The Demon Emperor's System: I Rose From a Dead Body

Chapter 8: The First Counterattack

The footsteps stopped outside the study door.

Seraphina stood flat against the wall beside the frame, one hand loose at her side. She had pushed the sword into its sheath. Adrian could see the muscles in her forearm bunched up like cords.

The door swung inward.

A man leaned through with a torch in his fist. Level twelve, said the little blue box. Broad nose, a grey coat with brass buttons, a short sword he hadn't bothered to draw.

"Lord Vale?" he called, bored. "Anybody home?"

He took one step into the room.

Seraphina's arm snapped around his neck from behind. The torch hit the floor. Her other hand cupped his jaw and gave it a sharp little twist, the kind you'd use on a stubborn jar lid, and he went limp without a sound.

She lowered him down like a sack of flour.

"Alive," she said, a little sourly. "As ordered."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. It's more work."

Adrian grabbed the torch before it set the rug on fire, then crouched and went through the man's belt pouch. A brass whistle. A pipe. A folded paper stamped with the black scales, the Ledger's charter, all twenty clauses printed in tiny letters.

He ran his eyes down it, and the page went into his head like water into sand.

*Clause fourteen. No collector shall enter a noble's dwelling by force without the seal of a magistrate.*

*Clause nineteen. On the sounding of any fire alarm, all collectors shall quit the premises immediately, the Ledger's wagons being loaded with records and powder.*

He read nineteen twice. Then he looked up.

"Seraphina. Can you make a man's voice?"

"I can make several."

"Great." He smiled for the first time since waking up in a dead body. "Help me find some lamp oil."

---

The study had four lamps. The kitchen, two floors down, had plenty more, and Seraphina went and got them. She was back in three minutes, silent as a cat, with six bottles and a very large iron pan.

Adrian sat on the floor by the fireplace and made smoke.

He packed the pan with torn letters and old bills. Then the tin of snuff, shaken out over the top. Then a careful splash of lamp oil, not too much, just enough to make it smolder instead of burn. He lit it with the torch and blew gently.

The paper curled. Grey smoke rose in a thick, greasy rope, and the smell was horrible, like a fire in a tobacco shop.

"That's not even flames," Seraphina said.

"It doesn't have to be flames. It just has to look like the house is on fire."

He made three pans. Seraphina carried them out to the second floor landing, the back stair, the long gallery above the great hall, one at a time. Each trailed a ribbon of grey behind it.

By the time she came back, the first smoke was drifting down the main staircase in slow, lazy sheets.

Down in the hall, someone coughed.

"Do you smell that?"

"Smells like..."

Seraphina stepped to the top of the stairs. She cupped her hands around her mouth.

"FIRE!" The voice that came out was a man's, hoarse and terrified, and it was nothing like hers. "FIRE ON THE SECOND FLOOR! GET OUT, GET OUT!"

A second voice joined in from the back stair, deeper, cracking. "THE WHOLE EAST WING'S GONE!"

A third, from the gallery. "PIKE! PIKE, THE POWDER!"

Adrian clamped a hand over his mouth to keep from laughing. It hurt his ribs.

The collectors in the hall were already moving. Boots stampeded across the marble. Somebody shrieked about his leg. Someone else knocked over a candle stand, and a whole line of men went out the front doors like water through a cracked dam.

From the courtyard came a bell, loud and desperate, ringing out the fire alarm.

"Pike's bell," Adrian said. "He's afraid of fire. I told you."

"You did."

"Now we go downstairs."

"We?"

"Me. You're staying out of sight."

She stared at him. "You can't stand up."

"I know." He let her pull him to his feet by the elbow. His knees shook, his head spun, and a thin sweat ran down his back, but the smoke was real and the cold air coming through the open front doors was real, and he was still breathing. "I'm going to need you to hold my arm until we hit the stairs."

---

It took him four minutes to reach the front steps.

By then the courtyard looked like a kicked anthill. Thirty-odd collectors stood in clumps around the wagons, coughing, shouting, pointing at the black smoke rolling out of the second floor windows. Pike sat on his gray horse in the middle of them, his waxed mustache gone limp, one fat fist wrapped around the bell rope.

Adrian walked out onto the top step with a lit torch in one hand and the dead man's crossbow in the other.

It wasn't loaded. The string was cut halfway. He kept the point aimed at Pike's chest anyway.

The courtyard went quiet.

"Lord Vale?" Pike's voice cracked on the second word. "Good heavens, man. The house is burning."

"It's not burning." Adrian kept his voice flat and steady, though the torch trembled. "I lit it. On purpose. Quite a few fires, actually. All of them in rooms I don't care about."

Pike's mouth dropped open.

"Clause fourteen of your charter," Adrian said. "No forced entry without a magistrate's seal. You broke my gate. You killed my dogs. You've been in my house for forty minutes with thirty men and no seal. Your writ is void."

A long silence.

"That's not..." Pike swallowed. "The Ledger holds a writ."

"Show me the seal."

Nobody moved.

"Right. Here's my offer." Adrian lifted the torch a little higher. Its light jumped across Pike's sweating face. "I have more fire in there. A cellar full of lamp oil, and a very bad temper. And your wagons, I'm told, are full of powder."

"You wouldn't."

"I'm a Vale." He tried a smile. It felt like a mask he had borrowed. "Ask anyone. I'm unstable."

Pike looked at the torch. At the bell in his hand. At the smoke.

"Thirty days," he said, very quickly. "A thirty-day extension. In writing. With a magistrate's seal, next time. I'll draw it up myself."

"Sign it now."

"I don't have..."

"Your pen's in your left breast pocket."

Pike stared at him. Then, slowly, he reached up and took it out.

Ten minutes later the last wagon rattled out under the broken gate, wheels grinding on the cobbles. The torches went with it, one by one, until the courtyard was dark and the wind blew in cold off the hills.

The torch fell out of Adrian's hand.

His knees went.