Fallen Victors

by Jonathan Lenahan

The heel of her foot plowed into his gut, and the momentum she’d gathered from the end of the hall snapped her foot forward so hard that it felt as if she’d touched his spine through his stomach. He slammed his head against the wall with a hollowed crack, muffled, but still loud. Crymson pulled a knife from her thigh sheath and stalked toward the man, intent on ending the job before he could recover.

  A door opened behind her. She whirled, knife ready to throw, and the man she’d grounded seized the opportunity to smash his shoulder into her upper back. Crymson twisted, and her head bounced off the floor. Her vision hazed, and she saw a third knife appear in the man’s hand. It flashed toward her neck. She raised her hand to block it, the punishing floor slowing her movement –

  The man hit the wall for the second time, courtesy of a black boot to the ribs. Slate stood over her, his mouth a hard line and his sword in hand. “You realize that people are fucking sleeping!” The man against the wall groaned, knife at his feet and blood pooling around it. Must have landed on its point when Slate had kicked him. Again, unfortunate.

  “Teach! Come get this sack of shit and bring him in the room. And you,” Slate glared at Crymson, “rip that fucking jacket off. You smell worse than you look, and that’s saying something.”

  A head poked above the stairwell – the downstairs drunkard. “Had a few too many,” Crymson called out. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Know the feeling,” said the drunk, who turned and stumbled down the stairs. Crymson sighed. She touched the back of her head and felt a goose egg the size of her fist. Amassing quite the collection.

  Dragging herself to the doorknob, Crymson pulled herself off the floor and walked into their room, now brightened by candles that cast lambent shadows. The unlucky self-stabbed man lay propped against the wall, his abdomen leaking blood, dammed only by his hands.

  Isaac sat on the bed, snapping his fingers, his eyes locked on the wounded man. Teacher, his duty done, stood in Slate’s shadow, an absurd reality until Crymson realized how much of a presence the latter man afforded, his arms crossed as he glared down at the man against the wall. Slate looked like a protector: the world behind him a refuge and the world in front of him a battle-scarred wasteland, ready to ignite at any moment.

  Crymson put her hands behind her back, a headache driving splinters of wood behind her eyes and into her skull. “You were watching our door,” Slate said. “Why?”

  “Get me a doctor and I’ll – ” the man gasped, and a short, wet cough bubbled up. “I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

  “Talk first, doctor second,” Slate said. Crymson didn’t think he actually intended to get the man any help.

  The man began to shake his head, and Slate gave him a light but full-handed slap across the face. “Listen, you’re going to bleed out soon, which means you’re in no position to be calling the shots, and if I remember anything about gut wounds, it’s not going to be pretty. It’ll be a slow, lingering death, and if we wait long enough, they’ll patch you up only for the wound to go caustic and poison you, which is even worse. Help me, and I’ll help you. You have my word.”

  The man’s breath left him. “Mendoza. He told me to watch your door and keep you from leaving, but he didn’t tell me about women dressed as drunkards or a man with a boot the size of my thigh.”

  “Why?”

  “Look, I dunno. Boss says something, I say yes, and I can put food on the table every month. It isn’t my job to ask questions.”

  “What about the Old Man?”

  The wounded man attempted to shrug, but he gasped as the movement pulled at his shredded organs. “Boss said he . . . wanted to talk to him. Gathered him up when . . . all you went to bed. That’s all I know, honest.”

  “No, it’s not. One more thing, and then you’ll have your doctor.” Where are they?”

  “Basement. Harlequin house.” The wounded man’s face greyed. “Old theater. Run-down. Two streets east . . . take a left. Can’t miss.”

  “Old?” Slate shook the man, and his eyes fluttered open. “How old?”

  “Hundred or so years, I don’t . . . ” The man’s head slumped and his shallow breaths ceased.

  “Well, looks like I don’t have to break another promise.” Slate wiped his hands on his pants as he turned to face Crymson. “This theater is going to be a bitch to navigate.”

  “Tell me about it as we walk.” Crymson barely gave the corpse a second glace. “Will you and Teacher help me pack up?”

  Slate’s eyes, still showing vestiges of that blasted wasteland, shredded her skin to ribbons, but she stood tall.

  “You requesting or telling?” he asked.

  “Hoping.”

  The corner of Slate’s mouth curled up. “Then I’ll help.”

  Crymson nodded briskly. “Good. I feel like we’re going to need it.”

  Angras

  I smiled, and it felt right on my face.

  Be not afraid of the pen, the scaffold, or the sword. Tell the truth wherever you please. Look what it has given you. Look at their power.

  Raucous shouts filled the air as the speaker began to pound on the podium, his forehead turning a bright purple. “Are we shit to be trampled upon, or are we men? We won’t stand for this! Not after all we’ve given!”

  Royal guards surrounded the crowd, some true servants of the king, others men I’d bought, bribed or otherwise killed and replaced. From an alcove above the square, I grabbed a small mirror and directed the light from the sun to the light of another mirror, reflecting it to make a white circle on the arm of a guard. He looked at it, toward my window, and then drew his sword.

  “Long live the king, and down with his oppressors!”

  My guards fell amongst the crowd. Wails. A massacre.

  Upstairs, in the window by myself, I ripped the mask from my head and threw it against the wall. I vomited, wiped my mouth, and then vomited again. All that blood, the children, the dead.

  Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. You take it.

  I stepped across the room and picked up my mask, slow to tie it back around my head. “No other way?”

  None. But if you can’t handle it, then I am here.

  I didn’t reply.

  Slate and Teacher

  Blasted woman. He stomped down the stairs, pushed not by conscious decision but rather by impromptu fury. Who was she kidding? He’d practically packed everything alone. Who the bloody fuck – why – for wha – where was fucking Isaac?

  Stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Some wasted fool sat in the back corner, his ugly mug mashed against the table in what looked to be a puddle of beer. Ha. Might drown. Isaac appeared from an opening behind the bar, avoiding looking anywhere but the ground. Slate found it impossible to read the runt – damn, but he hated to admit that .

  He shoved the thought far beneath the folds where it couldn’t come up again, and redoubled his focus on Isaac. “Coming with us?”

  The runt nodded. Slate looked at Teacher: though he gave no sign of it, the dragging of the man upstairs had reopened Teacher’s wounds, and Slate had barely managed to close them before they came downstairs. Even now, blood tinged the makeshift bandages red.

  The wood at the foot of the stairs creaked. Crymson stood there, clenching and unclenching her hands. “Let’s go.”

  Isaac placed a jingling purse on the bar’s corner, tossed a second one into the air, weighed it, and then placed it next to the first.

  “Walk outside already,” Slate said. “I’ll be right there.”

  “Hurry up.” Crymson walked out the door, Isaac close on her heels.

  “Come here, Teach.” Slate patted the stool to his right. “We’re going away for a little while, all right? I need you to stay here and watch over the room for me, make sure nobody gets inside. If they do, you make them hurt, okay?”

  Teacher nodded his big head. “Good. Now go upstairs and lock the door behind you. I’ll be back pretty soon.” He patted Teach
er on the shoulder, and watched him walk up the stairs. That shouldn’t be so hard.

  Hammonfall’s rooftops were pitched black outlines against a blacker sky. In the border cities, no matter the time of day, at least one business stayed open, though less than clandestine ventures might take place there. Here, in this jumped-up fishing village, not a soul stirred, and Slate found his eyes wandering the streets for anything familiar.

  “Why’d you leave Teacher behind?”

  Slate twisted his mouth at the runt. He’d never addressed Slate directly, but the question seemed honest enough, and he couldn’t bring himself to lie when concerning the big guy. “Wounds aren’t doing too good. Figured it’d be better to leave him behind, for his sake.”

  Isaac nodded, as if confirming something, but didn’t respond.

  “What were you saying about this theater?” Crymson asked.

  “It’s going to be a bitch, that’s all. Hundred or two years ago, they built the theater stages in basements, cooler air for the actors and such. Thing is, nobles on the east coast got it in their heads that’d it be amusing to make the first floor a maze and hide the entrance to the theater somewhere in it. Only gave maps to people they wanted attending. Became kind of a game, kind of a status thing. If this theater’s old enough, we might never find the Old Man.”

  Crymson looked at him sideways. “Never took you for much of an historian.”

  “Never asked.”

  They walked in near silence, interrupted only by intermittent snapping sounds coming from Isaac’s coat.

  “I think we’re here.”

  They stopped in front of the theater, its soft curves and low arches belying its age and general derelict. Its double-paned, faceless windows loomed large in the reflection of the dim moon, but they were dwarfed by the size of the theater itself, twice the size of the inn even when Slate discounted the stairs leading to its door.

  He pushed past Crymson and tried the front door. Locked, so Slate put his elbow to one of the windows. Glass tinkled and fell soundlessly into the theater. Carpeted? Taking care not to brush his groin against the shards at the bottom of the pane, Slate stepped inside and goosefooted over the broken glass littering the floor. Definitely carpeted.

  The theater swallowed the scant moonlight, but it provided enough to see the room’s outlines. He fumbled until he found the shoulders of the others and brought them in close, whispering, “This place is huge. If we look for a basement together, we may never find it. Split up, look for an opening. It could be as complicated as a sliding wall or easy as a door, just keep fucking quiet.”

  He felt them nod. Crymson disappeared to the left, hands in front of her and footsteps measured, but Isaac strode surefootedly, quick, even.

  The room into which they had entered branched off in three directions, and so Slate opened the middle door. Its hinges glided apart, and Slate found himself in a room bereft of moonbeams.

  What he wouldn’t give for a torch. Slate felt the air; nobody better have the balls to take him out at the knees. Finding an opening, he pushed past it and into what felt like another room, the air dead, like nothing had circulated for decades. The farther into the theater he went, the blacker it became, until it felt like a second skin, a parchment-thin armor for defending against nothing.

  He’d just made it to the back of the second room when a crash resounded and a loud groan echoed. Trusting instinct to keep him straight, Slate sprinted back toward the entrance and slammed through the door and into the parlor. Empty.

  Isaac or Crymson? He took a left, putting him in a hallway of sorts, one that twisted and turned instead of running straight. Slate felt displaced air on his shoulder and swung around, his knife drawn.

  “Whoa! It’s just me,” Crymson said.

  Slate sheathed his knife. “You say that like it makes a difference.”

  They walked, walked, and then walked some more, but still found no sign of Isaac. The air grew colder, drier. It felt like the hallway was leading them in circles, deeper and deeper into the house’s guts instead of toward its edges.

  “Are you sure we didn’t pass a door on the way here?”

  Slate didn’t reply, but her thoughts confirmed his. He had just decided to pull back when he heard the soft murmur of footsteps on carpet.

  Ignoring Crymson’s hushed protests, Slate pushed her against the wall and drew his knives. Rushed toward the sound.

  “Wait,” a voice said.

  Slate ignored it. The distance between them closed.

  Like a rose pushing through a newly fallen curtain of snow, a solitary light bloomed directly in front of the voice’s face. A pale visage stared out: Isaac.

  His momentum unstoppable, Slate plunged his knives into the wall on either side of Isaac’s neck, who, unruffled, gazed back at him. “I found something.”

  Slate growled. He wrenched his knives from the wall and flicked them at Isaac, gesturing him forward. The flame still in front of his face, Isaac turned and led them to a solitary door at the hallway’s end, no more than two minutes away.

  Isaac stopped, his normally expressionless face pinched – the eyes of the haunted, if somebody had forced Slate to describe it. Finger to his lips, he pushed open the door.

  The smell sent Slate reeling against the wall. He heard Crymson retching in the darkness of the outer hallway, and though he felt like doing the same, Slate forced himself to look; his eyes narrowing into slits as he attempted to take in the scene.

  “What the. . . ” he muttered to himself, arm up, nose pressed into its sleeve. Bodies lay cluttered about the room – ten, at the very least. Two sprawled against the wood farthest from Slate, guttering flames still dancing on their torsos. The same applied to every one of the bodies that lay about the room, including the one no less than a foot in front of Slate. He backed away from it. Flesh had warped and bubbled on these corpses, now eyeless. Only one had managed to get his sword out, and many of the others had sticklike black and white arms held in front of their faces.

  The smell of fried beef combined with fatty sides of pork being roasted on an open fire hit nerve endings and filled his nose with the blast of burned blood, giving the meat a distinctly metallic, almost coppery odor that washed into Slate’s mouth. He bent to the floor as he tasted last night’s dinner.

  Time passed, and Slate slowly lifted his hands from his knees. He eyed Isaac. The runt had always been different, but this was more than different – this was hellish. Even as he looked, Isaac seemed to shrink in on himself. His face, so calm and emotionless when Slate had rushed him, twitched. He noticed Crymson watching Isaac, her lips pursed. Guess he wasn’t the only one.

  “Sorry,” Isaac whispered, his voice absorbed by the bodies around him.

  “How the bloody fuck did you manage all this?” Slate asked.

  Isaac shrugged and toed one of the broiled bodies.

  “That’s it? You roast an entire room of people and all you can do is shrug?”

  Isaac didn’t reply.

  “You’re some kind of freak, you know that?”

  “We can deal with this later.” Crymson pointed toward a dark hole between the bodies, a golden-hued handrail and a set of stone stairs in view. “I think we’ve found what we needed.”

  “You sure you want to deal with this later?” Slate started down the stairwell. “Might better leave him with the bodies.”

  Slate disregarded the handrail, descending until he hit bottom and entered a hallway cut of similar stone, lit by shivering torches. He led the way, stopping every so often to listen and once just so that Isaac bumped into Crymson and was forced to whisper apologies.

  “ . . . you have to understand, Alocar: my intention isn’t to hurt you, at least not as my first option. I simply want you to . . . cease what you are doing.” The voice stopped, as did Isaac and Crymson, who halted behind Slate’s upraised fist. “You might as well come on in,” the disembodied voice continued. “You’re hardly sneaking up on anybody.”

  Slate b
lew out a harsh puff of air, but then turned it into an easy smile. The hallway opened, stretching widely enough to accompany a king’s throne room, its majesty only slightly diminished by the low-hanging ceiling. A stage dominated the room, fifty feet across at first glance and deep enough for a line of thirty men, complete with red curtains tied to either side of the stage with tasseled golden ropes. Cushioned, throne-like chairs lined the floor. The Old Man sat in the first chair of the middle column, and on center stage sat Cenedia, his legs swinging back and forth to an unheard rhythm.

  “Welcome.” Cenedia spread his scarred hands wide. “Come, sit. We have much to discuss.”

  “Alocar?” Crymson asked, a note of concern leaking through.

  “It’s fine. There’s nobody left in here, not if you made it this far.”

  Crymson shrugged and moved to the front, and Isaac skittered through the chairs to sit to the left of the Old Man. Slate remained standing in the back. These fools were too trusting.

  “As you might can tell by now, my name is not Cenedia. My name is actually – ”

  “Ah, not quite.” Alocar stood. “Isaac, grab this man a chair, if you would. There you go, right there. No reason for you to sit up on that big stage while we’re down here.”

  Cenedia scowled, but climbed down from the stage and seated himself before the group. “My name, as you have likely figured out by now and Alocar already knows, is Mendoza, and I’ve been instructed to kill the lot of you.”

  “Bold words for a guy outnumbered four to one.” Slate looked at Isaac. “Three to one.”

  Mendoza ignored him. “I’ve been hired to kill you. As you can tell from my boys in the forest, I hasn’t been very successful.”

  “Amateurs,” Slate said.

  Mendoza nodded. “Fodder, barely intelligent enough to hold the right end of the sword, but they were good boys. So were those men upstairs. Dead, aren’t they?”

  Isaac fidgeted in his chair, looking at the ground. “Yes.”

  “Then let me give you some advice. Quit. Now. Stop whatever you’re doing, whatever mission it is that you’ve been given, cease it, and in return, my employer has told me to extend her help. We know what’s being held against you, at least some of you, and we’ve been after this guy Angras for a long time. Help us help you, and we’ll all come out on top. My employer is powerful enough to make that happen.”