The Red-Inked Ripper of Radasanth

[Savas Tigh]

Direct continuation of The Wormaxe Cometh (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23043-The-Wormaxe-Cometh), which needs judging from any kind soul willing to take up the effort. D:

In the city of Radasanth under a hunter's moon, there stood one wall like a thousand others, except for one glaring detail writ large in dripping red letters from top to bottom.


THE RED GOD WAKES.

In front of the wall stood a man in a long black robe with a half-dozen daggers hidden in his belt and the rib of a virgin in his hand. Someone was going to die before the sun rose on Corone.

[Savas Tigh]

Rineca Sëwo was a pretty enough woman to make a decent, if slightly dishonest living on the streets of Radasanth, both before and after the end of the Republic. While the rest of the city traded struggling democracy for clear-eyed oppression, Rineca shrugged, rolled her sleeves a little higher than usual, and got on with both business and life in general. She was a thief by trade, using her looks the hard way only when she absolutely had to. She had a lot of advantages no matter what she was doing.

Rineca was smart. She had never been properly schooled, but she had learned to read, write, and do basic mathematics. She had exotic looks, owing to a mixed heritage from an Akashiman mother with hints of Nekojin ancestry, all manifesting in her oval eyes with their cat-like pupils and brighter than average irises. Her nails were sturdy enough to double as weapons and grappling claws. Her balance was uncanny and her eyesight unphased by changes in light or darkness. Where most girls in the bitter business did it out of desperation, Rineca did it out of boredom or laziness. There were some nights where she just felt like lying back and doing things the easy way. And every once in a while, it actually felt good and she even had fun.

Tonight was not one of those nights. Rineca was running along, bathed in the dull light of a low, huge moon, her legs springing from stride to stride in a way that underscored her less human ancestry. She jumped from rooftop to rooftop, always avoiding the gutters from hard-earned experience, her thin-soled boots just barely providing adequate traction and protection from the risks of Radasanth's roof-trash. Nobody ever saw her because people just don't look up, especially not when there's an army boot pressing down on the necks.

Rineca jumped and jumped, vaulting and somersaulting, flipping and spinning her way from district to district with a small messenger bag's worth of gold coins resting soundlessly on her right hip. She had a grin that spoke not of Robin Hooded ambitions, but of a soon-to-be-full belly and a shortsighted shopping spree. Rineca climbed the side of a tall roof, sprang up onto its narrow spine-like top, then ran for the moon at full tilt. She reached the edge and jumped again.

She miscalculated. That or there was a wall in front of her that hadn't been there before she blinked. Rineca's shins confirmed reality and the young woman went tumbling end over end, down into an alleyway that saw her land on her feet in a miserably quiet cat's crouch. The only tells of how much it hurt, how badly her ankles were sprained and her shins were bruised, were some popping sounds and a faint hiss that forced its way out from between clenched teeth.

Rineca tried to stand and fell to her knees, gasping. She looked up to see a distortion in the air, spreading over her as it turned black in the likeness of a great cloak. And she heard words.

"I love a woman on her knees. Fancy a go at it?"

A few minutes later, the wall was red and Rineca's clothes lay in a wet, jumbled heap on the ground.

[Savas Tigh]

Savas Tigh was, by the standards of Wizardry proper, a young talent not fully developed. He had neither a Hat nor a Grimoire, and his robe was a thing born of alchemic modifications to the one he'd worn as an acolyte in the ritual corps of a Death Lord during the Corpse War. Neither his extra senses nor his actual abilities had fully manifested in their true form. And his evocation was utterly stunted.

For all that, Savas still had intuition. And as he stood staring at a bunch of dripping red letters on a wall beneath the faded midnight moon of Radasanth, Corone, he had a distinct impression that someone else was going to die before the night was over. Tonight just felt like a twofer. And Savas, of all people, would know these things. He was a murderer, cannibal, and black mage, after all; a real nasty piece of work by any stretch of the imagination, and he was not motivated to do good for anyone or anything. He was here less out of a desperate urge to stop the so-called Ripper of Radasanth, and more out of a mix of professional disdain and ego-driven hatred. His nose was still sore. It was going to heal a bit crooked, given what had happened to it a few days ago. Savas had been trying to accelerate the process with low-end rituals, but that still meant trading months for a week or so.

He had found the wall and its gruesome message on a fluke. The city's dead were a little more restless than usual. It made the hairs stand up on his neck. The rest took care of itself with a long, aimless walk down the road and through as many turns as he felt like taking. Chance lead the Wizard here. Probably.

THE RED GOD WAKES. said the wall, screaming occult violence into the eyes of anyone who deigned look at it. The authorities still hadn't arrived. They probably weren't going to come tonight.

Savas took a deep breath and reached into the wide leather utility belt he had kept as a souvenir from Scara Brae. He drew a wand lovingly etched from the rib bone of a girl whose soul moaned in agony within the walls of his basement. Then he shuffled some trash out the way and took aim.

"Briya la verda," the Wizard Said, his Voice barely more than a whisper and the words little difference from inconsequential babble. The language of spellcasting is nothing consistent, especially not when the mage in question is still new to the game. This particular wand had been carved for a simple reason: to expose the truth of a situation. It shined a dark green light from its end, spreading out like the glow of a searchlight in a prison.

The clothes were soaked in blood and worse. The writing on the walls had also been in blood. But what was on the walls had come from four different women, and what was on the clothing was only blood in a metaphorical sense. It had never existed in any body that could be considered mortal, three dimensional, or alive. But it had been in a body and that was good enough.

Savas drew one of the daggers from his robe and looked over his shoulder. He stabbed it into a pair of pants and let the metal do its work while he studied the message.

THE RED GOD WAKES.

Underscored four times. A period, not an exclamation. Capital letters. A Wizard notices these things once he's filed away the horror of the blood and the crime -- and such details weren't remotely horrifying to a monster like Wormaxe. He counted seven blotches, and an eighth that merged into the O. There were two gaps, one in the H and one in the O. The bottom branch of the G looked as if it had been dragged out by a thumb. Savas leaned in close, shining the light over every detail and commiting them all to memory as he went.

It was a precisely calculated statement.

Underscores put an emphasis on every single word, and every single victim in the process. A period for details; madmen slap on exclamation points, cold killers with purpose don't. Capital letters for deception, shock value, a challenge no different from a broken nose. Seven for magic, an aborted eight as a hint of something. Gaps for the leaps in logic needed to get into the mind of an enemy. A thickly dragged branch that screamed I took my time. And empty clothes covered in meta-blood, belonging to a victim who probably wished she had the dignity to die screaming.

Savas knew better than to think he was right about everything, but it was something to start from. He turned back to the dagger and pulled it from a now dry pair of pants. He sheathed it, then drew another and started scraping it along each word, always a different spot on the blade for each one. When he was finished, he sheathed that as well. Then he looked over his shoulder and put away the wand.

He had gone unnoticed. This part of the city was dreadfully empty at midnight. People bolted their doors, shut their windows, and prayed that the steeljackets didn't come for them and their loved ones.

[Savas Tigh]

"I've never heard of a Red God," Blightcrow admitted after a very long pause. It was rare that the dead Dark Wizard didn't know something about whatever Savas asked him. It was a point of pride that Blightcrow's time in the realm of the dead had bolstered his knowledge and power to positively staggering heights. If Blightcrow were to be believed, he had been a major player in the Antifirmament of Raiaera. Not necessarily a sovereign, but life's bitter lessons weren't lost on him and he had made good on his learnings. He had the kind of power that, were it not for the efforts of multiple Wizards, Savas included, Blightcrow could've easily re-manifested from beyond the grave. At a minimum, he would've been seven shades of Hell as a poultergeist.

To have him stumped was almost worth a broken nose and a wounded ego.

"There's obviously the red power of the Dead Lord, but he's passed on beyond the Antifirmament and the Nether both. Wherever he is, nothing mortal is going to call him up no matter how many middlemen they go through."

"Xem'zund wasn't a god anyway," Savas shrugged as he began to drain the daggers into vials on his desk.

The process of draining plynt is both easy to learn and difficult to master. Cheaters just burn the stuff and collect what's left from the ashes using alchemy and ritual. Savas, who still lacked a stable income and didn't even properly exist as far as Corone was concerned, favored doing things the hard, cheap way. It involved a tiny ritual circle chalked into his desktop around the vial, and then water that had been 'weighted' with the lingering thoughts from a dying man's brain. It was the last service of Yianni, the slave that Savas had bought, killed, and long since recycled.

Liquid thought. Illegal in any civilized part of the world, but everyone still had a store that they didn't like other people knowing about. There was no harmless way to harvest the stuff, except possibly with the aid of a willing psychic, but those were few and far between, especially in Corone. It was a potent reagent in its own right, but it had another use: absorbed into plynt, it forced out any other fluids that the metal had taken on. After a few hours, it would fade away on its own, because thoughts unrecorded don't last long. As thought disappeared, the water turned existential and popped back up in the ocean somewhere, skipping every step of evaporation in the process.

It was painstaking effort. Savas dripped the blood from four women into four vials. The circle made it only slightly easier by guaranteeing that the blood dripped into the glass, not onto the table. When he was done, he stoppered each vial and scribbled onto its label and set it aside. T, R, G, W. The notion of a sequence in the letters hadn't been lost on him either. Even an insane sequence that made no sense.

Magic requires magical thinking. You either leap logic like an Olympian or you forget doing it and go back to raking shit in a village somewhere.

"Have you formed an assessment of your opposition yet?"

"Probably a black mage of some kind. Strikes me as being too calculated to be a mad cultist. Could be wrong. Certainly rogue by any Tradition I'm aware of. Seems to be focusing on murdering women. Good at going unseen, most likely knows how to twist light and sound to conceal his presence. Shitty handwriting even by my standards."

"Could just be a psuedointellectual murderfiend," Blightcrow suggested. "Those were always fun. Nasty little bluggers once they get to the other side and aren't quite bound by the limits of mortality anymore."

"He's not making it to the other side," Savas replied with casual conviction. "I'm going to rip out his soul and eat it. Slowly."

"Disembodied spirits in the Firmament can't feel pain, you know. Not physically. They can remember it and conceptualize it, and they can hurt emotionally, but that's it."

Savas stopped. He looked over at the skull and, very flatly, declared, "I'll find a way to make it hurt."

An orange-sounding whistle was the only response he got. Savas returned to draining plynt and hating the world. Somewhere out in the night, another woman was about to die.

[Savas Tigh]

Ryna Ejanelly had no great sob story. She wasn't even a prostitute. She was actually the third and most treasured daughter of a lesser noble among the former assembly of Corone, and her father knew how to play every side against the middle well enough to keep the family's collective neck above the water. Her brothers had taken support roles in the army, her oldest sister had died in the initial round of fighting that accompanied the coup of the Vicelords, and her other sister was happily married with her own mansion on the border between Jadet and the capital of Akashima. Ryna's only real complaint in life had always been how nothing ever went wrong. All her desires were met before she even felt them. In her father's house, still a beacon of luxury in an upscale neighborhood on the north side of the city, she had a servant to wait on her every possible need. And that had become a problem.

Life was boring.

Ryna solved the problem of boredom first by sports, but women in upper-class Corone are hardly athletes, and the men aren't willing to sacrifice their pride for a fair game. When she couldn't best them on the field, Ryna turned to besting them in the shadows, under the covers, on the couch, the counter, the floor of her father's study, anywhere with an element of risk involved. She always managed to stay just a sweet smile ahead of her father's suspicions, and any servants who suspected anything had a nasty habit of disappearing. Not necessarily dying or even being hurt, per se, just...they would abruptly stop being there at the house.

Ryna eventually bored of that too. So she took a chance on men -- and women -- beneath her station. It did not take long for Ryna to develop a certain appreciation for the fine officers of the Coronian army. When she tired of the officers, she worked her way down to the fighting men, and when she finally tired of them, Ryna went looking for a new thrill.

She found it in a substance called fire dust. It was an alchemic product, originally designed as a torture tool, derived from mundane peppers and a pinch of the dried gum the Akashimans called Sanmé, better known abroad as Third-Eye. It amplified tactile sensations. Mixed properly, it could let a man feel the blood in his own veins, the individual hairs on his skin, and every single nervous sensation triggered by any contact with another person. An apt torturer could turn a few ounces of the stuff into instant truth with nothing more than a toothpick. If fire dust was diluted enough, the body processed it differently. Tactile sensations were still enhanced, but not to maddening extremes, and a tweak here or there could remove pain from the equation all together.

The only thing left would be pleasure. Not even destructive pleasure, for the most part.

Fire dust gave Ryna a new ache between her legs. It literally made the world feel better. Sex felt like a new experience every single time, and she couldn't get tired of it even when she wanted to. It even made everyday suitors feel competitive with the men of the military. Fire dust allowed Ryna to feel like a godess in the clothes of a peasant servant girl, allowing her to slip out during the night. She went to a tavern or inn -- any of them, didn't matter which -- and picked a stand out at a whim. It was routine for her.

So when the tall, handsome stranger in the tophat and cloak asked her, "Fancy a go at it?" it was all Ryna could do not to giggle. Here she was, being propositioned by an apparent nobleman, unaware of the fact that her status probably surpassed his own. It was a new thrill, made all the more irresistable by the fire dust winding its way through her system.

"Why not?" she asked.

He lead her out the door and down the street to another inn, all while promising things he would do to her in some of the most uncannily civil, upper class language she'd ever heard in her life. It was an intellectual stimulation to match the physical, and the result had her tingling from head to toe and everywhere in between. Through a door, through a crowd of people who never deigned to look up from their own games and drinks and chit-chat. Up a flight of stairs, thirteenth door on the left. Ryna kissed him on the lips and her whole face flushed red. She could barely stand as the stranger opened the door into a red room.

"I never did get your name," she told him as he lead her in.

"Now is that really important?" he asked.

The door slammed shut.

[Savas Tigh]

Savas was awoken the next day by a loud banging on the door. He had a wand in each hand so fast that the rest of his brain took a few moments just to process what was happening, even as his feet lead the way up to the ground floor of his tower. Savas waited. He counted to ten.

Then he threw open the door and stormed the street with wands aiming at angles in every direction. Every step, a new angle. He had his eyes primed for visual distortions and there wasn't a chance that some bastard was going to break his nose a second time.

His alert stance was made infuriatingly futile by the fact that noone was there. It was just before dawn and not even the street sweepers were out yet, lowly peons that they were. Savas still didn't relax. He eased back into his tower, carefully looking back over his shoulder in measured bursts of speed and thought. Once he was inside, he examined the letter that had been left for him. He poked it with a wand, then meticulously dragged it inside and slammed the door shut behind him.

Still nothing.

"BLIGHTCROW!"

"WHAT?"

Silence.

"Nothing," Savas mumbled as he put away the wands and took the letter downstairs. He went over it a few times with the evidenciary wand, just to make sure there were no curses or poisons. Nevermind that anything coded into the envelope could have killed him several times over by that point. He flipped it over and examined the R|R seal holding the thing shut. Red. Wax. Stylized. Savas sneered and opened it.

The letter he received wasn't much different from the first one.


Hi Boss,

Last night was a double event and I am very disappointed that you did not try anything to stop me. I fed them to the red and took the leftovers for myself. I think I will share some with you.

A package will come later today.

Enjoy,
Your Friend
Savas grimaced.

"I think I annoyed him," he reported to the skull.

"You annoy me," Blightcrow replied.

"Yes, but I don't give a shit about you. You can't break my nose or kill me.

"Yet."

Savas looked at the skull. It said nothing. He had the vague impression that Blightcrow would've been smiling, if he still had lips.

"Alright," Savas sighed. "I think it's time I learned how to track someone. He's given me enough to work with. The day is yet to even be young. If he was busy all night, odds are he has to sleep during the day."

"So you're going to find him and murder him in his sleep?"

"And then eat his dead body bit by bit after binding his soul back into it."

"...I'm almost proud!" Blightcrow declared.

[Savas Tigh]

Savas' tower had a second basement in it. The first, where he actually did most of his living, had been a storage room repurposed into a study/bedroom. The second had started life as a last ditch hiding place from whatever the tower's builders expected to come rampaging through the rest of the building. It now served as a cross between a Great Big Closet of Weird Stuff and a ritual room. Savas had painstakingly constructed a pair of concentric ritual circles on the floor and one on the ceiling; two in chalk, and then another from wood nailed onto bloodstains.

The ritual chamber was where Savas intended to do all of his really dark magic -- where it could be contained and wouldn't run around knocking over most of his shelves or threatening to release the Dark Wizard by accident. He hadn't fully warded the room just yet, but there would be time enough for that later. For now, Savas just needed it to call up a relatively harmless spirit or two.

Savas put on his robe, took out the Arcanist's Rod he had stolen from Blueraven, then went right to work. He reached out for the women whose blood he had gathered, reading their names from the traces of them left behind in that congealing red slush.

"Polia Chols!"

"Nieh Anam!"

"Zabeli Detris!"

Nothing. The best he could do was muster up faint, fragmentary echoes for any of the three; nothing that could answer questions or even provide insight into what had happened to them. He saw Polia's disembodied arm flailing around in mid-air, followed by cracked chunks of Nieh's upper torso. Zabeli provided the tattered remnants of childhood laughter; possibly an echo of her last happy memory. Savas didn't know or care.

He cleaned up the circle after each ritual, then went right back to it. Rod held out to the air, his free hand aimlessly gesturing at the circle as he walked around it. Power funneled into the rod, through the rod into his hand, through his hand into his body, and through his body into his other hand. From there it poured into the circle, its purpose defined by the ritual as a place where the laws of mortality were a little more lax than usual. In time, he would raise the dead here, and not just as mere spirits, but not just yet.

At the height of his ritual, Savas stood on the north end of the circle and clasped the rod with both hands. He waved it around a few times, then called the last name in his collection.

"Rineca Sëwo!"

For a long couple of seconds, nothing happened.

Then, bit by bit, green light warped and congealed into something not quite physical, not at all tangible, and certainly not living. It began as clouds worming through the air, then became a swirling mass of liquids, then became a woman who was young and pretty, very naked, and even more afraid. She looked as if she hadn't even realized what had happened to her. And at a glance, it might've been hard to tell that anything had happened to her at all -- except for the fact that her skin moved less like flesh and more like clothing. Savas inspected her for a few seconds before realizing that there was no visible damage to her exterior at all.

He filed that away for later.

"Who killed you?"

She stared at him, her cat's eyes even more inhuman in death than they were in life.

"Who killed you?" he asked again.

I don't know, she answered. I'm really dead?

"Quite. What do you remember of your murderer?"

...it was dark. A wall came out of nowhere. I...I fell and then, as I was getting up, he put his cloak over me and said, "Fancy a go at it?" I...he killed me?

"Yep. Left behind a great big pile of clothes soaked in metaphysical blood. Scribbled the word WAKES on the wall in your actual blood. Anything sound familiar?" Wormaxe asked with all the sympathy and bedside manner of a coroner. Which wasn't entirely off the mark.

...what happens to me now? Rineca asked.

Savas grimaced. "Do you know anything else?"

She shook her head. He smiled unpleasantly and told her, "Nothing remotely good."

[Savas Tigh]

The package came late that day. It was wood wrapped in brown paper. Inside, a kidney. Half of a kidney, to be precise. And someone had evidently chewed on it. A normal person would've been utterly mortified.

Savas didn't even blink.

He spent the rest of the day figuring out all the proper formulae to break the kidney down to its basest elements, which he then placed inside of a beaker. With Blightcrow's assistance, Savas constructed a tracking spell and bound it to piece of bone dice that had been carved with arrows instead of numbers. Reinforcing the die so that it wouldn't burn out after one use was tricky business, the sort done with tiny brushes and paint mixed from bodily fluids that don't bear mention.

When he was done, Savas suited up. He put on heavy duty pants, a thick shirt, and then Salvic boots and his utility belt, its holsters full of vials and small weapons of every sort. He put on a heavy leather robe last. It was layered around chainmail, all pitch black and alchemically refined to avoid making any undue sounds. The interior had holsters for his axe, his rod, and several daggers. Savas used all of them.

"What are you planning to do?" Blightcrow asked.

"I'll figure that out when I get there," Savas said. "All I know at this point is that sitting at home and formulating spells in my basement isn't getting me anywhere."

"What do you expect to find with that dice then?"

"...something worth killing, hopefully," Savas answered.

[Savas Tigh]

Savas rolled the dice.

He dead-ended five times before finally ending up at the steps of Radasanth's largest, best stocked library, Surkham Hall -- one of the oldest such institutions in Corone, give or take a few natural disasters and the tolls inherent in civil war. It was a truly massive building, spanning most of a city block in any given direction. Once upon a time, it had been a castle, then a prison, and then an arcane laboratory, then a prison again before someone had decided to start cramming books into it. It still had a sense of grim majesty, darker than the rest of Radasanth by far. Gargoyles stood near many of the higher windows, leering viciously at the streets below. Weeping angels stood atop several towers. The only way in or out was an honest-to-Thaynes drawbridge that lead to a staircase taller than Savas' tower.

And, Savas noted with grim amusement, it was well guarded. Surkham's protectors were some of the most able-bodied men and women he had seen since coming to this crestfallen land; all clad in the same suits of white-painted armor under red and blue silk tunics, all armed with poleaxes and swords, all either carrying or close to sturdy iron lanterns. In many ways, they were a statement that the upper echelons of the military didn't know how to properly articulate; a statement those same men still understood almost intimately.

Knowledge is power.

Guard it well.

Savas nodded to himself a few times, then strolled in anyway. None of them so much as blinked at him. He didn't even realize that he was being watched until he got to the top of the stairs and found a tall, imposing man waiting for him. He dressed like all the others but he carried a steel club covered in domes -- an Akashiman tetsubo. Savas fought the natural urge to recoil at the sight of that weapon, especially since he knew what it could do. He greeted the man instead with a feeble, "Hello."

"What is your business here," the man said rather than asked.

"Ah, well, I just, ah, I just moved here from another-from Raiaera, that is to say, and-"

"Stop talking. Gather your words. Answer," spoken with a hint of impatience.

Savas forced his knees to stop shaking. Then he answered, "I'm new to town and want to read up on local history. I'm going to be working as a funerist and need to know local customs regarding death and what comes afterwards." This was, surprisingly, not too far from the truth.

The guard spat off to one side, then nodded him through. Savas waited until he was safely through the front door before having a miniature breakdown. He had seen a tetsubo in action during his travels, the ones he didn't actually take. It had broken the back of a horse and then caved in the skull. Savas had been riding the horse. He avoided its fate by falling off just before the crippling blow. For some reason, it was one of those memories that stuck with him long after it had outlived its usefulness. He straightened up and continued on into Surkham's main hall.

It was a tall room filled to capacity with bookshelves. Each wall was covered, floorspace was at such a premium that the hall's only desk was actually just outside the door in, and there were guards patrolling inside. They wore the same armor and silk, but they carried daggers instead of long weapons that might get caught on shelves or books. Savas looked around and then smiled to himself.

He was a lot of things, but he was a Wizard first and foremost. And Wizards are academics. A Wizard, whether good, evil, or just plain apathetic, will always be at home in a library. Doubly so if he's there to learn how to do something horribly unpleasant to someone.

Savas all but dove between the shelves and got to work.