Seven Sins: Wrath (Solo)

[Aurelianus Drak'shal]

Cadin took the stairs two at a time, heavy boots ringing off the cold stone. The alarm bells mounted on the walls were shrieking like bastard banshees and it was all he could do to keep his teeth gritted and try to ignore them.

Just keep running.

Bounding to the top of the narrow flight of stairs, he had to shoulder his way through gaggles of the disturbed perverts and pleasure-seekers that were drifting out into the hallways. Some angry mutters and shouts followed the sprinting man, but the rest were pacified out of their faces on whatever cornucopia of drugs and drink they had devoured that day, or were simply too inured to sensation to really notice his passing. They were being drawn by the hitherto unheard sound.

And how Cadin wished the sounds bleating from the cold-iron bells mounted high on the walls had remained unheard. He knew what they meant. And it was a grim bloody portent for his day.

Cursing loudly and freely, he swung a sharp right at the end of the corridor, nearly slipping on a puddle of.. he didn’t want to know what. His loping stride devoured the next set of stairs swiftly and as he burst into the main foyer of the House of Sin, he cursed some more at the crowd gathered before him. Leather-bound deviants, hobbled, shuffled after those holding their leashes; small clusters of men and women hovered around trays heaped with epicurean and anatomical delights; patrons were peeking out from the fur-lined alcoves lining the chamber, most in various states of undress – and in one case at least, a state of fleshlessness – as they whispered among themselves; a devil’s cast of misshapen nightmares made manifest, interspersed with the more sanely shaped creatures that frequented these infamous walls. There were so many that in the warm brazen glow of the braziers around the room, the walls were visibly sweating condensation, the tapestries hanging limp and heavy.

And all of them were between him and where he was going. But above their heads he could make out some of his own men at the top of the twin curving staircases to the next floor. The House’s security such as they were, trying to keep order (a first in this place, surely) and hold back the more brave among the curious souls. Without hesitation, the lean Salvaran drew his dirk from the worn sheath at his equally worn belt and laid about him to clear a path. He used the pommel of the weapon, aiming for noses, napes of necks and any weak spot that would get these stupid bastards out of his way faster. Nails rasped over his bare arms as he forged a way through the incense-fugged antechamber, hands reached out to snag his clothes, his hair, to demand to know what was happening. Cadin bulled through them ferociously, lashing out and keeping his momentum.

He repressed a sneer of disgust as he recognised nothing in common with these creatures. The ones that hadn’t been fleshcrafted into bizarre and harrowing forms made the bile rise in his throat more than the others sometimes. He had seen the tastes indulged beneath these eaves – at least some of the monsters in here had the decency to look like monsters.

The alarms screamed above it all.

Finally, sweat sheening his skin with a sickly light, prickling as it beaded between his shoulder blades, Cadin made it to the cordon of his men. Harl and Edd, two of the stockiest, grabbed his arm roughly and pulled him through before turning back to keep everyone else at bay with a mix of shouted jeers and swiftly delivered hobnails. Cadin took a moment to catch his breath, running a callused hand over his slick brow and leaning on the wrought iron balustrade while he returned his knife to his belt. His gaze shifted to his hand on the railing and he grimaced as he noticed the minute tremors of the white-knuckled grip. He swallowed thickly, feeling the lump in his throat catch on the collar of his jerkin.

Snatching the hand to his side and taking a deep breath, Cadin looked to see if any of the boys had noticed it too; fortunately they were too busy fending off thrill-seekers and the terminally idiotic. Alarm bells ringing, and they move toward the source of danger. Can see how they wound up here, he thought with a bitter shake of his head at his own situation. Maybe he did have more in common with them than he thought.

“Harl!” he yelled, realising suddenly that only the bells, and his own men’s shouts, were competing with him for volume. The rest of the assembled degenerates advanced or indulged their voyeuristic tastes in near silence. Murmured whispers, audible only as an irritating susurrus of background noise, muffled queries from behind metal bits, or the occasional less identifiably human sound, were all that emerged from their ranks. The effect was unsettling.

“Harl,” he started again, his voice just loud enough to cut through the sonorous peals, “has anyone seen who-- what opened it?”

“Beats me, Cad, we heard the alarms same as you and made it – ugh -- hell for leather this way.”

The hirsute ex-soldier grunted as he had to swing the iron-shod cudgel in his hand in a threatening arc to keep the creeping tide at bay. They tried to crowd in even closer, whether looking to inflict or receive pain… one could never guess with them. A hand completely hidden beneath a heavy chain glove reached up for the veteran’s beard but a quick backswing had the gunshot crack of a broken wrist loud enough to be heard over the clanging cacophony.

“Then these Sway-damned whoresons started pouring in like lice,” he finished with a shrug that turned into an elbow when an elven woman with too many tongues tried to press up against him lasciviously.

Cadin let his eyes dance over the rest of his men as they fought to stem the flow of people now seeping out of the darker corners of the House. The hunger in their eyes was a forlorn and hollow thing, terrible for him to look at for too long even after these many years working beneath the roof. A dozen of his men, most of them either ex-military like Harl, or former Crimson Hand assassins, were holding the perimeter against it. Most of them already bore cuts, scrapes and bruises from the more enthusiastic revellers.

That meant he was left to deal with upstairs.

“Where are Gimmel and his monsters?” he asked no-one in particular. For once he’d almost welcome letting that lot deal with the problem. From nearby a.. man? Woman? - It was impossible to tell through the delicate folds of bone and quivering flesh that made up its face – warbled a high-pitched, reedy sound that could have meant anything.

“I wasn’t asking you, but thanks anyway,” he muttered darkly, letting one of his men detach themselves from the base of the only staircase winding up from here to shove the freak back, further into one of the many doorways thronging the landing.

“Did someone open it from the outside?”

“Doubt it, boss,” Pawel chuckled from near Cadin’s shoulder, manning this last set of steps. “You see any thumbs lying about?”

Cadin tried not to smile; it wasn’t hard. He remembered the vicious traps and enchantments placed on the door to the foul little sanctum that hung over them all. And the bloody mess it had made of the past few fools who had decided to chance their luck. Almost against his will he let his head rise ponderously to look up at the room above – dark, malignant, like a tumour hanging from the roof of the building; it loomed pregnant with the promise of unpleasantness within. Torchlight from the foyer below licked against the curving windows but there was no sign of life within. Hadn’t been for damn well over a year now. It sat like a blinded eye.

“Well, fuck it all,” he sighed, drawing his knife again reluctantly. He tried to ignore the doubt worming in his mind that a knife wouldn’t be enough.

“What? If the door wasn’t opened from out here, means there’s no-one in there, right?”

“Or it means whatever’s in there is trying to get out, Pawel.”

The dark-haired cutthroat chewed on that thought for a second. He drew a short hatchet from a loop at his belt as an afterthought. Cadin eyed it, doubting it would be enough either. They both looked up the staircase to the slightly ajar door of the office.

Something moved within.

“Fuck it all,” Pawel agreed.

The two of them set their boots on the first step and began their ascent.