20 Frost 4622
Hakon looked down at the prone form of his quarry. The woman was bleeding from the head and he’d splintered her right kneecap with his mace like it was kindling, but she was otherwise unharmed, at least for now. That was going to change soon.
She looked up at him balefully, saying nothing. He stared back, impassive. He wasn’t given to talking much except when necessary, and he had little to say in this instance. If she wanted to attempt to explain herself or plead for her life, he would not deny her this.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t put up a good fight. She hadn’t taken on a Mark that was for anything other than straightforward destruction: a formidable Bane mage, her predilection for poisoning had drawn a bit too much attention after a few too many prominent Guildsman and minor nobility of Jorikford fell ill or died, and she’d been sniffed out. Then he’d been dispatched to find her and end her, and now she’d be snuffed out. Simple enough.
He’d come upon her on the path outside of her house. Using Huntersight to track her had not taken much effort. She seemed to have some kind of Bane mutation – it was like she dripped Ashes as she walked, leaving a little breadcrumb trail of etheric traces for him to follow. He hadn’t been caught off-guard by her attempts to leverage the accumulation of them around her house; he could see where they were and dodge them as she tried to use them against him.
She’d had less luck dodging one of his Branded weapons, a thrown mace. She’d been distracted, trying to hit him with some kind of wadded up ball of nastiness, and hadn’t seen it coming. He found that mages tended to underestimate him in that way. They saw a large man holding a club and they assumed they were safe as long as they kept out of close range. By the time they realized that the weapon held in his hand was the least of their worries, he’d already created an advantage for himself.
With her bleeding from the head, she became enraged and confused, and he’d been able to close the distance and apply the brutal spiked edges of his mace to her kneecap. A quick punch knocked the breath out of her and had her on the ground. The fight had not taken long, maybe five minutes, at most.
To keep her busy once she was on the ground, he grabbed her shoulder, squeezing until she winced and then intensifying his grip until she groaned in pain. He wanted her to hurt; it disrupted concentration, and he did not enjoy being so close to a Bane practitioner who was no doubt thinking about trying to spit poisoned blood into his mouth or somesuch. It was his turn to concentrate, as he focused on Winnowing out her life force to make up for the Bane she had managed to slap him with. He wasn’t certain which one it was, which suggested it was Sopor. Hush and Rot had immediate, obvious effects, and Sap was more annoying to handle.
He was unsure why she’d started with a weaker Bane when per the reports, she was capable of much worse. His Ethersight suggested she had overdone it a bit of late, but to his eyes he did not believe she would be experiencing worse than mild mage blight. Maybe she had underestimated him. Fatal mistake, that, or it would prove to be.
When he was finished healing himself via judicious use of her Vitessence, he swung his mace at her other kneecap once, twice, three times, until he was satisfied that it was a painful paste instead of a precise arrangement of muscle, sinew, and bone.
“I’ll break more if you try to cast,” he said. Not a threat, just a statement of fact. The fight was over, and the ending was inevitable. It was up to her how much pain she was in between now and then.
He saw a flare up of ether: she was preparing to cast a spell, either to distract herself or to test him. So he swung his mace again, this time at her wrist. That one hurt worse than either of her kneecaps, apparently, because she screamed, a long sustained noise that would have worried him had she not lived quite far from her nearest neighbors. He gave her a jab in the throat, just to make the noise stop. It was a bit of unnecessary force, but the sound annoyed him and he didn’t want to be discovered.
He watched for more etheric flare ups, but none came.
Silence blossomed between them, or the relative silence her labored breaths and pained exhalations allowed. He watched her, but did nothing. He had no strong desire to make hurt her more, and if he waited longer as she bled out and weakened, the Sunderstrike would be easier to apply.
Finally, she spoke. They always did, once it became clear that their precious magic had failed them.
“Revenant,” she ground out between clenched teeth like a curse. “I thought –” her leg spasmed and she groaned in pain, interrupting her thought process. After a few deep breaths, she continued: “I thought you were a bogeyman.”
“No,” was all he said in reply. “I am real.”
She looked at him. He was unsure what she saw when she did so. Was she disappointed that he was just a man, and not the monster that rogue mages warned one another about over campfires?
“You’re going to kill me,” she said.
He nodded, because she was correct. That was exactly what was about to happen. “Yes.”
“Is there anything I could say, or– or do– to change your mind?” She asked haltingly. Desperation tinged her voice as blood continued to seep from the wound at her temple.
He felt relieved that she asked the question without suggesting anything too sensual. It would not be the first time his quarry, often female but sometimes male, too, suggested that he let them go free in return for… congress. The very idea of lying with his quarry felt wrong to him. His religion did not exactly forbid him from having sex – some of the Living Gods were quite forthright about sex being a positive and necessary force for life – but if he were to do it, it would not be here, and not like this.
He wondered if she could have ever been pretty, without the Mark, without the particular toll Bane took on many Ferriers. Maybe without the injuries, as well. Her looks were not improved by the blood seeping into her fine, sandy hair, or pooling by the spiked cuts on her broken wrist, or by her muffled moans of pain.
“No,” he repeated. “There is nothing.”
That seemed to wake her up a bit. “Nothing?” She asked from her position on the floor of her cottage. “I could have kids, or a – a mother who is very sick. People who depend on me to keep them from starving.”
“You don’t.” He said in response, because that was part of his job. It was important to know if anyone might happen upon him while he was cleansing the world of a mage. It changed aspects of how to plan out how to do this quietly. He had no intention of killing a mage while their horrified children hid in a wardrobe and watched through the keyhole as he snuffed the life out of their parents.
He brushed past the memories that last image conjured up.
Fortunately, this woman did not have any. She lived alone. If she had friends, well, they would move on. People always did.
“I never – did anything,” she said haltingly.
He raised an eyebrow. Did she mean to say that she’d never done anything wrong?
“That someone else wouldn’t have done, some other way,” she finished.
He thought that over, and couldn’t fault the logic. She was a weapon, not a revolutionary. People had wanted those people poisoned, and had paid her to do it. That she had done it via magical means made her his problem, but had she not been paid to do these things, she would have presumably spent her days in another way.
Except. “You still murdered six men, Madam. The kind with families, and friends. The kind who wanted to figure out why this kept happening in this area.”
Her lips quirked. “You’re suggesting I am reaping what I sowed? Bad news for you, then, Revenant. How many mages have you murdered?”
“Enough to earn the nickname,” Hakon replied. He withheld the exact number. He earned nothing by boasting to the walking dead.
She tried to talk, but a gurgle came out instead. Her vitessence was draining, and death was nearing. It was almost time. He got closer, and removed the Sunderstrike from its sheath.
She wasn’t done trying to scare him. “Your time – will come.”
It was his turn to smile. “Many have tried,” he said. Not a boast, though he admitted to being proud that he had thwarted every attempt to date.
He set his Sunderstrike aside and pulled out a pair of sharp scissors. As he was cutting away the cloth of her robes to expose her heart, she vomited up a blob of Bane into his face. He managed to close his eyes and mouth, turning his head to avoid some of it, but he was not fast enough to dodge out of the way when they had been so close together.
She rasped out a wet-sounding laugh as it was his turn to grunt as the Bane got to work on his face.. From the sudden and immediate searing, acidic pain, he judged it to be Rot this time. It was tempting to just kill her and then deal with this, but he’d been told to retrieve a sunderscrap, and he intended to make good on his promise to do so. He couldn’t open his eyes with Rot all over his face or it could drip into his eyes, which would be ten times worse than dealing with it on his skin, even sensitive skin like one found around the face. If he left her on the floor for too long while he dealt with this, though, he’d be leaving himself vulnerable to further attacks. This was the problem with Bane practitioners – if you allowed a success, even a small one, they were well equipped to build upon it until their targets were ravaged with boils, rot, and sickness.He had to break the cycle, quickly.
Fortunately, his own magic could help with this.
He called upon the power within his Nightorch to Imbue the Rot away. It was a waste of the finite power in his Nightorch, but he needed the Rot away from his eyes so he could line up the Sunderstrike properly and keep an eye out for more treachery. While the torch worked its magic on him, he felt around for the Sunderstrike, grateful to find it by his elbow. It seemed he had knocked it about a bit when he’d been taken by surprise, but at least it hadn’t been flung to the other side of the cottage or similar.
He switched to Ethersight in time to see the vortex of ether building up inside of her, and knew he shouldn’t hesitate. He grabbed the Sunderstrike with the clawed hand of his Tonal Susser, and plunged it through her sternum to her heart. Weakened as she was, it didn’t take long. He watched the ether around her dissipate as her breaths went from labored to rasping to rattling. In short order, he opened his ‘torch up to receive her soul, Engulfing as much as remained in her body once the Sunderstrike took its due.
“Welcome,” he said to the Nightorch. He wasn’t certain how much the souls of the dead in the torch could perceive or understand, but he liked to be polite to them, even though most of what he collected was from prey who were either taken unawares or trying to kill him as they died.
He knew he had time before anyone would check on his victim, so he tidied up. He liked to do it after a job, if he could. Just because someone would eventually find what remained of her body didn’t mean they should find her in a dirty cabin. He cleaned up the blood so it wouldn’t stain the floor, wrapped her body in her bedsheets, and put it on her dining table. It was still grotesque, and would likely disturb whoever found it, but it was better, he thought. They didn’t have to look under the sheet if they didn’t have to. It wasn’t much of a mercy, but it was what he could provide.
He parted the sheets to retrieve his Sunderstrike, pleased to find a vibrant looking sunderscrap on the end of it. He separated them, putting the scrap in a small wooden box, then stowing it in his pack. He mostly specialized in sunderscrap creation and had not had a chance to actually work with them too much, but he liked looking at them and listening to them. While the power they represented was terrible, they were quite pretty, and he hoped to be able to keep some, someday.
He departed the cottage with the quick, purposeful stride of someone who had somewhere else to be. It would be a few hours walk to the public house where he was lodged, and from there it would be a few days' journey back home to the Guild. He was looking forward to giving his report and being back in his own bed, safe with the wardens that he’d come to view as good friends.
