100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids

Chapter 563 - 562- Sataro Giving a Demon Access to his Wife’s Chamber

Eleven at night was not a reasonable hour to call an emergency muster.The Santora Guild knew this.

They mustered anyway.

The guild hall occupied a converted merchant warehouse three streets from the Lantern Inn’s district — the kind of building that had been other things before it was this thing and remembered all of them in its architecture. High ceilings.

The smell of old timber and weapon oil and the particular, layered smell of many people who did physical work for a living having occupied a space over many years.

The main floor was long and wide, the walls hung with mission boards and equipment racks and the accumulated documentation of a guild that had been operating at reduced capacity but had not stopped operating.

Tonight, the main floor was chaos.

Organized chaos — functional chaos of people who had been woken up or interrupted or pulled from their off-duty routines and were doing the thing they did when pulled from routines, which was default to training and training said ’pack your kit, find your team, await orders.’

Fourteen adventurers.

Some still in their sleeping clothes with coats thrown over. Some in partial armor, the pieces they’d managed to find before the urgency of the summons had overridden the desire for completeness. One woman — a ranger, by her bow — was braiding her hair with one hand and attaching her quiver with the other, the multitasking of someone who had done this before and would do it again.

The noise of it: metal on metal, leather straps, buckles, the low voices of people having the same conversation in fourteen simultaneous versions.

"—anyone know what the mission is—"

"—emergency designation, which means outside the normal board—"

"—did anyone see the guild master tonight? He came back from somewhere and went straight to his office—"

"—his face was different. I’ve seen his face after bad missions. This wasn’t that. This was—"

"—where is he now? Who got the order directly?"

"—the head butler passed it. Emergency muster, pack for two weeks, departure within the hour—"

The ranger with the braid stopped braiding.

"Two weeks?" she said. "Without a briefing?"

"Guild master’s order," the man beside her said. The flat, definitive tone of a man who had been in the guild long enough to know that ’guild master’s order’ was a sentence that ended further questions rather than opened them.

The ranger considered this.

Resumed braiding.

"Fine," she said. "But if the mission parameters turn out to be something I would have asked questions about beforehand, I’m noting that for the record."

"Noted," said the man. The tone of a man who had also noted many things for many records over his career and had no strong feelings about records.

Near the weapon rack, two fighters — a woman in her thirties and a man about the same age, the easy-space body language of longtime partners — were checking blades.

"By the way," the woman said, running a thumb along her shortsword’s edge without looking at it. "Where is the guild master?"

Everyone in earshot looked at each other.

The question having been asked several times in the last twenty minutes without arriving at a satisfying answer.

"He came in from the inn," someone said. "With—" A pause. "Someone. A young man. I didn’t see the face."

"The guild master brought someone here," the woman with the shortsword said, the statement carrying the careful, noting quality of a person marking information for later.

"He was—" The person who’d seen them searching for the word. "Deferential. I’ve never seen him deferential."

The common room went slightly quieter at this.

The word ’deferential’ doing specific work in a room full of people who knew Remus Santora and knew that ’deferential’ was not a word in his behavioral vocabulary.

The ranger tied off her braid.

"Pack your kit," she said, to no one and everyone. "We’ll get the briefing on the road."

### The Upper Corridor — Same Time

The guild’s upper corridor was old stone.

The torches in their brackets burned with the slightly-too-orange color of torches that had been lit for warmth as much as light, the walls around them warm-colored and shadow-heavy, the corridor running from the main staircase to the private chambers in the way that all old-building corridors ran — not straight, accommodating the structural decisions of people who had built for different purposes.

Remus Santora walked it slightly ahead of Viktor.

Slightly. The positioning of a large man who was accustomed to leading through spaces and was navigating the unfamiliar territory of leading through a space while also deferring to the person behind him — the small, continuous, unconscious adjustments of a man recalibrating a posture he had not used since his apprenticeship.

His hand was not on his pommel.

Viktor noticed this.

The head butler appeared at the chamber door at the corridor’s end — a small, dry, precise man in his sixties, the kind of man who had organized other people’s lives for so long that his own personal life had become a matter of pure administration. He looked at Viktor with the contained, professional assessment of a man processing a guest he had not been given sufficient information about.

"This is the physician," Santora said.

The butler looked at Viktor.

Viktor looked at him.

"He is to have full access," Santora said. "Whatever he needs. Whatever he asks."

The butler absorbed this.

"Sir," he said. Not agreement exactly — the professional acknowledgment of an order from a person whose orders he followed, accompanied by the private reservation of a man who had questions and had filed them for later.

"The chamber," Viktor said.

The butler opened the door.

### The Chamber

The room had the quality of a room that had been a sickroom for long enough to forget it had been anything else.

The window covered. The candles — four of them, placed at the compass points of the bed in the particular arrangement of someone who had been told that light mattered and had applied light thoroughly. The smell: the medicinal, dried-herb, slightly-chemical smell of two years of physicians trying things and the sweet, slightly-wrong undertone that was not any of those things.

The woman on the bed.

She had been beautiful.

This was the thing you understood looking at her — not that she was beautiful now, though the architecture of it was still there, still readable beneath what had happened to her, but that she had been beautiful in the particular, physical, comprehensive way of a woman whose body had been built generously and had been used generously and had accumulated the evidence of both.

Big.

Not the polite, managed big of a woman who had made accommodations for her size — genuinely, uncomplicatedly big, the kind of body that a woman has when her physical existence has been continuous and demanding and she has never particularly thought about it because thinking about it was not relevant to the things she was doing.

Her breasts — heavy even in sleep, the full, dense, slightly-flattened weight of large breasts on a supine woman, the fabric of the blanket rising over them before falling to the flat of her stomach and the wider geography of her hips.

Her face.

The dark circles — comprehensive, the deep, bruised-purple color of circles that had been accumulating for weeks on skin that was going blue at the edges.

The blue crawling up from her fingertips, visible even in the candlelight, the particular, mana-poisoned blue of a body that was being consumed from the inside by its own power turned against it.