The Ghost's Crusade

Chapter IV: Akkali (cont)

Leaving the dog to do whatever helpful thing it thought it was doing Akkali quickly walked to the end of the alley to examine the corpses. There were three distinct skulls among the rancid flesh, but no maggots were feasting and no flies were swarming to lay their eggs. No beetles either, even though they seemed relatively fresh, at least not more than two or three days old. The way that nature left the remains alone was worrisome. There were only a handful of circumstances in which Eral's little minions didn't set about recycling the dead, and every single one involved the presence of foul and unnatural magic.

She squatted down and examined the corpses more closely, pulling a lightrock out of her pocket to push back the dimness of the alleyway. After making doubly sure what she was seeing was actually there, she wrinkled her nose in frustration and held the glowing stone closer to the heap.

There were stitches on the bits of flesh that were left. They ran along most of the critical joints she could discern: shoulders, knees, neck, wrists, all with an odd hatching pattern she usually saw on dainty needlepoint crafts like embroidered handkerchiefs or tailored waistcoats. It looked as if the corpses had been pieced together from findings, almost like a patchwork quilt of flesh. The lengths of the arms were similar, but when compared to the legs it became obvious: the arms had been plucked from someone roughly of her stature while the legs had once belonged to someone taller than Drystan. She was sure that if they weren't so rotted she would be able to see that even the flesh tones were mismatched.

The mutt growled and then yelped behind her. She shot to her feet and saw two hooded figures with longknives standing at the mouth of the alley. One of them had kicked the dog and it was laying on its side struggling to get up from a broken leg. Despite its injury it still seemed determined to fight back on her behalf; after all, she had told it to keep an eye out. To keep it from hurting itself further she raised one finger to her lips and shushed the mutt like a mischievous child. The dog's ears laid back on its head and it snarled at the men, but it made no further move to go after them.

“We saw you coming in like you own the place, vine-skin,” sneered the man nearest to her. “Fancy running into you here, over some dead humans. The price on your hide just went up.”

Their appearance made Akkali angry, but it wasn't because they had come for her—that was a situation that was inevitable as breathing. She was angry because of what they had done to the perfectly innocent dog, harming it even though it was clearly no threat to them. It was something which, over the years, she had come to find more and more irritating. “Returners.”

“At your service,” said the second one with a theatrical bow. “Your master has some very good coin out for you.”

“Price goes up every year.” She crossed her arms against her chest, having already taken measure of the men in the time it took them to spit out their posturing words. Unless one of them had the foresight to set out traps in the alleyway on the remote chance they would find her there, they were no match for her. "You're not going to collect a damn thing.”

The second man shook his head vehemently. “Like hell we're not. You're outnumbered. When we bring your head back we're set for life.”

She could tell the one with the knives was no more amiable to giving up and going away than his friend. Sighing, she muttered, “Idiots.”

“Get the heathen bitch!”

The leading man charged and actually gave her as fair a fight as she had expected. His hands were just quick enough to slip a knife through her sleeve though it didn't hit flesh. Unfortunately for him his feet couldn't keep up, and with a few artful steps Akkali had lead him around in a complete circle and tangled him up at the knees. Snaking her fingers around his wrist she deprived him of the knife in his left hand as he tripped and fell over his own feet. She tossed the knife up in the air, then caught it by the pommel and launched it end-over end at the second man. With the meaty thwack of a butcher's cleaver it sank halfway into the soft half-circle formed by his collarbones.

While the second man gargled his own blood and tried to figure out how she had thrown an unbalanced knife so far she pulled her batai from the sheaths strapped to her calves and drove the first through the eye of the man she had upended. He died with a surprised squishy sound, thrashing around a bit before his body accepted that his brain would no longer be ordering the rest of him about. Taking her weapon with her she charged down the alleyway and disarmed the second man before the shock of being hit with the knife wore off. Using the pommel of the blade as a lever she twisted it downwards hard and forced him up against the wall.

She stared into his eyes and saw the terror there. It gave her no pride to see this particular enemy cower before her, not like the enjoyment she got out of killing the other Returners foolhardy enough to try and collect the price on her head in such small numbers. He was barely an adult, and a stupid one at that. From the look of him he probably could have lead a very happy life as a blacksmith or even a strongman for the local brothels. But he chose bounty hunting as a profession, and picked her from of a plethora of targets available because he believed both were the quickest ways to riches.

Money drove men to do such foolish things. It was sad, really. They didn't get to take any of it with them when they died and yet they valued it more than their own lives at times. She had questioned Drystan about it occasionally, but he never had any better answer as to why his people lived and died for stamped metals and shiny gems.

“You were a waste of your mother's time," she whispered coldly.

She tore the knife out of his chest and drove it up through his palate, pinning his tongue to the roof of his mouth and keeping him from begging for the mercy his tearful eyes pleaded she show him. As soon as he quit twitching she drug his corpse back to the end of the alley by the hair and piled it among the others. She repeated the process with his compatriot, using his well-tailored shirt to get rid of the blood on her hands and weapon. It would be a day or two before they were discovered; judging from the rotting bodies at the end of the alley nobody bothered to look down the way often or too closely, and apparently the stink was easy to ignore.

Once she had settled things with Drystan and nightfall came she would be paying the local Returner guildhall a visit. There was a very good reason the price on her head was so high, and obviously the men who worked fetching back slaves in Baedorn needed to be reminded of it yet again. She had cut their numbers in half about five years ago, slaughtering the eight men who had thought they had 'accidentally' stumbled upon her camp in the woods outside the city. Given what was going on at the moment she was surprised that the circle of piked heads she had left behind hadn't spawned similar demonic rumors. Then again, Returners weren't exactly keen on running to the nearest guardpost with stories of how a single Enkiri woman had literally hacked apart their leadership in a single night. It was the worst kind of publicity.

Akkali jogged back to the dog at the end of the alley. It peered up at her pitifully from where it lay on its side, its front leg gimped from where the Returner had kicked it viciously. Still, it seemed as though it would get up and keep following her in spite of its wound. It was a dedicated mutt, she had to admit, and stubborn to the point of stupidity.

“Oh, well, why not,” she said with a sigh, scratching the dog behind its grimy ear. “You're a brave boy.” As an afterthought, she reached back and lifted up the dog's hind leg to check. “Oh. Brave girl.”

She gathered up the mutt in her arms and true to form she licked her in the face happily. The creature really was little more than a sack of bones and grayish mangy fur. Her breath smelled much better than her fur, which was strange because she had always heard that dog breath was one of the most disgusting smells anyone could come across. Then again, the end of the alley smelled like old blood, shit, and rotting bodies, so perhaps the people who had made that rumor up had never been caught downwind of a pile of decomposing flesh.

Looking up at the sky she judged it to be about two hours since she'd parted company with Drystan. She was going to have to find Fiddler's Pipe soon if she was going to clean the dog up and set her leg. Deciding to go in the opposite direction the Returners had come from, she started towards the city's keep.