Chapter 42

Marcus closed his eyes to the heap of shit and piss that assailed his senses, traveling up his nose and smearing itself across his pale face as the Yokun hit-squad dragged him through the Festering Fountain supply pipe.

He only opened his eyes and drew deep the dank air of Fleapit when the emerged on the other side, smashing through the fountain in the residential quarter square and sending up a shockwave of terror that swept through the ratmen civilians enjoying their putrid shower.

The Yokun women did not spare a single moment. As a unit they surged towards the jagged iron towers of the Industrial Sector forges, Marcus still being held by the second youngest of their order. On the way, only a few guards were roused from their sprints down the alleys of Fleapit by the team, having only enough time to raise their spears or halberds in defense before they Yokun’s Wakisashis slit their throats and left them gagging for breath in the dark.

To Marcus, the entire world was nothing but flashes of deep onyx and the puffs of smoke billowing from the great forces of Fleapit’s East District, mixed with flashes of grey, blue, and swamp green that he caught from within the Yokun’s visors. Occasionally such sights were bathed in corrupted crimson as some unfortunate peasant rat stumbled out onto the streets and was soundly silenced by the blades of the assassins as they bore their charge relentlessly towards the forges and foundries.

“Matron!” the youngest, wounded one shouted as they neared their destination. “Up top!”

The Elder’s eyes flared as she looked to the skies and saw javelins flying at them from the puffing chimneys of the foundry towers, clearly workmen who had taken up arms and decided to try their hand at defending their trade.

“Tsk,” the Matron hissed. “Ignore them. Into the shadows between the towers. Let them strike at nothing but air!”

The Yokun nodded as they advanced, Marcus at this point being carried on the back of the sister that held him captive. They snaked their way between the skeletal frames of the foundry pits, slashing away the life of any who dared to stand in their way, and Marcus spared a thought for all the innocent ratmen who had died by their scaly hands this day. If he knew his comrades like he did, they would seek to pay such deaths back tenfold…

“There!” the wounded sister shouted. “The wall comes into view!”

She was right. The thick, dark outline of Fleapit’s East guard tower loomed above them, and the three assassins wasted no time in scaling the bricks with their bare hands and dispatching the crossbow-wielding guards atop the battlements with as much ease as a child cutting through a cake.

And when then they looked beyond the walls, they saw nothing but an expanse of darkness waiting for them.

“Let us fly!” the youngling spat.

But as she made to leap and finally be free of the putrid waste of a city, the Matron held her back.

“Sister,” he said. “Look below.”

The youngling’s face was flushed with frenzy. Clearly her wound had caused her no small amount of trepidation – certainly more than she’d let on. But as Marcus watched the three of them step to the edge of the battlements and look over the side, he couldn’t help but feel a swelling of pride within his chest.

An army of eighty Spineripper-mounted Marrow rats waited below, gazing up at them while their mounts leaped to claw their way up to maul the assassins.

And at their head was someone all too familiar to Marcus.

“FORWARD!” The great hulking image of Festicus roared above the din of his baying horde. “FOR THE SHAI-ALUD!”

The Shai-Alud couldn’t be prouder. Not that he had any time to dwell on this.

The Yokun that held him put the edge of her blade to his throat.

“Do not come closer, filth of the underworld!” she hissed. “Or the human dies!”

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“HAH!” Festicus roared up at them. “Be going ahead! We are coming to avenge our Brothers’ deaths! By the Unclean, your heads shall be resting upon my spike by the end of this day!”

“Skittering rodent!” the young snake spat, but the Matron held both her charges back.

“We go higher,” she said, nodding up at the smog-producing towers of the foundries they had just cleared. “Let their bestial mounts try and follow us there.”

The three Yokun followed their Elder’s plan without flaw, managing to clear the walls just as the first of Festicus’s legion leaped to claw at their legs. The mounts had speed on their side, but the snake-women had stealth, and Marcus doubted they gave off any particular scents the Spineripper’s could sense that he could not.

They had effectively blinded the army that had been lying in wait for them.

The Yokun leaped through the foundry pits and latched onto the towers with their claws, sheathing their Wakishashi’s and scaling to the top of the highest tower, Marcus being dragged up after them wrapped in the tail of his captor.

He watched the legion of Festicus bark up at the women as they made their ascent, seeing the floor of Fleapit disappear entirely as they cleared the first of the smog-clouds above.

“Sister!” the youngest then shouted. “Where are we bound?”

“To them!” the grey Matron shouted back, pointing up at the last of the Glitterpaks that were floating by above. “We ride them out. Take out chances on the dead winds of this accursed place!”

Marcus was shocked by the level of dedication on display here, even as he tried wriggling against his captor’s surprisingly strong tail.

The Yokun finally made it to the top of the foundry platform, seeing the Glittperpaks float by with almost lifeless abandon above the city.

“Finally!” Marcus’s captor roared. “Let us fly!”

“Wait,” the Matron ordered. “I don’t like this. I will take-“

“We go!” the impatient snake that held Marcus roared. “I will not spend another second in this cesspit!”

She launched herself without waiting for her Sisters command towards the first Glitterpak she saw, trailing through the air with the dexterity of an Olympic gymnast, all while holding Marcus coiled in her tail who already knew, by the flickering color patterns that shone across the Glitterpak’s body, what was about to happen.

“Sister!”

The youngling’s call was not heard as the snake-woman made to grab the spiky folds of the Glitterpak’s body and watched her hand simply cleave through thin air. Her eyes bulging, tail finally uncoiling, she let out a shrill scream as she plummeted towards the fifty-foot drop to her death with Marcus falling behind her.

He looked into her eyes as he fell, seeing the desperation that smeared across her face in the end. That’s when he saw that, for him, there was actually no hatred there. There was instead merely a sense of duty. A duty that, the Yokun knew, had now been brought to an abrupt end.

Marcus would have assumed he’d meet the same fate as the bearer of those desparate eyes, but suddenly felt another lithe tail wrap itself around his waist from above, knocking him against the corrugated metal of the foundry silo and suspending him just below the lip of the platform. He watched as the snake-woman hit the ground – becoming nothing more than a wet puddle of burst flesh.

The other two cursed as the youngling pulled him up, pinning him to the floor and bringing up her Wakisahsi to slit his throat then and there.

“Sister,” came the warning voice of the Matron.

“Tsk’althoka!” the young snake cried. “We would be better to end his life here and now, Matron! We would be doing this entire world a favor!”

“It is not the Matriarch’s will, Sister.”

“My brood Sister is dead!’ the youngling screamed. “I – I will have vengea-“

“Yeeva,” the Matron said quietly, placing an affirming hand on the young snake woman’s shoulder. “She knew the risk. We all did.”

The hard eyes of the young snake met Marcus’s in that moment, and the latter was surprised to find what looked like tears welling up in the assassin’s predator eyes. Such tears were abruptly wiped away, however, as her hand flew to grab at Marcus’s arm.

“What…what is this?”

Marcus followed her eyes to see the small, almost imperceptible almond-shaped eyeball iris that was strapped to his sleeve, almost like it had been sown in there intentionally. Unless one had the perception of a hawk, there was no way anyone could have noticed it. Hell, he hadn’t even noticed it himself.

So when the Matron snake shook her old head in disbelief, he was just as surprised as she was.

“A marker,” she said. “The result of a basic incantation that allows the owner of the device to track the one implanted with it. Who knew these little beasts were capable of employing such rudimentary magic in such a clever way?”

“Devious, sneaky little wretches!” The young Yeeva spat. “You knew about this, didn’t you, piss-blood?”

Marcus shook his head desperately – an entirely honest answer delivered at the same time as he made the realization: Skeever had briefly brushed his arm as the snake women had led him out of the palace, hadn’t he? So he must have…

Skeever, Marcus thought. You really are a cut above your kind. If I get out of this, I swear I will raise you to the ranks of legend among your kind.

A sudden clanging of claws against iron drew the attention of the Yokun then, and both snakes turned to see the challenger that had finally come to face them on the platform.

“Be thinking you can outrun me?” Festicus said as he regained his breath from his ascent. “I am Festicus of Clan Marrow! Be meeting my eyes, for in them will you be seeing your death.”

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