When the conversation has stalled and Marka has the space to think, she realizes what’s left is not actually silence. There are sounds Marka hasn’t heard outside of a music hall – resonating plates and thrumming strings, energetic drumming. The timbre is off, like those in charge of the hall’s acoustics had failed utterly.
The blackbane is turning her head around, searching the room for an explanation. It’s out of the way, nestled in one corner: a device that exposes a two-roll scroll (or what loooks like one), only with lines instead of text, and a needle running across those lines. Or one long line, rather, which snakes back and forth.
Marka stands up to investigate. The material looks too thick and dark to be normal paper. Something vesper-made? Or a mundanity she’d never encountered? By the mechanics of the device, one roll is unfurling into the other, the needle dragging horizontally across the roll, back and forth. Looking closer at the line, she sees in it fine patterns. When Marka touches the needle, the sound stops. So the needle rubs against those patterns, and this becomes music somewhere inside the box?
Marka rubs her own palps against her face. It’s like talking, the box’s needle-arm like a mechanical palp, and the not-scroll a very long pars stridens.
While she fiddles with the box, Wik walks over. Without giving the box more than a moment’s glance, the tallowbane hits a lever on the side, and the music dies. The box is still.
Marka cocks her head at the other mantis.
Wik says, “I dislike music.”
“Oh. I liked it.”
“Too cheerful – I find it inappropriate.”
The tallowbane gestures back to the seating. The same high end style she’d seen downstairs, outside this parallel space. Pale red cushions on the abdominal rests, while the struts and supports were the white of the walls.
Earlier, the bee trapped in hardened honey, Felme’s gift, had been mindlessly dropped on the center table, far from the documents Wik had previously flipped.
Feeling a pang of hunger, Marka reaches for it now, slender digits enwrapping. Her body heat means the substance melts minutely, and sticks.
Wik stops her. “Don’t eat that.”
“Why?”
“It’s cruel.” Wik’s cotton antennae fall down on either side of its head. “Would you eat a mantis?”
There’s a joke which almost feels perfectly set up. How would they have put it? Sultry, something like ‘If there was enough passion – or disappointment – I might give a nibble.’ Maybe they would have said it snappier, but really, it isn’t Marka’s kind of joke. Growing up under her father, anything approaching that kind of attitude would be crushed by his hard words. After she left, though – in the Wardens – she’d seen more of it. Often enough for it to creep into her thoughts here.
If any part of her was tempted, Wik’s ambiguity (it was shorter, but not that much shorter), makes the prospect precarious. And this all is hardly a chivalrous mode of thought.
This is serious. After all this stress and arguing, her thoughts are fraying to thin ends so easily now.
“Of course I wouldn’t,” she said. That is an embarrassing pause, but she hopes she speaks definitely enough to compensate.
“Are bees any different? Bees farm, and their production of honey is delicate as any science. They had cities, before the third dominion.”
Marka frowns, her antennae curling up. “So they’re like roaches, then. Not mantids.”
“I think you shouldn’t eat roaches, either. They are like us.”
“What about vesperbats, then? They had had cities, too.”
“That is different. They are different.”
Because their blood is so useful?
Marka throws her antennae back behind her head, and she waves her raptorial, as if swiping away this conversation. “This is all besides the point,” she says. “I won’t eat the bee. What are we going to do about Felme?”
“Not much,” the tallowbane says. “He has us dead to rights. This is his domain, and he will get what he wants.”
“Sure, but which oath?” She says this slow, at the same time reaching into her bag, grabbing more of the paper she’d written her Wardens report on. What Wik just said reminded her of what it had said earlier, something she’d registered but let go unremarked.
On the paper, she writes quickly, sloppily.
said something about privacy? think he’s listening?
Marka slips Wik the paper. She affects stealth and passes it low, the table obscuring it from some angles. This feels silly, and probably pointless.
“We choose the second option: take the debts. My plan was to destroy the gang without gross violence, by seizing their finances. We cannot do that under the first oath.”
Wik is writing, and it’s unhurried and precise. When it returns the page, the new writing has a maleish neatness.
I cannot rule it out, and he’s exactly the type to do so.
What do you intend to keep private?
One thing, mainly. And Marka can’t put it politely. What approach has the best chance of getting an honest answer? It’s not something she can calculate. And there’s really only one approach Marka can ever marshal: the straight and direct.
The underlying suspicions weren’t that, however. It was as circuitous and unsteady line of reasoning – a guess, more than anything. But it held a glimmer of logic.
Felme’d mentioned the Golden Lady – a renegade who’d popped up a while ago, caused some trouble, left some spellbrands and haruspices dead, and then disappeared, apparently never captured or even fought.
If one could evade capture, and avoided combat instead of overpowering – what skillset was most suited to that?
are you the Golden
LadyGenderless?
Wik gives her a look. A moment passes where the closest it has to facial expression is the wax slowly sliding down its face.
No. I am not.
Marka sighs relief first of all. Wik is making no motion to kill her for knowing too much. But the blackbane has thought harder than this, and Wik is a master of disguise – and by implication, adept at deception. She wanted more than words.
could oaths be
ammamended w/ that?
A moment, and before she lets go of the note back, she adds:
i know it sounds paranoid. but something strange is going on, and i dont want another spear at my back
Marka’s writing is bigger than Wik’s and by now she’s just above the page’s bottom, cramping in the last few words, her downward strokes going off the page. She wipes ink off the stone table.
A second page is passed to Wik along with a used one, but the tallowbane instead just writes on the back of the first.
It is paranoid. And Felme will respect that. So if it shall give you peace of mind, we can ask.
You should say something aloud, by the way. Unless you do not mind it being fully obvious to any listeners what’s going on.
“Um, can you repeat that? Sorry, I may have zoned out a bit.”
“I’ll be swearing the second oath. You should too, otherwise you cannot assist me.”
“I’ll ask how much debt they’re in. And uh, what if they couldn’t pay it anyway? Are we just going to get saddled with a shitty debt and nothing to show for it?”
and… whats down in the catacombs? why was that part of your plan? i dont think its necessary
“Felme is a reasonable man. There will be a forgiveness clause.”
Because I have no interest in getting the Wentalel guard or the Wardens involved. And actually entering with their approval was not in consideration until you became my accomplice.
“Okay,” Marka says. She writes:
felme said theres something down there. it sounds… dangerous
The response:
If you insist on having your activity recorded and questioned later, sure, we can see if your status is enough to grant us access to the sewers.
“Are these concerns more than just stalling?” Wik asks, and it’s probably not all for show. “I am not amused by endless discussion and litigation. I would rather we just do it.”
“I guess,” Marka says. She looks again at the page. There wasn’t much to respond with than a mere ‘okay,’ which seemed a bit pointless.
Oh! She writes,
one of us should eat the paper or something. keep felme from reading it
Wik reads this with a glance, and twirls an antennae dismissively. It raises a foreleg. Around the digits, there’s an orifice. It puckers and discharges oil mixed with air, which comes out as a spray. Wik throws out the other foreleg, rubbing two special surfaces together, and three sparks dextrously fly off and two hit the oiled page. It goes up in flame, though sparing the stone table.
The tallowbane walks to the door, and pauses there. When Marka does not protest, it leaves and she’s behind it.
“– deadline can be extended. Once. This is not generosity – I understand the business with Osfe took you unawares. It surprised us all. But once. I hope this teaches you caution.”
“I –”
“Quiet. Save it for when we don’t have an audience.” The male looks up. Even after threatening their lives, Marka sees a secretary in Felme before she sees a cunning vesperbane. “I presume you’ve come to a decision?”
The mantis he was speaking to – a figure in a tattered black cloak, hooded and billowing, is scurrying off.
Marka watches them leave.
“Don’t mind them. Just business – there’s more in this city than concerns you.”
“Sorry if I have to look twice at every shadow now.”
Felme only nods with a vague mhmm.
“I believe you already suspect our choice,” Wik says.
“Ah, how convenient,” is Felme’s response. “For all that our kind are born killers and subjugators, I confess I trust a vesperbane’s word more than the commonry.”
“There is one caveat,” Wik says. It loooks to Marka.
She realizes she has to say it. “Vesperbanes have veritanyms, right? It’s how the Wardens verify renegade kills. Especially when facing one that can, uh. Disguise herself.” She sees Felme flick open a raptorial, surely meaning ‘get on with it’. “Wik and I have just met today. There’s a worry – you mentioned a dangerous renegade is in the area. The Golden Lady? First reports of her were correlated to haruspex and spellbrand killings, weren’t they?”
“Yes, and we do have our local dead haruspices. It’s all very suggestive, isn’t it?”
“Could you, maybe uh, tack on an ‘I am not the Golden Lady’ clause to the oaths? Something like that?”
Felme’s antennae droops over his face. “You’re clearly unaware of this case in detail. Part of why the Golden Lady is so vexsome is because there is no veritanym on file for her. Never was, or perhaps not anymore.” The reversed emphasis strikes her. Not the more natural ‘not any more or there never was.’ And it tracks – losing a veritanym was the stranger option.
He says, “Let me think.” The loanmonger retrieves a folio he’d had in the earlier conversation. A file for the Golden Lady? It was thin.
Felme’s compound eyes grow paler. In his sparsely-lit office, all of their eyes had grown darker, ommatidia exposing more light-sensitive pigment. Paled like this, he was lost in thought, unfocused on sight.
“What’s he doing?” Marka asks with a slight, quiet scrape of her palps.
“Thinking, I presume,” it scrapes with amusement. At this low volume, Wik is almost unintelligible from the wet softness of its palps.
“What about, do you suppose?”
“Whether he can implement your oath?”
“Is spellbrand work hard? I haven’t met many, and I think I would have, if vesperbanes so often swear oaths.”
“Spellbrands aren’t needed for oaths,” is its response. And Wik leaves it at that for a moment, but gives Marka a look, and resigns itself to another remedial theory lesson. “Not all vesperbanes have had so evidently deficient an education as to need assistance swearing simple oaths. It’s a feat of cogitation not harder than mastering tarsisigns.” Wik pauses, antennae working up and down for a second. “The best analogy for what Felme is doing for you – with the sclerotium, not right now – is writing a contract, to be given to your vespers. The most common oaths – the ones you probably swore already – are countenance oaths, requisites of being a registered vesperbane. For the Stewartry, and the Wardens, they’re the ones giving you your vespers. The vespers can simply arrive already given the contract. Though, in truth, for them, it’s more like how you came out of the ootheca already knowing how to walk.”
Marka idly glances over, and realizes Felme has again focused his eyes, and watches Wik, probably waiting for the tallowbane to finish speaking.
He slides a digit along an antennae. “I have devised something. We don’t have the Golden Lady’s veritanym,” he says, “but we do have the veritanym of the haruspices she likely killed. This allows for a bit of circumlocution. Instead of ‘I am not the golden lady’, I can write ‘I did not commit phagein to the vespers belonging to’” Felme pauses, as if to cringe, and adds “here I’d put the veritanyms of ‘Doomspeaker’ and ‘Fatesunder’, which are, being in the language of vespers, unpronounceable.”
“And you think she actually did this?” Wik said, ever the one to poke holes.
“Little reason to pluck the vespers from a bane’s corpse other than for phagein.”
Marka grimaces. Phagein wasn’t a crime, but it did have a patina of villainy about it. It was an inevitable step on the path of erosion.
The blackbane couldn’t say she’d never felt the urge. Any vesperbane would be lying if she did.
“That,” – it’s Wik chiming in now, – “relies on two assumptions. That she killed those two, and that she committed phagein.”
“Why the indirectness? Why not ‘I did not kill the haruspices’?”
“Because phagein is a primitive term in the language of vespers, requiring no definition. Unlike the manifold means that constitute killing.” His digit curls around his antennae. “Oaths of blood and soul aren’t magic, just communication with convenient properties. Despite the superstition, vespers are not gods or spirits. They have no supernatural ability to detect lies. At best, they could note blood pressure, pheromones or suspicious brain activity.” Continuing, as if listing off possibilities, “And there are means to interface directly with the mind, through neuroprojection, but I know nothing of the school, and neither do you.”
Marka sighs. Everything was ambiguity, and pockmarked with shadows and loopholes.
“Marka, was it?” Felme says. “I respect your vigilance, and I will carry out your request. But let me tell you something. There’s a very easy test to see if one of you is the Golden Lady.”
She waited. Then asked, “What?”
“Look at me.”
She peers at the male in modest utilitarian robes, still with the brush pen in tarsus and a ledger in front of him.
“What am I seeing?”
“I’m alive and well,” is his answer. “If the Golden Lady encountered me, we have every reason to expect me dead. Or worse, bankrupt.”
He was a spellbrand, the sort of vesperbane that had gone missing around the Golden Lady.
“But you’re fiend level, at least.”
“Yes.”
That was the dichotomy with renegades at large: insignificant, or devastating threats. With every bit of information dripped forth, there was less room to wonder which.
“Is there anything else that bears discussing?” Felme asked, a plainness of tone that indicated neither interest nor exasperation.
What was the outstanding debt? Twelve thousand bone pieces as principal, fertility of 4.7%, to be paid in installments of at least eight hundred evey thirty six days. What if the gang was insolvent? “I’ll halve the amount due,” he said. Mandibles yawning open, he asks, “Is that all?”
Marka looked to Wik, who nods, and so does she.
Felme throws up a hand again, and he whistles in his trachea. In a moment, a door is opening, a servant-robed mantis striding in beside two noble roaches. The roaches stand about as high as the servant’s legs. They have trays strapped to them that allow them to carry several plates burgeoning with food.
The servant first off passes the tray they carry to Felme, and then attends to the roaches, taking their trays to give to Wik and then to Marka. That done, the servant strokes a roach’s antennae, a gesture of affection.
This is a feast, but one that could have been prepped at a moment’s notice. There was uncut honeyloaf (a bee recipe – pollen mixed in with tough, leavened grains), and a kind of raw, gnarled tuber (one preferred only by vesperbanes, due to its bitter deterrent of a skin, laced with enervate), and a warped ascomycete fungus still spilling spores (a genus familiar to anyone who’s seen mycobanes practice mudwork).
Wik’s plates contained only these things, but for Felme and Marka, these were the sides, the main course being nondescript patties and sauges of meat, sauced to smell of blood and hemolymph, though their look indicates having been cooked or otherwise chemically treated to ease digestion.
For the knights of old, whose surviving diaries and treatises informed Marka’s outlook, there was something cowardly in eating what’s been hunted by others. A disrespect to yourself, who is denied the challenge. And a disrespect to the prey – at least those bound in traps or ranches, who are denied the chance to flee and earn survival.
This was simple for the knights of old, but the modern world has a wrinkle: that this meat quite possibly never belonged to a free-living creature to begin with. Meat farms no longer had the popularity they had at the height of the Third Dominion, but the efficiency meant it they would never truly go away, sordid history or not. Marka wonders if a skilled hemotechnic could tell the difference. Would there be there a lingering hint of bat blood? Some artifact of artifice?
As Marka is staring at the food, tired mind riding these tangents, it’s Felme who snaps her attention and gives an order. “Eat.”
“Oh yes, thank you!” Marka says.
“Don’t. This is not a gesture of kindness, and you are not its recipient.” Felme dismisses with a raptorial. “The bargin which binds vesper to bane, it’s quite well defined. And the vespers fulfill their half, whether they bother witnessing oaths or not. But no creature dislikes food. This is the standard way of enticing them to pause in their vesperly business and assist us mere arthropods.”
That couldn’t be all true, Marka thinks. If this was truly only for the vespers, there were more efficient means. Vesper-lard has organic amalgams, nerve-fats, with an energy density several times that of any mantid food. Vespers could easily digest it, because they invented it.
The servant returns (when had he left?) and this time bears drinks. For Marka & Felme, a glass of a concotion that could be mistaken for red wine due to the presences of bat blood. For Wik, something that smelled like lamp oil.
After Marka forces down the entirety of the meal – enough to feel fullness in her abdomen – Felme passes her the sclertotium.
“Do not chew.”
The next step is the tarsisigns. Each one is a complex contortion of digits made easy only with years’ practice. Vespers had no mouths with which to speak, and no ears to harken. Tarsisigns exist to solve part of this problem: a bane’s tarsus is laced with propriocepting hypae which finely sense the signs. But there was a mental component, of course.
To Marka, the tarsisigns involved in any technique had the feel of some relic unearthed, a rigid fact to be memorized. But under Felme’s guidance, another nature was revealed, that of something as fluid and configurable as any language.
As the process got further along, Marka felt – something take hold of the food she had just eaten, and the sense of fullness disappeared. The mass was still there… but it wasn’t hers.
Alongside the tarsisigns, Felme had Marka repeat a verbal component he admited was more ritual than necessary.
There was one flourish that had Marka worried.
“May this promise hold, lest our heart become but rot and pus,” was how the contract was ended.
“Is that actually going to happen?” Marka asked. “What, what is the punishment if we default?”
“There are oaths which exact the harshest punishments when broken,” Felme says, “but this will not be one of them. You will simply lose arete-standing. But of course, that doesn’t mean anything to someone so ignorant of oaths, does it?” He flicks a palp. “I’ll put it this way: when you break an oath, you’ll find that further oaths bind ever looser. And your vespers view their current arrangement as an oath. Techniques will cost you more calories upfront. Wounds that once would close under their mastery of blood instead fester. At the extreme, you become horkos, and the pretense that the vespers are symbiotic inhabitants of your body disappears. They will devour you, or you’ll wish they did.”
With that conveyed, the process of swearing the oath resumes. Marka values that bit of ritual Felme insists on, of speaking the oath aloud, in mantid language.
Because now it doesn’t feel like some magical technicality, but something Marka has sworn to do. It goes without saying that any knight of old would have kept every promise made.
And now Marka has a promise to keep.
The oath-swearing stays on Marka’s mind for a while after it’s done. Her connection to her vespers – other than the nerve-manipulating pathways forged by habit – is weak, and it had taken a while for her to feel what she realizes was their response.
When Wik was not destroyed in the contradiction of an oath broken, the two of them left the casino, seeing the evening sun just a few hours off from setting, the other horizon soon to be darkened by more than atmospheric enervate.
The tallowbane has not told Marka how it plans to follow her into the sewers. This percolates a worry as they walk towards one of the Wentalel sewers’ fat maintainance entrances.
There are two mantids there that could generously be called on guard. One slumps on a hammock between two tarsholds set into the building beside its wide doors. The eyes are paled like she wasn’t all the way awake. The other mantis dressed like a guard was initially nowhere to be seen, and now jogs over at their approach.
Having detoured to recover it, Marka is once more in her armor, sans helmet. Wik, though, is disguised, its first two abdominal segments clothed with two shirts with a professional trim and colors, embroidered with names and trademarks. It carries a bag, and Marka knows its normal metal shawl is folded up in there.
“Are you two lost?” says the guard coming to a stop from their jog. She sees Marka is in the front, and gives her a once over, bottom to top. And when she reach the top – where Marka’s Plains Southern antennae-band is visible – she adds, “Ah, vesperbane madam, I mean no offense.”
It’s not an addendum reeking of fear or excessive deference. Perhaps unsurprising, if she did guard work with any regularity – thus has probably interacted with vesperbanes in a capacity other than as avatars of impending violence.
“No. No, we’re…” Marka starts.
But Wik, who hadn’t stopped when Marka did, leading to it stepping forward now, speaks. “There’s a pipe down below the intersection of Eight and Limpback that’s damned about to break. Miss Bane here is going to get the grout and banestone out the way. That’s all you need to know, don’t hold us up,” Wik says, affecting an accent that has none of the stewarty educated poise it normally holds.
“Save it for tomorrow. Sorry, but the arch-fiend sent down an order. Sounds like there’s a collapse or some anomaly? Point is, it’s dangerous, and we can’t let civilians down there, even for some quick maintenance.”
“Yes, exactly. We’re here to fix the problems in the sewers,” Wik says. “Why do you think I have a vesperbane with me? They’re a Warden. Take it up with the arch-fiend if you’re confused, but don’t hold us up.”
“Just let ’em through.” It’s the guard in the hammock. She looks between Marka and Wik. “Let ’em through. It’s a vesperbane. Think, what is she gonna do if we hold ’em up longer? Vesperbane means this is either important or illegal, and I don’t want my neck in the way of either.”
Marka straightens her antennae at the implication. “We’re just –”
But the line gets through to its target. The first guard is sighing and asking, “Fine. Names?”
“Marka Ofronden”
“Tyumm.”
“We’ll let the Wardens know you came by. Go ahead, and don’t make us regret this.”
Marka was curling her palps together, but Wik has a raptorial at her back, urging her forward.
At first, the pressure has her jump, because the first thing she thinks of is the spear that was earlier at her back.
That unbidden memory passes, and it’s not enough to stop her following Wik through the wide doors and into the darkness of the sewers.
They pause in the darkness for a moment, long enough for Wik to – Marka imagines – form a tarsisign, and then generate the luciferin and luciferase chemicals that together react, bursting into blue luminescence. Ngini’s light, a Stewartry standby.
“I’m worried the Wardens are going to catch our lie,” Marka admits.
“And do what? What laws have we broken?” Wik says.
“Trespassing? Impersonating a licensed professional?”
“I’ve been away from official channels for a while, I admit. Do vesperbanes get charged for things that trivial now?” It makes a harsh popping sound in its trachea. “I might have something to worry about, but I’ve made arrangements. You, though?”
“Fine. But still, that order she mentioned… The arch-fiend doesn’t want mantids down here, why?”
“Doesn’t want civilians down here.” Wik throws out a leg, gesturing at what they’re walking down into. “It’s a sewers in city with a significant vesperbane population. Speaks for itself, doesn’t it?”
“Fair point,” she says. If the vesperbanes were only Wardens or Stewarts, one could regulate where bat blood and blood-derived biowaste was disposed off. Keep things manageable. But with this many mavericks…
No one liked dealing with sewer oozes.
As they descend, they enter a world ruled by a different aesthetic. Stone bricks, quarried and chiseled. Some supports are metal, but you might notice something odd in the proportions and standards.
Wik had said these sewers were old, and before the Stewartry had codified mudwork into a science, the quickest (though not cheapest) way to get something built was to enlist the help of the gilded ants.
The slow ramp downward ends, and they take a hard turn right. They’re now relegated to a thin walkway. Beside and beneath, a canal is carved and its flow is dark and turgid.
By the time this comes into view, Marka’s antennae are curling up from the smell, and Wik prods her.
It has produced cloth coverings from its bags, coverings that can be tied secure at the base of one’s antennae. It helps.
“Now that we’re finally nearing the actual operation, you should start using that… scanner box, the one you showed me earlier.”
The device is now in her tarsi, and warming up. “You said we’re looking for vesperbanes? Should I focus on the zeta-nrv signature of the mycoumbral system, or the gamma-nrv stores you’d expect from a serious blackbane?”
“Felme suggested we might see a devotee of the sanguine tongues, so it’s very possible we aren’t looking for blackbanes.”
Marka begins setting the right configuration into the knobs. Through the scanner, the world is rendered as if in a sketch, from the extremely faint amounts of enervate present in mantid waste, and distant traces visible as a consequence of the prevalence of banestone. She tunes the aperture and sensors more precisely. Turning to the side as a test, she sees Wik. Or part of Wik, limned in thin, branching strands. Marka had seen an animal with all the veins extracted, and it was a similar look.
The read-out behind the glass screen had reminded her of devices she’d played with as a nymph, one said to capture light too long to be visible. Her grandfather had used them to track enemy bases whenever the vindicators of Black Mountain had skirmishes with the New Protectorate.
They’re moving forward now, slower with Marka switching between watching her scanner and what’s in front of her. She sees Wik repeatedly glance between her and the box before it finally breaches the silence.
“I do not mean to pry, so decline to answer if you wish, but I cannot help the curiosity. The archaic armor, that weird little watch, and this scanner box. All odd possessions for a vesperbane. Is there… is there some story here?”
“Yeah.” Marka twists her antennae. “I-I wasn’t going to be a vesperbane, at first. My father, my grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts, uncles, siblings – all my family are orthodox welkinists. They, well, as per doctrine they have a… complex and negative relationship with vesperbanes.” A younger Marka would have just put it that they hated vesperbanes. But with more years behind her, and an audience who would no doubt uncritically accept another blithe ‘they hate us’, Marka feels it is uncharitable to simply write off the doctrine as blind prejudice, mere and simple. “I was supposed to be a vindicator. That’s what they raised me to be, and what I had training for.”
“What changed?”
“You probably noticed a relation I didn’t mention.” Nod. “Yeah, my mother. She – I eventually learned that she was a vesperbane. I never… No one ever told me how it happened. Some just said she bewitched my father somehow. Others said that he was – or is – lacking in his committment to purity. The ones who were most sympathetic quietly speculated that it… wasn’t consensual. And the paternity laws…” Marka lapses into silence, and takes a moment to regain her train of thought. “Point is, I wanted answers, and being an idiot nymph, I had this idea in my head that the heartlands were small enough that if I threw my life away and became a vesperbane myself, I could find her, or find out what happened to her. That when I told the vesperbane leaders my story, they’d care.”
“Marka?” Wik asks, and it meets her gaze, holds her gaze. “It doesn’t define you. Mantids and dung beetles share a common ancestor, as does every lifeform from the lowest to the most high. Ancestry is no guide for the present or future. You can only find your identity in yourself and those you choose as friends.” Wik stops for a moment, and lowers a gaze and perhaps reflects on having said something to make things more clear rather than less. Eventually, it adds, “I can understand pursuing answers as a matter of curiosity. But you should know you won’t, can’t, find meaning digging up long inert facts of your birth. You’re more than that.”
“I want to know what my mother intended for me. It matters to me, whether she wanted for things to go as they did, or a different nymphhood was taken from me. I think paying respects, and maybe doling revenge, is a matter of honor.”
“I suppose. I’ve seen a lot of vesperbanes go down a different road, chasing after their parents, letting that mission, or where they hope that mission ends, determine who they should be, rather than taking that responsibility on themselves.
“Is it that common among vesperbanes?” She’d never, really, asked anyone before. Never let a conversation get anywhere adjacent.
“So many vesperbanes are orphans, or they were taken as or sold as tribute. So yes, it’s common. Even among the vesperbanes with parents, that’s often because they’re from a clan, which ultimately amounts to a whole different pit laying in the same field, that of taking lineage as definition.”
They lapse into silence and something closer to understanding after that.
The canal of blackwater runs down the middle of the tunnel they follow and there’s another walkway on the other side.
Once, drawn by movement, Marka looks over. A rat.
A dire rat.
She can see, when the thing turns its head so that blue light touches its engorged eyes, the swollen and dark blood vessels. With that bit of context, she can decipher from the shadows the warped musculature, the diseased fur.
Marka didn’t just have armor. She had a weapon with her, as well. A sword, its grip to be wielded in the spines of her raptorials.
Now a foreleg drifts from a grip on the scanner box to the hilt, but the rat has seen them and dashes out of sight. Not yet crazed and territorial, perhaps.
Her foreleg lingers on the hilt, still.
Marka has a sword. Like her alliance-styled knight armor, it is a point of embarrassment and self-consciousness. Swords had a reputation, a perception – though at least in this case, not the fault of the Third Dominion specifically (though they certainly exacerbated it).
God-empress Oosifea had wielded a sword forged with ancient, forbidden magic, which had drunk the blood of vesperbats, at once empowering and maddening its wielder. Those who considered themselves heirs to Oosifea – the deathknights, the Third Dominion, the radical welkinists in general – as tendency took after her in choice of weapon.
And hammers or spears were better for smashing or piercing chitin. But there was a certain skillful professionalism that found its ideal in the sword. Marka had chosen a thin, piercing blade, where Oosifea’s had been a thick, half-axe of a design. She ever hoped that was enough differentiation.
“Did you see that?” she mentions to Wik.
“Yes. Worrisome. But it shouldn’t be hard to defend ourselves if we encounter one or many. I have ichortallow grafts, in case you get bitten. Is that acceptable to you?”
She had her reservations. “Yes.”
They trudged along in the dim, damp sewers. When they came to intersections, Wik would point this way or that, and they’d continue. They walked along the trunk mains beneath roads, meaning walking the sewers was a rough parallel of navigating aboveground. The pipes thinned sometimes, and sometimes returned to the initial width.
The sounds as they continued was the slow running of water and sometimes the chittering and scurrying of what was probably another rat somewhere near but unlit.
“Do you hear that?” Wik asks, quite low.
Marka had started to tune out sound, but when she returns her attention to it, she hears it: stridulation. A mantis? An ant? The tone is warped by reflection off the sewer walls.
“You think they hear us?” Marka says quietly.
“If they do, I doubt it’s anything telling. The clanking of your armor, probably.”
“Well, I can fix that.” Marka lets enervate out of her soul, flowing out through conduits to engulf the plates of her armor like palpable shadow. Enervate attenuates sound, so by covering metallic joints, she muffles herself.
The lantern Wik used has a shutter it can pull down, and block the light, or only let out a little. Like that, they return to darkness.
Wik touches Marka in the dark, again urging her forward.
“–the fuck are we down in the shit and piss of the city? Damned if she can choke the payouts and then ask us to do this. Lorded over by that freak, no less.”
“Keep quiet, sis. You know what happened when Nobb mouthed off to her.”
“Yeah,” the response is almost inaudible at this distance. When that voice speaks again, the levity seems almost forced. “By now he might even be among the shit we’re wading through.”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
“Sure. And I don’t want to be doing it. Even the excavation teams only go through the cloaca. We’re in the thick of it. Why? On account of some prank?”
“It was a credible tip. Murt encountered some vesperbanes earlier today, so it checks out.”
“Bite me if I don’t trust the words of some bane dressed up like a hierophant.” Then, “Look, there’s nothing here. Rats and worms, no sneaking banes. Let’s just go back. The sooner we get it through that freak’s head there ain’t shit but shit down here, the sooner we can crawl back up and clean ourself. Fucking need the seven ablutions after this.”
When Marka turns back to look at Wik, she startles enough she almost falls of the walkway. The flames in Wik’s body are still burning dimly in the dark, and the way it diffuses through its translucent wax is… frightening.
Collecting herself in a moment, she leans in to say, “Sounds like some kind of patrol?”
“Someone told them we were coming.”
“When I was being chased, the gangster – Murt? – called me a freak. They must be talking about a vesperbane. One they hired?”
Wik doesn’t get a chance to reply.
When one tries to be intimidating, the common way of doing it is with higher pitches, like the screeches bats navigate with.
But there a certain fear to be mined in the low, rumbling that would characterize a dread cat or bear. The next voice they hear is inmantidly low, telling of an altered vesperbane physiology. Were they even speaking with palps?
“Tell me, morsel,” is what the voice says. “Do you believe I am deaf?”
Whoever replied is too far away to easily be heard.
“You follow my orders. That’s how this works. I deserve every iota of respect you heap upon that coward you call a boss, and more. No, don’t run now.”
There’s a protest, louder now, but not enough to be intelligible.
A scream. And finally, they can hear who she’s talking to, a voice from earlier now distorted in pain. “My leg!”
“Next time, it’ll be two. Or perhaps I’ll go straight for the head?” The scraping sound that follows this is supposed to be laughter. “Now tell me, why are you slacking in your duties?” A pause, probably filled with a stuttered response. “Don’t lie to me. I can smell them out there. If you had kept looking, you would have found them.”
There’s a loud sound, of impacted chitin. “Oh, I’m sure they can hear me. If you haven’t run away like rabbits, you little prowlers, then come face your death. We know these pipes better than you do, so come on your own terms, or it will be on ours.”
Marka murmurs, “Better than we do? Those gangsters didn’t sound like they come down here much.”
“Obvious bravado.” Wik says absently, mind clearly occupied by other concerns. “Disengaging isn’t much of an option, is it? If it wasn’t all bluff – and could it be? They’d look like a fool if no one was here – I’m not convinced backing off and trying a different approach works out for us.”
“So it’ll be a fight then.”
Despite the darkness, it only takes one try for Marka to grasp her sword with her raptorials.
“Unfortunately.”
In the interests of having every sense at her disposal, Marka rips off the antennae coverings. Free to scent the air, she detects the hint of mantid odor, burning torches, and blood.
(The air isn’t unbearably foul; waste is generally diluted by water, and the sewers also collect water used to bathe and clean, meaning there is the slightest hint of soap and weak acid.)
When she checks with the scanner, she sees several faint souls as of civilians, and one developed umbral system characteristic of a vesperbane. But not a blackbane.
Quietly, they approach the gangsters. Marka is quiet because the bottom of her boots are coated with enough enervate she probably leaves prints behind her, and Wik naturally walked softly.
Marka sees firelight.
“Marka, you go first. You’ll look like a shadow, so long as you stick to the walls.”
“Any plan? I don’t suppose we could like, try to circle around and surprise them or something?”
Wik makes a thoughtful sound, honestly considering it. “Your trick of coating your armor – can you do wall-walking?”
“I’ve practiced it… some. It’s a bit niche, in my usual work. Can you?”
“No, there’s little I can do in the way of umbral techniques. I can make my wax adhesive. But that’s – not quite viable, compared to wall-walking through umbral means.” Wik shakes its head. “But no, I don’t have much of a plan. Perhaps you can climb on the ceiling and take them by surprise, depending on their positioning and the layout of the room? I’ll hang back and… prepare something.”
With a nod, she creeps forward. The enervate engulfing her armor is ever present in her mind, but distant and indirect, like spinning plates on sticks.
The trunk main she follows empties into a large room of unclear purpose. The canal itself drops suddenly, becoming a grimy waterfall. She can see two others from her place in the shadows, and from the angles, it looks like five other mains empty here, meeting hexagonally. The ceiling is vaulted high above, dashing hopes of creeping above.
The gang – or someone – uses this room enough that there are suspension bridges, their disparate style and shoddy quality belying them being anything that’s supposed to be here. It’s the sort of banestone you could easily buy or commission. The bridge carries you down for about a dozen strides, to a wide platform in the center, which, at least, has something to the effect of railing. Four such bridges hold up the platform.
There are torches set into the railing on the platform and at the trunk main mouths, providing sparse illumination. It gives Marka pause. Weren’t there dangerous fumes that arise from the decomposition of waste? But perhaps the sewers are ventilated.
“I can smell you approaching.”
Marka breathes in deep, worrying not for the foul air, and runs towards where the makeshift bridge starts, out of the shadows.
“Warden!”
Marka finally sees the one who’d spoken so deeply. Pale yellow chitin now reddening with veins crawling all over it, spiderwebbed and branching like cracks. Above her, thick tentacles pierce the stonework, and she hangs suspended by them where they emerge from the abdomen. In the mouth of a trunk main’s opening, her figure stands large even at a distance. She speaks not with the scraping of her palps, but of bone spurs on her red tentacles.
Looking at those tentacles, thicker than legs, Marka feels a bit of envy. Inadequacy.
“You made a mistake coming here.” One of the tentacles not holding her up languidly flicks out, smacking against some enshadowed form near her. It’s a mantis. “Go on, do you expect me to do all the work? Show the worm how we handle interlopers.”
The mantis she smacked – and only that mantis – staggers forward, and then finds the courage to walk faster. She’s sparsely dressed, clothing as much ropes as cloth, a warrior’s garb.
She hefts a club, the sort more appropriate for a game of sport, but it’s adorned with makeshift spikes.
Marka flares open her wings, partly to bare the intimidating eyespots on them, but partly for her next trick, a familiar one. She crouches, then leaps up, blasting enervate once again. Big jumps always feel a bit more comfortable with her wings out.
The enervate wasn’t just for extra distance. In this subterranean darkness, the enervate will hang around, darkening the opening beyond which Wik waits. It could make the difference, depending on what the tallowbane plans.
Several meters crossed, the blackbane impacts against the wide main platform, hard enough a wave ripples along all four bridges connected. It makes the gangster stumble stride just a bit.
Marka holds up her sword and stares down the approaching gangster.
“Shall we duel?” Marka says, voice unsteady, but not from fear.
The platform they’re on is a hexagonal slab, wide enough that mantis could make five strides from one end to the other. With four points of attachment, it’s stable under her. Is that… a rope ladder hanging off it?
The gangster straightens up just a little as she watches, seeing Marka brandish nothing more than her sword.
There’s a simple way for this fight to go. Marka can rush forward with the full force of her enervate behind her, sword out, running the gangster through, thorax to abdomen. Her ‘opponent’ wouldn’t have time to react.
But was that a fair and justifiable way to fight? It’s unclear if the gangster would even be willing to stand before her were the bloodbane not threatening, coercing her.
Marka holds a neutral stance, and watches the other mantis, slowly starting to circle them.
“What are you waiting for?” the bloodbane calls from the distance.
The words visibly jostle the gangster. She lashes out with the spiked club.
Marka watches the swing, and catches the club with her sword, the blade digging into the wood. Her response is a strike with her foreleg, raptorial open.
The gangster is quick enough to backstep out of the way, wrenching their club free with the motion.
They exchange a few more blows, the vesperbane letting the civilian push them back. Marka parries and dodges, ever conscious that the fight would be over in a moment if she were willing to kill or maim. Even if they landed a single hit – they don’t – it’d be meaningless. It’s a waiting game, Marka watching for an opportunity to take them down with the smallest chance of lethality.
Marka stops moving. The gangster is baited into swinging at her. The vesperbane rushes to the side, aided by a small burst of enervate.
The flat of her blade comes down hard against the club-wielding raptorial, still extending from the swing. She hits a joint, and the foreleg loses all grip, club clattering against the ground. A bright hiss of pain.
Disarmed.
Without pausing much longer, Marka is swinging at the gangster’s legs, aiming the inflict pain and minor injuries. The chitin of one leg cracks under the blow, the cuticle of another feels her blade bite enough to draw hemolymph, but no further.
Disabled. The mantis isn’t seriously injured, they should even be able to walk. But not stand well enough to carry on this futile endeavor.
“You know,” it’s the deep voice of the bloodbane. “You idiots would stand a better chance if you worked together.”
At the periphery of her vision, Marka sees the speaker look up, at her. “Are you fresh out of training? What are the Wardens teaching you, that it takes you that long against a single untrained civilian?”
Her tentacles are moving again. Closer now, she counts four red lengths, two holding her up. More gangsters are smacked into acting. Four rush down the swaying bridge at her.
One of them has a blade – either a very long dagger, or rather short sword, held with digits instead of spines. He holds it out as he charges. Marka steps out of the way. The charger misses, but it must be on purpose.
He stops near the middle of the platform, body between her and the mantids following behind him.
Is it some gesture toward strategy? The other mantids arrange themselves to cut off Marka’s escape routes, surrounding her. One for each bridge besides the one they’d come down.
One of them walks onto the bridge Marka had leapt over. The lingering cloud of enervate catches the gangster’s eye. She watches the mantis clad in a ruddy cloak turn and stare at it.
But she can’t stay distracted for long. Dagger mantis is swinging again. Her sword goes up to block. Marka starts to sidestep another attack. She’s not near the edge, but she wants to be even farther from it.
When she nears, a bridge-guarding mantis swings out with their raptorials open, forcing Marka to jump back. It gives Dagger a chance to grab at her foreleg, and the time it takes for her to wrench herself free is enough time for the third mantis – who has a spear! – to stab with it. It glances off her armor, but there’s force behind it.
The idea, she supposes, is that with this much going on, she’d be overwhelmed. And to an extent, it works. She’s certainly not at liberty to be methodical and hold back as she had before.
Again, there’s a simple enough way to end this, the prospect calling to her. The platform they were on had railing, but it shouldn’t be hard to knock someone over it.
But how high up were they? Below them was darkness. Hidden down there – was it stone at the bottom, or blackwater? If it was high enough, even falling into water could be dangerous.
The battle continues, Marka dodging and sidestepping away from her assailants. Their tired huffs, and weapons smacking against her armor become a rhythm against the rush of water falling distantly, and torches flickering dangerously.
There’s an opening. Marka lifts up her sword, about to bring it down in a mighty swing.
Then something cracks against her head, and painfully squishes one of her simple eyes. She looks. There’s a gangster still near the bloodbane, throwing rocks.
Rocks, or fatbergs.
There’s so much going on. Marka looks again to opening she’d entered from. Where was Wik? The gangster who had been investigating Marka’s nerve-cloud was gone now.
More attacks jar her armor. Hadn’t seen nerve-coated plate before? Do they realize she’s armored?
One attack slips through to pierce a joint of her leg. Marka snarls, and tackles a mantis. Throwing them down, she grabs at the small makeshift blade – shiv? – they had annoyed her with. Shiv held in her mesotarsus, she leaves them with a gash across their abdomen, and charges at the dagger-wielder.
Spear stabs again, but she’s expecting it. It misses. Simultaneously, enervate flows out of her mesotarsus and floods the shiv. It’s not made of nerve-conductive metal, but it doesn’t need to be. She swings hard enough for the blade to embed itself in the wood of the still-extended spear.
The shiv is melting, and with it, the spear shaft too.
The one holding the spear pulls it back, and tries to stab it again. Marka lets the point hit her armor, and tries not to smirk as the shaft snaps soundlessly apart. The wood is warped and blackened.
The three mantises still in the fight – Spear, Dagger, and one still blocking a bridge – all watch this happen.
So Marka lets black nerve wash over her sword. Being shadowsteel, it doesn’t dissolve as the shiv had.
She’s never dared do this till now – for a civilian, a cut from a nerve-coated blade was death with extra steps.
She hopes, seeing the spear, they understand that.
The rock thrower choses now to throw another.
Marka sees it arc through the air, and she meets it with her sword.
Enervate doesn’t work so fast that it’d let her slice effortlessly through stone. But she saturates her sword’s coating, black nerve billowing out, and it permeates the stone. It falls, she kicks it away.
Marka breathes in to steady herself. Then, she speaks.
“I don’t want to kill any of you. But if you continue to fight, you will do so accepting the risk of death. But if you run, I will not give chase.”
“Pathetic,” the bloodbane scrapes. “Imagine where’d you be if I weren’t here to save y’all from the scawy Warden.”
The bloodbane retracts their tentacles enough to fall to their legs with a solid sound. Then crouches. The bloodbane leaps much as Marka did, and lands with an even heavier impact against the suspended platform.
One of the gangsters had started to run – Spear. A long tentacle snakes out and runs them through the abdomen, erupting from their mesothorax.
Another tentacle reaches out for the slumped, cowering form of the one who had the shiv. The tentacle runs along the length of the gash as if licking the hemolymph.
At length, the bloodbane turns attention to Marka. The word is menace, towering two heads above her, and joints thick with muscle. The bane’s mutation runs deeper than the vein-covered chitin she’d seen at a distance. The antennae are fluffy, not like a male’s, not even with setae, but with tufts of fur. The palps have long hairs like whiskers. The three simple eyes have pupils.
“Perhaps I should give you a chance to run, little Warden.”
Marka wonders if the best move here is some gesture of negotiation. But if there were ever to be a monster to slay on this quest of hers, she couldn’t imagine it would be anything else.
“…But I can’t tell you I wouldn’t give chase.”
One tentacle rises up, telegraphing a downward swing. Marka starts moving her sword in the pullback and meets it, blade clattering against bits of exposed bone.
This bloodbane’s tentacles are made all the more horrifying for their lack of symmetry: one is all coiling muscle, like a skinless snake; another has enough spurs of bone jutting out at almost-regular intervals to look like a centipede. One is thin and encased in keratin, another long and thick.
That last one has large mouth at its end, with spiraling teeth sharp like knives.
Marka is circling around the mostly-stationary bloodbane. She feels played with. The swings and stabs of the tentacles are clean and telegraphed, and slow, like every motion is deliberated. Only one tentacle ever attacks at a time.
Marka knows that can’t be truth. Marka was facing a bloodbane with four wretched raptorials, and that had implications.
One difference between a tentacle and an ordinary limb is that a limb is mostly rigid with specific joints. There’s only so many ways you can move it. But a tentacle is all articulation. Four properly propriocepting wretched raptorials would have a sensorium comparable with your entire body. The only way to make it work is to borrow a trick from a certain mollusk’s nervous system.
Each wretched raptorial should have its own semi-autonomous cluster of ganglia, able to act without its owner finely controlling it. Marka knows this well.
If she was being played with, at least Marka could try to take advantage of it, punish the arrogance. When one tentacle jabs toward her face, she quickly brings up her sword. It catches on the meat and a strip of flesh is peeled off the limp.
“Ouch. So, you aren’t afraid to fight back, now?”
“You are a vesperbane. I think I can bring everything I have to bear against you.”
Marka blitzes forward. Her sword is held out to pierce. Could she end this quickly?
It’s not so. The bloodbane has the reflexes to match. Marka gives one slash and then two, but despite her greater size, the bloodbane is able to fluidly dodge out of the way.
Two tentacles come at her at once, slamming against either side of her armor. She vibrates.
“It won’t be enough, little Warden. Give up.”
Marka drops low, and tries to roll to safety.
With some distance between her and the other vesperbane, Marka has one last trick to pull. She feels it squirming in her thorax.
The problem of adding limbs to a complete body plan is one that every truly ambitious bloodbane eventually has to ponder when developing Expressions. In that regard, Marka and the bloodbane represent two opposite approaches. The bloodbane has the wretched raptorials attached where her two pairs of wings ordinarily would be – or had been – that is, on her last two thoratic segments.
Marka, though, made use of mantises’ elongate prothorax. There’s an easy to miss bulge on her back, and splits in her chitin between her fore- and mesolegs that aren’t supposed to be there.
In moments, her own version of those tentacles, the wretched raptorials, emerge, everting wetly from their sheaths. Hers are simple, each with a hard keratin spike at the end, and a three-jointed design that makes them more limb than tentacle. They are thinner than her legs, but not that much thinner.
“Cute. Do you know how to use them?”
“Better than you do, I imagine.” Marka wasn’t just bluffing, but her enemy would learn that screaming.
Marka leaps back in the fray, to measure her raptorial against the bloodbane’s. Marka has armor, but the bloodbane has two limbs more to block her attacks. Even when not attacking or reaching to grab her, they’re held up, forming what feels to Marka an impenetrable guard. And when they do attack, she’s constantly ducking and backstepping – this time not out of restraint, but because her opponent isn’t shy about going for her head.
A sudden movement makes them both pause. It’s from the opening where Wik – she hopes – is waiting in the wings.
But out comes out a mantis in ruddy cloak, the gangster who’d went in.
The arrival stops and kneels by the mantis the bloodbane had run through with a tentacle, cutting off bits of cloth to stem the flow of hemolymph.
They look up, face dark and unreadable in the torchlit room. “Madam vesperbane, we-”
“Shut up unless you’re going to help,” the bloodbane says, raptorials smacking down against the banestone platform. “Actually, don’t bother. I’d rather have this one all to myself.”
Breathing in deeply in this moment of distraction, Marka watches, seeing her unassailable tentacle guard lowered from that expressive bit of body language, a moment of vulnerability. When she turns back, Marka again raises her sword and wretched raptorials, ready to resume the dance.
The bane is speaking, “The way you fight, it’s so… considerate. As if you wait for permission before every swing, like I could say the word and you’d stop. So kind. But I… prefer to ravage.”
The bloodbane flails all four raptorials in a wild, overcomitted strike. It’s fast, and Marka has to blast enervate to dodge out of the way. The tentacles come down hard on the banestone, lodging into the floor a bit. The bloodbane is now where Marka once stood, unbalanced and doubled over. Her abdomen is lifted in the air.
Marka knows exactly where to find the dorsal vessel, and it’s the first place her mind goes. The bloodbane was different from the gangsters, from what little she’d seen. The mutant reveled in violence and cruelty. Marka struggled not to see her as a storybook monster to slay. But there was no kill order. Did she have the authority to make that call?
The heartlands didn’t have knights anymore, for more reason than just radical welkinists souring their reputation. When you give vesperbanes power over life and death, her father would say, you get the Third Dominion. It’s what banes always do with power.
In the Pantheca, vesperbanes were stewarts, not warriors. Certainly not executioners.
Marka is thinking quickly with the octopamine in her system, and these tracks are so worn the lines of thinking are more gestured than needed not be fully articulated.
Still, the opportunity to strike at the bane’s exposed abdomen is there for only a moment. The bloodbane spins around quickly, antennae extending out toward her. Her tentacles are lowered, not yet promising further attacks. Head cocked, eyes evaluating.
(Marka is confused. Was there more thought behind that attack? Was it a test?)
“You really act like you’re some type of hero, don’t you?” the bane says. “Refusing to stab my back, or kick me while I’m down, like this is some kind of formal duel,” she spits the word. “It’s cute. I’m going to enjoy eating you.”
Had the bloodbane been playing with her this entire time? Perhaps the only thing that lets Marka survive under the bloodbane’s renewed assault is those very moments she caught her breath instead of pressing the advantage.
Philosophical musing about honor and jurisprudence disappear, and the only thing Marka has room to think is further parries, blocks, and – as a last resort – dodging and backstepping, which now feels like selling off the last few strides of space she has before the bloodbane will have her pressed up against the railing.
All she can hear is the impacts of sword against bone, sword against flesh, the squish of their raptorials meeting and leaving hers bleeding, and the rhythmic breathing of the bloodbane which now sounds almost like laughing.
It’s all punctuated by one grand clash of her raptorial against the bloodbane’s. She feels something crack internally – wretch-raptorials have skeleton inside – and this opens a chasm of pain.
Marka staggers backwards. She can feel the bloodbane savoring her last moments. Her opponent pulls back that tentacle for a blow that could end this fight.
Something else on the platform is moving.
Now there’s a body between Marka and the bloodbane.
The gangster in the ruddy cloak? Holding a torch.
No, not a gangster. And not a torch either. A staff engulfed in flame, held in unburning, waxen tarsi.
Wik.
The bloodbane makes probing attempts to strike the tallowbane, but such probes are punished with the burning staff. In its other foreleg, it has the long dagger a gangster wielded.
The tallowbane isn’t a better fighter than Marka. But surprise and not being exhausted counts for a lot. There’s also the wariness of encountering a unknown vesperbane whose capabilities you haven’t seen.
Oh, and fire hurts.
“Wik!” Marka exclaims. “What took you so long?”
“Binding all the gangsters so they couldn’t fall back and make trouble for us. Tending to those most grievously wounded, ensuring we don’t have deaths on us.”
Even despite its lack of skill, Wik is making progress, regaining ground the bloodbane had taken from Marka. Its strikes are sloppy, too much weight behind them. Its stance means it’s probably one tripped leg away from being knocked fatally off-balance. But it is holding its own.
Or not. The bloodbane dares to wrap a tentacle around the burning staff, and yank Wik forward by it. It’s then punched by the biggest of the tentacles, punted back.
With the moments that buys, the bloodbane lunges over to one of the gangsters still on the platform, who had been trying to discretely slide away unnoticed. The mantis is picked up with three tentacles, exclamations turning to screams as the bloodbane bares its mandibles. In the flickering torchlight, you can just barely see something white – teeth? – before the view is obscured by two tentacles emerging from the mouth. No, not tentacles. Tongues.
With four wretched raptorials, the bloodbane tears the mantis apart, ripping off chunks of flesh plucked off to chew and swallow, and the maw on their biggest raptorial consuming limbs segment by segment: tarsus, then tibia, then femur, then trochanter, hemolymph gushing out all the while.
They’re not able to finish before Wik is running back toward them. Marka is getting up too, finding and grabbing her sword. Now that she has the chance, she flushes her raptorials with bits of black nerve, just like her sword. This is the advantage Marka has, one technique of the wretched raptorials, something the bloodbane’s neglected, atrophied umbral system can’t match.
“Angwi Renesbrood,” Wik pronounces, “of the Red Tongue, heiress of the devourer. You’re the only red-tongued cannibal I’ve seen without a kill order. But I suppose that’s not because you don’t deserve it, is it?”
“Not just the Red Tongue,” she says, stridulation slurred from the hemolymphic wetness. She doesn’t wipe it away. “The Red Raptorials too, in case you couldn’t tell. And do you think that’s all I can do?” Her tongue flicks out, as if teasing. “Tell me, have you ever heard of a vesperbane who mastered all six somatic arts?”
“Impossible,” Wik says, emphasizing the words with a jab of its staff. But it doesn’t strike, restrained with new wariness – what if it wasn’t impossible? Marka herself slows in her approach. “The Red Eyes and the Black Whiskers are both clan secrets. The Bones are excluded, and the Wings are a lost art. It’s impossible for one mantis to bear the six somatic endowments at once,” it emphasizes, the facts a spell to ward away the possibility.
“I know.” This is said with a lunge and tentacles sweeping out, knocking Wik off balance. “I’m fucking with you.”
But when Marka returns, the tenor of the fight changes.
Flanked by two other vesperbanes, the bloodbane can only do so much. Marka keeps her wretched raptorials occupied, going so far as is to stab one through with her sword, disabling it. Marka jerks the blade, and hears flesh tear. The bloodbane snarls, and flings limbs at her and Wik. One impact sounds particularly bad, and she can see hot wax still dripping from one raptorial.
Marka is determined, and with nerve-coated raptorials digs at the flesh of the limb, until the bloodbane has to give it up, and Marka is able to rip it off her, blood fountaining out for a second before clotting and starting to heal, in the fashion of bat blood.
The loss of a limb has the bloodbane frenzied. But it’s not enough to overcome the disadvantage. The two of them peel back enough of her guard, and Wik has the opportunity to stab forward with the dagger, end this. It doesn’t have Marka’s hesitance, and goes for it –
“Felme lied!”
Wik pauses, dagger close to the throat.
“What,” it starts, “did Felme lie about?”
The other bane steps back, blood from Marka and Wik’s inflicted wounds already coagulating then scabbing over. “Nothing. I’m beetleshitting you. Again. Wasn’t even sure you knew Felme, but if you have my family name – easy guess. Thanks for sparing me,” she says with a crooked smirk of the palps.
Wik immediately jabs with the staff, but now the bane has the space to dodge and hang back. She’s going for another gang member’s body, mandibles spread wide and hungry.
Leaning over quickly to whisper in Marka’s tympanum, the tallowbane says, “Move forward in step with me. I want to test something.”
When they approach the other vesperbane, her tentacles lash out first for Marka instead of the bane with the flame.
Marka hopes that was all the test Wik wanted, because as the fight resumes, she gets separated from it, needing to move out the way.
Wik calls out, “Fall back to a trunk main!”
Beating back flailing tentacles, Marka barely ekes out the space to disengage. The bloodbane earlier rendered one of Marka’s vesper-grown limbs pained and disabled. With only a sword, a foreleg and one wretched raptorial, Marka cannot match everything Angwi can throw at her, even one limb diminished.
Marka backs up quicker and quicker, until she can turn and start running down a rope bridge. The bloodbane is running after her, and deeply altered physiology means speed.
Marka has been trying to be conservative with her enervate-assisted bursts of speed, but she finds herself burning more just to create enough distance.
Now she can see what Wik’s gambit is. Marka makes it across the bridge, and turns around.
The tallowbane’s at the other end, dagger in one foreleg, fire in the other, cutting the ropes.
The bloodbane slows, realizing.
“Wait,” she says. “I’ll tell you everything I know about the Golden Lady.”
The bridge falls away beneath the bloodbane.
But the tentacles have reach, and can can grab on to the planks even as they fall away.
When the bridge’s banestone slabs slam audibly against the sewer wall, the bloodbane is still hanging on. The suspension bridge has become a ladder.
“What now?” Marka calls across the divide.
But a thought comes before a response does. A memory. “Can do you wall-walking?” “I’ve practiced it… some.”
Calling it wall-walking isn’t really accurate, because sticking to a wall with enervate doesn’t eliminate gravity. Your tarsi may been attached, but the rest of your body is still being pulled downward. Trying to stand on a wall just means falling, so wall-‘walking’ still looks like climbing.
That said, Marka wall-walks down toward the bloodbane climbing up the bridge. The stonework is damaged in her wake, her technique working by flooding the stone with enervate enough to anchor her, and pulling it back out when she lifts the leg.
Engaging the bloodbane like this, from the side, only half of her opponent’s limbs can reach her. When the bane tries to turn, hanging by only two legs, Marka punishes this by slicing at those legs, aiming to cause a fall. Her opponent gives up on that.
“What?” Marka says. “No more teasing remarks now?”
The response is only a wordless growl. The bloodbane isn’t trying to fight her now, and has instead return focused to trying to climb away.
Not up the bridge though. Angwi is jabbing tentacles into cracks and the space between bricks, climbing diagonally up the wall away from Marka. At the same time, her legs hold on to the bridge, carrying it with the bane as they move away.
The purpose of this becomes clear, as the bloodbane lets go of the bricks, and the the bridge swings downward at Marka, weight of the bloodbane behind it.
The enervate she’d put in the wall is lost as she’s forced to jump backward.
Like that, with the blackbane deterred, Angwi is free to climb upward. It’s a race, and one the bloodbane will win: skilled as Marka is, wall-walking requires effort a natural action like climbing does not.
But there’s a fire burning atop the trunk main’s opening, waiting for the bane to reach the top. In the time Marka had engaged the climbing bane, Wik has found a way across the chasm, its burning staff aimed at the face.
Angwi is looking back at the wide platform – no, lower, at the ladder descending into darkness. “Essi! It took you long enough to get here!”
Marka looks, and more importantly, so does Wik. But it’s another fucking trick, and even that distracted moment is enough for her to swing tentacles at Wik and climb up.
Angwi gets her footing, and before Wik has a chance to counterattack, she crouches. “Honestly, I think… I don’t want to fight you two without backup. Let me go see what Essi’s actually up to.” And with that, she leaps. From her spot on the wall, Marka watches the bloodbane soar across the divide, and land back on the wide platform. It’s swaying more now, with one of its four supports cut off.
But Angwi gives one last look up, at Marka. “You… you fought well. You’re a worthy opponent, maybe even an… intimfeind? What’s your name, little Warden?”
“Marka.”
“Marka. Fight me again. I’ll be waiting.”
And with that, she’s hopping off the platform, three remaining tentacle trailing behind her as she careens into the dark, unused rope ladder right beside her.
Marka climbs up to Wik. She finds the tallowbane has dug blocks of wax out of its bag, and melts them over a flame, applying the wax to open wounds. Marka wasn’t quite prepared for the wounds she saw, entire chunks of the tallowbane’s thorax having looked to have been scooped out.
“Did we… did we win?”
“I consider it a victory. Thanks to you, she lost one raptorial, on top of whatever minor injuries we inflicted. What did we lose? Aside from the wax I lost and the enervate you presumbly lost, our injuries seem to be all minor. Right? Are you okay, Marka?”
“She probably fractured a bone in my raptorial. I think I lost an ocelli from the rocks that one mantis was throwing. I probably have some bruising in my soft bits from some of the hits to my armor? But I think I’ll be alright.”
Wik nods and makes some sound of agreement. When it’s done apply new wax to its bleeding wounds, it stands, and they walk.
It’s now clear how Wik was able to to run over here even with the ropes cut. There is a narrow – almost too narrow to comfortably walk – path of outjutting stone around the perimeter of the room. They make it to another bridge, and cross back to the center platform.
Marka is staring down the ladder, dreading to see the bloodbane climbing back up, maybe even with the mysterious Essi in tow. What if they were twice as strong as Angwi was?
Wik, though, is looking at the slumped form of a gangster. They had seen heads poking up and watching them as the fight had concluded, but none of the gangsters had gotten up.
One of them is fidgeting, and listening to their grunted crescendo of complaints, Marka remembers what Wik had said about binding the gangsters.
“What the fuck is this you put on my legs? Wax?”
“We have to figure out what we’re going to do about these mantids,” the tallowbane says. “Too many for us to carry without many trips. If we leave them here, I worry about them coming up behind us. I do have a seditative, ketamine, but I wonder if it’s a form of assault, to leave them here for an extended period, breathing the sewer fumes.”
“I know you can hear me. Let me up, will you? If Angwi couldn’t beat you, i know there’s no way I stand a chance.”
“Your thoughts, Marka?”
“Hey!” It’s not the nearby gangster complaining this time. By the opening where the bloodbane had waited for them – what feels like a very long time ago – there’s a mantis.
The rock-thrower! She has a rock in grasp even now, holding it up as if it some defense.
Marka isn’t scared – even if the rock hitting them would do something, she doesn’t expect it’d actually hit home. Mantids didn’t throw things, it wasn’t a natural way to hunt. They weren’t shit-flinging monkeys.
Still, Wik nods at them, and watches as if waiting for what they have to say.
“You don’t want to keep doing this, vesperbanes. It’s not just us you’re going up against, you know. We have investors. Vesperbane investors! He won’t like you affecting his business like this.”
“Felme,” Wik says. “We know. We made arrangements with him before.”
You can see the moment the hope dies, their antennae falling limply down. “Okay, okay. Look. How about… I’ll help you. I can help you.”
Wik again waits.
“You’re not here to fight us – that wasn’t your intention, right? What was it, robbery? You wanted our goods? I can show you were we keep them.”
“We don’t need help navigating your base.”
There’s another bit of disappointment that flickers across her expression. But it’s not total, this time. “There’s more to it than that. There’s a special safe, made out of the weird metal. All shiny curves and some dark bits blacker than night. You can’t get it open without a special opener thing –” “A key?” “– No, it doesn’t look like a key. The boss has it, and she’s down in the catacombs.”
“Thanks for the tip?”
“Down in the catacombs, where Angwi just went?” She emphasizes, tone codescending. “Where the other freak already is? Here’s what I’m offering: we’ll help you. You’re not going to kill and eat us, are you? You’re not like those monsters boss hired.”
“Sis, what are you on about?” The gangster bound on the platform calls. “That’s mutiny.”
“So? Ain’t we the children of E’yama? Mantids were made to betray from the beginning.”
“That’s different. That was for a higher purpose.”
“And this isn’t? I don’t think we deserve to get fucking… predated upon by vesperbanes that are supposed to be on our side. Way I see it, Angwi was the first mutineer, not us.”
“Cut it out,” says Wik. “That’s your offer? You’ll help us… fight Angwi?”
“Yeah. More than that, we can go back to the base. I’m sure I can get a few more of the gang to side with us. And the rest… well, you can handle them, right? Tie ’em up with wax or whatever?” The gangster drops their rock. “Point is, numbers have got to mean something, right? Even in a fight between vesperbanes, a dozen of us will give her pause.”
“And it won’t just be her, will it?” Marka finally says something. “If the boss is down in the catacombs, it’s surely not just her and the vesperbane. We overheard one of you saying something about excavation teams.”
“Yeah,” the rock-thrower says. “Yeah. And that’s another reason to mutiny. What the hell are we doing fucking around underground?” She looks between the two vesperbanes. “Y’all wouldn’t know anything about this, but the change was quick enough to scare you. One day the boss turned around with this singleminded obsession with digging something out of the catacombs, got vesperbanes to invest in the pursuit, hired vesperbanes to help, and she doesn’t even say what the hell this is about.”
“Is it a termite ark… arcology? Down beneath the city?”
“A whatnow?”
Even Wik turns to cock a head at Marka.
“It would explain the weird weapon you have,” she starts, then digs in her memory of the conversation she overhead. “Murt. That’s the one I chased around town? He had a magic device?”
“Yep. Boss loaned it out. Got them along with the new safe. Won’t say where she got them, but we didn’t get it from the catacombs, no. We had it before we started excavating.”
The excavations the gang had been doing must be the thing causing the collapses down in the catacombs. “Essi, do they have something do with the excavations? What can they do?”
“Fuck all. Boss keeps them down in the tunnels cause they can’t do shit in a fight. Some tricks with the black magic vesperbanes get up to. Main thing she does is create these bomb-orbs that explode, it’s what we’re using to dig through the catacombs. But she’s clumsy, would probably struggle to fight off a rat.”
Wik asks, “Anything else you want to volunteer? No? Then back off while I discuss this with my partner.”
Wik starts walking down one of the bridges to put distance between them and the gangsters on the platform.
“What time is it?”
Marka takes the timepiece out. It was deep enough into the evening that the sun would begin setting.
“Didn’t think this would take half the day, but here we are.” Wik gives her a serious look. “Well, you heard what they have to say. My opinion is unchanged on the immorality of what this gang has done and will continue to do. But I don’t think I’d ever wish the tortures Angwi delights in inflicting on anyone.” A head-shake, and another attempt to get to the point: “Do you think we can trust them?”
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What will Marka do with the gang members?
OPTION 1.A: Keep the gang bound, and proceed without them.
OPTION 1.B: Free the gang members, and let them help you.
Where will Marka go next?
OPTION 2.A: Keep going to the gang’s base, and see what you can find in the treasury. Everything of value can’t be in that magic safe, and even then, is it impossible that between Marka’s skill with enervate and Wik’s skill at picking, they could crack a termite lock?
OPTION 2.B: Go straight down into the catacombs without giving Angwi time to lick her wounds or hostile gangsters time to lay traps.
And, more abstractly, how will Marka approach combat going forward?
OPTION 3.A: Continue offering quarter and mercy to all opponents.
OPTION 3.B: Act more effective and ruthlessly. The gang wouldn’t treat her differently if roles were reversed, and Marka’s sense of honor is becoming a liability.
Will you spare Angwi, given the chance?
Is there anything that Marka knows about Dlenam that has not been made manifest in either the Eifre or Marka quests so far?
Marka has not heard the name ‘Dlenam’ since she returned to Wentalel. It’s familiar, and she’s certainly heard it before, but there’s no face or title that would immediately come to mind if she heard it.
From her understanding, the arch-fiend of Wentalel is a lightning rod for interest and criticism, being not just male, but clanless. What she’s heard from her usual place far from her town of birth is mixed. He’s been engaged in a proactive crackdown on the rogue element of Wentalel, he’s garnered something at a distance approaching respect from Church-aligned syndics, and he has outspoken enemies among the clans.
Marka doesn’t care much about Wentalel, and she doesn’t care much for the weeds of politics. To her, the arch-fiend of Wentalel is no more than the arch-fiend of any other city in the Plains, and there are many.
Also how are joint vesperbane-Vindicator teams typically structured?
They aren’t. Vesperbanes and vindicators are about as inclined to work together as soldiers of armistice’d nations were, in the days before the Pantheca. In the heartlands, the Vindicators serve two specific purposes: one is to police and deter vesperbane defects, and two is as a response to certain classes of world-scars, such as crepuscular vesperbanes, termite mounds, or black nerve catastrophes.
Incidentally, banes and vindicators may both be a part of a response to events like these, but it’s better to think of it as working toward the same ends or against the same problem, rather than working together, as a team.
(There are exceptions to this, of course. Most famous being the Helldive Expedition in Vehna’s Abyss. Infamous, rather, as the endeavor was in all senses a disaster).
Who are Nemecha and Osfe? We should ask Wik; this can shed light onto how exactly the crackdown is going (and how ethically it’s being conducted).
“Did you know Osfe and Nemecha?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Felme mentioned them, right? Captured in the arch-fiend’s new crackdown? I’m wondering what you think about that.”
Wik briskly stridulates. “Osfe was a drug producer. Nemecha was an extremist welkinist.”
“Well, do you think it was justified? Is the arch-fiend doing the right thing?”
“Nemecha was an Oosifea-worshipper, to the point she even had ties to the Kult of Kaos. Osfe, though… I knew him. Not personally, but we had worked together occasionally. He was an idiot. Was he intentionally bad? No, I believe he didn’t mean harm. But he couldn’t seem to grasp that he might indirectly contribute — vesper-made drugs can be nastily addictive, and the gangs he worked with… But he didn’t see any of that from his lab. And it eventually got to the point I couldn’t abet it any longer.”
“So it’s good he’s gone?”
“With him gone, there’s room for worse mantids, ones who might truly not care about doing harm. But his capture is a political fortune for some. The Wentalel Stewartry used to have a program providing training and resources to Mavericks. It was highly unpopular — when most think of Mavericks, they don’t imagine the vesperbanes who are the same as any warden or stewart but with no institution behind them, they think of criminals with a fig leaf of legality. And Osfe? He came out of one those programs.”
… “Kult of Kaos”?
There’s a few tracks you could take to answer the question of just what the Kult of Kaos is. A comprehensive answer could go as far back as the priests of vesper in the Myriad Kingdoms. But we’ll start with the fall of the Second Dominion.
Before the end of the era of hope, Oosifea was destroyed, but not the Angels of Oosifea. Oosifea herself had opposed the Disenthralled Rebellion, because they betrayed her and killed her daughter, because their plans for the heartlands were utter naivety, and because (if you believe some theories – unconfirmed for the paucity of primary sources that survived the fall) her empire had slaves.
Many of the Angels of Oosifea dedicated themselves to furthering her vision. At first, that meant – however reluctantly – allying themselves with the bats. When the bats lost the war, that meant opposing and sabotaging the Alliance. When it proved more resilient than could be expected, they grew more subtle, and aimed to subvert the fledgling democracy.
An account of just how the Alliance fell is also outside the scope of this, but suffice it to say it ended in tyrannies like the Third Dominion.
When the tyrannies collapsed, when the nymphs of the dream brought mantids new hope and unification, a new democracy resulted, one that defined itself by learning from the mistakes of the past.
And one the essential lessons learned was that a democracy could not survive undemocratic elements seeking power. The Alliance’d had a party of Welkinists nostalgic for the days of the Second Dominion.
And the heartlands today still has those who would defend, deny, or reinstate the Third Dominion. The Kult of Kaos, though we’d dare describe no specifics of their doctrines, is one such group. They shouldn’t be allowed to fester, and they certainly can’t be allowed among the syndics. So the Kult is an clandestine thing, made of whispers and strange rituals at night.
Clandestine, but not subtle — the mantids who disappear, or are found impaled on spikes as the nymphs of dream were, are evidence of the Kult’s presence. And to some, the words and actions of certain syndics betray sympathies.
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