Bladeraver (pt59) (230 hits)
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Submitted by Tactile Ire (View user info) at 2007-05-03 18:47:26 EDT
*
Drewhldt eased the c'kroach drawn cart forward over the bumpy loam. He refused to think about the liquid in the flasks behind him even as the fumes gave him a pounding headache and set his teeth to wriggling in his jaw. He blinked to ease his blurred sight as he pulled in close to the dumpsite - an old, disused stockyard leased by the Mantling for the coming weeks. He dropped down from the cart and walked around to the back.
With exaggerated care, not trusting the baffles inside the flasks, he unloaded the cargo. He set the flasks down in the corner of one of the decaying pens. With a sigh he went and collected the now empty flasks he had dropped here a few days ago. After carefully scrubbing them out with a mixture of salt, lime and vinegar he loaded them, still open, on the back of the cart.
He paused for a few minutes, considering the proximity of the city and long, dark bars serving long, cool beers. Then he remembered his duty and, still trying to shake off his headache, restarted the cart and drove the c'kroach team back the way they had come, re-passing the North Tree and on into the random tracks of the undergrowth.
He very carefully did not think about where the contents of the flasks might be going. He thought of his lord and hoped he was untroubled in his works back in the city.
*
Puila's watchers got around to reporting the apparent absence of the swordsman a few days later. Puila considered this. He matched it against his plans. He knew the pike-armed woman was still around - and that was important. Who cared if Spikehand's other friend had also had enough of his company? He knew he might be missing something important but he was so intent on his own plans, so diminished by the recent attack, that he had no choice but to let it go. He could not lose focus now. His whole life had been about fixating on the goal and not losing sight of it. Still, the missing man upset his peace and disturbed his sleep until his wife (sweet, sweetest prize) skilfully consoled him in the dark.
He woke refreshed and refocused on his own game plan.
*
Fight night.
Time's up.
Think.
Work the problem. The relics are gone. There is nothing of the Terror left to you. He has taken and sold it all.
All?
Maybe not all. He likes to keep things, this one. He kept the impossum. He kept the woman. Would he not keep a little of this too? The phial. The sample you gave him at the docks. He'd still have that. Where would he keep it? His home - where there is something else he values. Something else to hurt him with, if you have the will.
Go.
The Mantling had been sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. He stood abruptly and turned a gaze of burning ice and frozen flame on his swordsman. "Drewhldt. Can we find our former fat-renderers? I need their services."
Drewhldt nodded uneasily.
*
The musicians played like they were twelve feet tall and made of thunder and rain. The drumming filled the room. The crescendo built and broke over the crowd who called the house battle cry to the rafters. "Back to the House of Pain!"
The sweaty press of the crowd chattered in counter-point to the relentless rhythm. The odd moan escaped those punters on the racks. Club dancers - supple peach-fishes and buff studlings wearing nothing but arrangements of leather belts - cornered punters at random, manipulating, caressing and stroking with fingers covered in razor blades. Blood flowed from a hundred thousand small cuts.
The House of Pain attracted the most hard-core clubbers. The gurners and tweakers who were locked deep in their addictions. The true nightbreed.
On a dais at one end, punters took turns forcing themselves on each other in naked couplings - grotesque parodies of the fights they had gathered to watch.
The music fell across them all. It sounded as through it had been ripped from the dark places of nature - the crash of falling bodies through leaves, the wing-beats of the Terror. The hiss of a vorpal. The crowd responded to its angry drive with their moans and calls and howls.
The chants rose and fell as the Mantling stretched his warm muscles. He checked the objects slung from his belt and eased the blades in their scabbards. The drums crashed into a higher tempo. The crowds roared.
At the far end of the bladerave came the House's bitch, a thin, wiry man with wispy hair and gentle blue pools of eyes. He was unique in clubland, a bitch who did not fight. Instead, he excelled in matching his opponents against mazes and machines, creatures and crowds. He was a master of human judgement. He could set a fighter up against all manner of torment; each one seemingly designed with his targets limits in mind. Each of his 'settings' seemed just enough to stretch and fold his opponent until, near to touching success and beaten down, they would ultimately fail. Defeated, but not dead - that was the proviso placed on him by his owners.
Except in unusual circumstances. Like tonight. When the opponent was known to be planning to cheat. To disgrace the bladeraves. Then his murderous tastes were given free rein. So he was unusually cheerful as he lifted the gate on the wooden crate beside him.
The vorpal had been taken by canopymen nearly two weeks ago. It had been brought back into the city and purchased by the House. It had been systematically abused, starved and beaten. For the last three days it had eaten nothing but ever-greater amounts of charge. The drug had caused its brain to haemorrhage. The creature was insane with pain and already dying as it lunged out of the box, tears of blood streaming down its snarling face.
A vorpal on charge. A 'rapid reaper'. A legend of quick death not seen on the sandfloor for nearly thirty moons. On that occasion the Lyon had lost eight of his famed 'pryde', The Team of Ten. The bout had been so horrific that neither survivor had ever stepped onto a sandfloor again. The bladeraves had lost a great champion and the brutality of his departure had caused a back-lash amongst the House's own punters. That had been the day the bitch had been barred from killing. The day his owners had muzzled him.
Since then no-one in all clubland had dared use such phenomenally deadly force.
The Mantling stood alone before this blood-flecked beast and quailed. They wanted him dead, and quick. There wasn't even the pretence of subtlety in this. The blue eyed man behind the beast smiled indulgently as the vorpal exploded forwards. The Mantling caught fragments of image. A muzzle spraying blood and snot and foam. Tight bunched shoulders rippling under matted fur. The overhead lights spinning across his vision. He rolled and picked himself up, spitting sand. He'd barely seen the beast charge, let alone been able to dodge. His back was lit by traceries of fire and he could feel blood flowing freely down towards his belt-line. The animal was still stiff from days of inactive confinement. Still waking itself to action. And so the Mantling was still alive. He looked for the vorpal. It was clear across the other side of the sandfloor and gathering itself again.
The Mantling pulled a six-inch spike with a plunger at one end from his belt. A steelwood hypodermic needle. As the ravening beast closed with him again <fast, so very fast> he raised the needle in hands made clumsy by his climbing spikes and stabbed it down into his own chest.
As he depressed the plunger the vorpal bowled into him, raking him with razor claws. Great weals were opened in his flesh as the beast scored him long down his left side.
The honeysalve in the needle flowed directly into his heart. There it mixed with his blood and was pumped around his body. When it came to the damage the vorpal had inflicted it activated, growing new tissue to replace what had been swept away.
Before the eyes of the club, the Mantling's cuts closed.
The pain of the creature's attacks was undiminished. He nearly howled with agony as it came at him for a third time. It got its front paws on his shoulders. Its back paws came up to his midriff and ripped down, punching through his armour and tearing into his abdominal muscles. Almost disembowelling him. He heaved and shrugged, shedding the creature and casting it to the sand. The vorpal landed a few feet from him, skewed to the right. It rebounded back at him, leading with its snarling, spitting muzzle.
Senses heightened by 'salve, reactions honed by agony, the Mantling managed to drop under the leaping beast. He let out a hiss and spun to his feet. He was losing blood from his abdominal wounds, getting weaker and slower. Already he'd taken more damage than the minute amount of honeysalve could repair. Desperate for some room to manoeuvre he grabbed at his belt. As he unfurled a short slingline he cast his gaze upwards, searching for a likely hold point. The glare of the lights hit his squinted eyes, searing away sight. He could almost feel the vorpal gathering itself. He blinked and found a great purple stain branded across his vision - legacy of the lights. He kept the slingline spinning as he tried in vain to focus. The laughter of the club bitch reached him through the crowd. The little man was standing atop the vorpal's crate, clapping his hands in glee.
Senses trained by cycles of pitch-black nest exploration guided the slingline hook out on a parabolic arc. The hook bit deep. The Mantling jerked back against the bite with a powerful two-handed snap that started in his toes and whipped all the way up his spine.
The hook, sunk deep into shoulder meat, pulled the House of Pain's bitch off the crate, over the sandfloor and past the Mantling to crash at the charging vorpal's feet. Any other animal would have missed the fish-hooked treat. Any other animal would have been past before it knew what was being cast at it. Any other animal wouldn't have been crazed enough to snap at any wriggling thing. But this was a vorpal on charge. The beast's head stopped, it's jaws cracking through the bitch's hip. The rest of the animal's body skewed through the air, momentum sending the heavy creature in a lithely twisting orbit around the blood-drenched muzzle.
The Mantling charged the beast's rear, steelwood spinning up into his grasp as he came. It took him four steps to reach the vorpal. Four rapid, sprinting steps. And still the vorpal's snarling muzzle was there to meet him. Crouched and ready. As he brought the right down in a sweeping crosscut the beast lunged into him, blocking the strike. Man and vorpal collided. The Mantling was carrying the momentum of his mass. This was enough to send them both rolling in the direction of his charge. The snapping jaws came together and down, striking at the pale human chest as the combatants spun across the sands. The vorpal hooked its teeth under a hard ridge and tore back and up. The Mantling was hauled bodily into the air. The ties on his armour parted and he sprawled clear as the vorpal destroyed the tattered remnants of the mantling-skin breastplate still lodged in its mouth.
The violent moves of the last few moments were pumping blood out of the Mantling's wounds. His legs were covered in a claret-bright sheen and he could feel the weakness taking hold. His ravaged vision was beginning to swim. The vorpal was unharmed and still limbering up, getting stronger and faster while he was bleeding his power into the sand.
It had to be now.
Roaring in anger. Determined to live. Aching for the victory of continued breath, he threw himself at the beast. He did not listen to the still, small voice inside him that told him he could not survive. That he was as good as already dead. He roared his defiance as he flew.
The giant rodent came up to meet him.
Steelwood flashed in the harsh overhead lights. Dark claws gleamed with blood already drawn. They met in the air above the sand.
Man and beast passed each other in a crimson squall. Both bodies pitched into the sand, rolled, and lay still.
*
The crowd's voice washed in a confused murmur. The action had happened at such blistering speed. Nobody was sure quite what they'd seen. Had they just seen a lone man kill a vorpal? Had he survived?
The music stopped.
The crowd leaned forward as medics stepped onto the sand.
The Mantling heaved and lifted one hand to the ceiling. There was a beat of silence and then the chant broke across the room like a storm through the high canopy leaves. "Spikehand! Spikehand! Spikehand!"
User Reviews
Submitted by genericIntent (user info) at 2007-05-04 17:16:29 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2007-05-04 12:54:41 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
EXCELLENT action writing.
Submitted by zwerg (user info) at 2007-05-04 11:06:42 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Awesome, as always
Submitted by Fey (user info) at 2007-05-04 05:39:27 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by messmind (user info) at 2007-05-04 04:30:17 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Fuk them lol-katz...
Submitted by Benny (user info) at 2007-05-04 02:27:47 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Now that is an action sequence! That was brilliant mate.
Submitted by FartSmeller (user info) at 2007-05-03 22:22:01 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I don't feel like reading all 59 parts. Just give me a quick gist, would you?
Submitted by Ildeth (user info) at 2007-05-03 21:15:31 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
ooh, I've got goosebumps
Submitted by TheUniter (user info) at 2007-05-03 20:49:40 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2007-05-03 19:09:08 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
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