Bladeraver (pt57) (238 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.44 on 9 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Tactile Ire (View user info) at 2007-05-01 19:06:29 EDT
The House of Pain was finally close to agreeing to a match. Gatecrusher had been on a bitch-breaking tour of the lower clubs. Scream's bladewhipper had been hurled from the sandfloor. The Hatecienda's famed high platform had shed a rain of wet body parts. The notoriously vocal locals had been stunned into silence. Omnipotence had been broken by fevered bladework and flawless footwork. Even the excellent Convergence had seen its own resident bitch, The Maniac, considered by many the most technically gifted fighter ever to grace the bladeraves, forced down by the sheer focused fury of Spikehand's twin bladed assault.
The last fight the Mantling had needed, the clincher of the House match, had been against Frantic's twisted twins. Razor-clad brothers named Rob and Caul. The fight had been his closest match to date. Before dying, the twins had scored the undrugged fighter wide and deep in several places, especially around the face. He'd had to use part of his precious supply of honeysalve to regenerate an eye. When he emerged from two weeks of secluded healing he still wore a patch. If only they'd had enough of the honeysalve back in the early days, Tarl might still be alive. The Mantling pushed the thought away as he caught up on recent developments.
In the time he had been recuperating, Charke and Puila had been in talks with the House of Pain. The house had agreed in principle to a match - provided they could name the opponent at a later date. This was a sure sign that the rumours of his intent to throw the fight had been heard. And believed. Charke and Puila were now down to negotiating purse terms.
He called his man to him.
"Drewhldt. Get your climbing gear. Pack food for a week. Bring your flamepole and whatever other ordinance you can lay your hands on. It's time to push things to the next level."
They were aloft before dawn the next day. They stood on one of the main pathways, adjusting equipment, limbering muscles. Once they were warmed up they spun their slinglines out into the Dreamingveldt. Without a sound they bounded into space and were gone.
They pushed it hard into the wilds, travelling at full pace for nearly fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes of blurred flight, half-seen casts and semi-guessed arcs. Fifteen minutes of near misses and grazing hits and misjudged landings. When the Mantling peeled the patch off his eye it was with a tremendous amount of relief. Slingline travel without depth perception was damned near impossible.
The new eye was blurry at first, still raw and new and he hadn't wanted to use it. Tears flowed down his cheek as he struggled to blink the orb into focus. After several more minutes he began to perceive shapes amidst the blurs. Some time later he could see as well as he ever had. Better perhaps. "Are the renderers in place?" he asked his swordsman.
"Should be. I gave the last of them his deposit four days ago. More than enough time to get to the rendezvous."
"The let's ride," came the growl as they slung lines out into the cool, green abyss.
They moved fast and hard in tandem with each other, old skills dropping back into place with easy rapidity. They travelled in a wide arc, heading north from the city and then looping back around to come in at it again from the west. Days later they had made the turn starting their inwards run when they found their target.
Far below them, in a quiet glade, the noises and fumes of a small chemining operation spread through the still air. They hauled off, checking napalm bombs and drop chutes. They idled and prepared for nearly half a day until they were alerted by a change in the rhythms of the small settlement below. The normal workaday noises abated as the men down there went to meet the mighty Gilgamesh. The impossum hauled its supplyliner full of meaty nerghs into the centre of the clearing. The bleats of the cargo mixed with the welcoming shouts of the men and the deep bass rumble of Gilgamesh's low.
The Mantling looked across at Drewhldt, who returned the look with a vicious grin and lit his flamepole. The blue pilot light raised shimmers in the early evening air. The Mantling passed him a brace of pottery flasks and presented his own for ignition. Cloying fumes wreathed them both as he pumped his fist and they launched themselves into space.
They dropped in a twin meatbomb, trailing blue fire.
On they plummeted through the thick air and the light gravity. They stayed in the tuck, ignoring their ripcords. Wind whistled past them as the ground leapt up. They held their tucks past the last possible moment. Charging on the ground-rush as the details of their landing zone leapt out of the gathering gloom. They were too close to the forest floor. The Mantling waited till he could see the individual bristles of the impossum's coat, till he could smell the close stink of the nergh's waste, till one of the wranglers heard the screaming wind and looked up, showing the whites of his eyes. Then the Mantling pulled his ripcord and dropped the flaming bundle of pottery. Beside him Drewhldt followed his lead. They both hurtled down with unstoppable speed.
The chutes caught, barely braking them before a scorching fireball erupted in the space between them and the loam. The cloying flames coated men and animal alike. Wranglers ran, beating at their clothes, and the great Gilgamesh let out a distressed wail. The chutists dropped through the flames and smacked down on the impossum's flanks, using the creature's lungs as airbags to brake their far too rapid descent.
As they bounced, scorched and winded, off the great beast's hide they pulled their clear cords, leaving their canopies flapping behind.
The Mantling rolled and came up with Tarl's blades in his spiked hands. He orientated himself and set off past the old house that still stood, slumped on the corner of the field, towards the newer workshop. It was larger and older than the one that had once stood there.
He left the impossum and its crew to Drewhldt. His quarry were the hardened guards he would find somewhere between himself and the trying pots.
He hit the door in full stride and it splintered beneath his spiked feet. The blades came up through the doorframe, stabbing above the lintel. Blood spattered across his face as he swept through the doorway. The man who had jumped to the top of the doorframe fell, still, behind him.
He swept into the lamp light with a face masked in blood. It ran down his cheeks and over his teeth, pooling around the bottom of his wide grin, dripping from his chin to splash his blades.
More men swept in towards this hellish figure.
More men died.
Their screams joined with those of the men outside as Drewhldt got the flamepole opened up and burning.
*
Drew' was still putting flaming arcs into clear space when the blood-drenched Mantling found him. "You love the burn don't you, man?" the Mantling asked from a safe distance.
Drewhldt eased back on the twist valve, ported the pole. "Almost as much as you love the wetworks," he said.
They looked at each other for a beat. "What now boss?" said Drewhldt with a wry smile.
The Mantling gazed across the clearing into the new hole carved in the underbrush by the spooked impossum. They could still hear the sounds of the huge supplyliner clattering across broken ground. "Anybody on that thing?" he said.
"One guy. Think he's dead."
"You think?"
"Caught him with a decent splash but he ducked down into the howdah."
"That means the beast was burnt."
"Little bit. Their furs supposed to be pretty flame retardant though."
"Well, we're not getting any closer to stopping it from here. Lets go," the Mantling said as he dropped into a long loping run. Drewhldt pulled up beside him.
"What about the gear inside?"
"Don't sweat it, Drew. We're not after the charge."
They stopped talking then, saving their breath for the run. Behind them a scene from history replayed itself as the shed flared, flamed and fell. Just as his father's had on the same spot, moons before.
*
They caught the supplyliner less than an hour later. One of the rear carriages had thrown a wheel on the rough ground and the added drag had been too much for the bewildered beast. It huddled in its traces, shivering occasionally and giving distressed snorts. Its noises were drowned out in the cacophony of bleats coming from its living cargo. The nerghs protested their rough treatment in idiotic, repetitive cries.
The Mantling jogged up past the 'liner to the beast. Speaking low and carefully he approached the impossum's head. He soothed the troubled animal with gentle touches and reassuring murmurs. Drewhldt watched on.
"I thought your scent had to be known to an impossum before they'd let you approach," he said. The Mantling ignored him and continued gentling the creature as he moved around it, removing its vast and complicated harness. When he was done he put a lead line through the great nose-ring and gently tugged Gilgamesh forwards.
After a wide arc of a journey, involving one right angle turn, the two men rode Gilgamesh into the middle of a camp of armed and filthy brigands. The eight men were standing in something of a half circle between the impossum and a pile of steelwood pots, spades and folded tripods. There was a mound of fresh cut brushwood off to their left. The Mantling eased Gilgamesh to a stop and looked around. Sun dappled large mouldering clothleaves all over the ground. This was the right clearing. Somewhere under these plates of vegetation there was an old steelwood sword. Somewhere close to that there might even still be bones. He gave a grim smile and dismounted, sliding easily down the beast's flank. "Everything looks in order. Well done Drewhldt. Now then - who has the lance?"
One of the eight went to the pile of industrial sized cooking equipment and extracted a twenty-foot long ironwood shaft with a polished steelwood head. The Mantling took it from him, thanking the man politely, before turning and walking back towards the impossum. With no perceptible change in pace or demeanour he hefted the thing above his head and drove it deep into the right eye of Gilgamesh. The impossum started backwards too late, the great haft piercing eyeball and pushing on through the brain and back into the skull. The Mantling thrust deep again and found the brain stem, ending Gilgamesh there.
The body collapsed with a sigh. A second, wetter release came from the other end of the animal as its bowels let go.
The Mantling released the haft, still deeply embedded, and turned to the vagabond crew.
"And now gentlemen," he called, "you render fat."
*
Nearly two full days later Drewhldt and the Mantling returned to the stalled supplyliner. By now the nerghs were even more insistent in their cries, driven to distraction by hunger and thirst. The two men had taken a long time erasing as many signs of the impossum's passage as they could. It was a task neither of them had much training in but they had managed to erase the more blatant signs of passage, the deep footprints and the snagged fur.
They worked erecting a makeshift pen to the side of the supplyliner. Once it was done they drove the nerghs from each hopper into the pen.
As soon as all the nerghs were assembled, Drewhldt fired up his weapon. He played the flame in great sweeping arcs back and forth in the air above the pen. The already distressed nerghs panicked and surged away from the flame. Their combined weight broke through the makeshift fence and they bolted. They tore down the same path the men had driven the linebeast down, further obscuring the tracks.
The Mantling clapped his man on the shoulder as they watched the nergh-herd's dust rise up amongst the trees. Without further conversation they slipped carefully away, erasing their footprints as they went.
*
Back in the city they slipped back into the house the way they had left - through the narrow confines of a ventilation tunnel that opened out on the level above their home. After stowing their equipment, Drewhldt couldn't resist a nervous look through one of the front windows.
Puila's sentry still sat in his usual spot, hidden in the shadows of a neighbouring store, watching their front door. Drewhldt breathed a sigh of relief and went to get cleaned up.
User Reviews
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2007-05-03 12:46:47 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Fey (user info) at 2007-05-02 14:20:43 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
ehm.
Submitted by genericIntent (user info) at 2007-05-02 10:20:30 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Zebra (user info) at 2007-05-02 08:56:49 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
No Comment
Submitted by zwerg (user info) at 2007-05-02 08:49:24 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Haha Rob and Caul
Submitted by Benny (user info) at 2007-05-01 23:36:02 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Poor old Gilgamesh
Submitted by ilikesteak (user info) at 2007-05-01 22:17:25 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Youve made some improvements, but I still say this needs to end.
Go out in a blaze of cynical, Dadaist glory. Have the last sentance fuck with everybody. We'll love you forever if you do.
Submitted by Ildeth (user info) at 2007-05-01 19:36:47 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
haha with your first couple of bladerave clubs I'm torn between breaking out the pingers and glowstix or putting on my shit kickers and jumping around - it's only distracting for a moment though.
Keep 'em coming - I like nothing better than a good reason to procrastinate
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2007-05-01 19:16:49 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
incomprehensible