42nd of Summer, 503 AV
Ulric gave a grunt, wiping beads of sweat from the crinkles of his brow, dusty fingers tracing over the ridge of a cheek. They left muddy stripes before vanishing into patchy whiskers. There wasn’t anything he despised more than this cursed slum, the boiling, squalid furnace that made his sweat congeal to a sultry jelly, leeching his vigor so he was clung by a fetid torpor. The tenements formed a huge cauldron, a sprawl of broken brick and warped, smeared timbers that seemed to tower haphazardly over a patchwork of huts, all bleached canvas and crumbling plaster, the roughly-hewn rocks ostensibly mortared by a crust of neglect and veined by drying tracks of urine, like the grime of a sundered augury. Lying nearby, he took in the debris of neglected crates, broken barrels, the staves crushed in and banded by rust, gray bones plunging up from refuse heaps. The throng was always there, unshorn and tidal in its jumbled estuary. There was a vein of chaos here, grizzled men pushing carts, skinny waifs piping up as they displayed baskets of cockles, the bending of a cutpurse. The clutches of urchins scurrying in their grubby rags, sly despite their visage of disarray.
Though he kept a wary eye on them, he kept casting sidelong glances at the bashers leaning against balusters freckled by so many years’ accrual of pigeon manure, assembled on trestles in the sordidly buzzing wine sinks. The boards strewn by moldy rushes, rough jeers jerking over the dust of dreams. There was a pair of graybeards engaged in a game of bones, wrinkly lips drawn over gums, over incisors like shards of cracked pottery. The clink of crockery, and the chalky skin of a harper, gaunt and desolately plucking at strings he regarded with jadedly bleary gaze. The clang of an anvil, a rowdy parade of reeling sailors, their braids stiff with tar, the dejected bray of a laden donkey.
Engulfed by the motley crowd, the hazy shimmer of a frying pan, he just kept trudging, intently studying every defiant jut of timber, every insolent bale of wool encased by burlap, rising up to thwart his way. The loads of urns, many tumbled by disregard, others brimming with water. He winced at the putridity of a decaying debris of fruit mingling with putrefying meat discarded just beyond the butchers’ decrepit awnings, the pats of shyke lying stagnant in the sickly jade dribble of a gutter, oily smoke lacing up from a scatter of braziers. There was a wafting of unusual, cloying spices, a sizzle of fat, sour puddles of beer, the jerking press of grubby skin crept over by lice. The tawdry perfume lying moribund over the musk of whores, reaching a crescendo over a drying of musty seed, burning the hairs from his nostrils.
Ulric kept going, the shingled roofs seeming to grope toward another over his spiky head, quenching the sun’s fury. The gables nearly touched in places, so near you could petch over the unruly taper of lanes. They were an infernal slither, infused by crevices and tinged by disorder. He’d let himself go, too. He gave a frown, taking in the crust of mud on his trousers, the determined flecks of rust that clung to the buckles of his coat of scales, fringed by bear fur. There was a coppery tang on his lips, the residue of harsh, vinegary wine. The pink tip of his tongue probing at the twinge of an incisor, he trudged around a corner with a creak of leather, cracking in the alternately clammy evenings and desiccated days.
Decaying.
That was when he spied them. The sets of eyes watching him, clouded by a spiteful patina. Don’t look, he told himself, but he just couldn’t. They were ruffians, clearly. The jut of a sword by one’s hip, a flanged mace grasped impatiently in another’s horny fist. They were mostly unshaven, angular faces bearing the scars of disease, of hard living. Their array ranging from sturdy, if not coarsely decrepit leathers, to dirty shirts and trousers, mixed with faded, dingy finery. They glared at him, beady eyes full of malice, of jaded, scarcely constrained iniquity. The feral stares of starving mongrels, of felons who’d plunge their cocks into a weaker man’s arse, crowded by a hooting gang, if only to revel in the power. Don’t, he urged, but he was already heading for them, to the lane they’d blocked.
Fuming, he locked eyes with a burly, ruddy-faced man clearly running to fat, bearing a cudgel. “Move,” he growled, knowing they wouldn’t be cowed, knowing they’d have to preserve their pride.
“Petch off,” Fatty grunted. He gave the cudgel a swing, making it clack on brick, dislodging a shower of rank, brown fragments.
“Don’t you have eyes?” Horse-Face gave a sneer, jerking a thumb at a scrawl of chalk, inscribing the nearby wall with the sigil of whatever syndicate they worked for. “No, don’t don’t tell me – you’ve gone blind trying to search for your prick.” He feigned the display, bringing out deriding laughs, faces broken by ugly grins.
Ulric’s jaw clenched, his chin slowly rising, his eyes suffused by a fever bright, inexorably burning fervor. They bored into the thugs, a surge of bile and jaded spite rising in his chest, to the morose harmony of a growl. There was an ugly glint, as if he was a mongrel flinging himself at his chains, ready to flay them to flaps of torn, rubbery flesh and empty cages of bone. “There’s two kinds of men in this world,” he snarled. “The kind that’ve got tongues, and the kind that don’t. The only question is, which kind would you like to be?” There was a hush, and abruptly a cruel chuckle was boiling up in his palate, tickling a dormant fury.
“You hear that?” Horse-Face glanced back, hand descending to his sword’s haft. Ulric didn’t falter, just leaned in, making his fist crunch into the man’s nose, driving a boot into his chest.
Hastily, he lurched away, tugging at the straps of his shield, a ringing medley of curses in his ears. They came on swiftly, drunk with rage. The mace was crashing against his bulwark, sending a painful jolt up his arm, and then he clove up with the axe, making it tear through flesh, grate against bone as he sliced through the man’s bicep just below the shoulder. The was a spray of blood, flecking his face with crimson. The limb tumbled awkwardly to the dirt, a high, keening scream erupting from a throat, only evaporating when he bashed that contorted face with the flat of his shield. He wasn’t done yet, though. His backswing came around, making the head snap back, mandible dangling, before he slumped away.
Ulric just laughed. The surviving pair was rushing in, just like angry bulls for the slaughter. They faced the masterwork of his ferocity, though, the grim tracery of his body. Fatty careened away, the cage of his ribs crushed through, revealing a sucking of lungs. Horse-Face was dead before his partner struck the ground. Ulric’s whirl had already begun, swiping the rim of his shield against that bruised face, and then the axe’s edge was hissing by, grating on vertebra, nearly severing the head.
Thunk. Five ticks, three corpses.
Nearly.
“You clearly don’t like your tongue,” he grunted, giving a shrug as he loomed over Fatty. Pity. He brought his boot down, pulping molars, driving his heel into an eye socket and twisting until the man’s writhing ceased.
Ulric rose, to a discord of cries. They’re coming, then, he sighed, cuffing crimson beads from the ridge of his jaw. Though he’d roused the wasp’s nest, he wasn’t going to run away. They came on, in a tide of gray shapes, strung out in the narrow, tapering lane. They were led by a squat man, his bare head fringed by wispy hair, a pitiful dagger grasped with the ring pommel held up, meaning to stab rather than cut. Bad choice, came the grunt, and then the shield was crunching into snarling face, and as it recoiled, a splay of deadly steel clove up through the juncture of his legs. There was a scream, a wash of viscera. The slither of purple, glistening coils of guts, of punctured bowel.
Ulric kicked him away, ducking away from a slashing sword. The girl behind it was skinny, but quick, her face an oval that might’ve been pleasing to gaze upon if she wasn’t trying to scatter his brains over this infernal alley. The laces of her leather vest were partly undone, and in that instant, he saw beads of sweat sliding between her cleavage, felt the kindling of a savage hunger. Then he was hewing at the back of her knee, severing tendons, putting her down on her back. The shrieks grated on his nerves, nearly made him feel guilty. “That’s where you belong,” he rasped, turning another blade. There was madness in this, a shrill joy echoing through his head. Look at me, he wanted to roar, Look what I can do. He’d been chuckling all along, and now he lashed out like a viper, snaring the man’s ankle with the axe’s curving edge, and jerked out his leg. There was dread in those eyes, but it didn’t matter.
The tumbling sword gave a clatter, skittering over the grit, out of reach. He found himself glanced around, transfixed by a sudden curiosity. The lane was hung over by cords of laundry, grayly furling in the tepid gusts. There were a few, fearful eyes poking from beyond splintery shutters. The sprawl of chairs around a crate, a leather cup and a few, crinkly cards splayed out in neglectful disarray. They must’ve been playing a game, he thought, deftly twirling the axe to plunge its spike through the cartilage of his downed foe’s sternum, making him spasm, curl around the injury. There was only a groan. The meager disgrace of agony.
Dull, pitiful.
Baring his teeth, the only specks of white in the bloody canvas of his face, he cast around for more foes. There weren’t any. There were cries, garbled by the sheer faces of rock. The ssshink[i] of blades scraping from their sheaths, the [i]clunk of heavy boots. This enclosure was like a hive, but there wasn’t any turning back from what he’d begun. He trudged further into the alley, the coals of his eyes scouring over wedges of windows, fringed by moldy drapes, beyond clutches of crates. There was a whir, like a wasp in his ear, and he sank to a crouch, hiding behind his circular shield. The timbers gave a shiver. The quarrel plunged partway through, its twisted head dragging over the ridge of his cheek, devilish splinters fusing with the frayed, aching flesh.
Ulric forced back a grimace, already hurling away from the sprawl of dirty rocks, his eyes tangled by a dusky figure nearly lost in the layers of unsteady tenement. The wind caught ragged in his chest. The portal, already cracked to permit entry of balmy drafts, yawned under the force of his charge. There was a clap as it crashed against dingy plaster, the discordant squeal of rusty hinges.
The gloom was tyrannical, curling around him, the rash charge enveloped by a scarcity of perception. There was an terse, frantic instant, when he just cut at the leaden confines of the air. Then, a squat, heavy blade jerked just past his eye. He cried out, let go of the axe’s haft so he could grope at his shadowy foe, clench the wrist in a vice try to wring the blade away. They were caught fast, grappling. The nasty prongs of a finger raked over his face. Try me. There was a bunching of muscles, a growl rattling from his lungs, and then he was hurling his foe down, mashing that jerky, knobby twist of a face against a baluster. He crunched his knee into ribs, flung back the mallet of his fist and drove it into a nose, the slope of a jaw, before the cleaver was pried from his grasp, scraped feebly against the layers of leather.
Dread surging thick as bile, he wriggled away. Clumsy fingers fumbled at his belt, as the cleaver nearly sheared away his ear. Frantic, he swung the back of his hand against that bloody face, then drove his curved knife under the ridge of a clavicle, giving it a savage twist. There was a deluge of warm, sticky red over his hands, lashing like frayed threads over his face. The cleaver vainly jerked at him, drawing a shallow gash into his flank, and he bashing his head against that hazy nose, cinched fingers around that burly neck and hurled the dying man away. There was fear in him, the starkly vulnerable horror of having been cut, and it engulfed him for a fetid instant. There he knelt, in that dismal, squalid cave under the stairs, infected by the same, crippling doubts that’d brought him to this city, with a croaking, trembly bag of flesh, the spastic drum of heels on timber.
Harshly, the cries woke him. There was a clatter, and a woman’s face leaned over the baluster. He squirmed over the congealing puddle, yet again caught up by the fever of his fury. Her eyes were hard, yet also broken by fright. He’d discarded his shield, and now he scooped up the cleaver, crooning softly as her quarrel whanged against the bricks, the shaft erupting in a shrapnel of splinters. “Run away, cunt,” he snarled, scaling the stairs with a demon’s frenzy. That she did, but there were only so many corridors, so many doors. There was a rhythmic drag of a foot, made huge by graying swathes of cloth, and then the click of a latch jerked shut, leaving him with only a panel of timber of stare down.
Ulric lowered his shoulder, his enraged charge ripping it off its hinges, though he sustained a nagging crack in the head for his insolence. Then he was on her, wincing away from the swipe of her dagger, making it clank on the tiles as he crushed the cleaver’s flat into her knuckles. There wasn’t any way she could resist. The back of his hand struck her, then harder when she began to thrash, and he pushed her face down on the lumpy mattress, savagely twisting an limb behind her back. He jerked at her leggings, at her shirt, tearing the fabric to gaze hungrily at pale, sweaty flesh.
Rawly, a shriek tore from her throat, like a caged animal. “Don’t,” he growled, fumbling at his trousers. The wrenching left her cowering, and now he ravished her, plunging hungrily, winding his fingers through her hair so he could jerk her head back. There was revulsion in him, melding with agony in a vast, burning abyss from which he couldn’t escape, and now he took it out on her. He despised every whimper, reviled as ulcerously as his grunts, hoarse and brutal in their implacability, rose over the slap of sweaty skin. You’re weak, he snarled, a scowl coming of his face. His vision swam, the jet tresses boiling away like serpents under his fingers, leaving a ruddy, vestigial face that invoked a revelation of an ugliness. The revelatory hush, dredged up from the depths of his rusty heart, was but a refraction of the infernal blemish over his soul. He nearly rebelled at the thought, but the rapture was blazing him, coruscating with spurned fury. He’d cull her insolence. You’ve defied me, and now, my dirty peach, you’ll suffer the plagued harvest of your treachery. The vulgar chasm of supremacy, though cloying, quickly welded into a sickly amalgam. The visage of a fiend, an effigy of man’s undying trespass.
Ulric was glaringly cognizant, in the lonely, desiccated confines of his heart, that what he was doing, this brutality, was far worse than just pillaging of her womanly coffers. There was an inherently craven augury, conjuring up bile. He wasn’t merely taking, but leaving an indelible scar. The sating of his rapture was like a plague of locusts, raping fields to dusty, desolate firmament. That, if anything, was the blight of his ascendancy. The leaden hypocrisy of his heart manifesting, thriving incestuously beyond his craving for violence.
Those final, sordid instants were the longest. The raging wildfire in his loins was quenched with a last, vicious plunge and a whimper. There was a tensing of his muscles, his face rigid and ugly as spurted inside her. The edges nearly crawled away, like flanged links fused by so many joints, betraying the grotesquery of his regret, the thunder of a thousandfold screaming recriminations.
Ulric clenched his jaw, the bleary veil sloughing away from gimlet eyes as rocked back on his haunches. There was a raspy groan. Then he shook his head, deluged by a sudden dread that he was going to be cornered. Flee. The impulse was so forceful, he just yanked up his trousers, veering away as rapidly as he could. He jostled through the broken door, hurling his defiling self down the stair. There was a tug of the splintery banister, inducing an transitory grimace.
But he couldn’t falter. He was choking on the stagnant, poisoned confines of this cursed tenement, as though there was something awful lurking in its bowels, an ulcer that required lancing. There was a direly vertiginous presence, menacing him with thoughts of pending consumption by invective. The augury of abyssal fabric tearing under his feet, tarring him with perfidy he already felt creeping through his body. Don’t. The urge was so poignant, so insistent, he jolted as if flayed by a lash.
There wouldn’t be any evading the tidal jerk, not with guilt unruly in his chest. The weary scour of his gaze. The way back, braided by the memory of his atrocity, was like running gauntlet. He found her in disarray, curled into a ball, cringing away from the vaguest thud of his passage. Though he wanted to do something, anything to change what he’d done, he just couldn’t. The ridges of his face, caked by ruddy flecks, were limned by pity.
Ulric fumbled for his purse, but the sinking reality of giving her coins, so cold, so horrid, that he just lowered his eyes. They were tarnished by his iniquity. The thought of allaying her injury her with rhetoric’s oily salve just caught in his chest, rasped empty. The whisper just dispersed in his head, broken asunder by his jarring emotions. Then, she looked up, as if emerging from a deep, weepy slumber. Her eyes shrank from his, devoid of luster. Bereft, he swept down the stairs. Forgive me, cried his sinking heart. There wasn’t any deceit, just a mauling smear of tar over his eyes, clinging to the cavity of his soul. The bead of a tear probed up in his eye, angrily cuffed away.
Beyond, the furnace hadn’t bunged up in their writhing fury. The embers danced around like angry hornets. There was a frenzy in him now, the shreds of his mind consumed by a flagellant’s zeal. They were there, as if biding for his arrival. The clatter of a closing portal.
Hurling his burly shoulders back, he yowled with a crazed, rabid fervor, eyes ruddy under a maniacal patina. They came, and he laughed at the vanity of their pretense, the idolatry of the blades. To him, their mettle was pitted by the rust of a nascent japery. They didn’t pray for carnage, as he did.
Leaping over a baking corpse, already crowded by flies, he deflected a canny slash, forcing the sword’s wielder away with a hurried swing. He kept pressing, though his backswing just sang through the furnace’s breath, that livid, shrieking visage swiftly receding before a swipe of his shield. He drew back, catching a groaning strike on his bulwark, then lurched away from a lancing blade at his contrary flank. He spun, deftly carrying back his other elbow, making it crunch into a face.
Caparisoned by exultant threads of gore, as if they were a priest’s robes, he sang a hymn of destruction. There was another slice, easily deflected, and then he sprang with a dancer’s grace, making his axe bite into a clavicle, shiver the bone to splintery wreckage. There was a yelp. The revelatory fury of a man who’d already scrawled his name in the tomes of fate, and now beheld his demise. The cloying melody of that cry, the sundering of that delusion of immortality, sluiced through him like liquor.
Ulric flowed over gravel, the spiked head of his axe jerking out, scraping over the ridge of an eye socket to carve at a nose, drawing a crimson sheet over bared incisors. He kicked the man away, roaring. There was a chapped veracity to his visage, fused by an immolating joy. Dare to defy me, he snarled. Dare, and perish. There was a scuff, and he inscribed dusky skin with a blur, spraying gobs of tissue, shards of bone as he beat the corpse away. There were more cries, hardly shaking in the profundity of their ignorance. The morosity of his chuckles intensifying, he reared into a whirl, swiping the shield’s rim over an ear, crushing away his sorely wounded foe as the other crawled up, chancing a lunge with his bloody face a rictus. The axe just turned like a spindle, inscribing the ridge of a skull.
Thunk.
There was a shiny flare, gryating to deflect of the leather padding of his shoulder, and another pair was nearing. The adder’s bristle of a spear snaking at his eyes. The axe caught, so he left it where it was, taking a crouching step his rear, warily eyed the other foe who was jerking out a sword. That distending bulge of steel caught in the corner of his eye, even as a canny flick made to bayonet the cage of his ribs. He ducked away, greasy as an eel, and clamped his fist over the shaft just below the spear’s head. Got you, tusker, he snarled, his spine a rippling whipcord as he tugged the foe nearer, drove his forehead into the scabby bridge of a nose. There was a spurt of red, painting a fine mist in vague dispersal. The elbow clove up to batter, knee thundering into the juxtapose of trembly legs. Those eyes went glassy, so he leapt back, keeping those reeling shoulders between himself and the scything blade, and smashed the edge of his shield around the grasping rigidity of fingers. The spear jerked away, and then he spun, plunged it into the slope of a back with a reverse grip, curling away from a slash. Those knees buckled in delay, a bloody froth on already chapped lips.
Ulric wormed around that quivery bag of flesh, lifting his bulwark higher as he ventured to change his grip. His fingers were clumsy, and the sword’s thunder jostled him with a disorderly grinding. The spear fell away with a clatter. Shyke, he gritted, turning another strike, and fumbled for the splintery shaft. Horny hands clutched at those circular slats, digging against their metal cap, trying to rip the barrier away. He jerked it, reluctant to divest himself of this shell, and the pithy jab was barely evaded. Then he was cinching fingers around wayward spear, drove it into the sepulchral cavity of a gut. Implacably, he twisted so that it clove viscera to slivers, crushed vertebrae, evoking a sourdust gasp of agony. Hurling the transfixed body away from him, he kicked that face to a bloody slush, then cast around for stragglers. There weren’t any others, just harsh, ringing cries from the bowels of an alley. The coals of his eyes were drawn to the scrawled sigil, the infernal incongruity. The dirty ground, flecked with drying ichor and tangled by corpses, strewn haphazardly over a crazy-quilt of blades.
Somewhere, there was a high, keening shriek. Those eyes rose, all smoldering coals and fevered, rapturous glee at the sprawl of mayhem. The skirl broke from beyond a pair of decrepit shutters, but it only distorted the trail of his butchery. Then the fuming cluck of a rooster, pinions patched by molt, sparsely rambling by a spiky cairn of timber. That’s enough of your japery, he grunted. Taking hold of the axe’s haft, his heel prying over an ear, he jerked it away from gristly moorings, scraping and coaxing away scraps of bone, gobbets of scalp clung by the bristle of locks. Unevenly riven, they looked like broken quills.
Ulric began to trudge, the furnace’s swelter making sweaty beads sluice over his chest, down the curve of his spine, puddling prickly between his legs. Every jerk, every chafing tug brought a sticky slip of red down his skin. That filmy covering left him demonic, a shiny tracery over ruddy crusts, plaiting his scaled armor with the throes of a darker peril. “Hiding, are we?” Ripped from his chest, this oratory beat over the squalid, intemperate anvil, chafing away japery.
Feverishly, his gaze rose to the sky. The sprawl of azure tinged already by rosy dusk, broken by shaky gutters, slabs of shingle, hanging spars. There’d be no mercy. That sigil, so feebly scrawled in chalk, was an augury of peril. There’d be a reaper’s dawn.
. But fire helps to burn them all down... >.>
