Teichostro’s poor district reeked with the oppressive stink of rotten fish. Built close to the city's lake, Valéry always felt like it combined the worst aspects of both the reservoir and the wen. Like the bottom of a pool, all the muck settled there. The locals called this district the Gutting. An apt moniker that called back to the district’s history.
A few decades ago, a booming fishing industry propped up this now-impoverished neighbourhood. Teichostro’s city council shifted its focus to other mercantile pursuits, and angling was left beached. Over the past decade, work dried up. Workers moved out in droves and all that was left in the lakebed of the city were the destitute, criminal, and downtrodden.
Valéry could feel something different lingering about him. Perhaps it was the low level of adrenaline, his body knowing there would be some action soon. The dim and ominous glow of the setting sun and the beginning of the evening rabble were making his skin tingle.
Next to Valéry was the aged battlemage, greying and wiry, Silas. "Typical woman, late again. Why do you let Joyln fetch the carriage?" His voice was rife with a usual grumpiness.
Valéry clicked his tongue. "It's alright, old man. I understand your frustration. It has to be difficult being made to wait. When you’re as old as you are, every minute matters, doesn’t it?"
"Just wait until you're thirty and your joints start aching."
"I've got a good few years in me yet, then."
Silas' dark brown eyes bulged from beneath obscenely bushy brows. "Is that breastplate strapped properly?" He gave a swift smack with the gnarled knot of his staff to Valéry's back.
A metal clank accompanied Valéry's unsteady lurch. Impeccable footwork kept him stable. He straightened himself out and broke into a chuckle, which infected Silas in short order. The mirth stopped once their ears caught the sound of carriage wheels and horses' hooves.
Around the bend came their hired driver. The buggy drew up to where they stood. The backdoors flew open and out leaned a very pleased-looking Joyln.
"Mr. Elwood," she said. A polite nod followed her greeting. Valéry climbed in with a helping hoist from her.
With a grimace she regarded Silas. "Bald bag of bones."
Silas grunted and popped off his tall, pointed hat. Under his cap was a greying comb-over that flowed down to a thick run of long grey hair. "Balding!" He said with emphasis. "Now help me up, these bones ache."
Joyln pulled him up, and hearing the creak of the carriage, produced a snide remark. "I hear your knees popping."
"You hear wrong. It's the wagon's suspension crying out in frustration from having to haul your behind."
"Goodness, it's only been a moment and you two are already starting."
Valéry got himself comfortable on the carriage's bench. Silas sat beside him with a 'hmph.' Joyln, in her heavy kit, placed herself across from them.
The tapping of her cloven hooves on the carriage floor got Valéry wondering. He wasn't sure if he'd trade never having to wear boots again for the risk of hoof scald.
Joyln was wearing twenty-five kilograms in armored plates fitted to her near-human anatomy. She was a plain, boyish woman, but her magnificent expressions added much to her appeal. Her youthful face, tanned and rich with color, was wide with a toothy smile.
"What?" Valéry asked, the excitement spreading to him as well.
"We haven't done an opium operation before. I'm thrilled."
"Maybe it'll be like the illegal brothel last month?"
"That wasn't too intense. They just needed some persuasion to pay their taxes and licenses."
"Hmm, tax evasion," Silas said, speaking in a manner as though he were considering a delicious pie.
"I don't know how you move in all that gear, Joyln," Valéry began. "I feel tied up in just a breastplate and vambraces."
Joyln curled her bicep, covered with a gambeson, chain, and plate. She patted it. "We're just crafted differently. Demihumans are a special breed."
"Go on, Valéry, say how much faster on your feet you are," Silas urged with a trenchant tone.
"I'm not so vain as to mention that she hasn't landed a solid blow on me to date."
"That blade of yours couldn't get past my armor either way."
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The wagon rolled to a sudden halt.
"Steel yourself, we're here,” Silas said.
"Imagine, in a few moments the back of this wagon will be filled with degenerate drug peddlers." Silas groaned as he stood. "We're doing good things, friends, good things."
They piled out and onto the streets of the inner Gutting.
The two-story building was rotting, the walls and woodwork pitted and decrepit. It wasn’t out of place among the other abandoned warehouses on the street. The shattered windows caught glances of the dwindling sun, making them look as though they were watching the triplet.
The trio set themselves up by the door as normal. Joyln at the left side by the lock. Silas was behind her, hand on her shoulder's pauldron. A few paces from the threshold, Valéry stood down the center-right.
With a nod, Joyln began their well-rehearsed routine. She drove her mace against the shoddy wood, ramming open the door and breaking it from its frame. She rolled back and allowed space for the stony-faced Silas, muttering incantations, to stick his staff in the opening. Flashes of prismatic color seeped from the gap as Silas cast a spell inside. Cries of shock and confusion from the inhabitants inside followed.
Silas pulled away and got behind Valéry and Joyln, who kicked their way in. Valéry got his truncheon up and ready for subduing anyone not blinded by Silas' spell. Rolling around the floor or stunned in place, grasping for stability, were three frail and ragged individuals.
Of the three present two were men and one a woman. They were dressed in rags and clearly hadn’t known the touch of a bath or the joy of a good meal in weeks. The woman’s ribs, visible through her roughspun tunic, stretched against the confines of her pale and pox-marked skin. An immediate and visceral revulsion ran over Valéry’s senses as he examined the inhabitants and their surroundings.
The entryway had been made into some sort of communal area. A bed had been pushed up into a corner and a couch shoved beside it, both draped with sheets to make a sleeping area.
Valéry shoved a man to the ground and worked passed him to secure the next room. Joyln and Silas set to keeping the others pinned and neutralized. As he got closer to the next door he detected something. I smell rotting animals. His face crinkled up at the smell. He brought his off-hand up to cover his nose and threw open the door.
The next room was far different. When the door was breached and the trio rolled in, even the iron Valéry drew a sharp breath of surprise. Etched into the wood of the walls and floor were arcane sigils, crude words, and rambling nonsense. Blood and rotting effluvia oozed from the carvings. Silas pushed between his two companions and waved his hands in a display of somatic casting.
The nauseating staining of the room by the remains of animal offerings had a visible effect on Joyln. Her skin ran pale and her breathing became more staggered. Valéry felt it in himself too, his chest stiffening as he tried to keep the repugnant stench from filling his nostrils.
Silas let his hands down. "They're inert, don't worry. It's just scribblings."
"Do they mean anything to you?" Joyln said, stepping over a pile of refuse deeper in.
Silas' jaw got particularly rigid. "It's mostly nonsense, incomplete spells or recipes. The rest I'm sure you can understand yourself." The wizened caster began to step deeper in, passed the darkened wood flooring that caught Valéry's eye.
"Wait a moment," Valéry said, grabbing Silas' shoulder and pulling him back. Valéry had stepped out too far, and there was an awful groan.
The floor, darkened with untold liters of sullage soaked into it, was sagging. The weight of Valéry and Silas was enough for it to give way in a single moment. Valéry had time only to shove Silas back with a kick of his elbow, but the force and effort drove him forward to the snapping and collapsing wood.
He felt Silas’ hand grasp and slip from his arm as he descended, wood and muck falling with him, to the floor below. Immediately pain exploded all along his side, he'd landed hard on his hip and shoulder. He rolled to his back and looked up at Silas and Joyln.
"Alright down there?"
"Ye--"
A loud crack interrupted him. He and everything else collapsed another floor deeper, into a lightless basement.
Thrashed and bruised and now deeply in the darkness of the building's sublevel, Valéry stood and gathered himself. His truncheon was lost, so he drew the sword from his hip. He stepped over the fallen debris and made for level ground.
Above, he heard Silas shout something, he paid no mind though. There was something else down here with him. The fine hairs of his forearms and neck prickled with tension. Somewhere just at the edge of his vision there was an object. A warbling sound broke the silence, the warped report of spellcasting.
From the darkness, before him, a cross-legged figure was illuminated. The light was a sickly, unnatural red that cast everything in a nauseating crimson. A swirling circle of rot and black rotated behind the individual's head as if an unholy halo.
"A commoner's name and hair dye won't obfuscate your origins to us."
Valéry froze as if struck on the head, his body stiffed and he raised up his sword. "Identify yourself."
"Impressive entrance."
Foreboding eyes gazed deeply at Valéry from holes in a smooth wooden mask. The mask itself was stitched into the flesh of its wearer. And upon a closer look, Valéry saw that those eyes were in fact some material of darkened glass. The mask covered the upper lip of the man but exposed the bone of a lower jaw missing much of its flesh. Receded gums clung sparsely to pointed teeth that cracked against their partners above with a sickening sound.
The hostile featurelessness of the mask sat appropriately disturbing on shoulders coated in ruddy pelts. Ornaments of bone crept out from his shoulders like rattling digits. The man was bare below the neck, only a pool of darkness hiding his nethers.
"What are you doing here?"
"I am here carrying out my duty." The man's voice was creepy in its low but nasal tones.
Valéry inched his way closer to the man, the glint of magic light moving along the swirling patterns of his sword. If I'm not careful, I'm dead with the flick of a wrist.
"That must have been difficult. Crawling all the way from exile in the south. To live up here as a leech."
Valéry scowled. "Are you in the city for me?"
"So vain too. That royal blood must make you think you're the center of the universe."
He lifted his left hand, there was the slightest twinkling of iridescent light from his fingerpads.
Valéry, driven by instinct and training, slid forward and swiped succinctly with his sword.
The man harshly cried out, biting down on his tongue. His left hand, severed at the middle of the forearm, fell to the floor wetly. Valéry moved for the coup de grace. Before his blade's tip could pierce the man's chest there was a crunch. In a flash of cold flame, the man was burned up to nothing in an instant. Valéry stumbled forward passed where the masked man was, kicking the severed hand in his stumble.
There was another flash of light, the door across the way was thrown open. "Valéry, are you alright?"
"Yes, I'm fine." Valéry flicked his blade clean of blood and sheathed it. He turned over the wrist with his boot. No markings, only pasty bare skin.
Silas swept his glowing staff tip across the room. Grizzly details revealed themselves, but Valéry's tunneled vision was razor focused on the severed limb.
Joyln's gloved hand squeezed his shoulder and she quietly spoke, "You sure you're okay?"
Valéry nodded, giving her eye contact to instill confidence in her. "Let's get them gathered up and report back to Hilde."
"Yeah, enough of your laying about," Silas grunts a laugh, pointing the end of his staff to the pile of rubble Valéry had fallen with.
Rendered in black and white, and sepia.
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