Crimson Ring Chapter 5

“Easy now,” Raven said as he eased back a step. “I’m on your side.”

“Sure you are. Come, let me introduce myself.”

Raven cocked his head to the side, more than a little impressed by the boldness of the woman. Moving quickly, he slipped one knife back into its sheath and drew the folded parchment of orders that Carrion had given him, taking care to hold the seal up before her hard eyes.

She paused mid-step. “You the recruit?”

Raven offered a begrudging nod. 

“A bit old,” she mused.

Another detonation from above rocked the building and sent deep fissures snaking down along all four of the room’s walls and a shower of dust and powdered clay raining down and thickening the already choking cloud of dust that hung over the room.

Raven and the woman both cursed in unison and crouched low, as if the ceiling would collapse at any moment. 

The corpsman was the first to react. She spun and sprinted across the room to the narrow clay staircase at the far end, sparing only a moment to scoop up a dust coated shamshir from the debris without breaking stride. She glanced over her shoulder just before she disappeared through the open doorway. “Well, move your ass, recruit!”

Raven stared after the burly woman for a few heartbeats, and then rushed through the room and up the stairs, taking them two at a time until he was near pressing to her back.

At the landing, they were met by a narrow hall. They swept through, kicking debris and materials clear of their path. Another corpse slumped against the wall, and this one wore the grinning skull kerchief.

“Damn,” the woman said, stumbling to a stop and looking down at the body. She lowered herself to a crouch and slowly reached toward her fallen team member. Her arm paused, then she cocked her head to the side, and then brought her hand down hard across the face of the fallen team member in a thunderous slap. “Mixer, you bastard. Wake your ass up and support the team!”

The corpse turned out to be very much alive and jolted awake after the hard slap to the face. He scrambled to his feet, but she dragged him to a standing position. She towered over the short, thin man, who stared around with red-rimmed eyes. 

“If I catch you sleeping during a skirmish one more damn time,” the woman said, manhandling the small corpsman by the arm as she whipped him around them shoved him hard down the corridor. “I’ll peel your damn eyelids off. Now move your ass or I’ll cut you down myself. And draw your damn weapon.”

Raven stood and watched as the woman hauled the man down the hall and into the next room, stunned by the level of sheer absurdity of the situation. It wasn’t until he felt the unveiling of sorcerous affinity that he snapped by to reality. The affinity was weak enough to not violate the sanction against sorcery throughout the Sovereign Cities. Still, a mage of any potency would wreak havoc anywhere there was no counter, especially in tight close quarters. 

There was a moment of tension, where Raven didn’t know whose side the mage was on, and then a pungent stench of ozone and copper filled the room—the telltale signs of aeromancy. Raven breathed a sigh of relief. Or as close to a sigh of relief as possible in the presence of a filthy mage. But this mage he would need to tolerate, because Carrion’s report detailed her as Breeze, strike team Dark’s squad mage.

There was a stillness as the affinity reached its peak. Unlike Raven, normal people couldn’t sense sorcery the way he could. But concentrated enough, some part of a normal person’s senses picked up on the energy like some sort of sixth sense. While Raven was forced to endure the rank intricacies of the sorcerous affinities, regular people experienced what he’d heard described as a sense of foreboding and wrongness. 

The affinity broke, and a roaring gale surged through the level above so powerfully the building trembled as if in an earthquake. This time, entire sections of the ceiling, walls, and floor broke loose in seemingly random areas. So much and dust filled the air that it because hard to see anything more than a dozen strides away without level of detail. 

The sorcerous unveiling lasted for several seconds, then cut short in sudden eerie silence. And the sounds of the fighting resumed with a notable increase of intensity. Raven’s senses went into a near frenzy. He was an assassin, both used to and comfortable delivering death. Killing was his profession, and he counted himself as the very best at his craft. But this was like the stories he’d heard of as a boy, of the war that resulted in the fall of the unified Djudenebhad kingdom and the desolation of the land that resulted in the creation of the seven pseudo-independent Sovereign Cities. This was war, and he was no soldier.

Raven was ill prepared to be thrusted into the maw of combat, particularly the frantic close quarters variety. In this environment, there was no time to think, no room for precisely executed preparations. It was a world of reactions and instincts; a way of operating that screamed counter to his patient and precise approach to the execution of his craft.

But he was there now, so what would he do? He knew full well. On pure adrenaline, he drew his long knives and rushed down the same corridor the large woman had gone and entered the next room at a full sprint—then dove to the ground and rolled behind an upturned table before he mentally registered what he saw. 

The image played in his mind as a pair of heavy thumps punched through the table he had crouched behind. He had seen the pair of crossbowmen side by side in front of the base of a narrow stairwell at the opposite end of what was the largest room he’d seen so far in the building. Their weapons were already raised and aimed at something off to his side. As he rushed into the room, they whipped the weapons toward him, and he dove to cover.

Enough of this…

Raven leapt clear over the table and slid one of his fighting knives back into the sheath at his waist, then withdrew a pair of throwing knives from a sleeve on his vest in a blur of well-practiced hand speed. He had his arm bent and was ready to throw before he even landed. From that point, a familiar sensation washed over him as time seemed to slow as he processed the scene before him.

The pair of crossbowmen paused, already loading another quarrel into their weapons, and looked up at him in open surprise. Beyond the pair, another three men rushed across the room toward Raven’s direction, each carrying an unsheathed shamshir. The three paused mid-stride and matched the pair of crossbowmen as they paused and stared at Raven wide eyed; Raven hadn’t seen those three, but it didn’t matter.

The assessment of the scene before Raven took but a fraction of a second, just the blink of time between moving from cover and leaping over the upturned table. And the others in the room hadn’t paused. In reality, they flinched for just a moment, and then resumed, their attention focused on Raven.

And then the world returned in a rush as Raven landed and committed to his assault. A flick of his wrist sent both spinning across the room. Before the knives struck their targets, he slipped his second fighting knife back into his hand, now once again wielding both, and rushed forward, past the crossbowmen who had dropped their weapons and clutched at their throats as they desperately tried to stem the geysers of blood that shot from their slashed throats. 

When targeting sword wielding enemies with nothing more than knives, it was important to remember the fight was no duel, no contest of skill or technique between warriors. There was no room for pride when outmatched by superior weapons and numbers. Overwhelming violence was the only edge. Each slice and cut needed to count. It was for all these reasons that when Raven barreled into the midsts of the three sword wielding men, instead of trying to parry the oncoming sword swing, as if the fool actually thought they would cross blades, Raven rushed closer, into the man’s reach, and slashed the sword wrist with one knife and buried the other to the hilt into the front of his throat. As the scimitar slipped from the weakened fingers, Raven had already dived away to gain separation from the other two. 

The two remaining swordsmen thought Raven sought to flee and rushed after in pursuit. And so they were unprepared when Raven came up in a roll and dashed back toward the swordsmen. He spun both knives in his grip and buried both into the closest man’s exposed abdomen, then savagely ripped them apart in a spray of blood and bile. 

He spun to face the last of the three swordsmen. The man hesitated, and Raven saw the look in the man’s eye. He considered fleeing, and he should have. Raven would have let him live to see another day. Instead, his face hardened, and Raven sighed as the man rushed forward, sword held high with reckless abandon, knowing full well what was about to happen.

A quick parry with the left-hand knife sent the sword strike wide, and Raven buried the right-handed knife to the hilt under his chin. 

It all happened in an instant. Now that he had a moment to let his mind process the situation, process what he had just done, a rage pure and hot ignited from deep in his gut and left him trembling with the effort to maintain control. Carrion had known his boundaries, knew where Raven had always drawn his line. Carrion knew and still placed him in a position that forced him to make corpses of five people with no trace of an affinity.

“Who the fu…” a voice hissed from behind, trailing off.

Raven glanced over his shoulder to see a small man, eyes still drooped low, standing beside the large woman that still held him by the arm. There was a third member of team dark huddled behind the upturned table, and all wore the grinning skull kerchief.

“That’s the recruit,” he heard the large woman he had followed into the room say.

“Recruit?” answered the third member. It was another feminine voice. “You sure about that, Breach?”

The large woman—breach, apparently—shrugged. “How the heck should I know, Rail? I didn’t exactly have time to comb through his orders.”

“Ok. I guess you’re right. But the bastard is kind of old, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Breach said, throwing up her hands. “That’s what I said.” 

Rail nodded toward Raven, who stood and watched the two women, once again stunned at the absurdity of the casual conversation. “Hey Rook—”

Raven flinched at the name and took a step toward the Rail. “What did you just call me?”

Both women shared a nervous glance, sensing the atmosphere in the room take a sudden shift. Rail stood from her crouch, bringing a massive assault stile crossbow into view, but kept it resting at the low-ready position, barrel facing the dust-coated floor. “Rook—as in rookie. Now, I get you might be too dense to understand the reference, and I guess we’ll learn that soon enough, but you take another step toward me holding those big ol’ knives of yours, especially after what you just did to those poor bastards, and we’ll have another slot to fill. That would be a team record, sugar.” She patted the side of the weapon slung across her shoulder.

Rookie, of course. Raven forced a heavy exhale, and the tension fled from the room. This was exactly why he preferred to work alone. His line of business did not lend itself to team dynamics. He was about to apologize, maybe even do proper introductions, when a series of thumping footfalls from the level above brought everyone’s gaze up toward the low ceiling. 

“He’s getting away.” A deep voice called out from an adjacent room, just beyond the wall to Raven’s left. The voice was a deep baritone that Raven felt in his chest.

Breach turned to face the wall and cupped her hand around her mouth. “Titan! Pursue…pursue…pursue…”

Raven was the first to react, spinning and racing toward the staircase at the far end of the room, taking them two at a time. It wasn’t until he was nearly at the top before he realized he really knew nothing about the current situation, why the team was even there, and who they were after. He was still moving with the unfamiliar guidance of his instincts. 

Cresting the top of the stairs, Raven nearly collided with a tall, gangly man hurrying around a corner to descend to the lower level. This man struggled at the shamshir at his waist. His wild eyes turned to shock, and then panic as Raven spun around him to avoid contact, and in the process carved a red line across the front of the man’s neck with the point of his knife. 

And then Raven was making his way down another corridor toward the sounds of hurried shouts coming from the single room at the other end of the short hall. By now he could hear the measured footfalls of the rest of strike team Dark making cautious progress up the stairs behind him. 

Raven darted into the open doorway where a half dozen crossbowmen stood ready, fanned out in a wide semicircle around the room with weapons trained on the opening he had just burst through.

Once again, time slowed to a crawl. Only this time, he had just enough time to realize just how thoroughly screwed he was. It was a revelation that burned away the madness of adrenaline and bloodlust and rage and fear. And then the crossbowmen fired. 

Luck spared his life. Not his breadth of talents, nor his superior survival skills. It was plain luck. They had fired center mass; none aimed for his head or neck. That was the first stroke of luck.

The second came at the fact that these men were competent. Only half fired, knowing should they miss, or if more of the team came in after him, they would have needed more quarrels already loaded and ready to fire again immediately.

The last stroke of luck was that he had flinched, a natural bodily reaction that turned him sideways just as they loosed. That caused him to take one quarrel to the meaty part of his thigh, and then two more to the soft part of his side, just under the ribs, both punching deep into his left lung. 

He staggered back out of the room, tripped over his feet, and crashed to his back on the dust coated floor. All three wounds were nasty. The two in his side especially so—mortal wounds, both. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he supposed that might have been the fourth stroke of luck. Had the quarrels taken him just a hand’s length higher, they likely would have punctured his heart. He would have died too quickly to do anything about it.

As it stood, those collective strokes of luck bought him the precious time he needed to save his life. 

Breathing down the searing fire of pain in all three wounds, he went to work. First, he ripped all three quarrels free unceremoniously, knowing full well the additional damage he was doing. But that was no matter. In this, speed was paramount. 

Hands trembling, he slipped a vial of viscous golden liquid from his belt, mentally lashing himself for not drinking it down before rushing into the hellhole of a tenement. It was the gold elixir, the strongest healing tonic Coragyps brewed at her lab back at the Roost. 

He upended half of the thick liquid into his mouth and held it on his pallet without swallowing. Moving quickly, he ignored both the pain of his wounds and the feeling of his blood spreading beneath him as he stoppered the vial and slipped it back into his belt, then slipped a second vial free. 

He paused a second time to stifle the cough that threatened to eject the liquid he held in his mouth, allowing the real fear of his potential lack of control to give him the adrenaline surge he needed to shield his mind and allow him to refocus on completing the sequence that would save his life. And he was running out of time.

As blackness closed in at the edge of his periphery, he uncorked the second vial he held in his hand—the alchemical activator—and took a sip of the clear liquid. The reaction was immediate, an alchemical transmutation that felt like an ignition in his mouth, shocking him enough to nearly make him swallow the brew, which would be decidedly not good. Thankfully, he kept the alchemy on his palate and it quickly dissolved, absorbing directly into his body. 

The pain intensified, swelling like a gathering wave, but he was ready for it, and braced himself as best he could. Still, his eyes grew wide as the pain crested, then crashed down on him, turning his world to agony. He wanted to roll and wallow as the alchemy forced his flesh to close and new bone to grow where the quarrels ravaged him, but there were still enemies about that could move into line of sight of him at any moment. Instead, he lay trembling and terrified at his total incapacitation as he heard the footfalls from the other room approach.

“Damn. You were right, Rail. The recruit went and got himself killed,” a voice called out from the hall behind him. It was the team. They just crested the staircase. It was Breach’s voice.

The sound of footfalls from the next room froze at hearing the woman’s powerful voice. Raven mouthed a silent thanks to the woman. She had delivered the precious seconds he had needed for the alchemical healing to bring him over the threshold to regain the functionality of his body.

“No shit,” Rail called out, excitement in her voice. “That would be three coppers, thank you very much.”

“Not so fast. He might still be alive.”

“The idiot went and got himself loaded up with quarrels, like a right desert cactus. If our friend there isn’t dead yet, he will be soon enough.”

Breach growled. “I suppose you’re right.” The sound of clinking coins filled the stillness. “But I get to keep his knives.”

“What? Now hold on. Why do you get to keep those?”

“Because I called it.”

“Doesn’t work that way, Breach.”

“Who says it doe—wait, I think the recruit’s moving.”

Finished absorbing the last wisps of healing alchemy, Raven reached into the bandoleer strapped across his chest, his fingers quickly brushing the characters etched onto the smooth surfaces of the crystal orbs nestled within, and found the munition he sought. He pulled it free, bathing the narrow hall in red light.

There was no time to properly cook the munition by shaking it to agitate the contents. Instead, he opted for the way Coragyps had always admonished, and splashed a drop of activator onto the surface of the orb. 

It took only a moment for the liquid to permeate the crystal, but Raven was already moving with urgency, ignoring the intense pain still surging through his body. He rolled to the side and lobbed the now blindingly bright munition into the next room, then shook his hand as the brief contact with the intense heat burned his palm bad enough to leave nasty blisters. Or, it would have blistered, had he not had the preternatural healing of the gold elixir still flowing through his system.

Rail’s startled voice called out from behind. “Well, I’ll be…” 

A thunderous detonation rocked the building and drove the air from Raven’s lungs. He crashed back down and tumbled back toward the stairs from the force of the super heated concussion. Only, he never made it to the stairs as the building shuttered again.

Pure white and a high-pitched ringing were all the sensory feedback Raven had received for several moments. That explosion was way too close, even with the gold elixir flowing through his body. He made a mental note to follow Coragyps’ instructions about her potent high alchemy much more strictly in the future before he got himself killed.

Sound was the first of his senses to return to him in full. He strained to listen and heard nothing but groans and cries of agony coming from close by. He laid back, still seeing only shades of darkness and light in his vision, content to allow himself a moment to rest and let the gold elixir repair the damage he caused to his body. 

But then another sustained thunderous rumble shook the building, this time coming from all directions. And then the floor beneath him fell away and left him tumbling down amid large chunks of debris and cascading sediment.