Will

Crossing the city to reach Darkside, Will found that Sheerhome's prospects were even worse than he'd thought. When he climbed the old disused clock tower in Topside to get a good vantage point, he glimpsed over the city walls that not only was the Outside slum completely engulfed in flames, but the conflagration had begun spreading to the crop fields in the north and northeast.

Things were not looking any better in the south. The docks had just begun to catch courtesy of the wind turning southward. A multitude of ships had cast off from the jetties, their crews overlooking the city's devastation from the relative safety of the open sea, bobbing on the choppy gray water. He imagined that many more vessels had already departed in search of safer havens.

The fields. The granaries. The ships. Not good.

He shook his head. No point philosophizing about the potential ramifications at this stage. He moved on, and kept a low profile as he slunk into the entertainment district. He maintained a wide net of Detect [Life], trawling for Thorpe's people. He wanted to know what they were up to. While cruel, their isolationist approach made a certain sense. Why break that off now? He could only think of two alternatives. Either they were looking to put Brimstone out of his misery, or there was something of value to them in Darkside. Something valuable enough to brave the lord's hellfire rage.

Explosions sounded in the distance. Brimstone was in peak genocidal form, evidently.

It did not take Will many minutes to hit paydirt. A five-man commando squad, four of them spread out over the various floors of a streetside building that had not yet been badly touched by the fire with the last one posted as a lookout on a roof across the street from them. Based on the sweeping back-and-forth movements of the four inside the building, they were clearly searching for something.

Will figured that the lookout was a sensory type, an assumption based both on logical inference and what he could observe of the man's behavior. He was static, crouched like a gargoyle, not even turning his head to scan for threats. An Explorer, most likely. No doubt he had Detect active.

Will took a few seconds to formulate a plan of attack, then moved in fast and hard. He glided across rooftops, leaping, landings and footsteps muffled by Light Touch. Exploiting a common deficiency even in more experienced sensory types, he approached directly from the man's rear. While Detect offered a perfect 360 degree view, most people were not accustomed to having eyes in the back of their head. This created an entirely psychological blindspot behind the caster that took a good deal of training to correct.

The lookout, it seemed, was not aware of this.

Will Dashed the last bit of the way, soaring. He took the lookout's head off with a spinning sweep before the man even knew what was happening. His momentum carried him onward. He curled up, went in through a glass balcony door on the second floor of the main building. He landed on his feet, skidding, and completed his swing by separating a second commando from his legs. His top half flopped over, and he let out a terrible shriek. By the time the man's companions went to check on his screams, Will had already slipped out an open window and was trotting around on street level to approach from below.

He went through the front door and caught the third man with an upward swing through the ceiling, shearing through his heels. His friends fired into the floor. Will was long gone by then. Circled around again, rooftops this time. He had not seen their sheets, and their arms were covered anyway, but he could tell there were no more sensory types among the remaining commandos. They were scrambling, yelling at each other. They had no idea where he was. One of them was dragging their hobbled friend off to tend to him while the last one ran about, checking through windows to try and find some sign of their attacker.

The last thing he saw was a knife in the eye, Repelled so hard it drove into his brain and killed him almost instantly. He slumped over a windowsill, arms dangling. Will Dashed back into the building. The last uninjured commando looked up from his downed friend. He trained his rifle on Will, lips peeled back in a snarl of equal parts anger and fear. Will was on him before he got off a shot. A flick of the wrist sheared the man's firearm in half, lopped a hand off along with it. The man howled like a banshee. Will would have preferred to keep him alive for questioning—two was always best—but the man expired from shock before Will could fix up a tourniquet.

The last man standing—crawling, really—had given up on the notion of fighting back, and was dragging himself on his elbows in some vain effort to escape. He left a messy blood trail behind him.

Will followed him at a sedate pace. The commando got through the glass door Will had busted open and onto the wide balcony beyond. With a low whimper, he dragged himself up onto the balustrade as though he intended to throw himself off the edge, came up short with his chin resting on the wooden crosspiece while he gathered his resolve.

He cried out when Will caught him by the ankle and dragged him back down to the balcony floor. A kick to the ribs turned the man around. He stared up wide-eyed, hands raised to beg mercy, babbling incoherently.

With some effort, Will managed to slam Anathema back in its scabbard and peel his fingers off the handle. Some skin came off with it. He crouched beside the commando, drew a long knife from a sheath on the man's chest, and calmly stuck it into his upper right abdomen through the gap between two armor plates. He had to put some force behind it. His victim was probably a Laborer. Hiking up the man's thick gambeson sleeve proved him right. Level 9.

"This is in your liver," Will informed the man, lightly tapping a finger against the butt of the handle. "If you tell me what I wanna know, I leave it in. If you give me fuss, I take it out. I do that, you'll bleed to death in about five minutes. Let's say ten if you've got Hemosynthesis. The internal bleeding will be so bad you'll look eight months pregnant by the time you're dead.

"So. How cooperative are we feeling?"

Very, it turned out. The man was so eager to talk that Will had a hard time understanding him.

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"Oh, good," Will said. "You're an Omen Bearer, aren't you?"

The man went quiet, pressed his shaking lips together. Got even paler than he already was.

Will smiled reassuringly. "Go on. Yes or no. See how good you lie with a knife in your gut."

"Y-Yes…" the man said at last.

"All the commandos?"

"All of them."

"Thorpe?"

"Yes."

"What rank is he in your organization?"

"Ha… Harbinger."

"I see." Will tap-tap-tapped his finger on the knife, producing a wince from his new friend with each one. "Why are you here? In Darkside, I mean. What is your objective?"

"A girl," the Laborer breathed. He let his head fall back, eyes squeezed shut against the pain. "There's a girl. We're supposed to find her. Find her… bring her to…" He swallowed hard. "Bring her back to the keep."

"What's so special about this woman?" Will asked.

"Not a woman. A girl. A little… l-little girl."

Will frowned. "What do you mean? Like a kid?" He flicked the side of the knife handle, and the Laborer moaned miserably.

"Yes…!" he sobbed.

"That's impossible. There are no children on the Frontier."

"I don't fucking know! That was the order! That's all we were told! Please, that's all I know!"

Will considered for a moment, chewed on his lip. "A kid." It was weird. It was unprecedented. Then again, the Omen Bearers didn't strike him as the type of people to act on bad intel. It was too specific and too unlikely of a lie for the Laborer to have made it up on the spot.

"All right," he said slowly. "A little girl. What do you people want with her?"

"I don't know…!"

Will didn't think he would. He was just a foot soldier, and the Omen Bearers seemed to take compartmentalization pretty seriously. "Fine. Okay, I believe you. Say I wanna find this girl—where would I look?"

The commando's lips had gone blue with shock. His eyelids fluttered. He'd be going out soon. Will tapped the knife again to get his attention. That perked him up.

"Commander said… some whorehouse. Didn't know which. Supposed to search them… them all. Please, I don't know anything else…" He began sobbing weakly. "Please let me live."

"Sure," Will said in a soft voice. "Sure. I just wanna know one more thing. Brimstone, he's here too. That a coincidence?"

The commando shook his head violently, sobbed. "I don't know! Maybe! We were told to stay clear of him!"

"Okay, friend. I believe you." Will stood up, taking the glistening red knife with him. "Hope it hurts. Die slow."

"No…" the commando whimpered while smearing his hands down the front of his armor, unable to put pressure on the wound through the steel plates. Not that it would have done him any good. Most of the bleeding would be internal. "You promised…!"

"Aw, did I pwomise?" Will mocked. He threw the bloody knife over the balcony and pointed an accusing finger at the man on the ground. "You're a traitor to all mankind. If I could kill you twice, I would. If I could kill you a thousand times, I would. If I could stay and take my time with you, I would. You deserve all my attention, all my ingenuity, to have your body dismantled joint by joint and unspooled nerve by nerve. You deserve to have your skull cracked open like an egg and your brains picked out a piece at a time until you're a drooling husk who can't remember his own name. But this will have to do. Consider yourself…"

He trailed off. Something about the way he'd stood up sent blood rushing in his ears. His vision tunneled. He blinked, and when he opened his eye again he'd fallen back against the balustrade, one arm awkwardly flung over it to keep himself from sliding all the way down. He took a ragged, sticky breath, felt like his lungs were full of water. He blinked, found himself sagged down even lower, folded limp in the middle like a sack of flour. Everything swayed madly.

"Bastard!" the commando cried, his voice sounding strange and distorted. In some final, spiteful burst of strength, he'd found his feet and was throwing himself at Will.

Will struggled with uncooperative lips. "Repel," he muttered.

The blast wasn't enough to knock the enemy away as intended, but threw him off course just enough. The man slammed against the balustrade at the waist, broke the rail with a loud splintering of wood, tripped over the side out of sight. A second later, there was a dull thud over the crackle and rumble of feasting flames.

Will sucked in a sharp breath, heart hammering, and shifted his weight off the ruined balustrade so he wouldn't go tumbling the same way as the other guy. Slowly, slowly, the world came back into focus, stopped its mad rocking. He fished two glass bottles out of his pocket, downed one after another. Stimulant. Goatweed healing draught. They settled badly in his stomach. He burped, felt a squirt of blood come out of his reopened gut wound.

"Shit," he muttered, and resisted the urge to rub his raw eye. The soot would only make it worse. "Stupid. I just had to gloat, didn't I?"

He got up. Shaky at first, but more solid the longer he was on his feet. He breathed slowly, deeply, trying not to catch too much smoke. His heartbeat slowly settled.

Better.

He jumped down off the balcony, landed in a clumsy crouch. The last commando had fallen on his neck, broken his spine against the cobbles. Somehow he was still alive even with his neck all twisted around, mouth working stupidly, one eye blinking up at nothing.

Will drew Anathema. Dark spirits raced up his arm, biting with invisible teeth and raking with invisible claws. The familiar pain brought him all the way back. For once, there was a perfect union of purpose between man and sword.

Anathema wanted death. Screamed for it.

Will felt the same. That fun little near-death experience had put him in a dark, dark mood.

He poked the last commando through the heart, finally stopped his wriggling. Looked at his sheet. 3 AP left. Not great.

The commando's sheet, too, drew his attention. Moments after the man had let out his final deathrattle, black ink bled out over his forearm, spreading until his Profession symbol was surrounded by that same warped eight-pointed star of Era that Will had seen before. The mark of the Omen Bearers.

Curious. Will climbed inside the building, checked with a few of the other commandos. Their marks had also appeared. It seemed they could conceal them at will, but they would reappear after death. Good to know.

He continued north along the road. Only flames now populated the tall Darkside tenements, dancing merry reels in absence of the original owners. He felt for stirrings in the spiderweb of his awareness. Looking for more commandos. Let them do the searching for him. He'd relieve them of whatever or whoever they found.

If the Omens were going to burn the world, he'd quench it in their blood.

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