Act One, Scene Fourteen
Countess Greenrose cut the leaves off her eyes, gave her hair another hack, trimmed her claws and checked her cameras while she pulled her long white gloves on with possibly unnecessary violence. She had to host parties sometimes, but she’d be damned if she’d let them make her enjoy it. The cameras showed nothing, not that they would - ordinary criminals wouldn’t try to rob Greenrose’s palace and Luminosa could just blink past the cameras, and nobody between them was worth bothering about.
The armored car pulled up to her gates, the royal emblem on the hood and rear with the motto “The World Is as We Make It” across it, and she spun to stalk (flow) down through her mansion to the gates herself, brushing past wood paneling and deep green velvet as if it was the brick and drywall of her childhood. The Tyrant’s Guard were here to check that she wasn’t going to kill any of her precious precious guests, and it made the back of her neck itch to have the Royal Guard crawling over her security precautions. They did it to everyone; it wasn’t that they hated and distrusted her (the Tyrant had explained the first year) it was simply that they couldn’t trust everyone she trusted. By now she was used to it, and when she greeted them she had her face set straight.
“Welcome,” she said as the men came out of it, the four of them in their nonuniform uniforms, each wearing some form of armor decorated with the blue and silver the Tyrant assigned to his servants, each with personal arms quartered with the serpent-and-crown. Flashfreeze, Ironclaw, Silvershield and springing out of the driver’s seat like a movie played just too fast Elgolian, the madman who thought he was an elf.
“Your Excellency,” he said, bowing to kiss her extended hand, smiling up at her. For a moment she envied his constant near-humanity, a body eternally static, and it took an effort of will to suppress her returning smile.
“Sir Elgolian,” she said. “Returned from the States, I see.”
“Indeed I am, and these fine gentlemen from the Royal Guard are here to make sure that your security precautions keep to the latest fashions.”
No offer to kiss her hand from the other knights. No offer to shake it, just a few vague courtesies while Elgolian talked. You sold your countries, too, you snakes. Who among you serves the flag that bore him?
“Of course,” said Greenrose, turning to lead them into her house. They could say what they wished, and whatever she might think she would be courteous. She no longer had the right to be otherwise. “I’d like you all to meet my security consultant, Mister James Davies.”
“A pleasure,” said Catherine’s knight. “Sir?”
Davies shook his head, and Greenrose watched as Elgolian dismissed him to the background. She focused on her fingers; best if they didn’t turn back into claws until she could trim them.
“If you’d follow me?” she said. “Davies, if you would?”
“Ma’am. We’ve increased the staff from six teams to twelve, for the duration. Two of them will be providing security for the main event. A kinetic deflector will go up around the county palace.”
“Do you have any answer to those who move from place to place without crossing between?”
She pointed at a spot on the ground; a black dot, the size of a period on a page. She’d had them scattered at intervals of about five yards everywhere throughout her compound. The price had been much too high.
“A solar attractor.” Doctor Dominion charged high prices for his creations, but he’d already sketched the design to deal with Bronze and Sunstorm. “It will trap energy from laser weapons.”
Stolen novel; please report.
“Luminosa is the only teleportiste you fear?”
“It’s not a common power,” she said curtly. “Nobody else with it on Novapest. She doesn’t kill but if she does I’ll be her first victim.”
He shrugged.
“Truly, there is little danger from others of the three known active, but still I and my comrades must finish our labor.”
“Let’s get this over with,” said Countess Greenrose.
“Ma’am.”
Her guards wore suits, not armor. David Allen had been working for her for nine years and so far he had done his work without any particular need for her involvement, which was exactly what she preferred to happen.
“Mister Allen?”
“We have a problem, ma’am.”
“How serious.”
“A hostage situation. Robbers in a jewelry store, we caught them before they could leave. They have three hostages, one’s the clerk.”
“That’s what police are for,” she said, running her eye over the knights. “Devoting additional energy to hostages only encourages people to take more of them. Ages?”
“Forty-three, thirty and nine.”
“You were explaining the security procedures, I believe?” Silvershield said.
“I’ll be back in an hour.” Her voice was flat.
“Oh, back to heroing?” Silvershield asked.
“I’m not Countess of the Thirteenth to throw parties, Silvershield,” she said. “I’m Countess of the Thirteenth to enforce the law. I’ll be back in an hour.” She took off running.
- - -
Greenrose moved like flowing water. She wasn’t just strong, or fast; it was more the tumbling rumbling rush of sea or stones that poured down the mountainside, the motion of a flood or landslide, running not like a man but like a centipede, human form an illusion as she rushed across her district.
Elgolian was running beside her, self-swift, and she accelerated again and again only to find that he was still somehow keeping up with her. “I told you to stay behind,” she said.
“I must know what you would do here, countess.”
“Stay back and watch, then,” she grunted. The building was already surrounded, a barricade built with armed men behind it. Her cops knew what they were doing; half of them had been Saint-Andrews police under the republic and when the other half of them told her to go to hell she’d hired whoever could tote a gun whom she hadn’t personally punched back in the white-hat days. Then she hanged the ones who wouldn’t play ball, and now she had the third-best police force in Novapest on the fifth-lowest budget.
She nodded to the lieutenant. “Mister Campbell.”
“Boss. Six gunmen, three hostages.”
“No capes?” She was already starting to grow, small tendrils creeping from her feet into the rock and dirt of the street, crawling along the ground.
“No.”
“Hostages prone?”
He nodded. “Lines of fire clear.”
“I can do better than that.”
Lieutenant Campbell handed Greenrose a megaphone, and she strode up to the front of the barricade and brought it to her lips. “HEY! ASSHOLES!”
“Don’t come any closer!”
She rolled her eyes dramatically. Hopefully enough that they could make it out from inside the building. (As she did, her strands of hair flared to disguise the tendrils growing into the ground, visible motion distracting from the hidden. “I don’t care!” she yelled back.
Elgolian laughed.
“I’m not bluffing!” His accent wasn’t Mexican, Igbo, American, Rohingya, Chinese or local and past that she couldn’t tell. All the nuts came here.
“I know you’re not! I’m just evil.” The tendrils snaked into the building one by one, and she formed tiny eyes as they entered. One of the gunmen had a microphone of his own; his rifle was pointed to the ground, safety on. The rest had pistols or submachine guns pointed whatever direction they wanted, but most of them had turned towards her or to the cops. Not much risk of an errant finger getting someone killed...
“Course,” she said, “that does mean I don’t care if you live. If you all want to make a run for it, I won’t shoot you. Just so long as you drop the money first.”
“We want safe passage -”
“What do you think I just offered you?”
More tendrils snuck in, crawling through cracks in the floor, creeping in the windows, sneaking through the tiniest cracks in the roof... Six. Twelve. Twenty...
“Drop the guns and walk away,” she said. “Last offer.”
“I -”
And then she killed them.
Greenrose normally tried to stay stable, stay human, but when she relaxed that for a moment and chose to grow she was lightning. Within the second every robber was impaled by three spears lashing out from the ground like bullets, more of them emerging from her creeping tendrils to strike or wrench the guns upwards so that the one burst of fire caused by the jerk of a dead finger struck the ceiling.
She tossed the megaphone behind her, lifted up her foot and severed the tendrils connecting her to the vines with one clawed nail. Her men could clean up the foliage when they took care of the bodies.
The last image her eye sent back was the horrified expression on the former hostages’ faces.
“So, Elgolian,” she said, turning to the elf, leaning against a wall, watching her. “Did you see what you were hoping to?”
He smiled sharply.
“Why yes, milady. Yes I did.”