Book 2 Chapter 12: The Death of Isolde

Isolde

March 24, 1787, Realm Time, the Swedish-Russian border north of Sankt Petersburg

Pretty, Isolde's mare, had been morose all day, eating very little, and was jerking often, like she was scared by some invisible monster. Unlike Good Boy, Tristan's horse, she couldn't speak, but she sure knew how to send vibes.

"What the hell is with you? Calm down!" Isolde hissed as she tried her best to maintain her smile.

A hand pulled the curtains of the carriage she escorted. "Have you said something?" Catherine the Great asked.

"No, Your Majesty, I was just correcting my horse," Isolde said.

The fabric went down without further comment. The Empress was old and cranky, and Isolde had been instructed to be extremely polite.

"We're about to arrive," the coachman said.

"Are we the first?" Isolde asked.

"No, they're already there."

Shoot!

She had made a bet with Jan about who would reach the rendez-vous first, and she was sure to win. Since she leveled to fifty, she had a skill to warp space for faster travel, and she had shared the buff with the carriage and its horses. The hundred miles between Sankt Petersburg and the border with Sweden, or Finland, on Earth, had taken just two hours.

Isolde dismissed the spell progressively, allowing the coach's horses to adapt to the normal speed. An accident involving the tsarina was the worst possible scenario. World peace hung in the balance.

The negotiations were to take place in a hunting lodge marking the border, an obscure crossing almost no one used, tucked inside the forest. Strangely, the snow stopped two hundred feet from the clearing. As they slowed down and stopped near the cabin, an oblong shape tied between the rare trees of the clearing made clear why Jan beat her to the task. The Swedes had a Zeppelin.

Next to the wooden lodge, a man in a fur coat was smoking a cigar and chatting with Jan, Isolde's lover. The latter threw his cigarette but down, crushing it under his boot, then came to greet her.

"Have we arrived?" Catherine asked, without pulling the curtains.

"Yes, Your Majesty," the coachman said.

"Hey, sweetheart," Jan said.

"Hey," Isolde replied, leaning down to kiss him. She felt happy to see him, and lucky. Janosh was a handsome man, by Realm's and her standards. That he had fallen for her was ot something she had expected, but in the end, it was fate. They were good together. Both riders, a marksman and a markswoman.

He grabbed her cheeks and returned the kiss. "I love you," he said, caressing her cheek. "Open the door, or those stuck-ups won't get out."

"Yeah," Isolde sighed, jumping down and handing Jan Pretty's reins. While he pulled the mare toward the back of the hut, she hurried to open the door for Catherine. The coachman was doing the same on the other side for Catherine's ministers. At the same time, the two guards watched the surroundings, still up in the carriage, twin-barrel shotguns in hand.

"Your Majesty," Isolde offered her hand.

Catherine stepped out rigidly, massaging her lower back. "That spell of yours didn't take care of the bumps. Next time, do better."

"I will, Your Majesty," Isolde said, continuing in her mind, Bitch!

The man with the fur coat advanced toward the empress, offering his arm.

"Catherine," she slightly bowed, kissing her hand before offering his arm.

"Gustav," the tsarina smiled.

The two walked toward the cabin, with the ministers following a few steps behind. There were two of them, both famous generals: Potemkin and Suvorov. From the lodge, a Swedish officer exited, taking position on the sides of the door, bowing, hat in hand.

"At ease, Axel, we're among friends here," Gustav the Third said.

A woman appeared in the doorway, holding a large piece of bread on a platter. She looked in her early thirties and had a homely appearance, the kind that many men fell for despite its blandness. Wife material.

"Welcome to my humble abode," she said in a low voice, putting a knee down as she offered the bread with a lowered head.

Catherine, then Gustav, took a piece and ate it before entering the lodge, arms locked. The rest followed, except the comely woman, who disappeared into an adjacent shack after taking a long, thin file hung from a nail in the log wall. Sounds of metal scraping on metal followed. If Isolde had had to guess, the woman was sharpening tools.

"Want a smoke?" Jan asked.

"What's this meeting about?" Isolde asked, waving her hand to refuse the cigarette pack he almost shoved in her face.

"Politics," Jan shrugged, tapping the bottom of the pack to make a cigarette go up, then lighting it and taking a deep puff and letting out a few smoke rings. "Gustav is trying to convince Catherine to ally against Poland and Prussia, and split it between them. Gustav wants the Polish territories that Prussia got during the First Partition.

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"Catherine, on the other hand, wants to go for the Turks, and offers Gustav stuff they took from Sweden in the last war, if Sweden helps with their fleet. It's a strong one and could threaten Constantinople."

"Hm…" Isolde frowned. "But we don't want Turkey to fall, right?"

"Right," Jan nodded slowly, "though neither option is good for the Protectorates. The Council wants to build buffer states around us, allowing the Krakow duchy to rejoin Poland if it reforms and abandons its liberum veto. And since there's curiosity in your eyes, my dear, I'll tell you: It's a rule that allows any member of the parliament to dissolve it. If Poland is divided again, we'll have the Russians for neighbors in the north. If the Crimean Khanate falls, we'll have them in the south."

Isolde grinned. Jan was a big show-off, doing it all the time when he wanted to impress her. "And what's our part in this?"

"None," Jan said. "Both Russia and Sweden hired us to make sure there's no foul play. You imagine the tsarina and the king coming in the middle of nowhere, otherwise?"

"The Company does have a reputation," Isolde said, tightening the wool coat around her. March in Russia was no different from January in the United States. She turned her eyes to the woman, who was lighting a fire outside, under a giant cauldron. "What's she up to?"

"Cooking," the woman said, showing she had good hearing. "There is hung venison in that hut," she made a swift hand motion toward an annex instead of pointing.

"You live here all by yourself?" Isolde asked.

"I find the company of humans exhausting," the woman said, smiling. However homely her face looked, the pointy teeth in her mouth made a sharp contrast. "Myself is all I need. And maybe a few pets. " Straightening up, the woman snapped her fingers.

The sharp pain in her chest came as much a surprise as the short red text she read before everything went black.

Happy Trigger Janosh had shot you.

When Isolde opened her eyes, she saw the world from an abnormal angle. Too high.

Am I a ghost?

Then, the pain hit, immense, burning, all around her midriff and in her chest. Her eyes became watery, and she screamed.

System rebooting in progress: 1%

"Geez, she scared me," a man dressed in a fur coat jerked, a few feet away. Gustav… stuff, the king of… something… Isolde's mind was foggy.

"She's in pain," the homely woman said. "It's normal."

Isolde gasped, trying to ask what was happening, but all she could do was pant.

"Will she remember anything?"

"I erased her memory," the woman said.

"What's going on?" Isolde whispered, but her words were lost in a loud engine noise.

"The blimp is warming up, it's time to go, the man said.

The stranger hugged the crone, then jogged toward the Zeppelin, grabbing a ladder. A few moments later, the engines roared, releasing a plume of smoke, and the blimp started to ascend rapidly, disappearing in the low clouds.

"What's happening?" Isolde managed to ask.

"Speech is still working… Magnificent!" the woman grinned, showing her sharp teeth, rubbing her hands. "Sleep!" she ordered, extracting a wavy branch from her belt and shaking it toward Isolde.

Despite her pain and anguish, Isolde's eyes started to twitch, then closed, and she struggled to keep on her four feet.

Four legs? Her mind screamed.

Her tail twitched, brushing her hips.

Tail? What's happening?

System rebooting in progress: 12%… Accessing logs. Compiling report.

Isolde's death was recorded on the 23^rd of March 1787, at 11.59 AM.

Cause: Heartshot

Murderer: Happy Trigger Janosh.

Motif: Unknown.

The System had concentrated in Isolde's brain, trying to prolong her life. Sensory input has been lost in the process.

Current situation: Isolde's upper body has been grafted onto her mare's body. Her heart has been replaced with a heart of unknown origin. Magic was involved. Unknown circumstances.

The mare's body showed signs of the yew virus. The System nanites cloned themselves into the virus and multiplied, halting further degradation of Isolde's brain.

Attempt to erase Isolde's memories detected at 01.19 PM. Attempt resisted by copying memories onto the yew virus and transferring them back. 95% of brain memories were saved.

System Reboot was initiated at 02.29 PM.

Sleep spell detected at 2.30 PM. Half-resisted. Superficial horse-like sleep is induced instead of profound sleep.

Please, let this be a nightmare… Please…

System rebooting in progress: 15%

Forcing herself to open an eyelid, Isolde looked around furtively. The wooden hut had changed shape, resting on three weird chicken-like legs, the few annexes incorporated in the main building. Besides, there were the corpses of the ones in the carriage: Catherine, Potemkin, and Suvorov.

The three corpses, the Empress naked, the generals with their pants down, were arranged in a gruesome display, a sexual threesome. Isolde retched, a burst of half-digested grass shooting out of her mouth. She almost fainted. Janosh's body was tied up to a stake, his head at his feet, his chest torn apart as if by giant claws. The lower part of Isolde's body was next to her lover, the mare's head sewn on top of it.

Bile rose in her throat, and it tasted unusual. Grassy. In front of the hut, the witch was stirring the contents of the giant cauldron. Isolde could see human and animal parts. Torsos, legs...

"Smoked, or not smoked, this is the question," the woman said.

Stepping to one of the hut's annexes, the woman opened the door, revealing a display of dried meat, human and animal. Isolde recognized the coachman and the two bodyguards among them. The woman picked up a smoked pig leg, returned to the cauldron, threw it in, tasted the soup, and added salt.

It's HER fault, Isolde realized. She mind-controlled Jan into killing me and the rest, and then she killed him. And that Swede with the coat is involved too...

System rebooting in progress: 24%

A thunder of hate clapped in her ears. With a roar, she shook the sleep spell off and dashed on, engaging her Warp, raising on her hind legs, then falling down on the woman with all the weight of an Arabian mare, crushing her head.

She continued stomping on the skull until it was reduced to paste. Smoke began to rise from it, but instead of dissipating in the faint wind, it rushed toward Isolde, aiming at her nostrils and mouth. She coughed.

You have slain an unidentified MAIN TARGET: Main Targets cleared 5/10

Level up... situation unclear.

Curse detected...

System rebooting in progress: 33%

Mind control detected. Body takeover.

What's happening here? A voice said in her head. Oh, no! What have you done, Elena? This is totally unacceptable. Isolde's body began to move on its own. She trotted to one of the generals, who had a sword tied to his belt. Pulling it out, Isolde started hacking at her own midriff, unable to stop, albeit able to scream. The pain redoubled; then she lost consciousness again.