The cat won't stop hunting mice.

Claudine de Laballe felt little regret for having helped turn her family's ancestral home into a smoking ruin. She would have a new castle built, bigger, more beautiful, more magnificent.

The noblewoman sat on a hill that rose beyond the castle moat, offering a good view of the ruined landscape that had once been her home. On this rise, which had often offered her refuge as a child when her brother stalked her with malicious intent, she mentally painted a picture of a new home with graceful towers, playful bay windows, and a formidable dungeon where all her enemies would languish.

This wishful thinking, as well as Claudine's vague plans for a pink, whimsical castle with a dwarf bodyguard in colorful uniforms parading along its battlements, encountered considerable problems of realization. She could be no more certain of the deaths of her father and brother than of the uncomplicated recognition of her claim to power.

After Trako's rampage, which Turmo the Trampler and his followers had actively supported, and after news reached them of the giant's liberation, old Laballe vanished without a trace. His son was also presumed missing. He had shamefully abandoned his soldiers when they could no longer count on the giants' support and were forced to retreat before the king's mercenaries, who had now been paid and were therefore ready for action again.

The king's troops were deep within the former Laballe territory, effectively occupying parts of it. Chaos reigned in the rest of their lands, and a revolt was spreading. Claudine's claim to power seemed difficult to enforce, not only for this reason—her lineage had no female line of succession. Moreover, it was unclear whether she was truly the last of the Laballes.

Claudine sighed and thoughtfully rolled her golden ball back and forth. It was the only thing she had left; she had never intended to part with it. But perhaps she would have to pawn it. At the moment, she was completely on her own, with no court, no army, not even a place to live. The golden ball would have to provide all of this for the time being.

Claudine shed a few bitter tears over her unjust fate. Then she wiped the snot from her cheek and straightened up. She would need allies, for her temporary pact with dwarves and giants was now invalid and, in any case, beneath her station.

Claudine mentally ran through the list of potential accomplices. It was short, because the Laballes had made themselves thoroughly unpopular. Alaba-sur-Mère? Too rich and too powerful, they had their own plans and wouldn't share them with anyone. The D'entre Deux Mères family? Too insignificant and too weak. The Sur Hieremonts? Too far away.

Claudine stroked the hair-stained habit she still wore with disgust, recalling her humiliating forced stay in the convent. Then a divine inspiration came to her.

A cardinal with a cardinal error

Preparations for the thanksgiving service celebrating the kingdom's miraculous deliverance from its dark enemies were in full swing throughout almost the entire Cardinal's Palace in the capital. Everywhere there was a flurry of activity, including in the Cardinal's own office – but there it served a different purpose.

Cardinal François-Magot Susduperieu had many minor flaws and one major one, a cardinal sin, so to speak. It concerned ordinary people. The practicing pederast devoted himself wholeheartedly to a teenage altar boy, in order to draw him closer to the bosom of the Church and, above all, to his own.

Susduperieu enjoyed having the children come to him, two or three times a week. On these occasions, he wore no underwear under his scarlet cassock. He also enjoyed having his cardinal's ring kissed.

Susduperdieu closed his eyes and leaned back in his high-backed chair. The altar boy performed his duty while his bishop, ecstatic, bestowed his blessing upon him in short bursts. Then the cardinal sent the smeared boy away, went to a holy water font, and washed his hands and everything else in innocence.

There was a knock. "Yes?".

Susduperieu's private secretary appeared in the doorway, lowered his head and said: "Sister Ignatia requests an audience, Your Eminence."

Sister Ignatia? The cardinal thought hard. Did he know a Sister Ignatia? Then it dawned on him: the generous donation from the Duc de Laballe for his daughter's admission to the Order of the Immaculate Conception! The unexplained fire at the convent! The only missing person report!

Susduperieu grimaced. The name Laballe generally meant trouble. On the other hand, the last living nun was, of course, his ward.

The cardinal waved the secretary out the door and commanded, "She should come in!" At first, however, only a golden ball rolled to his feet. Claudine followed, immediately throwing herself flat on the floor before him, her arms crossed. Nothing else happened. Claudine remained silent. Susduperieu remained silent. The silence became uncomfortable.

The cardinal seized the golden ball that lay at his feet. He weighed it in his hand, first appraisingly, then with satisfaction. Something glimmered in his eyes. It was not the reflection of the golden gleam, but an inner fire ignited behind his pupils: greed.

“My daughter,” the chief shepherd began.

“I am worthless!” Claudine screamed, without raising her head. “Forgive me, Your Eminence!”

“Well, well,” replied Susduperieu, slightly unsettled. “It won’t be so bad, my daughter. I thank the Lord to see you in good health. Rise!”

Claudine allowed herself a grin before revealing her face. Her entrance had been a success! When she raised her eyes to the cardinal with masterful shyness, her expression was a perfect blend of feigned subservience and despair. Hastily, she seized Susduperieu's right hand and kissed his gold ring.

“You are too kind to me, my shepherd! Yet I have sinned,” she cried out, kneeling before him. “I should no longer be alive, but with my sisters in the Lord. My sisters, oh, my poor sisters!”

Claudine tossed her head wildly from side to side and tugged at her hairy robe. Susduperieu was overcome with fear that she might throw off her clothes. He hated nothing more than the sinful body of a woman, any woman.

The cardinal concealed the gold bullet in the folds of his scarlet cassock, took Sister Ignatia's hands, and helped her to her feet. "Calm yourself, my daughter. The ways of the Lord are mysterious. They have led you to me. Here you are safe. As safe as in Abraham's bosom."

"Sure," Claudine thought to herself. "As if anything in your lap was certain except that he's horny from morning till night." But to the cardinal, she said, stroking her forehead with a gesture of exhaustion—a forehead she had rubbed with dirt before her visit to the cardinal's palace to make herself look as disheveled as possible: "Your Eminence, I humbly beg your grace to be allowed to confess before you."

Claudine lacked all five prerequisites for confession: neither an examination of conscience (completely impossible due to the absence of a conscience to examine), nor remorse or good intentions, and certainly not the will to confess and make amends. Quite the opposite, in fact. She intended to use the cardinal as her useful tool.

Susduperieu very rarely heard confessions personally. In fact, he had little interest in the liturgy and rites of his own church, paying attention only to the servants at Mass. In this particular case, however, he was willing to make an exception. With a discreet gesture, he made sure that the golden ball rested securely in the depths of his luxurious robe.

Claudine crossed herself and whispered: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” The cardinal replied: “God, who enlightens our hearts, grant you true knowledge of your sins and of His mercy.” What followed put to shame all the lies that had ever made the beams of a confessional bend.

One man's monster is another man's benefactor

The stranger was new to the far north. Since he had checked into Hieremont's only inn a few days earlier, he had sat alone every evening at a table in the far corner of the taproom, silently eating his meal and drinking liters of wine, staring gloomily ahead.

The neighboring tables remained empty. No one wanted to approach the giant, who always kept one hand on the hilt of his sword. Upon his guest's arrival, the innkeeper had tried to engage him in conversation, amiably inquiring about the newcomer's origins and destination. A single glance from two poisonous green eyes had silenced him instantly.

Foreigners rarely ventured to Hieremont. There was no reason to visit the area, only many reasons to leave. What elsewhere appeared as a bitterly cold winter was considered spring here. For six months of the year, daylight barely reached its peak. The barren soil, largely frozen in permafrost, yielded virtually nothing. The national dish was a salad made from lichen.

The stranger poked at his bowl glumly. He waved to the innkeeper and asked for more wine. This time he was in a conversational mood. "It's cold in here," he said as the innkeeper refilled his glass. "That's just how it is here," the innkeeper replied shyly and obsequiously.

The innkeeper remembered, well—or rather, badly—how his decidedly unwelcome guest had arrived. He had come wearing blood-stained silver armor adorned with finely chiseled skulls. “Shall I have more wood added to the fire, sir? Would you like some spiced mulled wine? Would you prefer a supple woman to warm you on your bed?”

The giant dismissed all offers with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Nothing of the sort." He tugged at the drawstrings of his host's doublet until the latter had to bend down to his eye level. "Tell me, innkeeper: What's the story with that ice dragon we hear so much about?"

"Is that so?" gasped the innkeeper, the cords of his doublet pressing against his throat. "What did you hear?"

"They say a monster reigns in the glaciers that almost completely crush your miserable village, except for the pass I came through. A monstrous reptilian abnormality, more than twice as tall as a man, armed with claws, fire-breathing, and with wings several meters long with which it can soar high into the air."

“Well, people talk a lot.” The innkeeper took the liberty of loosening the stranger’s grip and straightening up. Then he said, “I don’t know where you come from or what stories they tell there. But the dragon isn’t a legend; it exists.”

"A truly dangerous creature, isn't it? Devastating, much feared?"

“Absolutely not,” the innkeeper replied indignantly, taking a decisive step back. “The ice dragon is highly revered here, a blessing, our benefactor. He breathes his fiery breath into the glaciers, triggering meltwater that we collect – it is our lifeblood.”

“Indeed,” the innkeeper added with a smile, “tomorrow begins the festival in which we pay our respects and make sacrifices to our benefactor, as he then floats down from the glacier heights for the only time of the year: Dragon Day.”

“Ah,” replied the giant, leaning back, licking his lips and asking: “Surely virgins are sacrificed, chained to a rocky outcrop from which the monster gets its food?”

“Certainly not. As every year, there will be a joyous celebration full of gratitude, during which we offer the few fruits that our meager land bears to the dragon – who will then reject them, because he knows how hard our existence is. He will content himself with millet porridge, his favorite food. When he has had his fill of that, a great feast will follow for us.”

“Interesting,” said Henri de Laballe, emptying his cup and rising to his full height before going to bed. “I’ll stay another day.”

Another villain's fate

The old Duc de Laballe, Henri's father, had also been swept away to a harsh region, though not nearly as far north as his cowardly son who had fled. The old man had survived too, but he had suffered considerable damage. His most loyal bodyguard had carried him on his shoulders through the inferno of collapsing columns and breaking ceiling beams that Trako, his father who had rushed to the scene, and the rest of the giant staff had created in the Laballe castle.

The Duke lay with festering wounds on the dirty straw mattress of a rickety bed in a wretched inn in the capital of the county of Entre-Deux-Mères. This county, a narrow but long strip of land between the western and eastern seas, consisted mainly of marsh and swampland.

Among the authors of travel guides, there was disagreement as to whether this region was to be avoided primarily because of its bloodthirsty swarms of mosquitoes, or rather because of the infamous swamp spirits that liked to lead travelers astray, only to then drag them into the bog pools that were their home, from which the damned souls of their victims sometimes rose as will-o'-the-wisps. According to legend, the swamps of the county had originated from a drop of the devil's sweat and had a direct connection to hell.

A local healer bent over the Duc's aged body under the watchful eye of the bodyguard. "Not good," she said, "not good at all." She poked at the old warhorse's wounds with her bony fingers. "Pus," she cackled, "lots of pus."

The Duke groaned. The herbalist dipped a dirty rag into a tincture she had brought in a wooden tub. Her services were well paid. The bodyguard had pawned the precious rings that had adorned each of his master's fingers at the local pawnshop.

The bodyguard closed the paper-covered hatch that passed for a window in this inn. "Too many mosquitoes," he remarked. "Not at all," hissed the old woman, giving him a look that made his blood run cold. "We need mosquitoes," cackled the witch, for she most certainly was one, and dug her dirty nails into the duc's wounds. "Mosquitoes suck bad blood. I see a lot of bad blood here. Very bad, very old blood."

The bodyguard began to doubt whether he had provided his master with the appropriate assistance. He wasn't very fluent in the local dialect. It was possible that, in his inquiries about medical care, he had confused the terms for "first aid" and "last rites." He decided to put a stop to the activities of the supposed healer and was about to draw his dagger.

But it was already too late. The paper over the hatch tore. A swarm of midges of biblical proportions poured in, accompanied by a pestilential stench that instantly took the bodyguard's breath away and caused him to collapse unconscious to the ground. A fine, then thickening mist seeped through the hatch opening, splitting into two strands. One became a grasping hand that strangled the bodyguard. The other penetrated both nostrils of the writhing Duc and entered his head. The rest was witches' cackles. Very bad, very old cackles.

Pens and arsonists

Cardinal Francois-Magot Susduperieu was outraged. If what Sister Ignatia had confided in him under the Holy Sacrament of Confession was true—and who would have reason to doubt the confession of this severely tested, excellent nun, who had relinquished her aristocratic pride and penitently proven herself to be a faithful bride of Christ?—then the following things were clear:

First: The treacherous brood of dwarves had set fire to the convent of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. Sister Ingnatia, who had only recently converted but was all the more fervent in her faith, was the only nun and eyewitness to escape this sacrilege. She had named an unchristian gnome named Mitschin as the arsonist; according to her confession, his henchman was a particularly small dwarf whose name the pederast Susduperdieu had memorized perfectly: Groasni. Susduperdieu, as is well known, had always been interested in the salvation of the souls of the smallest of people.

Secondly, Sister Ignatia, renouncing worldly possessions, provided the Church first recognized her as the sole heir of the Laballe family, would convert all the lands inherited by her into church property—with herself, the former noblewoman, as humble administrator, content with a church salary. This would be in the name and for the good of the Lord, whose faithful advocate on earth, the highly venerable Cardinal, would receive all the income for charitable use. However, this income still had to be wrested from the land and its inhabitants, who were currently in revolt. The Cardinal already had some ideas about how this could be remedied through the introduction of Christian discipline.

Thirdly: Claudine had intended the golden ball, which had now fallen to the cardinal, for the founding of a new monastery named after her. The cardinal had somewhat different ideas. However, he would keep this to himself for as long as possible.

The ice dragon freezes

The ice dragon was cold. He was also sad. He was a little ashamed, too. He held back his tears, because he knew from painful experience that they could only trickle a little way from his eyes before freezing into lumps of ice. Scraping them away with his paws required a painful effort, because the ice dragon was no longer young and suffered from rheumatism; every movement hurt him, and had for some time.

He dreaded the prospect of soon having to spread his weary wings and fly down to the village. Luckily, the way there had only been a glide. But whether he would make it back up to his glacier cave seemed increasingly uncertain.

But he couldn't abandon the good people down in the valley. He would give them their annual Dragon Day, as had been the tradition for hundreds of years. He would see familiar, grateful, and smiling faces again, and miss so many more. Human lifespans were short. Perhaps there would be some new faces to welcome as well.

During the dark months of the year, and there were many, the Hieremontians had little else to do but huddle together for warmth. This resulted in the birth of one or two new Hieremontians, both male and female. It was the dragon's duty to make the meager existence of the parents and children a little more bearable.

This proved increasingly difficult for the aging ice dragon. To his dismay, he had discovered that his fire breath was slowly drying up. Kind and caring as he was, he saved it for the annual ice melt, which he would trigger tomorrow to supply the village with large quantities of fresh water for the cisterns. For himself, only a little steam remained, which he sparingly exhaled from his nostrils now and then to keep the temperature in his cave somewhat bearable.

The ice dragon was afraid of tomorrow.

The Duc awakens

What had once been the old Duc de Laballe opened its eyes, from which a treacherous glow shone. The creature rose automaton-like from its pus-stained straw mattress. It stepped over the corpse of its bodyguard and opened the door to the inn's taproom.

Myriads of mosquitoes followed him. They descended upon the few drinkers who had entered the tavern. The bloodsuckers did their work, feasting on their prey. The alcohol in their victims' blood made the vampires even more murderous, increasing their thirst. They sucked every last drop of fluid from the defenseless bodies, swelling to many times their already unnatural size. Soon all the flailing and screaming ceased; limp sacks of skin, devoid of any lifeblood, slumped from the chairs.

The Duke strode onward, unperturbed, without looking back. He opened the swinging door to the inn's entrance. Behind him stood a massive wall of grotesquely bloated vermin. The Duke stepped out and headed for the swamp. His winged army followed. Reaching the marsh, the Duke entered without hesitation—old Laballe was already dead anyway. The swamp swallowed the Duke with a squelching sound. Above the now calm, but treacherous, surface of the swamp, the cloud of midges circled. The Duke sank to the bottom and awaited his orders.