Chapter 9 #2
Slowly, and with a stealth born of curiosity rather than fear, Rue lifted herself, rising until all that kept her in contact with the ground were her fingers and toes.
She had been stabbed. She had been broken.
Worse: she had been old. And she was still all of those things, but the anger flickering in the marrow of her bones didn’t seem to care about that level of detail.
Anger. A friend had once said that anger was the easiest emotion to bring back from the deadlands.
It wasn’t hunger that made the undead fill their mouths with the flesh of the living, that friend had said: it was rage.
To bite, that friend had told her, after that first lesson, was the instinct of true rage.
There was, Rue knew, another word for the curious mixture of hate and vitality that held the wreck of her body together and forced her heart to beat against its nature: necromancy.
Rue rose to her feet, unfolding in total silence save for the clicking of her joints. Her clothes, thick with blood and filth, felt strange around her after nakedness beneath a black sun.
The mercenaries at the table were the two large possible-brothers in the leather skullcaps and the almost-as-broad Tabtha who the leader (Isik!
his name came back to Rue as she stood) who Isik had titled “shield-breaker” and “heart-taker.” Rue had stabbed the woman in the thigh after breaking her finger and cutting her wrist, so at least she had a good excuse for not helping to drag out the bodies.
What reason the brothers, who had flanked Isik so closely in life, had for not caring what happened to him in death was less clear.
“Hello, dear.” Rue abandoned stealth. The woman was staring with the type of horror usually reserved for when you find yourself paralysed, with a head-sized spider steadily clicking its way up your leg.
Rue licked her teeth: some were broken, some gone, others unsteady in their sockets.
She had thought that age had robbed her entirely of what vanity had survived her childhood, but the fact that these louts, these blunt weapons, had maimed her so, proved enough to ignite the fire that she had kept tamped down for so long.
Rue didn’t like to fight angry. She had been taught to reserve rage for special occasions.
Rage was holy. Not to be wasted on the unworthy.
“Oh shit…” Tabtha wasn’t built for fear, but being wounded and vulnerable can suck the bully out of anyone.
The two brothers, tumbling their stools aside as they rose from them, grunted in surprise but apparently lacked the imagination to be scared. Rue was pleased. Hunting them down would be a chore.
As they approached, Rue forced herself to stillness.
She wasn’t unfamiliar with the intoxications of various drugs, and both necromancy and anger ranked among their number for overinflating the mind’s assessment of the body’s powers.
Her miraculous return would be short-lived and rather stupid if she had come back believing herself a lion, only to unleash a mouse’s squeak instead of a roar.
The slightly larger brother, with a touch of grey in his slightly bushier beard, took an ugly club from his belt.
The other one unslung a hatchet, clearly of a mind to do enough chopping to ensure there would be no third coming.
Both men towered over Rue. They looked like the competent butchers that formed the backbone of any mercenary company, creatures with stunted emotion and overgrown appetite.
If Rue had been ten years younger and held a suitable weapon she would have been confident.
Thirty years ago she would have been contemptuous.
Today, she backed away, slowly, patting her pockets for something, anything, that might help.
In the old days she’d kept all manner of tricks in her pockets.
“Toss me a knife, Tabtha, and I might let you live.”
Tabtha barked a laugh, but there was no heart in it.
The brothers’ lack of fear annoyed Rue. She had clawed her way back from the deadlands and stood before them clad in gore and dirt.
Even now she could smell Isik’s death as if it were smoke on the air.
His blood, lying on the packed earth, called to her.
How dare two beetle-browed illiterates just shrug that off and come at her with club and hatchet?
With patient focus the pair manoeuvred her into the nearest corner.
Rue’s patting discovered only her pipe, which by some miracle perhaps no less surprising than her own resurrection had survived her recent beating intact.
She held the bowl in her hand with the stem extending, remembering as she did the small girl who put out the eyes of an undead monstrosity on her first day at the Academy.
Rue would have swapped the pipe for a spoon in a heartbeat.
Even so, she aimed her knuckles forward, the fragile clay stem extending.
“Why don’t you boys—”
As she’d been speaking, Rue had reached for the spilled blood that kept calling to her, robed as she still was in the invisible tatters of the underworld.
Now, as they walked through it, Isik’s blood, together with whatever dirt it had soaked into, grasped the brothers’ feet.
Not in an iron, unbreakable grip, but firmly enough to cause both to stumble and glance down in confusion.
One reason that Rue had survived so long was that she took her moment.
She rushed in, slower than she would have liked, slower than in her prime, but much faster than she could have managed last week or last year.
The pipe stem jutting between her knuckles she drove deep into the smaller man’s eye and, twisting, left it there as she spun clear of his flailing arms.
She might have run then, between the tables, out the back door, and into the wide world. Instead, she stopped. If running had been on her mind she wouldn’t have marched here grim-faced from the open grave they’d tossed her into.
The larger brother had caught hold of his sibling as he staggered, twitching, his open mouth spilling drool and vowel-filled nonsense.
With a grunt the uninjured brother released the other, and he dropped with no attempt to break his fall.
In the slow turn of the mercenary’s head and the focused intensity of his stare, Rue found an echo of the anger whose ocean had always lapped around her.
Ten years of peace had quieted the storm, but it would take an eternity to evaporate the deep waters of her rage.
What they had done to her, here, in the now, was just the tapping of the barrel.
Rue understood that. She would like to say that the murdering of her friends, Jayne and Ambeth, lay behind this avenging.
Or that she’d fashioned herself the saviour of young Soosa Smith and the rest of the innocent or not-so-innocent village children.
None of that was true. This ran deeper, and whether it had been put into her back when she was far younger than Soosa, or whether it had been born into her, deep as the marrow of her bones, Rue didn’t know.
She rushed the mercenary, screaming, using her speed to get within the swing of his club and catching his wrist with one hand while attempting to jam the other thumb into his eye.
In turn, he tried to headbutt her, very nearly succeeding, and drove his knee into her, keeping her ferocity at bay. If he felt astonished that an old woman was holding back the thickness of his arm, he didn’t show it, only huffed as he brought his full effort and weight to bear, pushing down.
Rue gave up on her attempt to blind her foe and instead caught his other wrist, knowing that he might pull a knife on her at any moment. Slowly, the arm holding back the mercenary’s club began to surrender before the man’s brute strength. She braced herself, feet slipping.
“Twist her fucking head off, Brak!” Tabtha sounded relieved—the spell of the supernatural broken as the real world started to reassert itself. One old woman, no matter how angry, was never going to best a giant mercenary in a test of strength.
Even so, Rue gave ground only slowly. She changed her footing, tried to throw him, but again his knee slammed into her. By rights her thigh should have broken the first time and her hip the second.
“Crush her!” Tabtha warmed to her role as cheerleader.
Outside, a crow was cawing in alarm. Senna, no doubt, complaining about Rue’s performance.
Brak dropped his club and pressed down with still greater force.
Rue sank to her knees, grunting with the effort of keeping the man’s hands from her throat.
The bastard was going to beat her, again, by himself this time.
She snarled and rose an inch or two before being thrust down farther, blunt fingers clawing for purchase on her face.
Panic narrows your vision. That had been an early lesson. Panic shows you only one thing and you keep doing it until you die. And so, even as the mercenary forced her to the floor, seeking to wring her neck and tear off her head, Rue reached out for other ideas.
At the last, as the hands fastened around her throat, she saw the fire in Brak’s eyes, the twist of a grin in the forest of his beard. The end had come.
A moment later he was gone, torn away to an accompaniment of Tabtha’s screams, the arm of his freshly dead sibling braced against his throat.
Rue got to her hands and knees, spitting crimson drool. She scooped up the discarded hatchet as she rose above the brothers, one dead and one living, locked together in filial combat, one suddenly desperate, the other all rage and strength and the snapping of his jaw as he sought family flesh.
Rue ended Brak with a swing of the hatchet to the back of his neck. The other one she released, feeling his spirit tumble away down the long climb that had returned her to her body. Keeping him dancing to her tune was straining a muscle she’d not known she still owned, and she no longer needed him.
“Going somewhere?” Rue cricked her neck and looked over her shoulder to where Tabtha Heart-Taker was hobbling towards the back door.
“Wh-what are you?” The woman fumbled for her sword.
Rue turned and advanced on her slowly.
“Consider me a kindness.”