Annan explained how the Hellfire Legion had been drawn into a tangled conspiracy. Now both the Demons and the Stuen Ratfolk pointed toward Snow Mountain Fortress.
Add the underground ruins and the beautiful woman encased in ice that Brino Jana had found earlier, and there had to be a connection.
"The Demons have nothing to do with this," the Old Housemaster said, ruling them out at once. "Though they may have discovered something."
Idelia sat a little straighter in her Wheelchair. The Old Housemaster sounded certain. He clearly knew something.
"Do you know who the beautiful woman in the ice is?"
"Bastard! Is that woman all you can think about?" The Old Housemaster struck the floor angrily with his cane.
"That's not what I meant. Don't you find it strange? Beneath the Fortress, an Iceberg, a beautiful woman..."
It was enough to keep a Bard teasing out the story for a week.
"Of course it seems strange when you don't know the truth," the Old Housemaster said irritably. "Let me think where to begin... It was early in the Saint Laurent Calendar."
"Isn't that going back a bit far?"
Ignoring Annan's interruption, the Old Housemaster recalled the stories his grandfather had told him when he was young.
The story actually began a few years before the calendar did.
The prevailing account of humanity's Great Expedition in the early Saint Laurent Calendar held that "Wilhelm could no longer contain its exploding population, so humanity chose to expand into the outside world."
But humans weren't Ratfolk. How could a World Island that vast run out of room for them? Besides, no one had ever heard of a housemaster leaving home because the family had grown too large.
The people of the Wizard Era, and even the era of the Arcanists, had hardly