She was okay, of course. It looked bad to Rose, but Decima said she’d fought through worse. “It missed my lung. Didn’t even tear the muscle much, really. I was very lucky.” She’d told Rose that the shaking and wobbling was just her body “noticing that it got shot” which seemed awfully bad to Rose, but Decima seemed to consider it par for the course (though Rose did notice her favoring the other side).
By the time her chest was bound, so were the attackers. The ones who lived, anyway. Rose wasn’t a physician, but she was pretty sure that the headless woman wasn’t going to make it.
So that left a brown and bald dwarf man, a dark skinned individual wearing a dusty violet shirt under a dark jerkin, and another fellow with the sort of golden brown skin tone common in Ursaea and sporting the sort of top knot that implied that background a lot more clearly than the skin ever did. And the orange masked fool. Now that he was bound with his hands behind his back and kneeling like the rest, he seemed less absurd and a little more seasoned. His black beard was one of the thickest Rose had ever seen and his dark hair was wild and tousled, mostly due to falling on his face and being struck hard. He was the least awake of the group. Purple shirt was burned in several places and winced every time he moved. The dwarf looked perfectly comfortable as if he could kneel with his hands behind his back forever. It reminded Rose of Opal. Top-knot was also burned, even worse than purple shirt with one arm almost entirely useless, probably forever but he didn’t wince as much. He was probably the hardest of them.
Rose sat before orange mask because, you know, they had developed a sort of rapport, she thought. She’d seen his eyes, she’d beaten him pretty badly, it was a whole thing. Maybe this was the beginning of their epic love story. But she also held onto the baton. Because she was not stupid. She prodded him a bit with it to get his attention.
He focused his hazy gaze on her and seemed disappointed, somehow. He spoke with an accent that she didn’t quite recognize, but he also didn’t have long to speak. “Fek, I can’t believe I got dropped by a crip -” His head was smashed before he got the rest of it out. He wasn’t unconscious, but he hit the ground, dazed, his voice slurring as if he thought he was getting the rest of his words out. Rose was surprised because, rather unexpectedly, she hadn’t been the one to hit him. Decime was standing behind him. Rose hasn’t even seen her there. She looked at the woman who nodded. And winked. She winked!
Purple shirt loudly said, “Don’t look at me, I like the chair. Suits you.” Rose decided maybe he could be the recipient of the epic love story. As she moved to face him she heard top-knot beside him say, “Grace isn’t here. They killed her.”
“She tried to kill me first,” said Decima. “I gave her the professional courtesy of responding in kind.”
Top-knot looked deeply offended, but kept his mouth shut about it. Purple shirt seemed to have had the wind taken out of him by the exchange, but he was still watching Rose. Rose gave him a brief smile. “Who the shit are you guys? Did someone send you?”
“What?” said purple-shirt. “No, we just …. look, usually we just take what we can grab and run. That was the plan, but then that shit with the lantern happened and,” he glanced at orange mask, making a queasy face, “it just went badly. We didn’t know you were so … capable. That fire thing. Really very terrible.” He gave a light shudder.
Rose looked from purple shirt to top-knot and over to the dwarf. Top-knot looked less terrified than purple shirt, but even he looked shaken. The only one without a sense of being totally fucked was the dwarf, so she spun to look at him. “Okay, look …. hey, did I hear someone say that you hit me in the leg?”
The dwarf finally let confusion cross his face. He looked from Rose to the chair and back up. “I assumed it would immobilize you.” He made an inscrutable face, but Rose suspected it was the dwarven equivalent of embarrassment.
“I thought so.” Rose could see that her knee was swelling through her pants. It was rare that she considered herself lucky where legs are concerned, but she was very pleased not to have to think about it right now. She turned to Decima. “These are just low rent crooks. They’re not some plan, they’re poor and hungry and they probably do this shit to anyone who comes this way.
“Nonsense!” said purple shirt, seemingly offended enough not to notice that he was interrupting while bound at both ends. “Only people who seem well equipped and never more than once every other day. We are not monsters!”
Decima said, without rising and without much emotion, “Your soft hearted archer tried to shoot me in the stomach.”
Top-knot looked angry, but purple shirt just shrugged. “Grace was new. She got nervous. Excellent shot, but not much, uhh, nerve.” Orange mask was wiggling around to a sitting position now, but thought better of opening his mouth. Rose caught Emrys looking at her, his face full of all the empathy that she knew damned well would be there. It’s the whole reason she’d been avoiding looking at him in the first place. But there was his stupid sausage scented face. He didn’t say, “you know we’re going to have to let them go,” but he may as well have.
It was loud enough that Rose said, “I know!” much to his surprise. “Alright, fine,” she said, sliding the baton back into her chair. “We’re going to have to let you lot go.” At Decima’s surprised look Rose just shrugged. “What? I’m not a guard, you’re not in the army anymore, and we don’t exactly have a handy place to put them. If we leave them tied up we might as well be executing them.” Decima seemed as though she wasn’t as opposed to that idea as Rose was, but to be fair, Decima had been shot in the tit.
“Fine,” said Decima in a tone of voice so as to communicate that it was certainly not fine, “But we take their weapons.”
Top-knot said, “And rob us of our trade?” It took him a full ten seconds of being stared at very hard by Decima to realize what he’d just said, probably a testament to how upset he was. “Do you think I enjoy this life, soldier? Broken from my liege oaths, my familiar taken from me, living off of the scraps of peasants?” He screwed his face up and turned to look at the fire. “Fine. Take them. I have had nothing before. I will survive it again.”
Rose looked at her companions who seemed to have the same number of words as she did, but eventually she said, “Yeah, well, that pretty much killed the mood for the second time tonight, but we can’t leave you armed and walk away and just cross our fingers that you don’t follow us and kill us in our sleep.”
Purple shirt shook his head. “This is not our way. Besides, you defeated us easily when we outnumbered you.”
“So we just leave you to kill other people you DO outnumber? Yeah, very noble of us,” Rose replied, almost without thinking. Purple shirt looked like he wanted to say that nobody ever died, but he lost heart a moment into it. He just shrugged. Everyone was silent for a long moment, the night air filled mostly with crickets.
“What would you have us do?” asked the dwarf. “Our lives are in your hands and if you make a demand of us that is fair, I swear to you on the stone of my mothers that I will hold us to it.” Decima seemed impressed judging by how her eyebrows went up. Rose wasn’t sure what it even meant, but it had the sound of an oath. More than that, she had no other alternative, really, so she seized on it.
“Right. Yeah. Good, We accept. Let us just …. we’re going to have a little chat about what it is we demand for a bit and we’ll be right back, yeah?” She got about five feet before she heard it. A sort of a hooting noise. It warbled and echoed in the night. When the second sound came ringing out it was more of a whoop than a hoot. What in the mad gods was that?
The reaction from the thieves was more dramatic. Purple shirt began to yell, “No! Oh no, please. Please, if you do not wish to see us die, then you must release us!”
Top-knot was steeling himself. “Don’t bother, Gregano. Face your death with courage.”
Orange mask was less stalwart. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, the half man! I told you he was going to fuck us! I told you!”
Rose whirled on him. “Half man? When? Where?” But orange face mask was freaking himself right out with cries of, “that freaking bastard lied to us!” and Rose heard another whoop, closer this time. She moved toward Decima and Emrys. “What now?”
Emrys seemed grim. “I have just recently dismissed one powerful ally, and the magic I use to call him forth will not allow him to return. Decima is a powerful ally, but she is also wounded.”
Decima waved him off. “I’ve had worse just this week,” but then she hesitated. “But maybe we should release them. We don’t know what this is, but they seem to know.” Rose nodded without even looking around.
“Obviously.” She wheeled over to orange face mask. “Tell me about the man you saw.” but she was drowned out by Decima demanding information from the dwarf about what was coming.
“Don’t know,” he said, standing and casting about for his cudgel. “He summoned three of them when we encountered him at sunset. It was a threat, but we backed off.” The dwarf frowned and said to himself, “should have known today would be cursed when I cracked that stone sideways…” He looked up as a new whoop echoed through the night, much much closer this time. Too close.
Emrys was speaking desperately to nobody, trying to call up some elemental intelligence and by the sound of it he wasn’t having too much luck. Decima was cutting the last of the bonds away from top-knot and just turning towards orange face mask when the thing struck.
The pisser was, they should have seen it coming. It hit them faster than Rose would have thought possible. It’s like it slid out around a corner that nobody but it could access. Rose didn’t even see it apart from as a smear in the light until the Dwarf was bleeding. He let out a scream and Rose looked to see the thing that had him. It was large – around the length of a cow, but lower to the ground, like a lizard. The skin reflected in the firelight like scales, but the face was almost feline save for the mouth that was too wide to possibly be attached to the face. It almost blurred out at the edges as the dwarf’s dark blood dripped from the needle-like teeth.
Seeing that it had been spotted cleanly, it backed up, but it didn’t fully let go of the chunk it had taken from the dwarf, and the secondary scream and tearing sound that followed was worse than the initial noise. It slunk back a few feet on four – fire – maybe six legs? The number wasn’t consistent. The tail – also feline, but scaled – lashed about behind it and there was a faint glow to it, as if it was a smoldering branch it was trying to keep lit. It seemed familiar somehow.
But she didn’t have time to think about it, because the thing was set to spring again and nobody had even moved yet. Decima took care of that. Rose hadn’t even noticed that she’d retrieved the bow and arrow from the bandit woman, but the sound of the string launching the arrow was a welcome one.
The thing, whatever it was, moved almost before the bow finished making sound and well before the arrow would have struck it. “What?!” Decima must have been really flustered, she wasn’t prone to exclamation. Purple shirt – Gregano – broke and ran like mad into the night. Rose called out after him, but all she got out was, “No! Wait!” before she heard the sound of him screaming into a tumble as he went off the edge of the hillside they’d been camped on. It wasn’t technically too steep for him to have survived, but given the injuries he’d already sustained that night, she didn’t like his odds. She liked them even less because of how fast the screaming cut off. The beast glanced in the direction he’d gone. Was the tail dimmer? Anyway, whatever this thing was, it wasn’t primarily here for easy food, because it didn’t leave. Instead it looked back at the group of them. It politely shifted to the right, again, seemingly to slip around edges and corners that Rose couldn’t see, almost folding out of sight in places and then returning. Its eyes reflected the red of the fire cleanly and she could now see a long serpentine tongue extending from its maw. The moment it stepped right, the arrow struck where it had been. Rose could see Decima’s frustration as she dropped the bow and drew her long knife, advancing.
But the tail DID dim this time. It was doing something. Rose could almost sense it. What the shit was this thing doing? Rose decided it didn’t much matter right now. What she needed to do was distract it. She didn’t want to waste the time with a blast because she’d seen how effective the arrows were, so she tried a different tactic. “Hey, Ursaea! Throw something at it!” Top-knot looked like he wanted to be offended, but he was in no position to argue. He had a small staff, but it didn’t look like a throwing weapon, so he reached down for whatever was nearby. It turned out to be the leather wrap that Decima kept her bedroll wrapped in when it wasn’t in use. He shrugged and tossed it high. It would have to be good enough.
As the thing flew up and over the cat lizard monster thing – she’d need a better name later, but no time to think of that now – she let all her focus fall onto it. And onto the indisputable fact that it wasn’t a leather wrap, but a tightly bound net, ready to expand. She wasn’t great at rewriting things on this scale, but a net is simple enough that she was able to nail it down and a moment later, the thing was covered in netting. It wasn’t too solid, Rose didn’t think it would hold it, but it was better than nothing. And Decima didn’t hesitate.
She drove forward like a plow, the blade before her. The cat lizard mouth thing with too many limbs tried to twist to the side, and to its credit, it made a good show of it. The teeth tore into the net faster than Rose would have thought possible – the tail dimming slightly again- and one of its limbs actually seemed to be OUTSIDE the net clawing at it from the other side for a moment. It rolled to the side, but Decima adjusted course fast and the blade struck hard. Another whoop echoed and this time it was – shit, Rose wasn’t sure what it made her feel, but she knew for damned sure that it didn’t JUST come from the thing’s throat, beefy as it was. Decima dropped her arm and a claw contacted her armored forearm. Emrys spoke to the side.
<yuftah!>
The earth beneath the thing cracked loudly and opened up, taking at least half the beast into it, and stealing its leverage.
Now seemed like the time to strike and Rose drew her third eye’s focus sharply and unleashed the violet light found there at the thing. About two feet away from the thing, the blast stopped, having hit …. something? Nothing? She couldn’t see a shell of any sort around it, but she could almost feel it. While Rose was trying to figure that out, Decima’s blade went straight into the thing’s eye. The creature began to spasm, thrashing this way and that. Decima backed away from it, holding her blade out in front of herself defensively.
But the thing had no more real fight in it. The body was simply shuddering, like a bug you’ve killed the top half of. The legs twitched in and out of sight and the tail whipped around that corner nobody else could see and eventually the thing simply stopped moving, half in and half out of the world. Then it gave one last great shudder, and there was the sound of shattering glass and the whole of the creature snapped in one moment into a crystal of some sort laying on the ground with a faint red glow which faded into nothing as Rose watched. It left behind only a bland crystal which Emrys picked up and placed into a sack.
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