TOO DAMNED SOFT
Forgotten Tales from the Sevy Series
By Sarah-Jane Lehoux
Copyright @ 2021 Sarah-Jane Lehoux
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book and parts thereof may not be reproduced, scanned, uploaded, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without express written permission from the author.
TOO DAMNED SOFT
Although Eloria had at last begun to shake itself free from winter’s skeletonizing grip, there still weren’t any twittering songbirds to be heard or blossom-kissed breezes to be felt. All that heralded the arrival of spring was rain. Relentless, stinging rain. Everything stank of damp, and as Sevy struggled her way down the mud-slicked streets, she once again cursed herself for agreeing to this job. She could be comfortably lost at the bottom of a bottle by now, not dodging sloppy piles of thawing dung.
“Mind your step, ma’am,” squeaked Cloa, the fidgeting wreck of a girl currently acting as the most aggravating shadow that Sevy had ever had.
She threw a cold glare over her shoulder. “What is the one thing I told you not to do?”
“You, um, you said not to talk?”
“Correct. I said no talking. As in, not one single, solitary word. So what about that didn’t you understand?”
“Oh, I understood, ma’am! Really, I did! But you were just about to, um… And I didn’t want you to…”
While Cloa blurted out one blubbering half-sentence after another, Sevy cocked her head, clucked her tongue, and made a couple of exaggeratedly slow blinks, intending to wait as long as it took for her not-at-all subtle hints to sink through the girl’s thick skull, but patience had never been Sevy’s strong suit.
“Shut the fuck up!”
Almost immediately, she felt a pang of... Was it guilt? Regret? She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she didn’t like how Cloa winced. Which of course just made her that much more annoyed. She scowled up at the darkening sky and spent a few moments dragging Jarro’s coin back and forth along its chain. There were days this necklace seemed heavier than others. So heavy in fact, that she occasionally fantasized about taking it off, throwing it away. Life was easier when she could numb herself with ale or with anger, but that was difficult to do whenever she was reminded of him and just how truly good he’d been, how kind and understanding and everything else that she was not. Clenching the coin within her fist, she looked at Cloa. The poor thing was trembling like a womb-wet fawn, and her bloodshot eyes darted expectantly from Sevy’s face to her hands as though she was afraid of being beaten yet wanted to get it over with as soon as possible.
Brilliant, Sevy. You terrified an already terrorized child. Come on, smarten up. You’re better than this. You have to be. You owe it to him.
“Sorry, kid,” she said, tucking her necklace safely back beneath her shirt. “Didn’t mean to scare you. Well, no. That’s a lie. I did. I’ve got a nasty temper, but, hey, that’s why you hired me, right?”
Cloa nodded slowly, solemnly.
“Just do what I tell you to, and we won’t have a problem. Got it?”
Another nod would have sufficed, but Cloa apparently thought the situation called for something more significant, so she trapped her lips between her crooked teeth and mimed locking them up with an invisible key. A wayward thought popped into Sevy’s head then, all to do with teenage girls and their theatrics, but it sounded so much like something a certain cocky dark elf had said about her back in the day that she brushed it off.
Grumbling to herself, she turned and started walking again. Cloa scurried after her, and they passed several minutes in blessed silence and with little hassle. The miserable weather was keeping most people indoors these days, except for those unfortunate enough not to have anywhere else to go. They arranged themselves in sodden clumps of two or three in the doorways of shops that were closed for the night, and they coughed out pleas for spare change but otherwise were too busy being cold, wet, and hungry to make much noise or to pose much of a threat. Even an ambush attempt by a greasy, raggedy man with a humped back and a sharp knife wasn’t enough to break Sevy’s stride. She simply slammed him against a wall before he could grunt out anything more than, “Gimme,” and kept on walking.
But after a while, the coughing and the constant drip of rainwater from rooftops and eaves troughs and even the click, click, click of her own boots on the cobblestones began grating on her nerves more than Cloa’s squeaky voice had. Knots of tension tightened in her shoulders, and that pang of guilt or regret or whatever it was cut into her chest again and again, slicing deeper each time until she could scarcely take a breath without wanting to scream.
“Listen up!” she exclaimed, whipping around on her heel. “Here’s a life lesson for you, kid, free of charge. The world is a greedy son of a bitch. It’ll take whatever you give it and come back for seconds, thirds, fourths, and fifths. You’re gonna be eaten alive if you don’t stop feeding it. Catch my meaning?”
No, she really didn’t. Her eyes had expanded to frog-like proportions, and she was gulping like one too.
“See, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. You’re scared? Fine, be scared, but keep that shit to yourself. The world and all the big, bad monsters in it, we see that fear, that weakness, and we use it against you. It’s fuel on a fire. Blood in the water.”
Cloa mumbled something to her feet.
“What was that?”
Tugging nervously at the too short and too tight skirt of the dress she’d obviously outgrown months ago, Cloa mumbled even softer.
Sevy huffed. “You have permission to speak.”
“I…I can’t…”
“Can’t what?”
“Help it. Being scared. I just can’t help it, ma’am.”
“Then you damn well work at it until you can. You think I’ve survived in this gods-awful sewer of a city for as long as I have cringing at every shadow? No. I became the shadow. No one messes with me anymore, and do you know why? Because I don’t let them. It’s that simple. I don’t let them. They can hurt me, they can even kill me, but I will be fighting them the whole time. And that’s what you need to start doing. Quit making yourself such an easy target.”
Cloa hiccupped, rubbed her dirty, tear-stained cheek with the back of her wrist, and snorted up a noseful of mucus, and all the while, she gawked open-mouthed at Sevy as though she didn’t understand a single word of King’s Tongue. Well, Sevy had tried. No one could say she hadn’t. But she sure as hell wasn’t going to try again.
“We’re wasting time. Let’s get moving,” she said gruffly.
“Yes, ma’am.”
They’d barely gone three steps before Sevy felt a timid little tug on her cloak. She ignored it, but then it happened again and was accompanied by a whispered, “Ma’am?”
“What is it now?”
“You aren’t…” Cloa steadied her voice with another gulp. “I don’t think you’re a monster, ma’am, or a shadow neither.”
She shot the girl a sideways glance, only to find that she wasn’t snivelling or trembling anymore. She was actually smiling, so much so that her pale pink gums were on full display. Then with the foolishly brave impulsiveness that only children and halfwits possess, she pressed one of Sevy’s hands between her own, giving it what Sevy assumed was meant to be a friendly pat.
“You’re mean but kinda nice too, and I don’t guess real monsters have any niceness in them at all. Not the ones I’ve met anyway.”
&nb
sp; Sevy blinked in surprise. A strange fire suddenly kindled to life within her chest, and although it felt good, she hated it for the warmth it threatened to spread to all those parts of her she preferred to keep frozen. She yanked her hand free. “I’m not nice.”
“If you say so, ma’am,” Cloa replied, cocking her head as if amused.
“I do. And stop calling me ma’am.”
“Sure thing, Sevy.”
“Right, that does it. Old rules are back in effect. No more talking or I’ll show you just how not nice I actually am."
****
She left Cloa hidden in an alleyway with strict instructions not to move or make so much as a peep until she returned. Cloa had started to ask what she should do if Sevy didn’t return, but Sevy just shrugged and walked away. If she didn’t return, then whatever happened to the bothersome little bonerack wouldn’t be her problem anymore, now would it?
It took a couple more turns down a few more streets before she finally arrived at her destination: an inconspicuous building with an unmarked door and boarded up windows that were half-swallowed by a thorny, brick-eating tangle of creeping ivy. Perhaps in a different city, this building would have been as abandoned as it looked, but this was Eloria after all, and Eloria was like a wasteland. Although it may seem barren and deserted from a distance, every rock reveals a writhing jumble of pasty, scuttling life when turned over, and this particular rock sheltered some of the most repugnant vermin the kingdom had to offer.
But back when she was around Cloa’s age, the building, along with a few of its neighbours, had been a glass factory. Its chimneys puffed out billowing clouds of black smoke day and night for years on end, and Sevy had once spent a summer’s worth of evenings absentmindedly gazing up at that smoke while waiting for one of the dozens of heat-scalded, ash-covered workers to finish his shift. Sevy used to call him Crow because that’s what the other boys called him. He never told her his real name. She never asked. He smuggled out little cast-off lumps of foggy green glass as presents for her, and she would kiss him just as if they were diamonds. She wasn’t sure why she stopped coming here to see him. Maybe she’d gotten bored, maybe he had. They might have fought over something that seemed deathly important at the time but had actually been so trivial that she couldn’t even remember it now. That happened quite a lot back then. Still did, actually.
She frowned. It had been years since she last thought of Crow. Where had he gone once the factory closed down? She supposed she’d never know. But what she did know was that she was stalling.
All right, she thought, nodding to herself. Let’s get this over with.
Shaking out her shoulders, Sevy marched up the set of crumbling concrete stairs that led to the door. She knocked on it twice then waited ten seconds before knocking again, once, sharply, at the very top of the doorframe. If she’d been wanting to get into a similar door a little further up the street, it would have been four knocks and a kick. The door across the way? Jiggle the handle then drum the first few bars of a drinking song. Learning how to properly knock was a form of currency in and of itself, one that Sevy always made sure to deal in specifically for occasions such as this.
The door cracked open. A doorman scowled out at her. At first glance, he appeared to be some species of troll, but no. There was a human beneath that mangled mess of pitted, pinched skin. Someone had cut him good, and once he’d healed, someone else had cut him again. And then again. Scars were stacked upon scars in so many different layers that it was impossible to tell where one ended and another began.
“Yeah?”
“Evening,” Sevy said airily. “May I come in?”
“Depends.”
She held up two pieces of copper. “This enough?”
Without waiting for an answer, she flicked the coins at the doorman so that they bounced off his bumpy forehead and then pushed inside while he fumbled to catch them. Must have been his lucky night. If he had dared to say the slurs he muttered under his breath a little bit louder, Sevy would have been obliged to add a new scar to his collection.
As he shut the door behind her, she took stock of her surroundings. There was laughter echoing from somewhere further within the building, but the doorman was all on his own out here. That was promising. Places that changed hands as many times as this one tended to have maze-like interiors since their rooms were forever being divided, combined, and sealed off as each new tenant saw fit. Sevy couldn’t count on finding an alternate way out if she was forced to beat a hasty retreat, so she was glad there weren’t more men hanging around the entrance who might try to block her escape.
“Which way to the whores?” she asked.
The doorman sucked his teeth and rolled his eyes as he plopped down onto a soiled armchair. Guess she’d made a bad first impression. Oh well. She left him to sulk by himself and walked softly yet purposefully down one dimly lit tunnel of a hallway after another, pausing to peek into every room she passed. Although most had been stripped bare and weren’t being used for anything other than makeshift lavatories, some had cobbled together enough furniture out of old wooden crates to serve as gambling dens. There were a handful of snoring drunkards, hapless fools, and cheerful grifters spread amongst these rooms, but Sevy paid them little mind and moved on.
It was when she came to the rooms used for fighting that she slowed her pace. Her narrowed eyes roved over rows of empty, rusting cages and chalk-drawn arenas covered in gore and feathers before landing on a dead dog. He must have lost an important match because his owner had chained him to the wall and let him bleed out. He’d curled up into a ball while he died, and though this was nothing Sevy hadn’t seen before, she couldn’t help staring at the dark pool of congealed blood surrounding him. It was ugly. Like the doorman’s scars. Like the crack of bone she’d heard when she smashed that raggedy would-be thief against the wall. She needed all of that ugliness now. She wanted it burned into her brain as a permanent reminder that Cloa was wrong. Sevy was a monster. All that separated her from the ones who created this hellhole was a preference of prey. They chose to hunt the weak, the innocent, the vulnerable. She chose to hunt them.
And she was getting hungry.
The laughter she first noticed by the entrance was growing louder. She followed the sound of it and finally found the room where all of the real action was taking place. It was the largest one yet, with a vaulted, soot-stained ceiling and plastered walls hung with tatty red curtains to hide the cracks. A dozen or so dancers in various stages of undress gyrated upon a creaking stage to music provided by a trio of Vasurach drummers while an audience of dockworkers, gang members, and city guards cheered and leered and drank and fought.
Why do these places always smell the same? Sevy thought, stifling a gag. She couldn’t be the only one bothered by the stench, could she? Or perhaps they enjoyed marinating themselves in this putrid miasma of sweat and semen. They all certainly seemed to be having a marvellous time, and based on the number of wolf whistles and hopping eyebrows thrown her way, they fully expected her to join in on their so-called fun. Gods, she’d love to disabuse each and every last one of them of that notion. Her palms had that uncomfortably itchy feeling she knew from past experience would only get worse until she’d slit a throat or two, and she was just about to reach for the dagger strapped to her thigh when a familiar face stood out from the crowd.
He was, objectively speaking, handsome. Less bestial-looking than the other men here, though a tad too pretty for Sevy’s taste. His bare arms were oiled so that they shone, bringing more attention to the musculature that he obviously worked hard to maintain. Such a proud man, so concerned with appearances. Sevy smirked at the single black leather glove he wore. It did little to hide the twisted claw she’d made of his hand on the day they had first met.
“Take a break, darling,” she drawled to the dwarvish woman sat upon the man’s lap. “I’ll keep him company for a while.”
Instantly, his concentration was wrenched away from
the dwarf’s ample bosom and up towards Sevy, and when she slid into the seat across from his, he began to moan and fuss just like the spoiled brat he must have been as a child.
“Aw, for the love of Koad, what’re you…? Come on, give a guy a break, will ya? Go harass someone else for a change!”
“Now is that any way to greet an old friend?” Sevy asked, watching the almost hypnotic sway of the dwarf’s hips as she meandered off to find another customer.
“Do you got any idea what being seen with you does to my reputation?”
She turned back to him brightly. “No, but I’d love to hear all about it.”
“Please, you gotta believe me. It ain’t my fault! Anything that bitch told you is a lie! I swear I didn’t touch her!”
“Orius—”
“All right, all right!” he cried, throwing his arms up in defeat. “So I may have smacked her around, but that’s all. I dunno who carved her up, but it weren’t me.”
“Calm your tits, Orius. That’s not why I’m here.”
“Then whaddya want?”
“A boy.”
“A…? Oh. Ohhhh.” Orius relaxed against his chair. He called for a rather frazzled-looking barmaid to bring over a bottle of wine then winked at Sevy while he poured her a drink. “Well, well, well! So even little hell-cats like you need a good, hard scratch from time to time, huh? What’s your fancy? They got all sorts here. Human, elf, trolls… Gnomes even. Or how’s about a dark elf? Everyone knows you’ve got a sweet spot for them red-eyed rats.”
Sevy just smiled, leaned over, and gave his gloved hand a quick squeeze. That was all it took to wipe the salacious, shit-eating grin clean off his lips.
“Only teasing, Sevy. No disrespect intended.”
“His name’s Kordan,” she said, cutting to the chase. “Has a skinny sister with horse teeth.”
“Oh, him.” He knocked back a glass of wine and then poured himself another. His kohl-darkened, manicured eyebrows knit together as he carefully chose his next words. “That’s gonna be a problem. The guy what owns him won’t set him loose without a fuss. Kid’s been making him a fortune.”
Too Damned Soft Page 1
