Caught Red Handed

[Anke/Varg]

Caught Red Handed (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AIJEX7vQgg)

2630


Set before, during, and after the events of the attack on the Ixian Wagon (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?24209-IK-vs-PA-2v2-A).

I feel like sodden winter bloom
And no smile does grace my view;
The earth seems now to rend my soul
From pastures great and blue.

Some say Althanas, o' Mother Earth!
Gives in bounty and pleasant grace,
But here I stand as mortal juror,
With feet enslaved, with haggard face.

I am feral, and hide behind
The lunar and the land,
I anger quickly and swiftly heed
To nought but instinct's hand.

You see before you, man and beast,
But truly I am neither one,
I live with the land and still it rebels,
Resents me until I've gone.

Cydney Oliver.

[Anke/Varg]

“Tell a gullible man a lie, and he will twist reality to suit the falsity told. Tell a good man a white lie, and the world comes undone.” It was not the best fable, metaphor, and tenet Rouge lived by, but it suited the moment well enough for her to say it with conviction. He voice was soft, belittling her dagger wielding stance and position over the bloodied corpse in the dark, wet, and abandoned alleyway between two taverns in Radasanth fare.

The tall, dapper, and unconvinced gentlemen standing behind her clicked his mechanical limps through several minute adjustments, each one an attempt to keep his mortally wounded corpse rolling through the thing men called time, and he called a death sentence. His glowing eyes, pallid spheres burning bright behind two glasses lens looked down at the duo’s latest victim.

“Is now true the time for soliloquy, Rouge?” he wheezed. Steam poured from the joints of his face mask, and oozed from about his waist. The damp cloth of his elegant waistcoat and dinner jacket expanded briefly, before deflating to cling to his cankerous frame.

The assassin turned her dagger through several rotations in her sweaty fingers, using the motion to concentrate on her reply. She righted herself, clicked her back into normality, and turned on delicate heels which clicked against the blood stained cobbles of the slums. The rain, though light in cover, still managed to fall down between the tall rooftops and drape her hood, brown hair, and demeanour down across her sour expression.

“It is always appropriate to say a pious line for the deceased,” she jabbed a thumb over her shoulder. “Especially one who has been so…” she licked her lips, “accommodating to our demands.” The individual on the floor behind her was a messenger of sorts, who had been unfortunate in his coming across of the duo as they snook from the docks to the city walls.

“It seems…self-indulgent.” He chided.

Rouge looked up at the man’s glowing, lantern, and ghostly eyes with a stern grimace. He was a tall man, even without his mechanical extensions, but still she towered over him in immensity and indifference. She took several deep, meaningful, and pained breaths to steel her senses against the cold encroachment of the night.

“You do as you wish when you take a life, Leper, and I will do as I so desire.” She dropped her arms down by her sides, and bounced them hap hazard against the hem of her frilled skirt. “We have come too far to begin arguing over frivolities like this now.”

Leper nodded.

“Do you trust the information he volunteered?” the werewolf knew better than to pursue the point further. Rouge was a calculating, intelligent, and bitterly logical woman that seldom lost an argument. He had learnt long ago to simply admit faux defeat, and move very swiftly on to the next issue in their long agenda.

She shrugged, sheathed her knife, leaving it bloodied, and turned back to the corpse. She folded her arms across her chest and dropped her right hip with a swagger. Her left boot tapped against the stone, rain, blood, and refuse splashing up from the streets.

“I think it was all too convenient for an Ixian Knight messenger to be here, at this hour, and in our sights. I do not trust the Cult one bit, mark my words, but I trust the Ixian Knights less still.” There was contempt in her reasoning that seemed to grab the raindrops from the air and knock them aside with begrudging damnations of nature’s insistence on fallacy. “What about you?” she looked over her shoulder briefly to check his body language, and turned back when she saw he was giving it consideration.

“There is an element of truth in every lie, no matter the morality of the mouth that speaks it.” He said. It was one of Rouge’s own parables, and it bit into the assassin’s nerves like a heated blade into supple skin. She seethed, hisses, and clucked.

[Anke/Varg]

“Very funny,” she said at last. Leper might have learnt not to argue with his own logic, but he had quickly picked up on the fact that she could readily be undone with her own reasoning. “I doubt we would get very far if we marched up to the castle in the forest and asked to gut the great Sei Orlouge’s family.”

“I did not suggest it was quite as simple as that,” he advanced, his steel frame less clipping against the stone, more crushing it. Little chips and white scrapes marked his advance, ceasing only when he crouched and extended a claw to the chest of the corpse. Rouge looked away as the steel claws raked through the cloth of the man’s shirt with ease, and gauge out three lines into his exposed flesh. “There is one way to tell if a mortal being is telling the truth.” He continued. In his insanity, he had lost the human reaction to cannibalistic desires. He was a wolf, now, bound in the body of a gentleman.

“Must you?” she pleaded, turning away and walking several feet down the alleyway towards the skein of the busy street beyond. Radasanth, even gone midnight, seldom slept for long. Her soft eye observed the distant passing of tired merchant wagons and barkeeps and wenches, trying to find distraction in anything besides the barbaric deeds of her companion.

Leper nodded, too distracted to speak. When the skin was lacerated, he raised both his claws, and drove them downwards with a snap of his metallic limbs and a rush of air into his joints. They easily cracked the rib cage, the clavicle, and the sinew that stretched over the man’s torso. He tore them apart like blinds, and continued with rage to scythe through his body to get to the soul of his essence. The nose sent a shiver down Rouge’s spine, but a rush of excitement, adrenaline, and sycophantic pleasure up the half chordate column of Leper’s back. His clockwork heart bleated noisily in time with his mortal muscle.

“Well?” she offered.

Leper reached into the warm, moist, and bridling depths of the body and closed his claws softly around the still pulsating heart. He snipped through the aorta with a forefinger flick, and pulled the organ clean from the corpse with a roar of satisfaction, a groan of sexual desire, and an animalistic growl of self-indulgent success. Upon hearing the all too familiar sound, Rouge had to bury her fingers into her ears and wiggle them rapidly as she hummed. The sound of a gasmask being removed, followed by serrated teeth tearing through a man’s steaming heart was not a melody she wished to hear so soon into the night.

“He was not lying,” Leper replied, as soon as the mouthful was chewed, swallowed, and pouring down his throat like a rich, lumpy, and warm stew. He recognised the adrenaline stained taste of flesh with relish, and rose from the carnage with half the heart deflating, oozing, and loosely held in his bloodied claw. He looked at the back of Rouge’s head, and rolled his eyes. He replaced his gasmask with his free hand, and drowned out the sound of his continued chewing down on the gristle in his teeth. “He is not lying,” he repeated, much louder, so that she could hear through her ignorance.

“Oh good,” she moaned, removing the fingers from her ears and turning, slowly, hesitantly, and with much reservation. She looked down at the now sullied corpse, felt queasy, and looked back up at the pallid spheres. She wanted to strike him for his relinquishing of his control, but she had to appreciate the man’s tongue, senses, and wolf like ability to tell a man’s final thoughts through consuming his essence. It was something she was almost jealous of, but certainly thankful for. A werewolf might be a monster to some, but he was also a diviner, an oracle, at one with the moon. “Then we must go out onto the plains and find this wagon.” She nodded.

Without waiting, she turned and advanced out of the alleyway, eager to leave the smell of blood behind, and the memory of their actions on this dark night well and truly buried in the past. They still had much ground to cover, much to do, and many more deaths to tally in the night before they earned their promised ‘monetary ecstasy’ from their present employer.