Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Patriarchy" data-source="post: 71106" data-attributes="member: 162">You don’t smell blood at first. What you smell is sweat, and onions, and the damp mold-skin that every tent in the Dusk Market wears this late in summer. The canvas sweats like the bodies underneath it, keeping the filth close, trapping the rot and the gossip and the sting of foreign spice all under one sagging canopy. A city learns to keep secrets when the sun goes down, and I’ve always been a quick learner.Most folk think the Dusk Market is just another Varisian pit: get drunk, haggle for jewelry, or end up behind a stall for a quick ten-copper lay. But that’s only the first layer. Scratch the paint and the whole place is crawling with grave-robbers, relic-peddlers, and—if you know where to look—monsters that make whores and cutthroats seem honest by comparison.I move with the crowd, hands in my pockets, the cowl of my coat shadowing everything but the angle of my nose and the promise of iron beneath. My father always said I looked like a jackal waiting for the kill; my mother preferred “cocky little shit,” but she’s long dead and probably right. The crossbow sits beneath my arm, balanced on the leather strap that cuts across my chest. It’s not the kind you show off. It’s the kind you pull out only after the talking fails.The mark tonight is obvious from a hundred feet away. They always are, if you watch what doesn’t fit: too pale, too pretty, never sweating, never touching the food. He wears a coat like mine, but older, faded, blood-stained at the cuffs if you know how to spot it. His eyes flicker, not just from left to right, but up and down and up again, as if he’s cataloguing every throat within reach. That’s how you know.The girl is the usual type—dark-haired, gaudy bangles at wrist and ankle, eyes too wide and hungry for the promise she thinks she’s buying. She doesn’t see the hand on her elbow until it’s already tightening. By then she’s three steps down the alley, then five, then gone behind the tanner’s stall. Nobody follows. Nobody wants to get involved with that kind of transaction.I break off from the river of bodies, two steps behind a scribe in a piebald cloak, slip down the alley, and let the darkness press in. The noises die behind me. The wet slap of flesh against stone is all I need for confirmation.He’s got her pinned to a crate, her skirts rucked up and her legs kicking in lazy, dying circles. The mouth is wide—wider than it ought to be—and the teeth are no stage costume. He hisses when I rack the crossbow, an animal sound, no words in it. She slumps to the side, half-dead or more. He hisses again, licks the blood from his lips, and then the world slows down to a perfect line.One. The first quarrel takes him in the neck, just left of the larynx. His hands go up like he’s surprised, but not for long.Two. The second quarrel drills through the left eye, tearing a neat black spiral out the back of his head. He staggers back, already forgetting how to be upright, already a relic instead of a man.Three. The last is for insurance: through the heart, the way Professor Lorrimor taught me. Vampire spawns are bad at dying, but they’re worse at surviving with three holes in them.He doesn’t explode into dust or anything fancy. The body hits the ground like a dropped side of beef. The girl crawls away, leaking red down her throat and sobbing in a language that doesn’t care if I understand. I don’t chase her. She’ll live, or she won’t. The monster won’t.My hands don’t shake. Never have. You do this kind of work enough, you stop feeling it at all. The only thing I feel is the click of the next bolt sliding into place, the tension in the string, the silence after the scream.Footsteps. Someone else at the mouth of the alley, breathing too shallow and too quick to be anything but a city cop. I’m already gone, back through the side lanes, back into the stink and shimmer of the crowd.Nobody notices the blood on my boots, or if they do, they pretend not to. I drift toward the exit, feeling the eyes on my back—vendors and guards, fortune-tellers, cut-rate healers. It’s all the same. I keep moving until the city opens up and the river mist licks around my ankles, washing the taste of Dusk Market from my tongue.Another job done. Another night in Ustalav.The pay won’t be much, but the real reward is the quiet. No more girls dead behind stalls. At least, not tonight.I keep my head low and count the silver in my palm, just to make sure.He always waits until the job is finished. Never one to risk an extra heartbeat, never one to miss the aftermath.Professor Petros Lorrimor materializes at the mouth of the alley, as if he’d been there the whole time—just out of sight, just out of reach, like the punchline to a bitter joke. He picks his steps carefully, boot-heels silent against the mud, his robe as dark and practical as anything I’ve ever owned. The man’s hair has more salt than ink these days, and the lines on his face map the difference between book-learning and real learning. You can spot the grave-dirt even in this light; it clings to the wool like a badge of office.“Efficient,” he says, with a voice so quiet it’s almost apologetic.“Had the easy kind, this one.” I nudge the corpse with the toe of my boot. The spawn’s head lolls, one eye looking nowhere, the other a neat hole of leaking jelly. “Could’ve made more of a show, if that’s what you wanted.”“Spectacle has its place.” He glances at the girl, now a blurred memory in the distance, her silhouette shrinking as she flees back to the safety of the main avenue. “But efficiency is rarer. And safer. You saved her life, and probably three more.”He squats beside the body, gives it a quick once-over. The fingertips prod the wounds, testing the depth, checking the signs. “Three bolts. Three vital points. Very precise, Mr. Ionescu.”It’s always “Mr. Ionescu,” like we’re colleagues or rivals instead of just the professor and his hired hand. I watch him work, admiring the speed of his inspection. He flips the body over, digs in the pockets, pulls out a red silk handkerchief (ruined), a scrap of parchment, and—of course—a stoppered vial of blood. Academic curiosity more than greed.“Brings you out yourself, does it?” I nod to the professor’s own crossbow, slung under his coat. It’s custom, Dwarven made, nothing like mine. Probably worth more than my life.“These nights, I prefer to see things first-hand. Too many rumors, not enough data.” His eyes are sharp as butcher knives when he says it.He takes out a leather pouch from his inside pocket—heavy, rounded, the sound of coin unmistakable even before it lands in my palm. No counting required. It’ll be right, down to the last copper.“Next job?” I ask, stowing the pay at my belt. I never spend it all at once. One of the first lessons he taught me.He rises, dusts off his knees, then wipes his hands with the dead man’s own handkerchief. “There will always be a next job. But for tonight, enjoy your success.” He eyes the corpse again, the way some people admire the glasswork in a cathedral. “They’re getting braver, or hungrier. You’ll be in touch.”The alley is already losing its chill. In another few minutes, the market will reclaim the space, and someone will sweep the body into the river. The vendors are back to their banter, hawking everything from candied locusts to bad jewelry. If they see the professor and me, they don’t care. If they care, they won’t say.He turns to go, and for a moment I think he’ll say something more—maybe a lecture, maybe a joke. But he just nods, half bow, half favor, then walks back into the current of the city.I watch the crowd for a while, just to see if the world noticed. It didn’t.And I’m left, again, in the honest company of the dead.The best thing about this line of work is how quickly you stop caring about the calendar. Summer warps into autumn, autumn warps into winter, and with every shift in the sky there’s another mess, another monster, another payday. I’ve done worse jobs for less.The professor keeps his promises. Every few weeks he sends a note by way of some half-literate street runner—always in code, always tucked into the pages of some trash novel or medical journal. The notes are never more than one line, like a punch delivered straight to the teeth: “Midnight. Lorrimor Crypt. Wear boots.” Or: “Earl Smolak’s manor. South wing, after curfew. Use discretion.” The first time I asked what he meant by “use discretion,” he just looked at me with those pale little fish eyes and said, “If I need to explain, you aren’t my man.” We never discussed it again.The jobs themselves are never pretty, never clean. There’s no glamour in ghostbusting, no medals for putting a bolt through something that already smells like dirt. The best you get is a quiet street and the hush that follows when the city realizes it can breathe again.*First: the cemetery job. A full moon, but so thick with fog you could drown if you breathed too hard. The professor waits at the gate, all hunched in his thick black coat, scribbling in a little leather-bound book. He barely looks up when I hop the fence and land next to him.“You said ghoul,” I mutter. “I only see empty graves.”“They prefer the fresh ones,” he replies. He gestures to a headstone—new, the flowers still bright against the dirt. He hands me a spade. “Dig. Quietly.”This is how I know he likes me. He doesn’t waste time on pleasantries. He only makes me dig half the grave before the soil underneath slithers and pops, and the thing comes up clawing at the edge. Its face is ruined, lips stretched away from the gums, eyes blank as fish eggs. It moves faster than any man. But the professor’s already ready: one hand on a flask of silvered salt, the other on a stake. He lobs the flask into its mouth and lets me take the finish. Crossbow at three feet, right under the jaw. Instant silence.He watches, impassive, as I yank the bolt free and stomp the head in for good measure. “You learn quickly,” he says. “Most take twice as long and need three times the mess.”I shrug. “It’s easier when you’re not screaming.”He seems to approve.Payment: five gold, unmarked, wrapped in wax paper and smelling faintly of cloves.*Next: the nobleman’s library. By now we’re in matching coats, which is either a joke or a sign I’m moving up in the world. The manor is all velvet drapes and gilded wood, the kind of place that makes my fingernails itch just thinking about all the things I could pawn.“You brought a crowbar, yes?” he says.I tap my belt. “Always.”This time, it’s not a ghoul, but something subtler. The “nobleman” is standing at the head of a long, candlelit table, mouth full of black beetles, speaking words that make the candle flames gutter and bow. His guests are frozen, eyes wide, drool slipping from their lips.The professor points. “The spirit is inside him. Needs extraction.”“Anything that works on people?” I ask, already knowing the answer.He gives me a little glass knife. “Through the eye. Don’t miss.”I don’t.The beetles scream when I stab, and the man convulses, then collapses. The guests return to themselves, blinking, lost. The professor is already wiping down the knife with his own handkerchief.Payment: fifteen silver, a bottle of scotch, and the promise of my name never being mentioned in the house ledger.*Third: a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, with wind cold enough to crack your skin. The professor says he needs a witness for a “banishment,” but brings two extra crossbows, just in case. There’s a scarecrow nailed to a post, and every time the wind shifts, its mouth moves a little more.“Ignore the voice,” he warns me. “Just aim for the heart if it pulls free.”I spend the next two hours watching him paint the ground with chalk and pig’s blood. The scarecrow gets louder, and soon enough it’s cursing me in the voices of people I’ve killed, which is supposed to rattle me but mostly just makes me homesick.When the straw man finally rips off the post and comes for him, I fire twice—shoulder, leg—then close the distance and finish with a hatchet, just to be sure. The professor never even looks up from his work.This time, the payment is a thick wool scarf and a new set of boots. They fit perfectly.*It goes like this for months. Sometimes there’s banter, sometimes not. Sometimes I get the feeling he’s testing me, watching how far he can push before I snap or quit or ask questions I’m not supposed to ask. But the jobs keep coming, and the city gets a little bit less haunted every week. I never see him at the same place twice. He’s always on the move, always blending in—sometimes with a scholar’s air, sometimes like an undertaker, always a little out of step with the world around him. I like that. I trust that. He never tries to impress me, never promises what he can’t deliver.Every job is the same, in the end. I get the note. I show up, kill the thing, wipe my hands, take the pay. But every so often, after a kill or a close call, the professor will linger—just a second, just long enough to drop some wisdom or a warning.“History is written by the survivors, Mr. Ionescu.”Or: “Curiosity is a fine quality, but discretion is rarer still.”He never tells me why we do it. Never explains the big picture. Sometimes I wonder if he even knows.But that’s the thing about being a mercenary in Ustalav: you don’t need to know why. The monsters are real, the pay is real, and the world doesn’t mourn either one of us if we vanish into the mud.I don’t ask for more. I just do the job, and keep my boots dry.*The last job before the old man’s death is nothing special. Just a farmhouse, a lockbox full of teeth, and a starving man who doesn’t know he’s already a corpse. The professor gives me the sign, I go in, it’s done in seconds. He gives me the usual nod, the usual half-smile, and that’s that.I never expect to hear from him again.Funny thing is, I miss it before I realize I miss it.There are worse ways to make a living. There are worse men to work for.But now it’s just me, and a city that isn’t getting any quieter.# Scene 4Graveyards never scared me. At worst, they’re just collections of names and the stories people pretend to remember. At best, they’re honest—no talk, no politics, no surprises. You show up, plant the body, pretend you meant all the nice things you said, and then go back to rotting in your own skin. There are worse ways to make a living.Ravengro’s Restlands is the kind of cemetery that looks like it was born knowing the weight of the local souls. No marble angels, no cherubs, just mud and stones and the kind of iron fence that never quite keeps out what it’s supposed to. The morning is as gray as the stones, mist rolling off the marsh and up the hill in slow, damp waves. A crow sits on every third marker, black eyes beading at the living like they’re here for a last meal.I take my place a good ten feet from the crowd, just inside the gate, hands in pockets, the stock of my crossbow tucked under one arm like a cheap umbrella. There are only a handful of mourners—farmers mostly, the same ones I’ve seen in the market, the same ones who stare a little too long when they think I’m not watching. Small towns don’t trust outsiders. Especially ones who show up with a reputation and a professional grade weapon slung casual.Kendra Lorrimor is the first to spot me. She stands at the head of the fresh-dug grave, back as straight as if she’s holding up the sky by herself. She’s young—twenty-five at most—but there’s something about her eyes that says she’s already spent half a lifetime on the business end of heartbreak. Today she wears mourning black, her hair pinned with a scholar’s neatness, but she’s the only one in the crowd with the polish to make it look like more than a costume.When she calls our names, it’s with that soft, bruised politeness that only truly exhausted people can manage. “Skender. Rafael. Thank you both for joining us.” She pauses, the corners of her mouth pinched tight, the words gathering behind her teeth like tinder. “And for the… discretion you showed earlier. Father would have appreciated it.”Garrick the gravedigger—tall, rawboned, cap pulled low over his sweat-dark hair, chewing weed squashed between his teeth—spits into the mud and grins at us. “Told ’em you’d box their ears if they ever tried that with a paying guest. Nobody listens to old Garrick.”The crowd murmurs, damp and low as the morning fog. One of the women—broad-shouldered, sunburned arms, hair tied back with a faded red rag—turns to Kendra and says, “Those boys have been running wild since their ma let ’em loose. Somebody oughta thank these outsiders for teaching ’em respect.” She sounds amused, but her eyes are solemn, as if she means every word.Kendra’s gaze flicks to us, something like surprise flashing across her features. She straightens, steels her voice. “The attack was unprovoked. I apologize deeply for any danger this incident has caused the town.” Her tone is measured but warm. “I’m grateful you handled it.”A laugh slips out of me before I can swallow it. “Didn’t want to spoil the day with more paperwork, ma’am.” A few of the men chuckle, and even Father Donovan—short, round-faced, eyes like pickled onions—cracks a smile behind his prayer book.She gives me a look I know well: as if the world’s script just rewrote itself and she’s trying to catch up. “Be that as it may, we’re all thankful for your presence. Father held you both in the highest esteem. Please—stand with us, if you’d like.” The hand she lifts trembles just a hair; I doubt anyone but me notices.</blockquote>

Name

Verification

Layout Options

Color Schemes

Reply to thread