80th of Spring, 521
"Speech"
"Speech"
Madeira stroked the iron head of a short spear that bristled, plant-like, from a clay vase filled with identical spears at a weapon smith booth. They weren't as sharp as her souldarts, but something like this didn't need to be, she supposed. In the right hand these spears could rip through a target her puny little bow couldn't even tag.
She wondered if Rotsam the Curse Eater owned a spear.
The self contained world of the Outpost was a kaleidoscope of culture. As she stood pondering the weapons the sea of people in the Bazaar melded together in her peripherals, nothing but visual white noise. Until a stranger passed with dark skin and tattoos. These southern faces snagged Madeira's vision like a fish hook and dragged it away until she could confirm, with a nasty shiver, that it was not Rotsam.
"You reek of nerves", came a voice around her knee. Spooks was sitting in the shadow of her green skirt. His lamp-like yellow eyes, bright even in the daylight, were trained directly at her face. The beast's expression was as impossible to read as any cat, and his voice had an emotional range somewhere between mild apathy and annoyed disinterest, so she chose to believe the statement came from a place of concern.
"Performance anxiety, darling", Madeira assured with a smile, letting go of the spear and wandering further down the stall. "Today's the big day."
The next vase was full of pitted, double-headed axes. Some of these were as tall as her waist and wickedly curved. Even to her untrained eye they looked cheap and mass produced, but there was something frightening about the pure functionality of them. No pretty adornments, no finesse; these were made purely to be buried in someone's skull. How would you defend yourself from something like this, she wondered. She crossed her wrists in front of her, miming the action of desperately holding up ones hands to block a blow. She pressed the blade of one of the axes against her defending hands, to see what it felt like. It fit perfectly between her fingers.
"It doesn't have to be." Spooks was sticking close to his portable shadow, his tail tucked tight around his body to keep it from being stepped on.
"Yes, it does", she replied with a touch more venom than was called for. "I'm tired of Rotsam making all the moves in our little game. It's my turn." Her tongue slithered out and licked her bared teeth, and she imagined she could feel the Cordas mark on its bed stir excitedly. She wondered where Rotsam's mark was. As her partner they were bound together by the their twin gnosis marks, locked together in a game of subterfuge dictated by Sagllius, until one had defeated the other and became the dominant mage in Lhavit.
"His 'moves' were a lot less risky."
It was true. She had noticed Rotsam was developing a habit of simply booby trapping her life with cursed items. It was the safe option for sure. Being nowhere close when his plans went off meant he never had to deal with retaliation or risk getting caught, especially since she had more people on her side than he did. But it also meant he was never in direct control. He couldn't do more than sit back and hope she destroyed herself for him.
"High risk, high reward", she insisted. "Why nip at his reputation like he is mine, when I can destroy it, irrefutably, in one fell swoop? He's a big strong Myrian man, and I'm just a small, helpless human girl. If he raised a hand to me he would be villanized in an instant. And if he were to attack me, brutally, publicly, with all of Lhavit watching, he would be demonized. How dare this jungle savage do such a thing to their Miss Craven-Dusk?" She trilled, her eyes lighting up in excitement.
"You're bleeding."
She had been pressing too hard. The axe had cut through her doeskin gloves and the webbing of her fingers underneath. Madeira pulled her hand away and contemplated the growing stain, more miffed that the gloves were ruined more than anything else. Her left hand was partially paralyzed and no longer felt pain, just a dull sensation of pressure, like it was made of wood.
With his claws carefully sheathed, Spooks balanced on his hind legs in order to pull the injured hand towards him with his paws and lick at the cut. "Explain to me again", he asked between the sandpaper rasping of his pink tongue, "how you're going to get him to do something so stupid, and how this helpless human girl is going to stop him if he does."
"Stage magic", she smiled cheekily. "His body will be there, but it will be Jomi wearing it. Rotsam's soul will be safely out of the way right here." She held up her right wrist, where her pilfered charm bracelet and its one diamond charm reflected the desert sun back at them in a rainbow of colour. "Possession is just an elaborate costume change, is it not? And I will be playing the part of the damsel in distress. Then I'll have someone off stage ready to swoop in and save me if the crowd is too shell shocked. Alice, perhaps."
Spooks let go of her hand, and she checked to make sure she still had skin between her fingers after his thorough cleaning. "The only thing is, all the best stage makeup in the world won't pass for real injuries. And I'm not strong enough to take more than a hit or two, especially not from someone like Jomi. Before we even get there I need someone to break me in a way that I can recover from, that won't injure me permanently or threaten my life. That's why we're here." She wiped her hand on her skirt and smiled. "If I need someone to break me cleanly, they need to know what a clean break looks like. There's a hospital in the Outpost, in the middle of a domain that would do anything for the right coin, full of medical professionals. Seems like the right place, doesn't it?"
The end of Spook's tail was flicking in an agitated pattern, and his paws were blunting themselves as they scrapped at the cobblestone.
"And you've never tried to use the charm bracelet before?"
"Not on a living person", she admitted.
"What happens if you're found out?"
"I'll be tried by the Sezia, and appropriately punished."
"What happens if Rotsam breaks the possession?"
"He'll kill me."
Spooks stared at her for a long moment. "You know you're crazy, right?"
"That's show business, sweetheart", Madeira laughed, putting her hand to her forehead dramatically. Out of her periphery she saw a man coming up behind her, intending to squeeze between her and the main flow of traffic. Shifting her weight, she angled herself into his path.
His shoulder knocked into hers, and the smaller woman was thrown off balance. She stuck her left hand out as if to instinctively catch herself. Then, with as much force as she dared, Madeira slammed her left hand again onto the edge of the axe.
It was a strange sensation. Not painful, but it felt so wrong that it had every nerve in her body focused on that one point waiting for the signal that would never come. She could feel air moving against her open flesh as a nearly two-centimeter cut was sliced through her hand between her middle and ring finger.
Acting came naturally to the Spiritist. It had better, since she spent an inordinate amount of time pretending to be other people for the benefit of the dead. So summoning all her will, and using the memory of the injury that had paralyzed her hand in the first place, she clutched her bleeding limb to her chest and shrieked.
Spooks, startled by the noise and the sudden action, vanished in a cloud of soulmist. In ticks several passerby had stopped to help, including the confused weapons vendor and the poor man who had bumped into her. The man was white as a sheet and kept up a string of apologies as he pulled a scarf off his head and used it to stop the bleeding.
"Oh gods! oh gods, I'm so sorry, I didn't-, I don't know how-. Here, hold on to me. Oh gods, I'm so sorry. I'm going to take you to the Redynn. They're going to patch you right up. I'm so sorry."
She wondered if Rotsam the Curse Eater owned a spear.
The self contained world of the Outpost was a kaleidoscope of culture. As she stood pondering the weapons the sea of people in the Bazaar melded together in her peripherals, nothing but visual white noise. Until a stranger passed with dark skin and tattoos. These southern faces snagged Madeira's vision like a fish hook and dragged it away until she could confirm, with a nasty shiver, that it was not Rotsam.
"You reek of nerves", came a voice around her knee. Spooks was sitting in the shadow of her green skirt. His lamp-like yellow eyes, bright even in the daylight, were trained directly at her face. The beast's expression was as impossible to read as any cat, and his voice had an emotional range somewhere between mild apathy and annoyed disinterest, so she chose to believe the statement came from a place of concern.
"Performance anxiety, darling", Madeira assured with a smile, letting go of the spear and wandering further down the stall. "Today's the big day."
The next vase was full of pitted, double-headed axes. Some of these were as tall as her waist and wickedly curved. Even to her untrained eye they looked cheap and mass produced, but there was something frightening about the pure functionality of them. No pretty adornments, no finesse; these were made purely to be buried in someone's skull. How would you defend yourself from something like this, she wondered. She crossed her wrists in front of her, miming the action of desperately holding up ones hands to block a blow. She pressed the blade of one of the axes against her defending hands, to see what it felt like. It fit perfectly between her fingers.
"It doesn't have to be." Spooks was sticking close to his portable shadow, his tail tucked tight around his body to keep it from being stepped on.
"Yes, it does", she replied with a touch more venom than was called for. "I'm tired of Rotsam making all the moves in our little game. It's my turn." Her tongue slithered out and licked her bared teeth, and she imagined she could feel the Cordas mark on its bed stir excitedly. She wondered where Rotsam's mark was. As her partner they were bound together by the their twin gnosis marks, locked together in a game of subterfuge dictated by Sagllius, until one had defeated the other and became the dominant mage in Lhavit.
"His 'moves' were a lot less risky."
It was true. She had noticed Rotsam was developing a habit of simply booby trapping her life with cursed items. It was the safe option for sure. Being nowhere close when his plans went off meant he never had to deal with retaliation or risk getting caught, especially since she had more people on her side than he did. But it also meant he was never in direct control. He couldn't do more than sit back and hope she destroyed herself for him.
"High risk, high reward", she insisted. "Why nip at his reputation like he is mine, when I can destroy it, irrefutably, in one fell swoop? He's a big strong Myrian man, and I'm just a small, helpless human girl. If he raised a hand to me he would be villanized in an instant. And if he were to attack me, brutally, publicly, with all of Lhavit watching, he would be demonized. How dare this jungle savage do such a thing to their Miss Craven-Dusk?" She trilled, her eyes lighting up in excitement.
"You're bleeding."
She had been pressing too hard. The axe had cut through her doeskin gloves and the webbing of her fingers underneath. Madeira pulled her hand away and contemplated the growing stain, more miffed that the gloves were ruined more than anything else. Her left hand was partially paralyzed and no longer felt pain, just a dull sensation of pressure, like it was made of wood.
With his claws carefully sheathed, Spooks balanced on his hind legs in order to pull the injured hand towards him with his paws and lick at the cut. "Explain to me again", he asked between the sandpaper rasping of his pink tongue, "how you're going to get him to do something so stupid, and how this helpless human girl is going to stop him if he does."
"Stage magic", she smiled cheekily. "His body will be there, but it will be Jomi wearing it. Rotsam's soul will be safely out of the way right here." She held up her right wrist, where her pilfered charm bracelet and its one diamond charm reflected the desert sun back at them in a rainbow of colour. "Possession is just an elaborate costume change, is it not? And I will be playing the part of the damsel in distress. Then I'll have someone off stage ready to swoop in and save me if the crowd is too shell shocked. Alice, perhaps."
Spooks let go of her hand, and she checked to make sure she still had skin between her fingers after his thorough cleaning. "The only thing is, all the best stage makeup in the world won't pass for real injuries. And I'm not strong enough to take more than a hit or two, especially not from someone like Jomi. Before we even get there I need someone to break me in a way that I can recover from, that won't injure me permanently or threaten my life. That's why we're here." She wiped her hand on her skirt and smiled. "If I need someone to break me cleanly, they need to know what a clean break looks like. There's a hospital in the Outpost, in the middle of a domain that would do anything for the right coin, full of medical professionals. Seems like the right place, doesn't it?"
The end of Spook's tail was flicking in an agitated pattern, and his paws were blunting themselves as they scrapped at the cobblestone.
"And you've never tried to use the charm bracelet before?"
"Not on a living person", she admitted.
"What happens if you're found out?"
"I'll be tried by the Sezia, and appropriately punished."
"What happens if Rotsam breaks the possession?"
"He'll kill me."
Spooks stared at her for a long moment. "You know you're crazy, right?"
"That's show business, sweetheart", Madeira laughed, putting her hand to her forehead dramatically. Out of her periphery she saw a man coming up behind her, intending to squeeze between her and the main flow of traffic. Shifting her weight, she angled herself into his path.
His shoulder knocked into hers, and the smaller woman was thrown off balance. She stuck her left hand out as if to instinctively catch herself. Then, with as much force as she dared, Madeira slammed her left hand again onto the edge of the axe.
It was a strange sensation. Not painful, but it felt so wrong that it had every nerve in her body focused on that one point waiting for the signal that would never come. She could feel air moving against her open flesh as a nearly two-centimeter cut was sliced through her hand between her middle and ring finger.
Acting came naturally to the Spiritist. It had better, since she spent an inordinate amount of time pretending to be other people for the benefit of the dead. So summoning all her will, and using the memory of the injury that had paralyzed her hand in the first place, she clutched her bleeding limb to her chest and shrieked.
Spooks, startled by the noise and the sudden action, vanished in a cloud of soulmist. In ticks several passerby had stopped to help, including the confused weapons vendor and the poor man who had bumped into her. The man was white as a sheet and kept up a string of apologies as he pulled a scarf off his head and used it to stop the bleeding.
"Oh gods! oh gods, I'm so sorry, I didn't-, I don't know how-. Here, hold on to me. Oh gods, I'm so sorry. I'm going to take you to the Redynn. They're going to patch you right up. I'm so sorry."
