Hi darlins!
This went live to my Patreon folks yesterday and I thought I'd give you a taste of it too :) I'll eventually put these parts together and make them into something more easily consumable, but for now, enjoy our hero returning to the city he came from and not liking it one bit. (Warning, graphic violence ahead.)
***
A Monstrous Light,
Part Two
Six months after…
There was nothing like coming home to the sight of a fresh
corpse dangling in the breeze.
Dascenne’s still a complete shithole, I see, Beniel Tallance
thought as he maneuvered his drake around the hanging post that had been
erected just a quarter mile from the city gates. The sign on the corpse’s chest
said that he was a thief.
Looks like the days of merely chopping off a thief’s hand
are gone.
That a man—and it was hard to tell under the bloat, but it
looked like a young man, perhaps merely a boy—could be killed and strung up as
a warning against thievery, of all the petty acts of crime out there, was an
affront to anyone with a soul.
Then again, when had anyone other than Korran had a soul in
this forsaken place? It was almost reassuring, in a terrible way, to see that
some things never changed.
The largest city of the empire by far, the seat of the
Imperial throne, the immortal homeland of the emperor, may he live forever, ha…what
it amounted to these days was rot. It was a pustulating, filth-ridden, decaying
city-state that had grown fat and comfortable under the reign of a
near-immortal monarch accustomed to fucking off and doing as he pleased
whenever he was moved to do so, leaving his kingdom behind to be run by
functionaries.
Now that the old emperor was gone and Ormyr was still
establishing his power base, the secondary nobility was tearing at the heart of
the city, using every means in their power to achieve more status for
themselves at the price of everyone around them. Beniel had heard the tales of
the capitol’s chaos, even a hundred miles out from Dascenne. The outer levels,
which had never been prosperous but had at least been relatively safe once upon
a time, were choked with the leftovers of dying houses, people used to having
power who suddenly had none but what they could collect with their own hands.
Streets were unsafe, and even the toughest footpads quailed in the presence of
armed guards who had once labored for dead men, and now made dead men of their
fellow laborers.
Beniel walked his drake Flower through the western gate of
the lowest level of Dascenne just after twilight. It was a dangerous time to be
entering the city—would have been dangerous even before the change in command—but
he didn’t really care. He was tired, he was angry, and he was heartsick after
half a year of searching for more on what his prince had become and finding
little to go on.
It wasn’t as easy as hunting down a battle site or coming
across an illegitimate killing, or Beniel would never have had to leave
Dascenne in the first place. The trouble was that his prince, the new Great
One, the Lord of Vengeance as he was being called, didn’t respond to all the prayers
directed his way. The crime in question had to be unquestionably evil,
perpetrated against a being of innocence. A fight, even a wrongful death or
two, wasn’t enough. There had to be heinousness involved, and something that
heinous was often so shameful it was hard to get evidence of it, or to convince
people to talk about it. Who wanted to put their own shortcomings on display?
Who wanted to admit to one of their own being such a freak that a literal god
had had to put them in their place?
It was Beniel’s growing frustration with such findings, as
well as a missive written by the king himself that had been delivered a few
weeks ago to the backwater hostel he was staying in, that convinced him to
return to Dascenne. Ormyr might be willing to help him. It was clear that he
knew Beniel’s purpose, and that son of a bitch was one of the smartest princes
the emperor had ever produced. The fact that he was the last one standing was
proof of that.
Ormyr would name his price. It remained to be seen whether
Beniel was interested in paying it.
He stepped around a pile of midden in the middle of Sawset
Road and wondered whether it would be worth it to get a room in the lower
levels tonight, and meet with Ormyr in the morning. At the rate he was going,
it would be midnight before he got to the palace, and no matter how carefully
he moved he was doubtless going to misjudge a pile in his path before long and
end up with shit on his shoe, and—
“Hands high, gentry.”
As though the warning wasn’t enough—which, to be fair, it
really wasn’t—it was immediately reinforced by the bright gleam of firelight
against a blade in the alley to the right. Not just one blade, either. There
were at least three people back there, all of them armed. One of them held a
crossbow.
No wonder they hadn’t tried to charge right in. They didn’t
need to as long as he was held at the bolt’s bay.
“Raise ‘em,” the man in front went on, wielding a long knife
in each hand. His voice was little more than a hiss of air, but there was a
thread of pure satisfaction running through it. “Up now, or my man’ll stick you
deep with his arrow.”
“Is that what it’s called these days?” Beniel
muttered, annoyed. He lifted his hands, though, turning to get a better view of
his muggers. “What can I do for you gentlemen?” he asked in a bored tone.
The man in front didn’t seem to care for that. He stepped
out of the shadows and into the street, which had miraculously emptied of
people despite the relatively early hour. He was a big man, wiry but broad
through the shoulders and chest, and held his daggers like someone who knew how
to use them. A professional, then, and wearing a mail shirt beneath his leather
jerkin if the smell was anything to go by. “You can start by handing over that
drake,” he snapped, gesturing at Flower with his right blade.
“What are you going to do, ride her? In this city?” Beniel
scoffed. “It’s too crowded by half for a drake this size.” The palace had
grounds specifically set aside for the health and welfare of the royal drakes,
but in town they tended to use animals no larger than a country farmer’s dog
for towing small carts and the like.
“Ride her? Nah,” the one in front said with a half grin.
“We’ll take this old lass of yours to the knacker’s. Get plenty of coin for the
teeth and scales, and enough meat to eat on for a week from just one of those
haunches. Gift that keeps on giving, she’ll be.”
Ah. He should have guessed. Beniel tapped Flower on the neck
two times before releasing her reins, a signal which put her into an immediate
defensive stance. “That’s a terrible idea,” he told his attacker. He wasn’t
going to go for his sword until the crossbow bolt was out of the picture—he
didn’t have Korran around to heal him anymore, after all—but his hands itched
to draw his sword. “How about this one instead? You three turn back down that
alley and get out of my sight, and you’ll live to steal and murder another day.”
“Ah, regal lad.” The man in front shook his head. “Don’t you
go worrying your pretty head about the future from here on out. Galen, now!”
The man holding the crossbow aimed it and fired, shooting straight for Beniel’s
face. At this range, an iron-tipped bolt like that would penetrate to the back
of his skull.
Flower’s tail swept up faster than Beniel could see, and
with a snap like the sound of a fan falling open, it batted the bolt out
of the air. The bowman blinked, stunned at a result he hadn’t even begun to
anticipate. Flower extended her neck so that her sharp, scaly head appeared
over Beniel’s shoulder, and hissed menacingly.
Beniel had his paired swords out a second later. He moved
quick enough to get the advantage over the man in front, parrying both his
blades down and driving one of his swords through the man’s thigh before the
second swordsman got his head together and launched into the fray. Beniel backed
up one step, pivoted to the right with a parry that got his attacker’s
longsword well out of the way, then brought his second sword up and swept it
across the center of the man’s face a moment later. He cut through one eye, the
bridge of the man’s nose, a cheek, and sliced off the very tip of his left
earlobe as well in a single stroke.
The swordsman screamed and fell to the ground, right into a
pile of muck. He didn’t seem to care, shrieking and clawing at his face the way
he was.
“What…how?” groaned the first man, clutching his
perforated thigh. Beniel didn’t pay him any heed as he went after the bowman,
who’d finally gotten himself together enough to begin reloading the crossbow.
Beniel knocked the deadly device out of his hands, then swung the edge of his
blade down to cut the man’s right hand off at the wrist. Blood spurted, but
even as the bowman shouted with horror and pain he was already going for the
knife at his waist.
“A would-be thief and murderer,” Beniel said coldly.
“You’re right. One hand isn’t enough.” He cut the other hand off before the
bowman could do more than grasp the handle of his blade.
Now the experience overwhelmed him to the point where he
collapsed on the ground, staring at the stumps of his arms with pure agony etched
onto his face as his lifeblood poured into the gutters. Beniel took his head
just as he began to scream—one person’s cries piercing his ears was more than
enough.
“You son of a—aaargh!” Beniel whirled around to see
the man he’d stabbed through the thigh halted mid-lunge, both daggers extended
but rendered useless as Flower engulfed his head in her serpentine jaw. Her
needle-like teeth pierced both sides of the man’s face, and it was a mercy for
her prey that she shook him so hard his neck snapped, cutting his hideous and
well-deserved death short. She dropped him on the ground a moment later, and
his hands and legs twitched spasmodically for a few more seconds before he
finally stilled.
“Well done,” Beniel said quietly to Flower, who huffed and ran
her forked tongue over her gory teeth. He looked around the street, which still
rang with the screams of the swordsman, whose whole body was now covered in
filth and blood.
“Would anyone else care to try me tonight?” he shouted into
the voice, suddenly furious. Great Ones and the sainted sodding emperor, he was
fucking tired of this shit. He didn’t even want to be here, and
these uppity renegades thought they would make easy pickings of him? How many
people did they do this to a night? Travelers, neighbors—how many people did
they violate, simply because they could? “Anyone, absolutely anyone! Come at me
now or hold your peace forever, because after tonight I won’t be so nice about
giving you a chance to back down like I did these gents.”
He’d be talking to Ormyr about the disgraceful lack of
safety on the streets of his damnable city, that fucking dundercock.
