairwell shook.
The statue ground against itself, the sound of stone moving on stone after centuries of stillness, and the entire stairwell structure began to rotate, a vast gear chanism turning for the first ti in a very long ti.
The stairs swung through half a revolution. The upper portion, previously hidden behind the ceiling, ca into view.
A path to the third floor had opened.
Raphael looked down at the lantern. The mont the chanism completed, every trace of light in the crystal went out. Whatever arcane charge had filled it was gone.
"No wonder whoever ca through before left it down here."
He originally intended to leave it there, but since it might still be useful, he decided to leave it near the threshold on the third floor, just in case.
The climb was long. The castle’s first and second floors together had been less than fifty ters, the third floor sat near the very top of a structure approaching two hundred, and the staircase covered the distance between in an unbroken ascent.
Whatever occupied the space in between remained unseen.
When he reached the top, he checked the threshold. Nothing carved into it.
He activated Blood Frenzy before stepping through, the familiar compression hit imdiately, his arcane energy pinned as before, but the Blood Frenzy had already engaged, and the physical amplification held at double his base functions.
The entrance opened into a long corridor.
Light ca from crystals embedded in the ceiling, the sa material as the lantern’s core, casting a steady pale glow over everything below them.
The corridor walls were hung with things. Luxury goods, paintings, suits of knight’s armor in full plate.
All of it deep in dust, and all of it degraded past any real value, centuries without maintenance had taken whatever worth these objects once held, and they would crumble at a firm touch.
At the far end of the corridor, a set of double doors, closed. One knight statue stood on each side, weapons drawn, motionless.
Whatever material they were made of, it had not aged. No weathering on the surface. No patina, no cracking, no staining.
Centuries had passed through this place and left no mark on them.
Near the doors, a dark stain on the floor.
Dried, but not old, the color still had depth to it. He followed it to a corner and found the person it had co from.
A human, dead for so ti, a ragged wound blown open through the chest. The heart had been punctured.
"You didn’t make it. That’s a pity."
He crouched beside the body and searched for anything identifying.
A coat-of-arms on the inner lining, a cross with lines through it, a gold coin above the skull. He recognized the symbol.
"Bounty hunter. Independent freelance operators, contracted work. So he took the sa commission from the vampire and made it this far."
He looked around. Nothing else in the corridor except the two statues, which stood where they stood and had not moved.
"Who killed him? Not here. Maybe inside the doors?"
He went back to the body and searched more carefully. A long-handled knife at the hip, the blade snapped clean off. Beside it, a nine-milliter pistol with the barrel sheared away.
"Whoever hit him was strong, had a sharp weapon, and knew what they were doing. He started with the gun, that didn’t work, switched to the blade.
Neither was enough. Sothing broke through his guard and opened his chest."
Raphael made a quiet sound. He understood now why the eting room had gone silent when the vampire presented his commission, and why the vampire had looked genuinely surprised when Raphael accepted.
"Soone took it before and never ca back. After that, nobody believed him when he said low risk."
He wasn’t particularly bothered. He was going to find Alp’s Shadow regardless, this was simply one more thing on the list.
He looked at the rotting face, felt a faint pull of sothing, and searched through the inner lining of the coat.
A small book and a drawstring bag.
Sam’s Notes.
He opened it. The first line on the first page read like a man settling his affairs:
"If you’re reading this, I either died unexpectedly or walked away with the job done. There’s no third scenario in which this book gets found."
The rest of the book was divided into Chapters, records of Supernatural creatures Sam had hunted across his career, species Raphael hadn’t personally encountered alongside ones he had.
The aerial creatures circling the castle were in there. Sam had identified them: Harpies, a group-dwelling Demon type resembling feather-kin closely enough to confuse, but without reasoning, operating on animal instinct.
Single-sex species, self-reproducing, talons extrely sharp, strong intragroup communication, social structure of a pack animal.
The final section was about the castle.
Sam had docunted his reasoning process, everything he’d found and worked through, ending on a single unsolved question:
"Everything here feels arranged, a puzzle with interlocking parts, each one feeding the next, the projection work more sophisticated than anything I’ve co across in thirty years of this work.
This doesn’t feel like an ancient ruin. It feels like soone built a ga. Everything inside is connected.
But I can’t figure out why a ga like this has a group of Demons living in the upper floors who don’t fit into any of it."
That was the last page. The next thing that had happened was in front of him, Sam, dead on the floor, the notebook ending where his life did.
Raphael closed it, opened the drawstring bag. Several green vials that looked like recovery potions, a few other items, so paper currency, there is also a key.
"Unexpected."
He was about to stand when the floor shook.
Not much, a single pulse, as if sothing heavy below had shifted.
Sam’s body tilted with it, and the movent uncovered what had been lying alongside him, hidden under the angle of the corpse.
Words written in dried blood on the stone.
The statues...
Raphael’s eyes snapped to the nearest one.
His hands were already claws before the thought completed, crossing in front of his chest.
The sword hit his guard almost simultaneously, heavy, direct, full-force through the air at his heart, striking his crossed claws and throwing sparks in every direction.
tal rang off tal and filled the corridor with sound.
A knight in black armor stood before him. The sa face as one of the two statues by the doors.
"That strength—"
The impact had pushed against Blood Frenzy at full output. Whatever was inside that armor, its physical functions were running at Lv6 at minimum.
He caught movent in the corner of his eye, the second statue’s position, now empty.
Footsteps, perfectly silent, from directly behind him.
A blade ca through his abdon.
Both statues. Both alive.
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