|
|
re: [Story] Alone In The Dark Pt 1
 by Maitrie on 2010/01/25 3:23 pm
A dismal rain had started to patter down from the sky, something that Cutter would have smiled at save for the fact that most of the flesh around his mouth had been gnawed away by some manner of beast before he had risen again. The Forsaken in general were indifferent to most natural weather conditions, but a small ember of spiteful amusement flickered in his cold breast as he watched Aenisa pick her way through the cracked cobbles made slippery with a coating of grease and ash, a mixture that would still burn given the right conditions. At least she had had the sense to blacken her shining armor with a mixture of lamp-black and wax. You never knew what was out there in the ruins, waiting for any kind of fresh meat to wander in, and the elven paladin was fresher than the others by dint of still being alive and breathing.
“Ah. Fair Stratholme. The jewel in the dungheap of Lordaeron, eh?” Cutter hissed through lipless teeth at the rest of his party, Forsaken all. Patience, Ratface and himself were all clad in a dubious assortment of scavenged armor over leather jack. Their weapons were plain and battered, looted from the hands of dead soldiers. Also with them was a priestess, Imma. Cutter could not imagine the kind of self-loathing that would make any Forsaken turn from the Forgotten Shadow and join the Argent Dawn, but he asked her few questions and she answered even less.
At his signal they fanned out from their straggling single file, weapons drawn. It had been six years since the Mad Prince had culled its living inhabitants and put it to the torch, and a little less than that since the Scourge had moved in. Nevertheless there were still things of worth to be scavenged from the ruins, and a not-insignificant part of the Argent Dawn’s logistics accounted for plunder bought from independent contractors such as Cutter himself. With the looting came a certain amount of risk, however. Elements of the Scourge still haunted the streets, and once Cutter had lost two of his crew to a patrol of Scarlet Crusaders. He would probably have never admitted it to himself, but the paladin’s armed presence was somewhat reassuring. He found the Argent Dawn sanctimonious at best, but an extra sword was an extra sword.
Patience took point, her crossbow nocked as they scanned the rubble for signs of ambush. Freed from the burdens of their biology, most of the undead were capable of remaining motionless for impossible periods of time. Cutter knew from bitter experience just how well they blended into the burned timbers and scorched rocks that made up the rubble piles.
“Are we trying for the marketplace today, boss?” Ratface hissed out of ruined lungs, the bones of his feet squeaking softly on the slippery cobbles. “Nowt much left uptown.”
“And you think the marketplace is any better?” Cutter cuffed Ratface almost-affectionately over his rotting ear, pulling his blow somewhat so as not to detach it entirely. “No, today we go for the buried ones. Humans bury their kinfolk with all kinds of things, things they won’t need any more. If any of the unhappy dead are Scourge, why, we have a priest and a paladin of the Argent Dawn with us this time.”
He glanced sidelong at Aenisa, wondering if she would take the bait this time. Her mouth narrowed in a thin, hard line even as the tips of her ears went red from anger. He had no idea why she chose to come along with them if she objected to their looting so much. No doubt the silver-wire inlay on her plate probably came from a scavenged candlestick or something similar.
“That’s all right,” the priestess, Imma, whispered out of the dark, staring hard at Cutter as she did. “It will let us put some Scourge to rest and give them the last rites they deserve.”
“Fine,” Aenisa said at last, “If you’ll leave them decently buried after you’re done.”
Ratface only shook his head, grumbling softly about how they would still be here when the Old Gods died if they buried every corpse or set of bones they came across in the Plaguelands, but Cutter raised a skeletal hand and cut him off. “If that makes you happy,” he said.
“Far from it,” Aenisa said, “But it’ll do.”
“I know he comes across as a complete bastard,” Patience whispered to Aenisa as they stalked through the desolate throughfares of Stratholme at the front of the group, with Ratface bringing up the rear.
“Is this the part where you tell me about his tragic past and how it’ll redeem him magically?” Aenisa asked sourly. She kept her sword drawn as they walked and kept her gaze alert for any kind of movement.
“Oh, no,” Patience said with an almost-laugh. “I think he was probably still a complete rat bastard before this.” The undead woman nudged a fallen plank aside with the toe of her boot. Plague-battened rats squeaked and ran ahead of them as the wood scraped softly aside, clearing the way. “I know the boss. He keeps coming back here if he wasn’t looking for something. There’s barely any profit in this any more. I think he has unfinished business here.”
“I think we all do, in some form or another,” Aenisa whispered. “Some of us just have more of it than others.”
The graveyards of Stratholme were choked with coffins left unburied and the skeletal heaps of the plague-dead still tangled in their shrouds. On their way there Cutter and his crew had fought a few disintegrating ghouls accompanied by plague-dogs, the creatures dying and yet unable to die from the unnatural disease battening in their veins. Cutter and his band had helped send them on their way. The ghouls they interred in cairns made from broken masonry, the dogs they had burned.
The organized Scourge patrols they had feared were nowhere to be seen. Cutter had heard something of a rumor himself; that Kel’Thuzad had quit Naxxramas, that the Lich King held a legion of deathknights in reserve with which to crush the Argent Dawn. He had stopped worrying about rumors a long time ago. If the Lich King did move against Light’s Hope Chapel, then he would pack up his mule-cart and his followers and find new buyers in Undercity. It would be inconvenient. In his experience the Apothecaries and Deathstalkers were harder bargainers than the Argent Dawn.
Cutter had had Patience and Ratface go out in search of unclaimed salvage while the priest and paladin kept themselves busy sanctifying the graves that Scourge had desecrated long before the scavengers had arrived. Most of the mass graves were in deplorable shape, with their inhabitants long gone. Gnawed bones lay scattered about the weed-choked ground and crypts had been broken into for the bodies interred within. Few, if any of the valuables had been taken at all. The Scourge did not bother itself with trinkets.
There was a stack of splintering coffins nearby, left unburied from the last days of the plague when Arthas had culled the inhabitants of the city. Most of them lay empty, their occupants having risen again as Scourge. Most of them had left possessions behind, however. Rooting around in the coffins on the top of the pile, Cutter found a silver ring, a small string of amber beads and a carnelian statuette. He pulled his crowbar from the belt loop he carried it in and levered the first coffin off the top of the pile with a loud crash.
A scraping sound followed, along with a squeak that sounded like a muffled cry. He turned to see if Imma or Aenisa had called for him, but the both of them were still busy sprinkling a rededicated grave with chrism. There was more scraping, and a sound that he would have assumed was the work of a frightened rat, except that rats, when scared, did not stay to make more noise. Cutter tightened the grip on his crowbar and beckoned his assistants over, pointing to the coffins. Patience glanced at him, tilting her head such to suggest a raised eyebrow – an expression she was no longer capable of after all these years of undeath. Ratface drew his axe and beckoned so as to summon Imma and Aenisa.
“What is it?” the paladin asked, eyeing the shaking coffin with suspicion.
“Something’s trapped in there,” Patience hissed, “If it’s Scourge, we’ll kill it when Cutter pops the lid off with his crowbar.”
A faint look of suspicion crossed Imma’s face as she listened to the scraping and pounding sounds within one of the coffins below. “Somehow I can’t imagine Scourge being this noisy.”
Cutter counted to three, softly, before Patience shoved the top coffin off the pile with an astounding crash. The sounds were in fact coming from one of the coffins on the bottom of the pile. They stood with weapons drawn as Cutter slid the wedge end of his crowbar under the nailed-down lid and levered it open with a crunch, revealing what was within.
“Not Scourge,” Ratface said after a long moment. “Didn’t try to eat my face.”
“That’s assuming you’ve even got any face left to eat,” Patience hissed before leaning in for a closer look. “Frozen Throne, how long have you been in here?” That question was directed to a mummified undead woman huddled in the bottom of the coffin, blinking at the light.
“That’s not any salvage we can sell,” Cutter hissed, before stalking away and mock-spitting across the cemetery grounds.
“She’s a novice, or was before she died.” Imma said as Ratface leaned in and carried the woman out of her coffin. He sat her up on the coffin next to hers, with Patience’s help. Calcified joints popped and cracked with the movement. “Those are initiate’s robes, and that’s a set of prayer beads tucked into her belt-rope.” A gaping wound in the side of her head made the cause of death obvious, and the bony claws on her hands had been worn down to blunt nubs against the lid of her coffin.
“Has she been in here all this time?” Aenisa breathed. “Nobody could be sane after six years in the dark.”
“I’d ask her,” Patience replied, “but see that? Her throat’s too rotted for speech. Maybe the Apothecaries can fix her up. Hey,” she said, this time to the woman they had just dug out of the coffin, “Is there any way for you to tell us who you are?”
She shook her head and them fumbled around in the pocket of her rotted gown, pulling out a mottled, stained handkerchief. Embroidered on the spotted linen was the name “Maitrie”.
“Maitrie?” Patience asked, picking up the cloth and reading the name, “Is that your name?”
A wordless nod as the woman started to swing her heels like a child during a boring sermon.
“Well, what do we do with her, chief? Turn her loose?” Ratface asked.
“No, you idiot, what do you think?” Cutter cuffed Ratface over the ear, again. “We saved her, and now we’re responsible for her. Pick her up and take her with us, we’re getting out of here. We’ll hand her over to the census in Undercity, they’ll know what to do about her.” Grumbling, Ratface hoisted Maitrie carefully over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. It was fortunate that she had mummified so well; she weighed barely anything at all. Not that Forsaken got tired any more, anyway.
“That’ll teach me to go rooting around in other people’s graves,” Cutter muttered as he picked up the loot bags and crossed over to where Aenisa and Imma were waiting for him. “I hope you’re enjoying this, paladin.”
“What do you mean by that?” Aenisa asked in mock innocence.
“Being right,” he hissed, “This whole graverobbing thing was a bad idea.”
“Well, now we’ve saved someone from an eternity in darkness I can’t say it was entirely a bad thing,” she said with a shrug.
“And now you change your mind,” Cutter grumbled. “Are elves always this perverse?”
“Only if it gets a rise out of someone like you.” Aenisa said lightly, provoking a laugh out of Imma.
|
