Closed to Philomel. Thread rated Aure.
Williard Crake stood in the darkened confines of his warehouse, a thin cheroot clasped in his thick-fingered hands. Each hairy-knuckled finger was crowned with a golden ring - no two were of the same design and ranged in value from the dirt-cheap to the extravagant. The only thing they all had in common was the fact they were gold, and they were topped with a blue gem. The rest of his attire was much the same; the trappings of a man who had only a passing acquaintance with taste. They were of a fashionable cut, though the materials were those available from the bazaars of Radasanth. A forked beard adorned his jowled chin, oiled more with the grease on his skin than with any deliberate attempt on his part.
He was accompanied by four of his employees, all of the men burly and dripping with the promise of physical violence. Their clothing consisted mainly of boiled leather jerkins, the occasional jacket and a dizzying array of weaponry hanging from their broad belts. Tattoos and scars decorated all of them without exception; Old Gris was a shining example with his crude metal eye-patch hammered into his skull. And yet all of them looked visibly pale, jittery. Something had spooked them and that something had been laid out in the centre of the warehouse some time during the night.
Toying with his rings and clamping the cigar back between his teeth, Crake turned his attention to the man on his right (though he could not seem to tear his eyes away from the sight before him).
"Ben," he started, voice a deep rumbling baritone, "mind telling me how the fuck this happened while you were on watch?"
Ben, a singularly ugly thug with a chest like a wine cask, looked at his feet like they were the most interesting things he had ever laid eyes on.
"I don't know, Mr. Crake. I was up all night, I swear it. Never heard nothin'. Not one damned thing."
Crake wasn't really listening. His attention was once again on the spectacle dripping all over his floor.
"I went out for a piss just afore dawn and when I came back through this way there they was, all drippin' and moanin'."
He decided to omit the part where he had vomited all over one of the open crates and then sealed it up so the damages didn't come out of his wages.
Chains had been attached to the rafters of the warehouse roof, fifteen feet up, and stretched across the open area in the middle of the floor. They were forged of black-iron and upon closer inspection one could see they all bore minute barbs - clearly they had been brought for the occasion and not just found here. That spoke of premeditation. But as strange as the design of the chain was, it paled in comparison to the five vivisected bodies dangling from them by the wrists, outlined in the hazy shafts of sunlight spearing in through the skylights. Each body bore hideous wounds, their ribs pried open like treasure chests of meat, baring viscera and organs to the salt-laced air of the docks - the smell of fish and seawater couldn't conceal the rank stench of the exposed meat. Strangely, none of the ribs were broken. It was more like they had simply been bent out of the way - sorcery, he thought with a barely suppressed shudder. Intestines had been spooled from the poor bastards and tied together to form pulsating streamers between the bodies.
When Crake had been summoned from his bed at dawn, three of the men had still been alive. They hadn't screamed once; nor could they despite their fervent wishes to the contrary - every throat had been opened and the tongues pulled through the hole to writhe wetly against the lungs of the victims. Their mouths had been sealed but from the ground it was hard to make out any stitches or staples. What really unsettled Williard Crake was the nagging suspicion that there weren't any to be seen. The word 'witchcraft' danced across the front of his mind again. He could feel a cold sweat start to build on his brow.
More atrocities met the eye the longer he looked, but Crake finally decided he'd seen enough after a minute of watching the far left man's lungs expanding and contracting shallowly. None of the men present had had the common decency to end their suffering, too transfixed with morbid curiosity at what they were seeing.
Every one of the men up there was familiar to the assembled bruisers. Every one of the men up there was one of Crake's.
Puffing furiously on his cigar, he started to pace the warehouse floor. He sneered down in disgust when his wandering dragged his polished maroon boots through the still-spreading puddle of blood. Absently, he mused there should have been a lot more of it across the ground if the wounds inflicted on his men were anything to go by. His workers wisely avoided his gaze, all of them sharing nervous glances. This wasn't a common occurrence even in their illicit professions.
Smeared across the nearest pile of crates, like some monstrous child's finger-painting, were wet, red letters.
'The Gilded Lily Knows.'
The Gilded Lily; those upstart whores and their horned bitch "matriarch". Crake was more than familiar with them, and remembered none too fondly the encounters he'd had. But he couldn't wrap his head around what exactly they purported to know. And why that knowledge had apparently driven them to the heights of cruelty with his former under-pimps - the occupants of the chains.
He had been put firmly out of the pimping scene a while ago now by their own hand; his drug trade was below the notice of even some of the lower-level players; sharing the wealth among the criminal circuits ensured no-one paid mind to his gambling dens; and his smuggling was done so cleverly (as far as he was concerned, and pity the man who disagreed with that to his face) that no-one even knew about it... He wracked his brain for long minutes trying to figure out what he could have possibly done to warrant this reaction, to no avail. All he knew was that he was going to get his revenge on those Lily bitches. He wanted it to be every bit as brutal as their message to him, but sadly no-one he knew would - or could - do something this heinous. Not even the Gubrath twins, and those fuckers were insane.
Finally, crushing out the cigar on the edge of one of the wooden crates lining the walls, he ran a hand through his thinning crown of salt-and-pepper hair and swore long and freely. Then he took a deep breath and proceeded to hammer his fist through the crate. Crake had been a behemoth in his youth and even though a lot of it had gone to fat when he started running the show instead of breaking arms, he was still a powerful man.
His frame was shivering with anger. Not just at the audacity of who had done this, but at the fact is had left him feeling shaken.
"I want every single one of the men brought in. All of them." His voice rose steadily louder with every word. "We're going to pay a visit to a few of those brothels, boys. They owe us five lives."
The brutish bodyguards drew their weapons, two long-bladed ballock knives, one iron cudgel and a cruel looking meat-hook with a few feet of chain. Together with their leader, the men thundered out of the warehouse amid a storm of curses and threats.
Sitting on a wooden barrel in an alleyway across from the warehouse, smiling contentedly to himself, Aurelianus Drak'shal quietly wiped the congealed blood from his hands with a rag.
***
This scene, and others similar, had played out across the city a dozen times or more in the past few days.
The tiefling and his agents had been busy; threats had been made; messages like the one delivered to Crake sent to as many of the former whore-runners as could be found on short notice; extensive bribes had been offered and accepted. The word was out that the Gilded Lily's patrons were fair game, that their brothels were to be demolished, razed or just trashed. Rumours circulated as to the why but most didn't care - they were either too greedy, too scared or too incensed to spare much thought on the matter.
And sitting behind it all, delighted with the chaos that was about to rain down, was Aurelius himself. He had cut deals with most of the parties involved that the whores weren't to be touched, soul-binding the stooges he had bribed or intimidated to enforce that rule among their men. Without their knowledge of course. But he had no illusions that the gang-leaders, former pimps and cutthroats had very little control over their men. It was only a matter of time before one underling got too hopped up and tried to force his way with one of the Faun Matriarch's girls, or cut on her to put her out of work.
It had all been taken into account. This was all just part of the game.
Once Philomel heard of the events transpiring in her little fiefdom, the fun could really begin.
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