Confronted by Shan in the darkness, Bolin could not immediately demand to know what he thought he was doing breaking into his home. Just as a man who unexpectedly encounters a tiger in the woods would not dare shout at it, the sight of those flashing eyes had brought his mind to a halt.

Yet he was a seasoned knight who had weathered all manner of situations. When Shan strode toward him, Bolin finally recovered his wits and shouted.

"Sir Shan! What is the meaning of this outrage in the middle of the night? Have you no honor?"

Even as he shouted, Bolin clenched his fists and assumed a fighting stance. He knew only too well that his opponent was several levels above him as a warrior. But the figure briefly illuminated by the moonlight was plainly unarmed.

Unlike armed combat, a bare-knuckle fight depended far more on physique than technique. Though not especially tall, he stood half a head above the boy, and a childhood spent in the city slums had given him plenty of experience with his fists.

Some little brat who had spent his entire childhood doing nothing but drilling with swords and spears—

Before the thought could finish, two green lights traced a blurred path through the air. Bolin raised his arms to block the incoming kick, only to find, bewilderingly, that he felt no impact.

'What?'

The dim moonlight kept him from seeing what had happened: Shan's leg, rising at an angle, had climbed higher before Bolin could catch it and was now plunging back down.

CRACK!

The top of Shan's foot struck him squarely in the temple, and Bolin lost consciousness.

Shan looked down at the fallen Bolin.

'That startled me.'

He had originally planned to administer the drug Sherin had given him while Bolin slept, then carry him away. He had not expected the man to wake and sit up the instant he closed the door, and had briefly given him an opening. Still, he had knocked him out, so it hardly mattered.

As planned, Shan trickled a little of the drug into the unconscious Bolin's mouth, hoisted him onto his back, and left the room. Bolin's two squires, lodged in an annex, slept sweetly and without dreams, unaware that their lord was being abducted.

"Heave-ho."

Like a leopard hauling prey several times its size up a tree, Shan easily scaled the wall with the sturdily built Bolin, half a head taller than himself, on his back.

Had anyone seen him carrying a man through the dark alleys or hopping between rooftops, they would undoubtedly have pointed him out as a criminal.

Not that they would have been wrong.

* * *

For roughly half an hour, Shan made his way through the city, slipping into the shadows whenever he encountered a night watchman. At last he successfully entered Count Pales's mansion, which Sherin used as her villa. The princess, her guards, and Roden were waiting inside to greet him.

"I'm back."

"That was quick. Did you give him the drug?"

"Yes."

"Hmm. He looks as though a blow knocked him out."

"He woke up just as I entered his room, so I put him back to sleep with a hit."

"I thought so! Bring him inside. Let's question him."

A space for the interrogation had already been prepared beneath the mansion. In the middle of the dark cellar, lit by only a few candles, Kagon tied Bolin to a chair, and Aran doused him with cold water to wake him.

Shan and Roden were struck anew by how naturally the pair went about their work. Evidently, this was far from their first abduction and interrogation.

"Gah! Hah... Wh-where am I?"

"Bolin—or should I call you Kadek? Filing down perfectly healthy teeth to hide your Altoan features. What remarkable endurance. I would never have dared face the pain myself."

At Sherin's words, horror spread across Bolin—Kadek's face. Naturally so, when a girl he had never seen before was revealing the secret he had concealed all his life.

As she said, he was not merely a knight sponsored by the Brotherhood, but an Altoan knight they had raised themselves. He had filed down his prominent tusks to pass as an ordinary Westerner.

'How in the world?'

How had she learned a secret known only to the Brotherhood's highest officers? And why had they abducted him?

Surely it wasn't because of the report he had sent—

"[Razgrafina, Aldiob, Samurgragante—]"

Sherin removed her amethyst spectacles and chanted an incantation. Beside her, Aran seized Kadek by the hair and forced his head up until his eyes met Sherin's. His terrified eyes abruptly went slack.

It was magic that charmed its target and temporarily suppressed their reason—the same sort Shan had experienced at a vampire's hands.

"N-no..."

"Yes."

True to his knighthood, Kadek tried to rouse his spirit and resist, but the circumstances were overwhelmingly against him. It was difficult to properly wield spirit, a power of the mind, under the extreme strain of being beaten upon waking and dragged into a cellar.

Moreover, the drug Sherin had instructed Shan to administer beforehand clouded the mind and lowered resistance to this sort of magic. Its primary effect was closer to that of a sleeping draught, though.

"Good. It's taken full effect. Your name?"

"Bolin... ma'am..."

"No, your real name."

"Kadek..."

Watching him obediently answer every subsequent question, Roden stifled an inward groan.

'So this was it.'

He felt he had glimpsed part of the secret behind Sherin's extraordinary intelligence-gathering ability. If she could wring the truth from others like this, she could certainly build a powerful information network.

Provided, of course, that she was unafraid to stain her hands with other people's blood...

While Roden pondered this, Sherin continued extracting testimony from Kadek. Born among the poor of a southern Pendian port city, he had been recruited by the Brotherhood as a child for his exceptional physical abilities and features that made it easy for him to pass as a Westerner.

Through various connections, he had subsequently become Bolin, the adopted son of the knightly House Anix, and grown into a distinguished, duly invested knight-errant. Now a mid-ranking Brotherhood officer, he had been tasked with delivering Shan's letter and assessing how much of an obstacle his squire, Roden, would pose to their plans.

Naturally, he was also the very man who had reported to his superiors that Roden would have to be eliminated before they could recruit Shan. That fact alone ensured Kadek would never leave this mansion alive.

"Good. Well told. Such a good boy..."

Having successfully drawn out his personal history, Sherin continued coaxing answers from him with a vile smile: the Brotherhood's principal hideouts still operating in the capital, the identities of its highest officers, and similar information.

Unfortunately, Kadek did not know who led the Brotherhood. Even among its senior officers, he knew the identities of only one or two who had given him orders directly. To round them all up, they would evidently have to capture and question more of them.

After extracting every useful piece of information she could, Sherin asked all her questions a second time to check for discrepancies. Only then did she end the interrogation.

"Good. There's nothing more we can get out of this one. Kagon?"

"Yes, Your Highness."

At Sherin's call, Kagon nodded, took out a rope, and pulled it tight around Kadek's neck. Cutting his throat here would make the cleanup troublesome, so he was being strangled instead.

Watching Kadek's face turn blue as he suffocated, Roden asked, "What will you do with the body?"

"Dispose of it as waste from magical experiments. You needn't worry about discovery."

There was not the slightest hint of guilt on the princess's face as she answered. The same was true of Shan. Roden alone felt inwardly uncomfortable amid the abduction, murder, and disposal of a corpse.

Of course, since all this had begun to protect his life, he did not let it show.

"Then who should I go capture next?"

At Shan's bloodthirsty question, Sherin briefly felt the urge to name one of her brothers' hidden factions. This powerful warrior would probably return after tearing his targets to pieces, whoever they were.

But the thought passed. With a slight shake of her head, she resisted the temptation and answered honestly.

"First, before our next hunt, I have a proposal."

"What sort of proposal?"

"This organization, the Brotherhood... Now that I've examined its structure in detail, it seems even more vulnerable than I expected. Simply cutting it down would be something of a waste."

The Brotherhood operated on principles of rigid hierarchy and secrecy. Every member obeyed their superiors absolutely, while all information and authority rested solely with those at the very top.

Understanding her meaning, Roden gave a quiet sigh.

"Don't tell me... You intend to seize the Brotherhood rather than destroy it?"

"I believe it would benefit you both as well."

Sherin looked from Shan to Roden and back.

"Sir Shan, your dream was to rule a domain where Altoans could live freely, was it not?"

"Yes."

"No domain in the world can function with nothing but unskilled paupers. Capable officials, merchants, and a warrior class are essential—the very people the Altoans currently lack so desperately."

By its nature, the Brotherhood had a comparatively high proportion of Altoans belonging to those classes. Under the pretext of fellow-feeling, they had been bleeding the impoverished Altoan masses dry while secretly infiltrating the privileged classes.

If the Brotherhood were crushed now, all those highly educated or specially gifted Altoans would naturally die or lose their foundations and fall into ruin. Sherin proposed that it would be better to swallow the organization whole, cut away everything unnecessary, and put the rest to use.

"We can easily take control by cutting off the Brotherhood's upper ranks and putting a plausible figure in their place. There are any number of things we could do with it: work to improve Altoan living standards, as its original stated purpose promised, or move them to Sir Shan's domain when he acquires one someday."

"Who would this plausible figure be? Putting just anyone in charge seems likely to cause trouble."

To Roden's surprise, Sherin pointed at him.

"But I'm not Altoan."

"Most members of the Brotherhood don't know who their leader is anyway. Does race matter when you're running an organization anonymously?"

"Then couldn't you do it yourself, Your Highness—"

"I'm busy enough already. Devoting so much attention to this matter lately has made me miss several official functions and neglect developments at court."

Thus, Sherin added quietly, once they seized the Brotherhood, it would belong entirely to Shan and Roden.

Roden felt her proposal was certainly not a bad one. Once again, he was reminded that both he and Shan needed something that could at least detect hands reaching for them from the darkness, even if it could not stop them.

As part of the criminal organization known as the Council, the Brotherhood could provide feelers sensitive enough to detect such threats. He would have preferred not to become entangled with such sinister forces, but when they had taken an interest first, they were hardly going to say, "Oh, is that so?" and withdraw just because he pretended to be above it all.

"What do you think, Shan?"

"If it'll help us establish an Altoan domain someday, as Her Highness says, I'm in favor. And I'd feel safe with you in charge, Roden."

"I see..."

At Shan's answer, Roden closed his eyes for a moment, exhaled a long sigh, then opened them wide.

"Very well. Let's give it a try."

* * *

Only after dawn did Shan and Roden secretly leave Sherin's villa and return to the Wievers mansion, where they slept soundly until the sun was high overhead.

That night, Shan left the mansion alone with a letter in hand and made his rounds of the capital. The letter listed the addresses of Brotherhood officers in the city, obtained through Sherin's interrogation.

They were a more varied collection than he had expected: a retired minor official, a respected scholar, a high-class prostitute once courted by countless nobles, and even an Old Faith priest, who should have hated Altoans more than anyone.

Unfortunately for them, most paid little attention to security. There was little help for that; trivial news such as one mid-ranking officer being absent for a day was not relayed to every last member. Though even had they known, it was doubtful they would immediately have realized they were under attack.

After his first abduction, experience made Shan's infiltration techniques faster and stealthier than before. Scaling walls and climbing buildings without a sound was merely the beginning. Locked doors yielded readily to just two long, thin, flexible iron rods.

His sensitive fingertips and hearing, combined with his spatial awareness, let him grasp the interior of a lock as though he were literally looking inside it.

Thus, the soundly sleeping officers lost all awareness as soon as a few drops of the drug entered their mouths, and were bundled in their bedding and carried off through their windows. The operation, begun shortly after dark, did not end until just before sunrise the next day.

For days afterward, the Brotherhood officers Shan had gathered through the night were interrogated by Sherin in Count Pales's cellar, forced to spill everything they knew. The identity of the Brotherhood's leader, uncovered in the process, was more surprising than they had imagined.

"The Marquis of Veshalia's mistress... You mean his favorite concubine leads the Brotherhood?"

"Yes..."

"Not the marquis himself?"

"The marquis... is so besotted with her that he grants her anything she wants... So there was... no need to recruit him..."

It was one thing for none of the highest officers to be nobles, but to think even their leader was merely a nobleman's mistress. The revelation was so startling that not only Shan and Roden, but even the princess's two guards exchanged looks of wonder.

Then Roden noticed that Sherin alone showed no particular surprise. It might simply have been her remarkable self-control, but his instincts told him the princess had already known.

Once every piece of information had been extracted, all the Brotherhood's highest officers were strangled with cords and packed into sealed wooden crates. Tomorrow, their bodies would be dumped into the river as experimental waste from the Magic Society.

Every one of them was scum who had squeezed the lifeblood from their own people to enjoy petty power and wealth. There was no reason to spare them.

"What should we do about their leader?"

"Hmm. Dealing with her immediately would be troublesome. Veshalia is quite far from here."

Of course, Shan could reach it within a few days on Arwin, but that would draw far too much attention. Would it not look suspicious if the marquis's favorite mistress were murdered or disappeared shortly after a knight on a Horace warhorse visited?

Above all, given her position, she was likely to share the Marquis of Veshalia's bed. In effect, Shan would have to infiltrate the marquis's bedchamber. That was a different level of difficulty from abducting relatively well-off commoners.

"We should take our time and finish her off later. We've already cut away every officer she could use as her hands and feet."

Though they had not dealt with the brain, they had severed the head and neck through which its orders traveled. Now it was their turn to replace those severed parts.

* * *

A week after all the highest officers disappeared, those Brotherhood officers who were not posing as nobles or knights, and could therefore act without drawing public attention, assembled at the Golden Theater. Some were based not in the capital, Hasra, but in its nearby satellite towns.

"It's been a while, Olof."

"You've aged quite a bit yourself."

"Who's aged?"

Even as they laughed and caught up with old comrades they had not seen in years, the officers kept glancing around. This was the first time since the Brotherhood's founding that all its officers had gathered in one place like this.

And had not several of the highest officers, whose identities some of them knew, recently vanished? They suspected this summons was connected.

Just then, two figures stepped onto the stage.

"Hmm?"

"Those are..."

Both wore animal masks that covered not only their faces but their entire heads: one a lion, the other a horse. The lion-masked figure was powerfully built, like a knight, while the horse-masked figure was slightly shorter, slender, and unusually long-legged.

The lion mask spoke in a booming voice.

"You who labor day and night for our oppressed brethren! I thank you for answering this summons despite your many duties!"

"And who exactly are you?"

"I am an emissary sent by the leader."

At the mention of their leader, every Brotherhood officer's face tightened. In the Brotherhood's pervasive culture of strict hierarchy, the leader was no different from a king to them.

The lion mask swept his gaze over the officers, as though gauging the atmosphere, and continued.

"Recently, a dispute within our Brotherhood led to the tragic deaths of our Guides."

Hearing that their highest officers had died in an internal conflict, the officers exchanged startled looks. Could this really be why several officers had recently disappeared?

"To prevent the Brotherhood from collapsing after the loss of its Guides, the leader has sent us. From this moment onward, we will reorganize and restore the organization here."

"Have you heard anything about this?!"

"No, nothing!"

"Surely the master hasn't died...?"

They argued among themselves over the unexpected news, until one of the larger men among the officers shouted out. His menacing face was covered with knife scars; he looked every inch a thug or mercenary.

"Show us proof! Proof the leader sent you!"

"If the leader did not send me, how did I contact all of you through the official chain of command?"

The man grunted at the lion mask's cool rebuttal. As he said, every officer present had received a letter bearing the Brotherhood's secret passwords. Only an insider could know all their identities and use the separate code appropriate to each.

If the highest officers were dead, these two could only be emissaries sent by the leader.

But the man soon thought of a counterargument and shouted again.

"Traitors! You could be the surviving traitors! Aren't you trying to seize the Brotherhood after eliminating the other Guides?"

"That is possible."

The lion mask readily conceded the point.

Naturally, the highest officers—the Guides—knew the codes for communicating with the leader, but the middle and lower ranks did not. Thus, they had no way to determine whether the leader had sent him personally.

"But a lack of proof is no reason to let the organization splinter. Choose. Will you obey, or rebel? Our rules decree that traitors to our people shall not live."

At the words "traitors to our people," the officers all swallowed hard. They had seen several members purged on precisely those grounds. As befitted a secret society, the Brotherhood's rules were both strict and cruel.

But the first man to object would not yield to such threats. If the lion mask was telling the truth, he might swallow the Brotherhood whole simply by seizing the initiative here.

How he had envied the Guides, who settled everything with a nod from on high while middle managers like him worked themselves to the bone. Burning ambition smothered the warning bells of instinct.

"You think a threat like that scares me? The rest of you, listen! We don't have to obey these bastards when we don't even know if the leader really sent—!"

"Horse."

At that single word from the lion mask, the horse-masked man walked down from the stage. His strangely weightless gait, combined with the horse mask's vacant expression, made for an uncanny sight.

"W-want to try me?"

The thuggish man drew a hatchet, and several people around him produced weapons of their own: short swords and clubs. Their job was to exploit the capital's Altoans and collect taxes from them; in practice, they were gangsters.

Though inferior to the few knights whose identities only the highest officers knew—Kadek had been one of them—they were effectively the Brotherhood's strongest fighting force. The thug was just thinking it had been worth bringing more guards than the other officers, just in case, when—

"Eliminate the traitors to our people."

At the lion mask's command, the horse mask sprang forward. It was a grotesque movement, as though his ankles bent at two separate joints. The thug was about to swing his axe and strike first when the horse mask drew the sword at his waist too fast to see.

With a hiss of cleaving air, the thug's head tumbled to the floor, spraying blood.

"Boss!"

"You bastard!"

The underlings who charged in fury at their boss's death met much the same fate. Whenever the blade flashed in the light of the candles set around the theater, limbs were sliced away or entrails spilled from torsos.

"Aaaaargh!"

Realizing he was outmatched, the youngest thug tried to flee, screaming. But the horse mask bounded across several seats with that same uncanny gait and finished him with a sword thrust through the back in an instant.

As blood and filth stained the Golden Theater's sumptuous seating, the other officers nearby froze. The Brotherhood was a criminal organization at its core; even those with no talent for fighting knew enough to recognize skill.

'A knight...!'

Even if he had never been invested, he was certainly a warrior of equivalent ability. How else could anyone cut down five or six men in an instant with a single sword?

Looking down over the blood-reeking seats, the lion mask declared in a somber voice, "So, who is the next traitor?"

Everyone shook their heads frantically and swore loyalty. A low chuckle came from behind the mask.

"Remember this. The Brotherhood knows who you are, where you are, and what you do. Betrayal will be paid for not only by you, but by your families as well. That is the price of betraying the blood that flows in your veins."

Prostrate throughout the auditorium, the officers thought that whoever this lion mask might be, even meeting their actual leader could not possibly be so terrifying.

Since he had contacted them directly, the organization's information network must still be intact. When they imagined that monstrous horse mask coming for them the moment they betrayed it, they had no choice but to obey.

"To the eternal prosperity of the Altoan people."

"To its prosperity!"

The quiet declaration was answered by a chorus that bordered on desperation.