CHAPTER 4
A Hornet Steps into a Hive of Flies
I n an unremarkable tavern, on an unremarkable street, in an unremarkable corner of Audunpoint, a man sat with his feet up on the table of a bar, grayish-blue smoke pouring from a cigarette in his mouth and gathering into a puddle at his chair’s feet. On the table stood a bottle of liquor distilled from a fruit found only on Xaugeth. It was absolutely revolting and cost 500 dregs per bottle. But on the upside, it gained the mild prestige of costing such, and inflicted a clear-headed kind of intoxication that neither left a hangover nor harmed one’s health.
From his seat on the upper floor balcony, he surveilled his domain as some two dozen people, a mixture of civilians, contractors, and his subordinates, gambled away. The games were rigged, of course, but in a fair way; the odds were skewed in the house’s favor, was all, and anyone who won too much too quickly or even too consistently would be removed. Anything more overt drew too much trouble, and he was content with the profit margins as they were. The gambling was why this place was cheaper than others; the drinks were a loss leader, meant to get asses in seats and stupefy the gamblers’ risk assessment. Some of these innovations were his own, but most of what he used to make money hand over fist was based on advice from a friend who owned one of the great gambling houses in the Sultanate.
Cassius Hortator III was his name. He ruled over this one street, as a Hashem Family lieutenant managing this gambling house in addition to three front businesses. There was also the obvious protection racket, book forging, and a small waystation for the family’s butchering business. Below him were grunts and made men, though dealing with the latter required a more cautious hand since any made man could replace him if he fucked up. Above him stood the Three Bosses, and above them, Damrus Hashem himself. He was king in this area, and he had both the good wisdom to have eyes on every corner and the raw power to exterminate any invaders. At his rank, he was known for completely disproportionate firepower from a combination of six Lesser Eidolons and the ability to modify Red Reapers into a wide variety of aftermarket subtypes with adjusted properties.
Being part of the Hashem Family wasn’t all fleecing gamblers and screwing scaly Saurian whores, of course. Whenever serious shit went down, ripples carried out even to the clever, smaller fish that didn’t muddy up the pond, like Cassius. His high-priority tenants—people he had to house and protect, yet whose identities he wasn’t allowed to know—were being pissy and sending him requests for extra security. It was all because of that goatfuck at Slaughterhouse 9.
As far as he was aware, some power hungry idiot named Jahangir Panahi had sold out the family to church dogs by arranging for a Banisher Mamon Knight to get broken out of jail. All it got him was slaughtered by that same Mamon Knight and some buttfuck insane Anathemist. Or, so the story went.
Cassius was sure the facts differed, but he didn’t care. All that mattered was the shit on his shoulder and the face on his table. A shitty, exaggerated sketch of a razor grinned woman with charred skin and huge, absurdly puffy black hair. The verbal description, at least, was specific enough to get an idea of how she might really look.
He was under orders to report any sightings, to kill her if possible, or to obtain her gun by any means necessary. Of course, he wasn’t about to do any of that shit unless she waltzed herself straight into his line of sight.
Which, unfortunately, she did, and Cassius, though not a particularly brave or ambitious man, was a man of principle.
His cowardice and his principles fought inside him for the decision of whether to let her go or foolishly take a shot at her. At first, cowardice won. Alongside most of his subordinates, he watched the woman come in, play cards for half an hour, and leave twenty DDs richer. But he was a man of principle—so, he finished his cigarette, rose from his comfortable seat, and prepared himself alongside a handful of his subordinates to ambush her if she came this way again. That meant side alleys and street corners, the windows of the gambling house, every spot within around twenty meters of where he stood at that exact moment. This way, he could feel good about having done something without actually doing anything.
Meanwhile, Krahe walked straight into an apartment building filled with Vedesian Evoy, because that was the location of her contact, a broker not unlike Garvesh and one of the only individuals who knew something substantial about the Talisman Mistress.
The moment she laid eyes on the structure, with its blacked-out windows, she fully expected to be antagonized or even openly attacked. As she walked through its halls, somewhat to her disappointment, she only got hateful stares from beyond cracked open doors. Before she could reach her informant’s basement door, a group of three surprisingly bulky fly-men, each proudly and openly displaying their natural Vedesian markings, emerged. They stopped the moment they saw her, and the largest of the three, over two meters tall and with spiky, armor-like chitin, stepped forward. Until now, she had only received a few random, barked slurs from the locals. This man, who she mentally nicknamed Tsetse after the eponymous giant fly, lambasted her with a tirade of insults pertaining to her species, sex, manner of dress, status as an Anathemist, and finally, the supposed impending extermination and enslavement of all non-Evoy.
It was undoubtedly a withering verbal assault by anyone’s standards but having actively participated in communities where such tirades were a part of everyday conversation, it washed off her like water from a turtle’s back. The answer which she gave, masterfully controlling her violent impulses, was a venomous smile, marking the moment when she mentally reached her hand into the pool of distilled vitriol in her head, dipping her recently gained knowledge of this world and of Evoy culture in the vile substance.
“I could fry you into the wall right this second if I wanted, but I’m feeling mighty peaceful today, so, my feces-feasting friend…”
This was followed by a tirade of entomological and religious slurs as well as absurdly gruesome threats too graphic and hateful to be recorded in writing. Throughout her tirade, Krahe burned thauma and built up a charge within her left arm, until it cast a light over the whole of the hallway. Meanwhile, as she spoke, she spewed smoke with each word, which she purposely imbued with Isotope to give it the unmistakable rancid quality. The sheer vitriol behind her words was such that, by pure accident, it imbued her thauma with a malicious quality and set her smoke upon the three Evoy, eroding their wards. At the end of her tirade, she said, “Now, if you would, stop wasting my time and go kill yourself some other way.”
She was well aware of the fact she had just spent the better part of two minutes doing exactly what she was accusing the speechless, confused Tsetse of doing, but that didn’t matter. Before he could realize what was happening, she had already Astro Dived, power-walked through him, and returned to physicality, banging on her contact’s door. She was betting that he would choose to remove himself from the situation out of a mixture of confusion and intimidation, and, this time, her bet proved correct when the trio shuffled away, muttering insults and threats to placate themselves.
“Who is it?!” came a buzzy, flighty voice.
“An urgent yellow-banded delivery from Tajik,” she answered in code speak.
“I don’t ’member orderin’ anything from Tajik.”
“Open up before I put a reaper through your keyhole. I just want to ask a question.”
It was truly a stupidly wide keyhole to go with a stupidly chunky lock.
“What’d you do to Tajik?!” the voice questioned. Light footsteps. A key plugged the keyhole. Rattling of chains and deadbolts followed.
“I got him zonked out of his gourd on Sabbi Root and showed him a yellow talisman paper. He’s probably nursing a horrifying hangover by now.”
The moment the door cracked open, Krahe pushed her way past, diving to bypass the fly-man altogether. His home was a hoarder’s den, and his form, startled and panicking, was the most fly-like she had seen yet. His carapace bore obvious patternsmarking him a Vedesian, though they were so slight and faint that it took an active effort to notice them. He ambled about on four spindly legs while ceaselessly, neurotically rubbing his forelimbs together as a proboscis darted in and out of his lamprey-like mouth. A harness was strapped to his body, a backpack power source where his wings may have once been, and a pair of mechanical arms to the sides, gesturing as he spoke.
“Ey, the fuck’s that supposed to be, eh?! You can’t just break into my home like that! Who the fuck are you, anyway? An… Anathemist? Oh. Oh no. Oh no, no, no. I ain’t got no fuckin’ Class 3 Painkillers, y’understand?”
“Do I look like I need painkillers? C’mon. I’m looking for the Talisman Mistress,” Krahe said, conjuring the yellow talisman paper into the palm of her hand. She waved it back and forth in front of the Evoy’s nearly expressionless face. He licked it.
Then, his compound eyes flashed red, and Krahe felt an appraisal attempt smack impotently into her deathsmoke shroud.
“Y’involved with an Outer God by any chance?” he asked with an unsettling calm.
“Don’t try to turn shit around on me, Nozar. Tajik sent me to you because he thinks you might know where to find the Talisman Mistress.”
“I know. She’s moved in recently, just a week after that Archon Flash sent everyone packin’ from Jas’raba. Pushed half my clientele out of the market with her product. Half of ‘em want her dead, and the other half wanna lick her feet for a peek at her source charts. Question is, which one’re you?”
She didn’t like this. The fly-man had suddenly become utterly, rapturously calm, as if some realization made him think he had nothing to fear from her, or perhaps a chip to play that would secure his safety.
“The kind with a vendetta against one of her customers.”
A tilt of his head. Another cycle of forelimb-rubbing.
“So you’re lookin’ for her ‘cause you want information. Funny thing, she’s been lookin’ for someone, too. Won’t say who, or give any criteria… But hell, maybe bein’ able to find her is qualifier enough. I can tell you what I know—for a price.”
“Name it.”
A finger-wag gesture from his right mech-arm. The insecticidal urge within Krahe grew.
“No. You know how these deals work. You make the offer, or there’s no deal.”
“How about I spray your brains over that pile of trash? I’ve got three more leads to get to; one of them has to be less obnoxious than you.”
The fly-man rubbed his forelimbs, absently staring at her with his compound eyes.
“Y’willin’ to make that bet?”
Krahe conjured a capsule of Class 3 Painkiller and threw it at him. One of his hands caught it.
“Pristine. Original capsule. Unbroken seal. Where’d you get this, I wonder? I won’t ask. I know better. The deal’s made. Come with me.”
Several minutes later, Krahe realized that most of this side of the first floor and the basements below were all Nozar’s property. All the piled-up stuff wasn’t just trash, but strangely organized piles of records, towers of memslates, scrolls, and books. They arrived at a room with a huge terminal, two rows of three projected screens over an organ-like layered keyboard, and four mechanical arms hanging down from the ceiling. Nozar plugged a pair of black cables with key-like spikes on the ends into his backpack, and the hanging armatures came to life, tapping away.
A portrait appeared on one screen: a vaguely southeast asian woman’s face with one eye plastered over by talisman paper and slicked-back black hair. A map came up on another—a central landmass surrounded by countless islands.
“Name: Yao Fu. Likely a pseudonym. Place of origin: the Tiengenzhen Region. Status: Unaffiliated. As I said earlier, she came in and completely fucked the market. Single-use and reusable artifacts, eidolon vessels, charms, weird-ass voidkeys—you name it, she’s sold it to someone. They’re all variations of paper-charm designs, and they’re all way the fuck up there. I’m talkin’ the sorta thing you’d expect the Grafters or Wheelers to outfit one a’ their saints with. If I was a bettin’ man—and I am if I can be sure I’ll win—I’d bet a pretty sum that she’s some big shot tryin’ to lay low as far away from her homeland as possible… and not doin’ too hot at it. The woman’s turned Audunpoint’s underbelly upside down with her supply, and anyone who gets their hands on her product shoots way the hell up on the ladder.”
“That doesn’t help me find her,” Krahe hissed.
“Fuckin’ hold on, I’m getting to it. So there’s this place…”
***
Cassius dared to hope he would get out of this easy. That, come the next day, he would have reported the incident and reaped the rewards without breaking the long streak of no violent incidents within or around his gambling house.
That hope, like a wayward ship, was dashed upon the spiky boulders of reality when That Woman swaggered into the building less than two hours after her initial passage. She seated herself, once more gambling in an entirely inconspicuous manner, though the atmosphere of tension within the room was palpable. The keen-eared among the patrons were on edge, aware of what was to come, and, by proxy, so were the others.
Nonetheless, an uneasy illusion of normal goings-on was maintained for the next twenty minutes, during which That Woman played dice at one of the tables while Cassius strained to clandestinely move his men into place for a coup-de-grace. Then one among them, fool that he was, misinterpreted a gesture from Cassius. The man, tall, strong, and not very bright, approached That Woman, looming over her. Cassius knew what was to come; that man, Habib, combined preternatural strength with thaumaturgy to punch with the force of an Atropal. The way he held himself, the tunnel-vision look in his eyes, and the clenching of his fists and calves, all told that he intended to take Her head off right then and there.
“I wouldn’t come that close if I were you,” That Woman said, not taking her eye off of her opponents’ dice, idly swirling her own back and forth.
“There is a high price on your head in these parts,” Habib said. His thaumaturgy waxed strong, invisibly at first, then visibly, five golden lines spiraling down his arm. It was subtle, nearly unnoticeable if you didn’t know what to look for. The way he stood, even the five lines were hidden from his prey. When they reached his fist, he would kill. That moment never came.
That Woman stopped swirling her dice and raised the cup, revealing they had been stacked into a tower, the topmost one showing a snake-eye.
“I know.”
She vanished in a burst of smoke, leaving the cup clattering on the table. Then, Habib lurched forward, and Cassius realized she was somehow behind him. He knew what it was; teleportation, even the extremely short-range kind, was a coveted ability.
Before anyone could act, she had lifted the man off his feet, and a crimson-red light flooded down her arm. His barrier took shape between him and her, but the golden light couldn’t remove something that had already bypassed it. Then, came the noise, something between electric snapping and buzzing.
It was only seconds before Habib gruesomely slid down onto the Anathemist’s blackened arm, his boiling blood and viscera trickling onto the ground and fountaining from every orifice of his frozen face. The cursed light, redder than blood, burst forth from the man’s mouth and eyes, obliterating the latter instantly and projecting his rapidly disintegrating insides over the ceiling. One of the croupiers, a pure-white Inax, had risen up with the intent to take action but froze when the green-eyed demon pulled her gun.
“Don’t. I can still leave just one corpse in my wake. Don’t give me an excuse to change that to a double-digit number.”
She cast Habib to the ground with some effort, her stance wide, a section of his scorched-black spine still in her hand. Letting it fall to the ground, she turned as if to walk out, only to turn into a shape of smoke and burning light as she rushed out the door. Thrown knives and thaumaturgies flew her way, a few of which were on target, yet passed through her unimpeded.
Cassius felt a struggle within himself. Every fiber of his being told him to leave it be, but he couldn’t. One of his men lay dead, and the mistake was his. There was no other choice than to pursue, and that was just what he did.
He and five of his best subordinates pursued the woman on motorbikes, catching her before she even got out of his territory. Despite her speedy escape, she obviously couldn’t keep up that smoke-form for long, and he knew this area better than the back of his hand, as did his squad of five.
He had her in a back alley, with two behind himself and two at its other end, waiting for his signal to come over the top of the wall.
Cassius drew one of his pistols and fired, unleashing two Pale-Red Reapers that threw him backward with the force of its recoil. These marginally weaker versions of the Red Reaper had the advantage of being much smaller both as bullets and as manifested projectiles, focusing two-thirds the power into one-third the blast radius, while also having a higher maximum velocity and accelerating to that velocity instantly. Plus they operated on Arcane principles, generating the explosion in a manner that would retain effectiveness against barriers. Furthermore, two could be energized with just one Class Three Lesser Eidolon, the same as Yellow Atropals. Being custom-tuned to him alone, his Pale-Reds were still significantly more potent than Yellow Atropals, however. With his double-barreled howdah pistol, even the defenses of his superiors couldn’t hold up, allowing him to keep his cushy, comfortable position without politicking.
At this distance, That Woman would have, at best, time to raise a barrier, which would still require exceptionally fast expansion rate and reflexes. Even then, the impact would surely leave her melting down for him to finish off with a third shot from his double-barreled shotgun, into which he had loaded two Crimson Reapers, the opposite of a Pale-Red, being far more forceful but also larger, slower and with a limited range and collateral damage akin to a Bloody Reaper.
But… when the white-red flash passed, and the explosion came, it was not through impact with a human body or a barrier but with the cobblestones and crates right behind her, sending up a spray of dust and debris, ripping into the wall. Confused, he quickly reloaded two more Pale-Reds, and raised his gun, seeing That Woman walking out of the dust with a demented grin on her face, holding up a Pattner-type pistol to her face while running that charred waste of a left arm through her hair. An ember-like glow emerged from the limb, and at that moment, fanged mouths opened down its length, and slick, black tendrils emerged, both from those mouths and from behind her, sprouting from that ridge that ran down the length of her spine.
“Oh man, you have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this!” she exclaimed, a melodious laughter ringing out from her as the tendrils continued to expand, enveloping her and even pushing under the edges of that black suit she wore. “How many did you bring? Five? Ten?!”
He wasn’t sure if that question was about his ammunition or his reinforcements. He fired again.
Again, his Pale-Reds passed through her like she wasn’t even there, but this time, he saw it clearly. Just for a moment, she changed; a devil of smoke and fire, a blazing spine-and-ribcage seething inside her. Green, burning embers in place of eyes, hair billowing as if blasted upward by nonexistent wind. She walked three steps’ worth in the span of two, then snapped back into physicality. He instinctively raised his barrier as he loaded two more Pale-Reds, only to find those tar tendrils setting upon him with thunderous impacts, smashing down his barrier before he could set off another shot. He knew better than to risk a meltdown and so allowed himself to be struck on the wards, hoping to be thrown back by the force so he could use the velocity to escape.
It seemed it would work, until he saw the bangle on her wrist flash with light, and felt the ground behind him shudder. When the next strike came, he smacked back-first into a solid stone wall that absolutely wasn’t there before. With a snap of his fingers, he fired a whistling, reddish missile straight upward, bursting with a bright flash and loud noise. It was the signal for his squad to go in, and they did—the two of them on the other side.
The Woman’s eyes briefly tracked the flare, and, hearing the sound of Cassius’ allies, she flicked her gun hand towards him—but didn’t shoot. Her finger wasn’t even on the trigger. Instead, the bangle on her wrist began to glow, floating and spinning. Protuberances emerged from the wall behind him, seamless as if they’d always been there, followed by thin rods of the same material from the ground and walls. The wall itself grew taller, as if specifically to forestall any aid from that direction. He was stuck; his gun arm was mostly free, as was his left forearm, but they were too far apart to do anything besides fire one more time.
The next moment, it seemed as if something was erupting from inside That Woman’s chest, only for her suit to tear open, a black blur flying out. Down the middle of her chest, a fanged maw yawning into a swirling void of eldritch blackness that dragged the eyes. It snapped shut right away, leaving just a tear, which began to close as if even that suit was alive.
The shape landed on her gun’s barrel, and Cassius saw clearly what it was: a raven of smoke, with red coals for eyes.
“Barzai. Keep an eye on him,” she said to the bird, and it flew off, perching somewhere above Cassius’ head while its mistress arrogantly spun around on a bootheel. He held out his hand in an attempt to shoot her in the back but realized that the thrice-damned bird had flicked the break-open switch on his gun. The forward lurch of his arm was enough. The barrel tilted, the extractor pushing his bullets halfway out the chamber—and the thrice-damned bird snatched them in its beak.
***