Valerie had him explain, as best he could, how he’d come to that conclusion. It wasn’t easy. Jam’s senses were too strange, too abstract. How did he adequately convey to someone that he was certain there was a whiff of demonic chaos, but he didn’t even really understand how he knew that? Jam had been dealing with this feeling for days without pinning down where it was coming from. Lucas couldn’t hope to communicate it in any reasonable time frame, if ever.

  First, he had to explain what had happened with his mana system. Even that was difficult, though, since his situation was so unusual that they didn’t really have a frame of reference for what it meant to deliberately grow your channels with your bonded companion and semi-intentionally mingle your mana together.

  “Nothing about it contradicts our current understanding of magic and mana,” Valerie said when he was finished with that, “but I’ve never heard of anyone doing it. I wouldn’t even be able to venture a guess as to how it was done.”

  Lucas shrugged. They were stood in a loose triangle at the centre of the room, with both of the skycloaks having rushed over the moment that dreadful speculation had passed his lips. “I don’t think a grown adult could replicate it. Maybe if a kid bonded a similarly young familiar at a super early age and grew up with it intertwined with his soul, he’d be able to achieve something similar.”

  “Soul bonding with living creatures isn’t common, but it’s not unheard of either. What you suggest wouldn’t lead to your mana mixing.” She stared at him, her gaze straying down to his heart. “Perhaps this is simply a unique ability possessed only by your… companion.”

  “Maybe it usually occurs over a longer period of time, so most don’t notice,” Lucas said with a shrug. “It doesn’t feel much different, to be honest. My mana’s still mine. Jam’s mana is still Jam’s. Still two distinct and separate beings. It’s just both of ours too, I guess? I dunno. We’ve blurred the lines a bit, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed anything. I’ve gotten a bit of insight into Jam, and I’m sure whatever it is has gotten some insight into me.”

  “I still dearly wish to know what it is,” Valerie said.

  Florence nodded in agreement. She’d been much quieter throughout this conversation, and her expression seemed studiously dedicated to neutrality.

  “Same here,” Lucas said. “But at least I have some idea of what Jam does, potentially. Back in Taunton, it went crazy when a demon was around, completely lost its shit and wanting nothing more than to fight the fucker. Now, it’s been on full alert for days because it detected a hint of demonic influence nearby, somehow.”

  “You think it’s some kind of anti-demon artificial construct?”

  Lucas frowned, staring at his hands. “Something like that, yeah. It was right there in the middle of Pentaburgh when I arrived, and I think it might have been there long before I showed up. Placed there as a guardian, maybe. A last line of defence in case anything got past the plant network.”

  “That would imply Lady Claire created this thing.”

  “It’s one explanation,” Lucas said with a shrug.

  “Hm.”

  Valerie seemed reluctant to pursue that line of inquiry, and they swiftly moved on to the meat of the matter. The trouble was, Lucas wasn’t certain of his proclamation. It just seemed the best explanation to him.

  “Jam would be going way crazier if it was a full demon somehow avoided detection and infiltrated the city,” Lucas said in an attempt to justify himself.

  “Not possible,” Valerie said definitively. “No demon could hide its presence to that degree. Not so far from the Blight, in a city containing millions of souls so densely packed together.

  “Well there you go. Jam senses something demonic, or demon-infliuenced, and it can’t be an actual demon. A possession is the only thing I personally know of, from all you told me in our lessons, that fits the bill.”

  Valerie’s lips thinned.

  Florence glanced at her, eyes unreadable.

  “I struggle to imagine a possession would be missed,” Valerie said eventually, with a hint of strain in her voice. “But I concede it sounds far more likely than a demon itself infiltrating the city somehow. Let us assume you are interpreting your soul bond’s senses correctly.” She held up a hand when Lucas opened his mouth. “I am not meaning to imply I doubt you. For the sake of discussion, I’m merely dismissing other possibilities and approaching this situation as if your assertion is absolutely certain. We’re assuming there’s an individual who’s been possessed by a demon. Our trouble is this: the phrase ‘demonic possession’ is something of a misnomer. The vast majority of cases referred to as such do not involve a demon directly taking over the body of an individual. Most incidents would better be described as demonic corruption: a demon warps a person’s mana until they are functionally a beast in a human shell, then sends them to cause mayhem at a time and location of its choosing.”

  Lucas stared at her. He hoped he wasn’t too wide-eyed. “But there are situations where a demon takes over directly?”

  “Many such claims have been made. Those who survive their corruption have described feeling like something took over their body, but that’s not quite accurate. It’s still them. They’re not being puppetted by an outside force. It’s just that the demon has so fundamentally changed them at the level of their soul that it can feel like their body is moving on its own, foreign thoughts and feelings infecting their minds, turning reality into a warped nightmare. It’s understandable that many would prefer to see this as someone else entirely taking them over. Perhaps, semantically, you could say it is.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  Valerie’s gaze strayed, and she let out a short breath that almost sounded like a swiftly-strangled laugh. “I don’t think it matters, particularly. The demon is the ultimate cause of all the suffering that results of its influence, in the end. Survivors can tell themselves whatever comforts them most. The demon wouldn’t care.” She let out a sigh, eyes falling momentarily shut. When they opened again, they were back to their usual iciness, fixed on Lucas. “The important thing is this: demonic influence is not typically so nuanced that it would allow a ‘possessed’ individual to infiltrate this far into the city without acting.”

  “It doesn’t have to be demonic influence, though, does it?” Florence said. She’d tried to sound casual, but there was a tension to her jaw that gave away her true feelings on the matter.

  Valerie turned a blank look on her. After a moment of silence, she said, “You are correct. It’s not impossible that a Dread General could carry out a technique much closer to what ‘demonic possession’ implies, and execute a plan with considerably more nuance than the simplistic sadistic machinations of a regular demon.”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Lucas stomach dropped. “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It’s unlikely,” Valerie said.

  “But not impossible,” Florence countered with Valerie’s own words. “What was it you said to me, that one time? Demons and Dread Generals are playing the same game, but demons are children bashing toys together, while Dread Generals actually formulate strategy. I know you considered the possibility the moment Lord Lucas mentioned possession, Val. Don’t be obstinate.”

  “It’s unlikely, but not impossible,” Valerie conceded. Her jaw flexed momentarily, and her hand came up to rest against her heart, as if she was prepared to draw her sword from her soul space. “I suppose,” she said, much softer, “I simply do not want it to be true.”

  “I don’t either,” Florence said, grimacing.

  “I’ll third that,” Lucas said.

  Their lecture on Dread Generals had been one of the more disturbing lessons he’d received in the last few months’ crash course on Aerth. Little was known about them, in that it wasn’t well understood why some demons seemed to be capable of far more long-term thought than others, it had simply been noted, and then a name applied to them in reference to their widely observed capacity to strategise for the sake of a wider goal. They even coordinated other demons.

  It didn’t necessarily mean they were individually the most powerful demons—though power levels couldn’t really be applied to demons in the same way they were to beasts—but it undoubtedly made them far more dangerous, both on a micro and macro level. A battle against demons was considered far less winnable when a Dread General was present to coordinate them. Their only solace was there weren’t that many of the fuckers, and plenty had been killed in the past.

  “But we do have to consider the possibility,” Valerie said. “So, we move forward with the assumption that there’s an individual in the Order’s headquarters at this moment who has been corrupted by a demon, and possibly a Dread General. Confronting the disturbing thought that a Dread General seems to possess knowledge of the Moontower, our first and most important task is figuring out what the corrupted invidual wants in particular.”

  “Would this take precedence over the situation going on in the city?” Lucas asked.

  “Absolutely,” Valerie said.

  “So… do we try to bring other people in on it?”

  “A good question. It would certainly be wise to do so, but we would have to be cautious. There is always the risk that we accidentally approach the possessed individual and, whether they are controlled directly or merely corrupted, inadvertently set them off and cause them to attack.”

  “Maybe Jam will be able to tell if we get close?”

  “That’s worth testing,” Valerie said with a nod.

  “If your lunamancy has been helping Valerie,” Florence added, “there’s a chance it could be used to free our possessed comrade.”

  “Not permanently,” Valerie said. “But yes, it could help there. If we could free them, we could gain some insight into what the demon or Dread General wanted them to do.”

  “So we try to bring people in on it, using a combo of Jam and my lunamancy to check they’re legit, yeah?” Lucas asked.

  Valerie and Florence both nodded.

  “How do we want to explain how we even figured out this was happening? Think it’ll present too many questions if we give the truth, here.”

  “We’ll claim it was me who discovered it,” Valerie said. “Most would believe it if I explained that I could sense a demonic possession had occurred, but am unsure who has been possessed. It would also serve to give an excuse for you to check them, since it’s already known to some that I’ve been employing you to cleanse my soul.”

  Lucas nodded. He sent a mental probe through his mana towards Jam and, after a moment, the monstercat reciprocated. The feeling of demonic chaos was still there, somewhere. It was fuzzy, like trying to see an image through static, but somehow he could sense it, like a change in air pressure, or a sound that was just too high pitched for regular human hearing.

  “Okay,” he said. “How are we gonna approach this?”

  ~~~

  They got started immediately. Valerie deemed it their highest priority, though she expressed she still had some doubt. It turned out that even the mere possibility was enough to act on, because the potential consequences were too severe to risk ignoring, even if they seemed unlikely.

  Their first act was to search every inch of the Order’s territory, making sure to look like they were on regular in-house missions. They gathered up some crates and lugged them around, moving like they had a place to be. It was unlikely anyone would stop a group that included Valerie for a friendly chat or unfriendly interrogation anyway, but it was better not to draw suspicion, lest a potential possessee catch on to their investigation and activate whatever nefarious plans they had been inflicted with.

  The goal was to see if Jam would pick up anything more substantial, hoping they might happen across the possessed individual and ping Jam’s suite of bizarre senses. It was an imperfect plan. There was always a chance that the Dread General would be aware of Valerie to some degree and deliberately seek to avoid her so as to mitigate the risk of discovery. Or they’d simply get unlucky, and the possessee would evade them by pure happenstance. Or, the individual was hiding away somewhere, waiting for the right moment to strike.

  Either way, Jam’s general state of alertness didn’t change. Through the monstercat’s senses leaking through their bond, Lucas could feel no difference in the demonic wrongness, either.

  He got to see much more of the Order’s headquarters than he had before, at least. Most of it had been explained to him in one of his crash course lessons, but visiting it was different than seeing pictures or reading about it. The stables were massive, containing hundreds of horses, donkeys, oxes, and a few more native species, like a strangely muscular donkey thing with an anteater-esque snout called a bobar.

  There were also several barracks he hadn’t seen before. Massive food storage buildings. A place for laundry. Another for livestock animals. Textiles, administrative offices, a vault for money. Lots of non-combat personnel that an organisation like the Order relied on, all in-house so the skycloaks couldn’t be deprived of anything essential in times of strife. Like right now.

  The Order’s territory was practically an entire neighbourhood in and of itself. Tens of thousands of regular people lived and worked here, wearing the sky blue uniform but not the armour, civilians treated with just as much respect as the warriors. It was a little daunting to witness just how big of an operation the Order was, and Lucas found himself understanding why Claire had sought to delegate so much. Keeping even one aspect of this place running was a full-time job, and he could image Claire seeing it all as a distraction for the most important task on her plate: the very one she’d been summoned for.

  At the same time, he found himself appreciating how devastating it would be to the Order’s operations if someone on the inside managed to set off the right chain reaction. It wouldn’t be easy for them. There were redundancies and safeguards in place even at a glance. Every function of the Order had back-ups and those back-ups were always located on the other side of their territory, so a hypothetical saboteur couldn’t take out an entire wing of the Order’s operations in one blow.

  But he couldn’t help thinking that there was a possibility for a failure cascade her, if some devious bastard got it just right. The concern that the Dread General’s possessed warrior had been biding his time, observing, searching for just the right moment where they could do the most damage… The thought wouldn’t leave him alone.

  They found themselves back in the atrium at the base of the grand staircase, with no hint of a demonic possession. Jam’s state of alertness hadn’t changed, and neither had Lucas’.

  Valerie was frowning, looking up at the staircase.

  “Who should we approach first?” Florence asked the question on Lucas’ mind before he could.

  “Lady Claire, preferably,” Valerie said.

  “Much as I wish it were otherwise, she’s not here,” Lucas pointed out the obvious.

  “Indeed,” Valerie said. Her brows furrowed as she turned to him. “Then we should start with Master Haddem.”