[Mkguild] MK: "Last Light" (Act 1 of "Snow Storm") 4/5‏‏‏

[Hallan Mirayas]

Author's note: Special thanks goes out to Ian Jones for loaning me his character Theningaraf for Alexastra to abuse. :)

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February 25

   Misha need not have worried, at least about Xavier and Wolfram.  Xavier warmed up over time, especially once they found the common ground of each having a sister in the Marigund Mage Guild.  Wolfram, realizing that he wasn't going to impress his way into the Long Scouts in a day, settled down into being reliably competent.  Misha could see why George wanted to keep him: there was good potential in the man.

   For an improvisation, Drift's plan bore fruit quite quickly as their week in Glen Avery passed.  It started out (to Xavier's groan at the cliché of it all) at the Glen Avery tavern.  Lars vaguely remembered Drift's father and his sudden death, and pointed them to one of the older Glen scouts, now retired due to injury.  "Better be warned, though," the bartender said as he directed them to a home just outside the Glen.  "He's a grumpy old cuss, and his place isn't kind to those with sensitive noses."

   "Yeah, what do you want?"  Lars' warning had not been idle.  The former scout's home, a ramshackle wood-and-stone cabin that looked like it had survived at least five attempts at burning it, and it could be smelled from much farther away than it could be seen.  This was to be expected: it was a leather tannery.  Urine, dung, rotting meat, and even worse odors drove Xavier to moisten a handkerchief with several drops from a small bottle of perfume and clutch it over his nose in desperation while Drift tried to persuade the hostile brown eye glaring at him through a slit in the barely-opened door to come out and talk for a few minutes.  "I'm busy!" the eye snapped, but a voice from inside the cabin drew its attention away for a moment, and when the eye returned, its ire seemed to have been banked a little.  "All right, fine, give me a minute," it growled, and the door shut hard.

   The quartet of friends glanced at each other as a thud-clump, thud-clump resounded from inside, and then the door opened again and the occupant of the cabin stepped forth carrying a torn-off leg of cooked meat still hanging on a thick thigh bone.  He was a short, bearish creature clad in leather and furred pelts, black-furred save for a grimy white 'V' across his shoulders and chest along the collarbone.  A short, otterlike tail stood out behind him, bushed with irritation, and a wooden leg carved in crude imitation of its fellow ended his right leg from the knee down.  "What do you want?" he snapped.  "Hurry up.  I'm missing dinner."

   "I...  um..."

   Misha stepped in for the suddenly intimidated samoyed.  "My friend would like to hire you for a job, if you're able to do it.  His father was killed in the area several years ago, and we were told that you were the one who first found the body."

   "I found a lot of dead bodies," the bear-otter growled, taking a large bite out of the shank in his hand and talking around it while he chewed.  "Narrow it down or don't waste my time."

   "A goat," Drift replied, and then hastily amended.  "A goat-cursed Keeper, gray fur, short horns.  He was found in the area with a lutin blade through his chest, six years ago."

   "Ah.  That one.  What's in it for me?"

   "This."  Drift underhand tossed a small pouch, which the bear-otter caught from midair with a clink of coins.  Several pieces of silver spilled out, with the glint of more inside.

   "This is nearly two weeks' wages," the leathermaker said with grudging admiration, judging the quantity by weight and sound alone.  He quickly hustled the hint of surprise out of his voice, dropping it back into its rude growl.  "And all this supposing I can remember where-"

   "And guide us to-"

   "And guide you to someplace where some old goat got himself killed- ow!"

   "Byron!  For shame!"  An old human man, gray of hair and wearing an incongruously feminine apron, stepped out of the cabin from behind the animal Keeper.  His face had a pinched, nearsighted look and he squinted for a moment to take a look at the visitors.  Finally, he rounded on the beastly Byron and snatched the money pouch away.  "Quit acting like a child!  This young man is looking for his father's death site.  You will show him where it is this very evening and without any more of your lip, or I'll break a switch off on your backside like you were still two years old and /just you see if I don't!/"  As he spoke, he drove the beast-man backward with sharp jabs of the metal ladle in his hand, the one he had earlier used for a rap between the ears.  "You just spent three days complaining about how you're sick of being stuck inside.  Well, the snow's melted and the ground's dry enough for you to walk without your stump leg sticking, so go take a walk!"

   "Ow!  Dammit, Ma!  Ow!" Byron cursed, and swiped at the swinging ladle, then tried to parry it with his half-eaten leg shank.  He got smacked hard on the nose for his trouble.  "All right!  Fine!  I'll do it!  Ow!  Just quit hitting me!"

   "Nice pressure point strikes," Misha murmured under his breath.

   Byron speared the fox with a venomous but impotent glare and then shoved his way back into the cabin with a muttered string of curses.  He returned with a wide-footed cane and stumped down from the porch, still muttering obscenities with a variety and fluency that would do credit to a full army battalion.  "Come on," he snarled as he started off into the woods, ripping the last of the meat off the shank with his teeth and gripping the leg bone in a clenched fist like a primitive club.  "I haven't got all day."

   "What is his problem?" Drift asked, lagging behind for a moment with the old man to reclaim his money pouch.

   The old man sighed, handing the small leather bag over.  "His leg pains him badly, especially when a storm's coming."

   "A storm?  How far off?"

   The old man eyed the sky through the treetops.  "Hard to tell...  could be a few hours, could be a few days.  The stronger the storm, the farther off he can feel it."

   "My friend is a weather mage... he would have told me if a storm were on its way."

   "Well, I can't say as I can argue with a storm mage," the old man hedged, "but my boy's not been wrong yet."  He gestured with the ladle toward the departing group.  "Now you hustle off after him or you'll get left behind.  I hope you find what you're looking for."

   Drift needn't have hurried, and soon wished he hadn't.  The smell of the tannery clung to Byron with the tenacity of a lover, a putrid, stomach-churning cloud that trailed behind him when he walked, yet refused to dissipate no matter what strength of breeze Xavier called.  It maintained the bear-otter's personal space quite effectively as everyone else jockeyed to stay upwind.  "No, I don't bathe much," Byron snapped when he caught the leopard's incredulous sidelong glance.  "It's half the reason the lutins don't bother me."

   "And the other half?" Misha asked, the least affected by the stench thanks to years as a siege engineer.

   Byron grinned, a twisted smile of yellowed teeth and savored malice.  "Because I'm a mean bastard trapmaker with a lot of time on my hands.  Don't step there."  Without breaking stride, he reached out with his cane and jerked Wolfram away from an unremarkable stretch of path.

   The ram paused, confused, but Misha took one glance and walked around the spot.  "Booby trap.  Watch your step."  Continuing on once he'd made sure that his companions had made it past the booby trap without incident (and after discouraging Drift from trying to figure out how it worked), he caught up to the trapmaker.  "I've heard of you.  The lutins call you Slow Death."

   "I know.  When they piss me off, I make sure I live up to it."

   "You do realize we've negotiated a truce with them now."

   "Yeah, I know."  Byron hawked and spat, his muzzle wrinkling in a disgusted snarl.  "Like that will last.  What a stupid decision."
 
   Misha's eyes narrowed. "So you think we should just keep fighting the lutins endlessly?"

   "You think we won't?  We should have killed off all the little green monsters when we had the chance."

   "Fighting the lutins endlessly didn't help the empire," the fox responded. "We have to at least try to end it."

   "Hmmph," Byron harrumphed, unable to deny the logic of that.  Not that he didn't try.  "Won't last," he grumbled and stumped onward, refusing to be drawn into any further conversation aside from an occasional 'Don't step there' or 'Don't touch that'.  Every so often, he stopped to renew a set of claw marks raked into a tree's bark, a broad-mouthed 'V' mimicking the distinctive pattern of white along his collarbone.  The message was clear, a warning to lutin intruders and Metamor scouts alike: 'This is my territory.  Stay out.'  Their guide's taciturn manner and the growing paranoia invoked by his numerous booby traps brought a damper down on conversation in general, and silence descended on the group until they reached their destination.

   Unsurprisingly, Byron's first words were, "Don't touch anything."

   Two years ago, a ferocious windstorm had descended upon Metamor Valley.  To Metamor it had brought a tornado, but to the Glen it had only brought tree-flattening winds.  When the Glen's timber crews ventured out afterward, they had discovered something remarkable in Byron's 'hunting territory'.  An oak, one of the ancient monarchs of the forest, had toppled roots and all, ripping open the hillock upon which it had grown.  This left a miniature amphitheatre, roofed by a lid of roots and drained by a small spring that bubbled and burbled near the entrance.

   It was to this spot that Byron led them, and he repeated himself as he carefully stepped into the sheltered earthen cave.  "I mean it," he said, his voice for once lacking its habitual snarl.  In its place, it held the wary tension of someone trying to sneak up on a large, venomous, and /extremely/ irritable snake.  "Stay outside.  Do not touch a damn thing.  Don't even /breathe/ in here without my say-so."  Moving with the ginger care of a tightrope walker, Byron made his way across the room, visibly planning each footfall before he made it.

   "What do you think this one is?" Drift quietly asked Misha, but it was Byron that answered.

   "My masterpiece.  Shut up and stop distracting-"

   Click.

   Five sets of eyes widened, and Byron dove for the ground as a storm of metal darts lacerated the air where he'd just been standing, scything at waist height across the entire alcove.  Rolling to the side and pulling his legs up into a tight ball, he dodged a second hail of metal that descended from the ceiling to rip up nearly the entire floor.  Only the spot where he lay remained untouched.  The thigh bone he'd carried for an after-dinner snack lay shattered on the ground nearby, speared by two darts, and a third hummed like an angry wasp in the hard wooden calf of his artificial leg.

   The bear-otter carefully uncoiled and shot a furious glare at the shocked faces looking in.  "Dammit.  It'll take -hours- to reset this damned thing," he complained as he jerked the dart from his leg, and then threw his cane at Wolfram when the ram tried to come in to help him up.  "Don't step there.  It's a trap that will kill you."  Levering himself with difficulty to his feet, he waved them away from the door with the back of his hand.  "You do whatever you need to do out there," he said to the samoyed.  "Your pa was found right next to this tree before it got knocked over.  I'll let you know when it's safe to come in, if you need to."  Misha was just starting to draw the three of them away when Byron's voice called out again.  "And if you see a cairn of rocks out there, for Sammekh's sake, DON'T TOUCH IT!"

   Four sets of eyes exchanged glances, and Xavier circled one extended finger next to his ear in the universal gesture for ‘crazy’.  Misha nodded.  "Smart, but... yeah."

   "I HEARD THAT!"

   While Misha and Drift circled around to the far side of the hollowed hillock to search, Wolfram and Xavier swung wide, out into the forest where they could secure a perimeter.  Every so often, Xavier pulled a metal rod from a pack Wolfram carried and stuck it into the ground, each giving a soft hum before going silent as they attuned to their surroundings.  "Is he sleeping any better?" the leopard asked.

   Wolfram shook his head.  "He thinks he's being quiet enough to fool me, but he's still having nightmares.  If his thrashings are any judge, pretty bad ones."

   "I'll pick up some sleeping pills from the town healer tonight when we get back.  Can you get them into one of his drinks?"

   "He won't thank you for it."

   "Probably not," Xavier replied with a shrug, "but it's for his own good.  He needs to rest.  You've seen how tired he looks.  Can you do it?"

   Wolfram shrugged the rapidly emptying bag further up onto his shoulder.  "Yeah, I can do it," he replied, and kept the rest of his thought to himself.  /I can, I'm just not certain if I will./  "If I see the chance to.  I can't make promises."

   "Fair enough."

-----

Feb 26

   Hidden away in a secret room lit by a single candle, Alexastra winced at her reflection in the mirror.  "A closer escape than I would have liked," she said to herself as she dipped a cloth in a small basin of water and dabbed at a long cut over her eye, carefully mopping the blood while it healed.  Her healing wasn't as fast as an imp's regeneration, but at least it didn't sting so badly.  It also didn't take enough daedric energy to disrupt her stealth and reveal her to Kyia and the Lothanasi.  That alone would have made it worth the wait even if it had hurt like a week-long stay in Lord Revonos' personal torture chambers.

   /Still, all things considered, I would consider that a successful bit of mischief.  It should keep Linafex occupied for quite some time./  Implicating Linafex in a northward-bound smuggling ring had probably been enough of a distraction, but she'd decided to sweeten the pot with a little something extra.  How she wished she could watch the hound Keeper try to explain, either to the Watch or to his wife, the hand-sculpted statuette of Duke Thomas that she'd hidden in his workshop.  A naked /and quite explicit/ statuette of Duke Thomas.

   /Ah, to be a fly on the wall for that conversation./  A malicious chuckle echoed into the darkness as the wound over her brow closed.

   /Next up...  Thestilus./  She dabbed once more at her fur, clearing away the last hint of crimson, then set the cloth down and examined her unmarked reflection in the mirror, smiling with satisfaction.  Brushing her fur back into place with the side of a claw, she allowed herself the indulgence of anticipation, and the far wider smile that thought brought to her lips boded very ill for her former partner.

   Her merriment died a sudden death as an unfamiliar noise reached her ears.  From the moment she'd created her secret room in the sewers under the Jolly Collie Tavern, she'd made a point to familiarize herself with all of the usual sounds of the area.  The echoing click of claws on stone was not one of those.  Careful to make as little noise as possible, she emptied the washbasin into a small drain and put it away, then reached for her hand crossbow and nocked a bolt with the stealthy smoothness of a trained assassin.  At the same time, she shifted shape from a fruit bat Keeper to a dark-haired human woman- it would not do to have Alexis linked to this should worse come to worst- and sank back into the shadows.

   Claws on stone in a quadrupedal gait suggested an animal of some sort, but they were too spread out and too heavy a footfall for it to be a normal beast.  The next most logical source would therefore be a taurform Keeper, but how would one of those fit down here?  She shook her head, dismissing the useless question as the footfalls continued past her hideaway.  As long as they didn't spot the secret door, she had no cause for concern-

   The footfalls stopped short.  Then they reversed themselves, and Alexastra silently cursed as she heard an investigative sniff at the base of the door.  She reached for the door of one of her several escape tunnels, just to make sure it was unlocked and ready for a hasty exit.  Still, as long as they didn't start hunting for the latch-

   Scratch, scrabble, scratch- click!

   /Damnation!/

   She heard the latch click as the same moment that she realized, to her professional horror, that /she'd left the bloodied cloth on the nightstand!/  That was a trace spell just /begging/ to happen, and she wasted a second that she couldn't afford to spare incinerating it with a mortal-style fire spell while the secret door to her hideaway swung open.  The small fire distracted the intruder long enough to get a good look at him and her brow furrowed in confusion.  In the doorway stood one of the largest dire wolves that she had ever seen outside of Lilith's own kennels.  Where had it come from?  Hadn't Drift taken all of Metamor's dire wolves off to-

   The wolf's head turned and the two locked eyes.  Both froze, shocked into a momentary paralysis of mutual recognition.    "Of all the- You?!  Damn it, I do not need more distractions!" Alexastra snarled, then fired her crossbow and leaped for the shelter of a sturdy writing desk.  The wolf dodged the bolt and then lunged for her, but his delay had bought her a second's head start.  She made the most of it, sweeping up the chair and breaking it across his face before diving under the desk, slapping open the hidden panel, and crawling as fast as she could into the escape tunnel.

   She wasn't quite fast enough, and a massive paw slapped down on her ankle.  Black claws snagged on her boot, and the jolt of it jarred the crossbow out of her hand.  To her frustration, it bounced just out of reach.  He dragged her back, preparing to bite her in half, but she grabbed one of the tunnel braces to counter.  Seizing the moment, she then rolled onto her back, shapeshifted her free foot into a hawk's talons, and raked it down the wolf's paw.  The talons didn't draw blood through the beast's thick fur, but they hurt and he let go with a yelp.  

   Alexastra scrambled deeper into the tunnel, back out of reach, and retrieved her crossbow, checking it hastily before blowing out a sigh of relief.  No damage.  A cavernous growl chased after her, and she whirled around to bring her weapon into line for another shot.  Framed by the desk and nearly sparking with fury, a yellow eye glared at her for a moment before jerking back out of sight, taking the paw along with it before she could shoot either one.

   She almost kicked out the support that would collapse the end of the tunnel, ensuring her escape, but then paused in frustration.  /First Malabrinium and now -him-?/ she raged inside.  /Is -everyone- who has ever seen through my disguises here?/  If she let him go, he'd expose her.  There was no question, not after what she'd done to him the last time they'd met.  If she killed him, she'd just have to come back at the new moon and kill him again.  And then again the next month.  Not exactly unappealing, but tedious in the long run.  That left one other option, and her lips curled in pained distaste as she thought it.  This was going to be /expensive./

   Shifting her hawk-taloned foot back into a boot, she settled prone on the tunnel floor and lined up her shot.  It was for just such a contingency that she had made sure the 'door close' trigger to her secret room had been in line-of-sight of every single escape tunnel.  She fired, hitting it square, and the stone door ground shut behind him before the wolf could stop it.  Next, she opened a small compartment in the stock of the crossbow and pulled out a single, heavily enchanted bolt.  It was a special one, obscenely expensive to make.  This she also nocked and fired.  It hit the wall with the sound of an angry hornet and, unbroken, ricocheted onward seeking someone to sting.  It found something on the third bounce.  Ping-ping-ping-whack!  The wolf yelped, and Alexastra bared her teeth.  She hoped it had hit that interfering bastard somewhere delicate.  Nocking a regular bolt for the sound of it, she called out, "I have plenty more just like that one, Saelor."  She lied with the forceful conviction of someone growing used to having to play outrageous bluffs, and used the old name she'd known him as back in the days of the Suielman Empire just to twist the knife.  "Now shut up and listen or I'll fill you so full of them you'll think you'd been born a pincushion."  Taking a deep breath, she pushed ahead before her ego could try to advocate the monthly killing again.  /Well, maybe as a backup plan.../

   "I'll make you a deal..."

   Some time later, Alexastra curled up in Drift's bed.  She had nowhere else to go.  It felt cold and empty with him gone, but at least it smelled like him and she could imagine his arms holding her.  As she drifted off, she groused a short complaint to her mistress, Nocturna: /A little warning that he was coming would have been appreciated./

   In her dreams, she heard Drift's voice in her ear, but with Nocturna's words.  /None was needed.  You handled him perfectly./

   The first few times Nocturna had taken over a voice in her dreams, the mental dissonance had jarred Alexastra awake.  Now, she was too tired to care.  /Tell that to my nice, comfortable hideaway.  Now the place will smell like dog... and not in a good way.  If he marks territory on my furniture again, I swear I'll neuter him./  Rolling over in her sleep, she pulled the covers tighter and sank into dreamless slumber.

 		 	   		  

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