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The estate is approximately seven miles from the city, off by itself surrounded by forest. According to Lindsey, all the major noble houses have personal armies. His lands extend north and east, encompassing dozens of villages and towns. All the nobles’ armies together are slightly smaller than the king’s army. On an individual basis, the royal army would easily crush any individual noble house if they became a problem. If all the nobles united against the crown, the war could go in either direction.
The idea of the nobles all coming together makes Lindsey laugh so hard she almost has an accident.
Infiltrating a manor house with a private army of guards is right out of a James Bond movie. I don’t feel like trying to sneak my way past a fence and sentries and so on. Sure, they’re not going to have rifles or electronic sensors here. Still, I am in a hurry. My best option is to go in by air via my dark wings. No one in this world is going to be prepared for that. And hey, if someone catches me, I can always come up with some BS about being a messenger of the gods.
Tammy, Lindsey, and I head up to a third-story bedroom in Demetria’s manor, one where a set of ornate double doors offer access to a balcony that’s perfect for a take-off point.
Lindsey polymorphs herself (her word—I’ve never heard of polymorphing before) into a housecat. Her magic causes her entire form to blur and collapse down into a cat. Her clothes and stuff disappear somewhere in the glowing blurriness. Something tells me when she cancels the spell, they’ll all come back.
My daughter shapeshifts into the form of a sparrow, her own clothing dropping to the floor. Of course, my daughter can always summon her ‘faerie dress’ of plants, vines, and leaves whenever she needs. Truth is, I’m jealous of both gals. Unless I bring my clothing with me after shifting (usually via a knapsack carried in a talon), I’ll be butt-naked when I shift back to human.
Who makes up these rules, anyway?
Anyway, we fly north away from the city. Lindsey is clearly not a fan of heights as evidenced by her cat claws digging into my arm.
“That way,” says Lindsey in a somewhat normal voice, though I detect a low-pitched growl.
“Wow, you can talk?” I ask.
“Yes, I can talk. I’m not really a cat.” She shakes her little feline head in my peripheral vision. “I’m not a lawyer on a zoom call either.”
Hah. I chuckle.
“I can talk, too,” chirps Tammy in a super high-pitched birdy voice.
Heh. “Yeah, I guess. I’m just so used to Kingsley.”
Lindsey’s pointing paw leads us to a sprawling estate surrounded by forest. A great stone wall surrounds the estate. I can’t imagine building such a thing would be practical. It would have taken decades of back-breaking work. There’s a reason castles are only so big in the real world. Having a twenty-foot-high wall surrounding an estate that’s got to be several acres is ridiculous. I really hope this place came into being based on Quentin’s description and did not, in fact, require a whole bunch of laborers toiling for the better part of a century.
Could be either one really. I’m absolutely fuzzy on how this whole ‘creating actual worlds’ thing works. At some point in the past, this realm did not exist. Not sure when it made the leap from Quentin’s head to a true reality separate from ours, but it definitely did not exist before he was born. I don’t think anyone could build a stone wall of this scale in under a hundred years, so it had to have just come into being already done. One of those things where the people who live here have strange knowledge of it having been built long ago but can’t say when or by who.
Yanno, that kinda reminds me of our pyramids. And yeah, that’s only a little bit unsettling to think about. Sure, we are fairly certain Egyptians built them, but no one seems to be able to explain how they managed it.
Some of the property, mostly to the south, looks like a military garrison from medieval days. Soldiers elsewhere move or stand around on guard duty in pairs. Though there are lookout positions every fifty feet along the top of the crazy huge wall, only a scattering of them are manned... probably because this is a time of relative peace. Still, sneaking into this place the conventional way would be an extreme pain.
Thankfully, I am far from conventional.
I fly in too high for anyone to spot me by accident. Other than birds, the people here aren’t used to anything flying above them. Once I’m directly over the manor house, I dive into a tight spiral, gradually coming down to land on a rear second-story balcony near the center of the building.
As soon as my feet touch the beautiful marble floor, a man inside the adjoining room belts out a startled yelp.
“So much for stealth,” chirps Tammy, right before she jumps off my shoulder and flies to the floor, morphing into a tiny mouse and hiding behind a vase.
Malin Normund bursts out a pair of fancy double doors and onto the balcony. He stares at me like he wants to go off yelling like he caught a thief or spy, but can’t get his brain to engage his mouth because he’s staring in awe at my wings.
Tammy the mouse darts out from behind the vase and races unnoticed past Malin’s foot into the room he came from.
This close, a step and a half away from being within grabbing distance, the supernatural oddness radiating from the guy is unmistakable. I don’t know what it means, but it’s definitely there. He’s got mental energy, the kind I can feed from… so he’s no undead or a demon. Not getting a whiff of dark master off him, either. Demetria cautioned me about that, though. Thanks to infiltrating Quentin’s mind, Nesanth has some degree of control over this reality. If she doesn’t want to ‘smell’ like a dark master, she won’t. We know she’s aware of our presence in this realm, so it stands to reason she’s going to try and hide as much as possible. I can’t count on ‘feeling’ her presence that way.
On a whim, I decide not to put the wings away and leave them out, shrouding myself in their black-feathered glory. “Malin Normund, I presume?”
“What manner of being are you?” asks Malin, one eyebrow cocked.
“I shall spare you the disservice of a circuitous conversation,” I say, not entirely sure why I’m talking like that. Hey, it feels right. “I know you practice magic.”
He leans slightly back, narrowing his eyes.
“No, I’m not a demon,” I say quickly. “Nor am I too concerned with you knowing magic. At least, not simply for knowing it. I’m starting off there because it means you are likely aware of things most people would dismiss as folly.”
