Nikha soon found out where the carpets had gone. They were all stuffed up against the bottom of a door at the end of the hall. Scowling with trepidation, she moved them aside with her boot. Immediately she stutter-stepped away with a noise of disgust, just avoiding the sluggish trickle of blood running out from beneath the door. Not taking any chances, she nudged the handle with the tip of her bayonet to open it then quickly stepped back. There was no danger immediately apparent, though. Just more horror, crushing disappointment, and a ripe coppery stink.

Somehow she'd made her way to the Cartographer's Room, though it was meant to be two floors below and on the opposite end of the house. It was one of her favorite places in Eldergrave. An ancestor of hers had been a man with a keen interest in geography. He'd paid a master artist from Remulia- her name now lost to time- to paint a series of frescoes on all of the walls and even the high ceiling. Rather than landscapes or religious scenes, though, they were beautifully illustrated maps. All proven inaccurate now, of course, but Nikha had always loved them anyway. There was something about seeing the world drawn out and carefully labeled, its beauty put in a form where one person could see it all at once, that appealed to her still.

The frescoes were destroyed, scarred by blows, pocked with bullet holes. Blood sprayed the walls, trickled down the fluted faux-pillars in the corners, dyed whole painted countries red, laid so thick on the floor she couldn't see its parquet design. It came from the great pile of bodies in the center of the room. There were perhaps ten men and women heaped there, obscene in their nakedness and in their mutilation. All were missing limbs or marred by horrific, mortal wounds. Weapons lay on the floor around them or dangled from limp hands: eating knives, letter-openers, an emptied revolver, leaden candelabra. As far as Nikha could tell, they'd just… gone at each other for some reason until everyone was dead, and ruined the room in the process. It had become obvious that her problems were much larger than a single madman on the loose.

The blood on the floor was so deep it hadn't quite congealed fully, and her boots stuck in it as she walked in. The stench was incredible, physically overwhelming. She glanced around at the mess and shook her head. Nothing useful that she could see, and she wasn't about to dig through the charnel-heap. Instead Nikha said her little prayer for the dead and sighed. Already she was becoming used to the sight of corpses. I must. Her papa had had to do the same when he was a cavalryman. At this rate I will become a priest. Or perhaps a funerary nun.

Luckily the hallway past the Cartographer's Room was cleaner. Normal. In fact, there was the discolored patch on the wall where her grandmother's portrait used to hang. She couldn't help a little smirk. The door next to it ought to be- Wait, stupid. 'Ought' doesn't matter. She stepped up to the door, knife in hand, and stepped back as she pulled it open. For once, there was no surprise. The Huws machine room was exactly as she remembered it. The walls were papered with gold-on-red floral designs and the floor was a crosshatched cherrywood parquet. It was a small space, empty but for a chair and the machine itself, which hunched atop its heavy table like a vulture. It was currently running, gears and governor-weights spinning about, and had been for a while based on the reams of paper piled up around its base.

Nikha went in and started reading the printout. The Huws machine was yet another incredible Cymdwish import, though Papa told her the inventor came from the Cantons of Oestia. It consisted of a spinning print wheel, complex phlogistic valves, and a keyboard like half of a piano's. The keys were all marked with letters. 'Play' them in time with the wheel, and the machine would send electrophlogistic impulses down a copper wire. At the other end of the wire a synchronized machine- or several if there was a switchboard- would print out the message. Then that machine's owner could play a reply, and it would be printed at back at the first machine. They were a godsend for a country as large as Tsev. A man in the remotest part of Nametsia could have a conversation with one in Svetsk-am-Raykhskoe so long as the wire was there. Papa had used it to talk science with faraway colleagues. Right now, though, it seemed to be printing nothing but nonsense.

"KA BAR RA GGHI SU KHUL DU IA IA IA GLUQQ GPREI ZQHERT FLEGGHH PRAN TFELHQ IA IA IA GGHI YA GGHI SHLWM QQUGL NAR DHTHA IA IA IA IA IA IA IA" read Nikha off the thin paper strip. Utter gibberish. Probably the person on the other end didn't know how to type in time with the print wheel- not that she did either, but Papa did and he said it took plenty of practice. She'd faintly hoped for some useful information, but it seemed she would be disappointed. Whoever the sender was, though, they had certainly been going for awhile. They'd covered most of a roll of paper with garbled text. Maybe there was no one on the other end at all, and this was just the result of an electrical malfunction. In the end it didn't matter. There was still nothing useful here.

This hallway was meant to be on the ground floor, close to the old ice-rooms, relics of the time when beer was brewed at Eldergrave. Pass those and she'd be in the central wing of the house. It seemed yet another rough kind of party had passed through here. Paintings were knocked askew, side tables smashed, and the rugs crumpled and wrinkled. The walls and windows were splattered with drink, vomit, and worse. Nearer to the kitchen she passed a corpse that looked fresher than most of the others she'd seen. The woman's party dress was tattered across the chest, as though she'd been stabbed many times. The blood soaking the cloth looked wet. Nikha prayed mentally this time, then unslung her rifle and crouched into a stalk.

She began to hear noises as she closed in on the lagering rooms: the rapid click of shoe heels on their slate floors, and the echo of a man's muttering voice. "…accursed things…told him not to…so rude, it's unbelievable…knew it from the..." She thought she knew that voice, but hoped she was wrong. Leading the way with the tip of her bayonet, she rounded the final corner in to the open area by the entrances.

Indeed, the double-thick door to one of the lager rooms was open. In the dim light of its arc-sconces she made out a familiar lanky figure pacing back and forth. The voice was clearer now. Oh, no, she thought.

"…ought to have said something, not that the man would have listened," the man said to himself. "He wouldn't listen to his own mother! The both of us knew she was no good-"

"Ossoff?" called Nikha, interrupting. The figure froze. "Is that you?" The man stalked up to the doorway so quickly that Nikha took several steps back. He came into the light of the hall and she realized she was right, though she'd hoped not to be. Glaring at her across the hall was Ossoff, the von Kranssov family's butler. "You..." he hissed, voice oozing with hate.

Nikha didn't know whether or not to be relieved. On the one hand, she'd finally found someone alive and familiar! On the other hand, well...it was Ossoff, and he seemed even less happy to see her than usual.

Still, she had to try. "Ossoff! What's going on? Have you seen Papa-er, Count von Kranssov?" The butler was very particular about modes of address.

"Shut up!" he snapped, his face even more pinched and wrinkled than usual. "I'll not be taken as a fool by your insipid lies. Once, but no longer!" Nikha took another step back in shock. The man was always icy to her, sometimes actively poisonous, but the Ossoff she knew would never be so barefacedly rude. But now Nikha looked closer, noticing the bags under his eyes, his ragged uniform, the long kitchen knife clenched in one fist. It seemed he'd been having at least as rough a time as she was.

"O-Ossoff, I-" she tried, but the butler cut her off.

"I said quiet! You know full well what you've done." He knuckled his brow hard enough to leave pale spots on the skin, equal parts furious and distraught. "You've brought ruination upon this house, you… you witchborn hussy! You and your accursed harlot of a mother. I told your father, I told him..." He trailed off, sounding like he was about to weep.

Nikha narrowed her eyes, her mouth set in an angry line. His words made her feel like crying, but they angered her even more. She'd been born with her mother's porcelain-pale skin and her father's coal-black hair and eyes. Children with such coloring were called many things: curse-touched, heathenish, witchborn. They were considered ill-omened, wolves in the sheepfold- especially by those belonging to older generations like Ossoff and her father's late mother. It didn't help that she had rather sharp features and was slow to smile- Rulia and Jyatis, her supposed friends, had even called her ‘sinister’ once.

Nikha had grown so distraught about it that she’d asked Papa if she was evil, if she was going to grow up to be a witch and kill everyone she loved like in the stories. He'd looked at her with a grave expression and asked her: "Do you want to do that?"

"O-of course I don't!" she'd answered, desperate for him to believe her.

Papa laughed suddenly and gave her a pat on the head.. "Then you won't, will you? Nikha, darling, your appearance doesn’t determine your behavior any more than it does intelligence or artistic ability or skill at arms. It's nothing more than an antiquated superstition. Do you understand?" She'd nodded desperately, and Papa hugged her then sent her to tell Jyatis and Rulia that it was unfortunately time for them to leave.

Papa told her that the superstition surrounding so-called witchborn was just that: superstition. And she'd believed him- so why did Ossoff's words still make her feel so ashamed, so angry? Not to mention the fact that he'd insulted her mother! The poor woman had been comatose as long as Nikha could remember. She was no more responsible for this than Nikha was. How dare you, you bitter old prune.

So she used that anger, glaring up at the butler with spine straight and rifle at low ready. She had to take control. "Ossoff, that's entirely ridiculous," she snapped in the haughtiest tone she could muster. "I've no more to do with this… situation than you do. Please calm yourself, and perhaps then we can-"

"LIAR!" the butler roared with more volume than she'd thought his narrow chest could produce. He lunged at her, sweeping his kitchen knife out in a low arc, and if not for the few steps she'd taken back he would have gutted her right there. She just managed to dodge, then backed even farther away and brought her rifle into a guard position. She had no real experience with bayonet fighting, just a few moves out of fighting manuals practiced in the mirror. She was surely scared, but she wasn’t about to let a mad old butler stop her. All I have to do is defend until he calms down, though. That wouldn't be so hard.

Ossoff matched her step for step, still slashing wildly. "I couldn't stop it, this time," he babbled, almost more to himself than to her. "It was too late. You and that which spawned you corrupted him beyond redemption." He made a sudden, almost drunken lunge. Nikha fended it off with the barrel of her rifle, then had to yank it away to keep the butler from impaling himself. He kept rambling as if he hadn't noticed. "Oh, how Perenikè would weep to see her son, her family so disgraced..."

"Ossoff, stop! Please!" she shouted over him. "I promise I had nothing to do with this! I don't have any idea what's going on either! Just stop it and we can talk, please!"

"I told you to shut up!" the old man howled, voice cracking. "But you never could listen, could you? Always the willful child, always a disappointment! Over and over I told your father that you needed a firmer hand, to spare not the rod. But he ignored me, let you run wild, and so doomed himself! Never again!"

So this is how he felt about me, Nikha thought as she fended off a looping overhand with her bayonet. The blades squealed against each other, and the heavy woodsman knife left a notch in Ossoff's thinner steel. She'd always known Ossoff didn't like her. In fact, she couldn't remember a time when he'd been kind to her, or done more than the bare minimum required by his station. And it was true she'd misbehaved.

Once, frustrated at being called inside, she'd come to dinner with leaves still in her hair and mud spattered halfway up her dress. Ossoff had gone deathly white, his thin lips almost disappearing. He'd served her the grayest, toughest cut of meat for dinner, and when she looked at Papa in protest he'd just raised an eyebrow in a way that said, What did you expect? And then there was the incident with her grandmother's portrait. When Ossoff caught her she'd honestly expected him to hit her, he looked so angry. But he hadn't, and had simply stalked off to inform her father without a word to her. Relations between them had gone from chilly to North Namets frigid over the last year or two.

Never had she expected, though, the depthless hate she now saw in Ossoff's eyes. He truly believed all this was her fault. And a moment later, when he managed to grab her gun just below the bayonet, she realized she would not be able to just wait for him to calm himself. She yanked the gun backwards before he could get a full grip. She might have been a thirteen-year-old girl, but he was an old man and not strong for it. He stumbled at the sudden jerk, and she took the opportunity to move out of knife range, her back nearly to the wall of the corridor. She thumbed the hammer back. When he pushed himself back upright, the muzzle of her rifle followed him.

"Last chance, Ossoff," said Nikha. Her voice trembled, and she hated herself for it, but her sights were steady. "Please, just drop the knife and sit down. You aren't well. Please."

His arm slackened, slowly lowering the knife to his side. A glimmer of something like sanity returned to his eyes, and for a moment she had hope. Just a moment.

"Not well? You'd like me to think that, wouldn't you?" he said, voice quiet and sly. "Maybe you even believe it. What godly man could understand how your kind think? I don’t believe it, though. Not for a moment. So go on then." Ossoff raised the knife once more. "Kill me." He came at her. "Prove me r-"

Nikha put a bullet through his heart. He fell flat on his face, skidded a short distance, and stopped barely a foot away from her. He didn't move, didn't make a sound. For a few seconds Nikha was very still, as the smoke spread and the echoes dissipated. Then she reloaded her gun, slow and careful as if it was the first time she'd tried it. She slung the weapon, looked down at her work, and frowned very hard to keep from crying.