Old Fen gripped the hilt of his sword. It smelled of rot and oil. Or was it his own stench? Did it matter? They had blended with him for so many decades that he couldn't tell them apart anymore.
"Wait! ARGH!" A cry from below distracted him from his blade.
He closed his eyes. Another of his men screamed for the last time on the ground floor. The others would follow. He would.
Silma's threat shattered his wildest expectations. Now, he recognised, albeit reluctantly, that she was as dangerous as Brannick. Not necessarily stronger than this monster, but a different kind of dangerous.
Beneath his mottled beard, a smirk curved his lips. Death it was. It had been from the moment this war started.
He opened his eyes and rose from his chair. Not with the resignation of a doomed man, but with a back ironed straight. The lamplight didn't cast shadows onto his dirty, wrinkled face; it only reflected conviction.
"How much would Garrick weep if he lost Silma and ten of his bearers?" He strode to the door. "A shame I won't see it. In the end, it all rots back to me."
Between overturned rags, clotted blood smeared the ground. A faint scent of burnt flesh lingered beneath the stench of blood coming from the stairs, where silence replaced the wails of his men. Able-bodied, bearers, and wounded should have all died by now.
He walked toward the stairs.
Before crossing half the corridor, footsteps echoed. Still slow. Still mocking.
Silma emerged first. They exchanged a glance, and while his smirk broadened, her lips curled like a knife.
Her men followed in groups of three. Fresh blood dripped from their blades, spears, and cuirasses—that of his men, but not only. A wound cut across a man's forehead down to his chin, while another pressed his hand against his missing arm.
Six ranks of three... Two of her twenty men had died, plus a heavily injured one. "I raised my Sump Dogs well." He chuckled.
"You're taking their deaths quite well." Silma arched a brow. "Well, you won't have time to miss them. Do you plan to fight in that cramped corridor? Or is that foul bastard, Joss, waiting in ambush?"
"Neither." Fen waved to the stairs. "I was about to join in the fun downstairs, so why don't we talk on our way?"
"Of your surrender? We both know Garrick won't accept it. I won't either." Silma nodded toward the stairs, and her men descended.
Fen walked beside her, his missing fingers wrapped around his blade. "Of course not. Is it because of Theda's teachings, or because I called you a bitch—"
"Where's Joss?" Silma's voice cut through the small talk.
"Gone," Fen sighed.
"And you let him? My opinion of you was never higher than the sewers you crawled from. Now? I can't tell if I'm speaking to a gang leader or a fool."
He laughed at her stinging remark, then shrugged it off. "You know how he is—always thought himself the wisest. If he believes he can escape the Black Cask and my dogs, good for him. But that's not what I wanted to talk about. Do you know where I came from?"
"Another noxious gutter?" Silma spread her palms. "You'd better hurry if you want to speak about things no one cares about. We're almost on the ground floor, and I still have the rat-man you hid, and Joss to catch."
Fen leapt down the last remaining steps. Corpses sprawled around the broken base of metallic pillars and the shattered door. Silma's men took positions in the broader space, shields raised at the front, bows drawn at the back, and blades and spears aimed at him.
"Exactly. No one ever heard where I came from. I was a nobody. A man who knew he could achieve more than what his starving village could ever allow him to."
He unsheathed his blade. "Do you know why no one will ever know where I came from? Because I burned it to the ground and fed the people who looked down on me to the dogs. I'm not like any of you; I choose the slums. And here, I became someone."
Silma passed him by. She stood before her men, then whipped an imaginary tear at the corner of her light brown eyes. "The old dog became someone in the slums. What a touching story, right, boys?"
Laughter spread across her men. She joined them, clapping her hands. "Amusing, truly. Last I remember, you were still no one twenty years ago. Even today, I wouldn't remember your name had Garrick not allowed you to sort his trash. Thank you for telling me, though. I'll forget everything the moment I slit your old throat."
"Ay. I'm an old dog. But old people have the patience to listen." Fen observed two knives appear in Silma's hands. "Your rat-man. I never hid it. Wherever he is, he must be mocking you all."
He jabbed his sword into the ground and opened his heavy leather coat. No shirt beneath, but skin. Pale as every sun-bereaved slum-dweller. Covered in scars of teeth and claws framed in the scaly green of rot. All the marks pulsed, and each time they did, the stench of oil and rot overwhelmed that of blood.
"As I do."
Silma lifted her hands as her men covered their noses. "You got us, old dog. That stench's a weapon on its own. Hahaha. Did you ever bathe? Oh. I forgot. You must have in the sewer waters." Her eyes narrowed, pleasantries dissolving into the red of her pupils. "I wonder if your blood's still red."
"Would you let me have the honor of taking his life?" The spearman drew attention to him.
The short, broad man jumped in front of him, slamming his iron gauntlets against each other. "Don't stain your hands with putrid blood, leader."
The archer pressed his bow against the ground, then kicked it into his hands, while the dancers waved their spiked fans. More stepped forward to offer to end Old Fen.
They all halted when Silma raised her palm. "No heretic can best Theda's followers in single combat. This is no belief. It's truth. I see it in your eyes, Fen. You're not afraid. You're not running. But you don't plan to fight either. Let me guess. You showed us your scars because you will..."
Her question came out strangled before dying in her throat.
Old Fen finished the question for her. "Right. Let me remind you why every church, Theda's included, fears heretics."
Rot squirmed on skin, spreading to devour every bit of paleness they had speared along the years. They reached Fen's neck, then paused for a heartbeat at his chin.
In that suspended moment, right as he smashed his anchor into shards, memories reflected on their surfaces.
His young and weak self pressed against the dirty wall of his living room. His parents, brother, and sisters munched on bread and spooned root vegetable soup in front of the hearth inside. Not him.
He heard their voices as if they had spoken yesterday. "Ill-born child. Rot-devoured, cursed creature leeching on their food. A disabled boy who can't swing an axe or cut wheat should hurry to die."
On another shard, he saw the other village kid playing their favorite game: beat the cripple up. And his brother and sister smirked as they did.
But he knew he could become more than any of them if that bitch of an illness didn't take him first. That must have been why they hated him. That was why he would hate humans in return.
Dogs, abandoned like him, became his only friends. They watched over him. They bit his corrupted fingers off before the illness spread and protected him from the other children. For years, he lived, ate, learned, and slept with them.
Amidst the pack, he understood. "Everything will rot back to me."
He paid the price for a heretic truth. One ingrained within him: the same illness ravaging him from birth, now twisted from something slowly killing him into the cost of using that power.
Dogs answered his calls from all over the village. They poured on the people who had tried to crush him. Blood flowed from ripped throats and gnawed sides.
And he smirked at the corpses of his siblings as he lit the biggest brazier Silver Crest Bay had ever seen.
Eventually, priests from Kraghor's temple captured him. Somehow, his illness turned them blind to his truth until their verdict: live with criminals and sons of slaves down the rotten pit called the slums. Fine by him.
There, he gathered the broken and weak to run a kennel by the sewers. His influence grew until Garrick overturned the Broken Chain; until the Sump Dogs were born. He had never been allowed anything. What he got, he tore it with his teeth.
Before the shards shattered, all the versions of a past he had burned to the ground turned toward him.
"What does everything will rot back to me mean now?" They whispered.
Fen remained silent for a heartbeat. If this was supposed to happen, he had heard none of it. His plan had never changed. The Black Cask cornered him, and he would bury them with him. Of course, defeating Silma and her men was a pipe dream even if his truth granted him the nine lives of a cat.
But an anchor ghast? Would answering right make it powerful enough to bleed Garrick dry?
The possibility erased his doubts and he screamed what he believed in. "All that is cast off is mine. Not eventually, not later. Now."