The sea worried at the White Sand Empire like a slow, methodical predator.
Waves chewed the quay into a permanent bruise. White froth raged against the pylons. Salt wind crawled through streets of limestone and mushroom flesh. It carried tar and brine. Old fish. Wet rope. The whole harbor breathed like a wounded leviathan that refused to die.
Terraces of white stone climbed from the water in precise, imperial bands. Each block of limestone wore tide scars. Thin horizontal stains where past floods had licked and receded. Lichen formed chalky beards along the seams. Between these terraces rose districts of cultivated fungus. Towers of pale mushroom flesh thrust upward like pallid obelisks. Some were thin and spear-straight. Others bulged into parasols that overlapped the streets in layered canopies. Their gills pulsed with bioluminescent veins. Turquoise. Sickly jade. Filmy violet. Spores drifted from them in an endless, lazy fall. A false snow made of living dust that shimmered before it sank into grime.
Closer to the water, elegance rotted into utility.
Warehouses squatted along the quay. Brutal volumes of stone. Their walls sweated condensation in long vertical rivulets. Efflorescences of fungus gnawed at corners and seams. Shelf mushrooms laminated the eaves in overlapping crescents. Rope-thin stems erupted from cracks underfoot. Each supported a small cap the color of drowned parchment. Lanterns hung crooked above loading doors. Their flames burned low and yellow. Each cast a sick halo that smeared across puddles of oil and seawater.
One warehouse claimed the farthest stretch of quay like a clenched fist.
It rose on foundations sunk deep into the tide. The façade held a single pair of iron-banded doors. No windows. No ornament, save for a guild sigil whose blue paint had bled into the stone until it looked like a bruise beneath watery skin. Above the doors jutted a narrow balcony. Its rail of white stone caught wind-slung spray. Droplets beaded along the underside and fell in patient threads. From that perch a man could see the forest of masts. The black water. The glow of distant taverns. He could not see his own insignificance.
To the right of the warehouse a service alley slit the city.
The neighboring mushroom tower leaned over it in a slow collapse. Its colossal cap drooped low. Gills hung like rows of damp parchment. They wept cold dew that pattered onto the stones below. No lanterns burned within this gap. The walls pressed close. The air stank of tar and mildew. Rotting nets. Fish viscera forgotten in barrels. Runoff from both buildings met in the alley’s spine and congealed into a permanent film. The paving stones shone dark and slick.
The harbor made its own music. Chains clanked against mooring posts. Hulls groaned. Ropes creaked as the tide shoved itself between pilings and withdrew. Somewhere a crane shrieked as it lifted cargo from a groaning hull. Voices of stevedores and sailors rose and fell, blurred by the humidity into one long, irritable growl.
Then a new rhythm entered the orchestra.
Claws on stone.
A single impact. Razor on limestone. A high, clean shriek. Then the almost inaudible crackle of ice.
Another impact. The same shriek. The same spread of frost.
The alley’s breath steamed once and then ceased
.
Ixqueya came out of the deeper black as if the dark itself had decided it required a queen.
Her arrival began at the ground. Her feet were not feet in any human sense. They were fans of chitin and sharpened inevitability. Each foot comprised overlapping plates of lacquered carapace, glossy as black jade. From the front of every plate emerged talons. Curved. Narrow. Razor-thin along their edges. When she set one down the talons dug into the stone. Limestone groaned. White dust curled up in fragile ribbons. Frost rushed to occupy the wound. It spread outward from each print in lace-like crystals. Within heartbeats the slick grime of the alley floor became a thin, glassy skin.
Heat peeled away from her shins.
Above those claws, bronze calves rose with the heavy grace of statues that decided to walk. Muscle worked under the skin in dense cords. Chitinous greaves clung to them, grown rather than strapped. Each greave bore ridges along the front where Necro Ice had erupted in jagged clusters. Crystals thrust outward like a bouquet of frozen knives. Their interiors glowed with a subdued aurora. Hints of teal. Hints of corpse-light green. Droplets of mushroom dew that struck those facets solidified at once. Beads of pure ice studded the jagged edges like cold pearls.
Her thighs were almost bare. Bronze flesh and ritual pigment. Warpaint climbed them in deliberate geometry. Thick turquoise bands crossed the fronts. Thin strokes of vermilion slashed diagonally across those bands. Bone-white dots marched along the outer ridges of muscle. The pattern evoked claws. Teeth. The rising stem of some monstrous blossom. It was not decoration. It was heraldry written on skin.
Around her hips hung a war-skirt of feather and carapace.
Plumes from jungle birds had been pressed into service. Their quills dyed deep teal. Their barbs left in gradients of white and blood-red. Each feather had been lacquered in alchemical resins until it hardened into something between plume and scale. Slivers of Necro Ice capped their tips. The skirt fell in stiff, overlapping panels that whispered when she moved. The sound resembled tiny bones rattling in a velvet pouch. Chitin plates anchored the plumes along a belt of golden rings and jade lozenges.
Behind that skirt, her true abdomen dominated.
Where a human spine ended, hers joined to a wasp-slender petiole that swelled into a massive queen’s thorax. Segmented armor wrapped this volume in bands of dark carapace. The surface shone with an oily iridescence. Hues flickered along it in the thin light. Wine. Deep green. Occasional hints of purple. Each segment bore small ridged nodes along its margins. Frost gathered in their valleys and drew tiny, radial patterns that resembled sigils of ice. At the lowest point of that swollen thorax jutted a stinger. Thick at the root. Tapering to a murderous needle. It carried a faint inner glow. A vein of frozen light waiting for a reason.
The thorax moved with her gait. A slow, hypnotic sway. Heavy and entirely under control. With every step the armored mass swung just enough to remind any watcher that it could smash bone as easily as it now tolerated air.
From the upper half of that insect mass sprang her auxiliary limbs.
Eight in total. Four on each side. The anatomy evoked both ant and wasp. The first segment of each limb rose sharply from the thorax. The second bent forward with a predatory curve. The third extended like a long, serrated scythe. Carapace plate overlapped carapace plate along their lengths. Closer to the tips, the plates narrowed and left exposed ridges lined in barbed spurs. Runes etched in turquoise fire crawled along the inner surfaces. The light within them pulsed in time with the slow beat of her heart.
At the terminus of each limb rested a talon. Some curved inward like hooks. Others sharpened to straight spikes. All looked fully capable of punching through armor or spine. Two of these limbs currently gripped the Sukegei. One claw hooked the back strap of his cuirass. Another had claimed the waist of his belt. His body dragged behind her like an inelegant accessory. Each swing of her thorax bumped armored chitin against his skull. Thud. Step. Thud. Step. A pendular cadence. An object lesson in who determined the rhythm of his life.
Other limbs spread around her in a living halo of blades. Some brushed the alley walls in exploratory touches. One ran lightly along a fungal stalk, leaving a narrow groove of ice in its flesh. A few arched above her head in high curves, as if they wished to spear the very air and pin it in place.
Her humanoid torso rose from that monstrous chassis with terrifying ease.
The waist narrowed as if the thorax had simply decided to pinch inward and display a woman. Bronze skin stretched over solid muscle. Her abdomen bore a central stripe of turquoise paint that climbed from navel to sternum. On either side, short crimson hash-marks indicated campaigns ended and enemies extinguished. Faint pale scars intersected the pigment here and there. Not many. Enough to prove that she had stood under steel and claw and lived.
Armor grew from her upper chest like an exoskeleton imitating couture.
Chitin cups molded flawlessly around the weight of her breasts. They did not flatter. They asserted. The sheen of the material caught rivulets of alley light. At their center, where cleft met sternum, a shard of Necro Ice rested in a golden setting. The shard glowed from within. Not with warmth. With the pale light of frozen moons. Thin channels scored the armor around it. The channels looked like veins. They implied that the crystal fed cold directly into the exoskeletal weave.
Below the cups, strips of carapace crossed her ribs in an X. They met at a small bone ring above the solar plexus. From that ring hung trophies. Teeth from large beasts. Jagged fragments of enemy blades set into resin. Tiny segments of vertebrae. They chimed softly when she walked. Memory made into percussion.
Her shoulders bore large pauldrons of carapace and crystal.
Each pauldron began as a hugging base plate over the deltoid. From that plate rose a fan of articulated shell segments. These climbed in a ridged arc and ended in a spray of Necro Ice spines. The crystals projected backward and upward, catching light from behind and framing her head in a ragged nimbus. Frost smoked gently from them. As if the air itself suffered minor wounds each time they encountered it.
Her upper arms remained mostly bare. Bronze flesh encircled by turquoise bands of warpaint. From those bands dripped thin strokes of red, like stylized blood soaking downward. Her forearms wore bracers grown from the same chitin as her greaves. Raised ridges traced the line of bone beneath. Along the outer edge of each bracer grew a line of short, hooked barbs. Useful for catching blades. Or throats. Votive knots of leather and tooth dangled near the wrist. Each knot marked a kill she deemed personally instructive.
Her hands were instruments rather than hands.
Palms broad and calloused. Fingers long. At their ends, talons of dark keratin extended in lethal curves. Not clumsy claws. Fine. Delicate. Capable of picking a lock or disemboweling a man with equal intimacy. Tiny shards of Necro Ice glittered beneath the cuticle line of each talon. Her grip on the Sukegei’s harness looked casual. It restrained him with the effortless authority of a vise that had forgotten how to open.
Her neck carried a heavy torque.
Segments of bone shaped like compressed vertebrae alternated with lozenges of green jade. Each piece bore minuscule runic etching. Gold wire threaded them together. The whole collar sat at the base of her throat with the weight and certainty of a decree.
Above it, her face ruled the rest of her with tyrannical poise.
Her skin held the burnished bronze of late sunlight over desert dunes. High cheekbones cast sculptural shadows. Her nose ran in an uncompromising line. Her mouth was full without softness. Designed for verdicts. Not mercy. The corners rested in a faint downturn that made every silence sound like disapproval.
Her eyes glowed in the alley gloom. Cold sapphire irises ringed in a corona of pale frost. Pupils narrowed to blade-thin slits. When she shifted her focus the movement felt like the swing of a guillotine. Warpaint reinforced their severity. Turquoise strokes swept from inner corners toward the temples. A short vertical streak descended from the lower lid of each eye. Farther down her cheeks, three vermilion bars marked one side. Two bone-white stripes crossed them at an angle on the other. Together the markings suggested claws raking outward. Any gaze that met hers did so through that painted geometry. It felt like staring into a snare.
At the center of her forehead sat a turquoise dot. Encircled by hair-fine spokes of pigment. A frozen sun suspended above a mind that measured the world in cold increments.
Her headdress turned that mind into a visible empire.
A circlet of carved bone sat low on her brow. Its surface engraved with dense, almost microscopic glyphs. From this band erupted a fan of feathers. Hundreds of quills. Their bases dyed deep teal. Their midsections left pale. Their tips soaked in carmine. Necro Ice shards had been bound to those tips. The crystals extended each feather into a narrow spear of glassy blue. When she moved, the entire crown swayed with deliberate majesty. Bone and jade disks dangled from golden wires between the plumes. They clicked against one another. A soft, incessant percussion that lent her every gesture the feeling of ceremony.
Black hair poured from beneath this crown in heavy rivers.
It cascaded over her shoulders. Over the upper segments of her thorax. Strands clung to carapace here and there. Streaks of teal glimmered within the mass like submerged blades. When the wind from the sea pushed into the alley, it caught those rivers of hair and stirred them. The motion contrasted with the stillness of her body. A storm around a glacier.
Her demeanor matched the architecture of her form.
She carried no visible anxiety. No haste. No visible excitement for the violence to come. There was only attention. Cold. Exact. The kind of focus with which a surgeon chooses where to place the knife. Each step said she owned whatever she walked upon. Each breath said she considered the air a temporary loan.
The Sukegei dangling behind her existed, at present, as a piece of luggage. He collided again with the thorax. Another dull thud. She registered the impact with the same notice she gave to the creak of rigging outside. An ambient noise within a theatre she had already rented for the evening.
The alley pinched tighter near the quay. The warehouse wall leaned inward on one side. The mushroom tower bulged closer on the other. Dew dripped from the overhanging gills in slow, fat drops. They hit the frost that crept along the stones and froze in place. Beads of ice formed a necklace at the alley’s center.
Ixqueya halted just before the alley’s final angle.
Her claws settled with surgical precision. The great thorax slowed, then stilled. The pendular impacts to the man’s head ceased. Silence gathered. The harbor’s distant noise receded until it felt like it came from another life.
The auxiliary limbs lifted her captive.
A single, economical motion redirected his weight. He sailed forward on a bed of air so cold it hurt. His boots skidded over ice-slick stone. He struck the warehouse wall with a short, ugly clang. Before he could rebound, one of the spider-limbs drove a talon into the space just above his sternum. It did not pierce the armor. It simply occupied the idea of escape.
She turned her head slightly. One sapphire eye cut toward him. The limb at his chest pressed down with the lazy inevitability of a falling slab.
“Stay.”
Her voice was low and clear. The syllable landed like a stone dropped into a shallow grave.
A heartbeat later she allowed herself another sentence. “I did not drag you across half a city to watch you improvise. You will be where I place you. Until I decide otherwise. That is the entire arrangement.”
She gave him no time to protest. That would have suggested negotiation.
Ixqueya shifted back toward the mouth of the alley. Her shoulder met limestone. Carapace rasped softly. Frost blossomed outward from the contact, veining the wall in white. She rolled her weight along that surface with the slow confidence of someone who trusted her own footing more than she trusted stone. Her thorax compressed nearer to the wall. Spider-limbs folded close until they became jagged extensions of the masonry.
She reached the edge of shadow and leaned forward.
Only the sharp plane of a cheek and the ridge of one eye crossed the line. The rest of her remained a presence in blackness.
The quay opened before her. A broad sheet of damp stone that mirrored the bruised sky. Lanterns along the water smeared their light over the surface in sick arcs. Crates formed irregular barricades. Some bore stamped sigils. Others remained deliberately blank. Unnamed cargo. Unregistered sin. Coiled ropes lay like discarded serpents. Nets hung from hooks in sagging swathes. Their weights brushed the ground with the faint clink of beadless jewelry.
Two guards stood before the main doors.
Their stance stank of complacency. One leaned on his spear. Weight dumped onto a crooked hip. His armor had never seen proper oil. Verdigris ate at the rings along his shoulders. The other had a wineskin at his mouth. Head tilted back. Throat exposed. Hand nowhere near any weapon. Their gazes wandered through the middle distance. They watched the sea. The lamps. Each other. They did not watch the alley that mattered.
Above them, the balcony cut a spare line against the sky. A figure paced along its narrow span. The man’s existence was marked not by presence but by ember. A red coal flared near his face. Drifted along the parapet. Paused at the outer corner. Leaned. Flicked ash into darkness. Turned. Walked back toward the opposite wall. Repeated. A neat pendulum of negligence.
Ixqueya’s attention deepened.
She drew a long, slow breath. Held it. Let the cold within her breastbone gather. The Tlāzōtlalpan in her chest contracted like a clenched fist of ice. Necro Ice within it drank heat. The air close to her skin dropped. Frost thickened around her feet. A pale corona expanded along the stone.
Her awareness sank into the wall beneath her shoulder.
Vibration climbed her bones. The warehouse spoke in tremors. Footfalls thudded through the stone. She counted three distinct rhythms. Two lighter. Quick. Burdened by crates. One slower. Heavier. The stride of someone who expected things to move out of his way. The sound of sliding wood. The thump of cargo set down without care. Occasional bright chime of coins. No one inside believed they would be interrupted. That belief tasted sweet. She enjoyed the flavor.
Behind her, the pinned man shifted by a fraction. Metal groaned. The spider-limb at his chest answered with a small increase in pressure. Enough to crush air from lungs if she wished. Enough to remind him that every twitch of his muscles was only permitted because she had not yet revoked it.
She spoke without turning.
“Look.”
The word slid into the cold like a blade into a throat. The limb eased by the width of a breath. It allowed him to lean, to see past the sculpted mass of her shoulder. She did not check that he obeyed. Obedience was the assumed default. Anything else would be a brief and terminal anomaly.
“Fix this in your memory.” Her tone did not rise or fall. It remained level. “Every guard. Every lamp. Every ladder. If someone dies because you failed to see what lay in front of you. They do not die for want of courage. They die for your laziness. I do not accept that cause on any ledger with my name on it.”
Her chin lifted a fraction. The feathers of her headdress whispered against the stone. Ice-shards tied to the plumes scraped tiny white lines into the limestone.
She tipped her gaze toward the balcony. “The one above believes height is power. It is not. Height is exposure. Height is a promise that when you fall you will have time to think about why. Correct him.”
She let the words settle between them. Then added, almost as an afterthought, “Quietly. Permanently.”
She felt more than heard his reaction. The subtle constriction of muscle under armor. The way breath shifted. It satisfied her for now.
Her eyes returned to the door guards. She studied the spread of their feet. The slackness in their knees. The distance between them and the nearest crate. The arc each spear could cover before the arm tired. She ran those details against old experience. Against the catalogued failures of other men who had stood before her and thought steel or numbers mattered.
“Attend to the balcony.” she said, voice dropping again. “When that ember goes out, I move. Until then, you will not blunder across my line of sight. If you must gamble tonight, gamble with your own blood. Not my plan.”
The instruction carried no fire. Fire could be argued with. This sounded like gravity.
Her gaze did not follow him if he left his pin. She knew where he should go. She would know soon enough whether he had gone there properly.
Wind surged up the quay. It shoved against the warehouse fronts. It pushed the sea’s salt into the alley. The current met the colder air around her and condensed into a faint brume. A low, thin veil gathered at the alley mouth. Sea salt glittered inside it like dusted glass. Spores drifting from the mushroom tower descended into that chill and froze mid-air. They fell as tiny, crystalline husks. They shattered beneath her claws with soft, brittle pops.
Ixqueya inhaled. The scent reached her in layers. Tar and pitch from ship hulls. Cheap wine on guard-breath. The richer smell of spices trapped inside certain crates. Sweat baked into leather. Beneath it all, a faint metallic tang. The subtle perspiration of men who did not yet know they were afraid. She found that early perspiration pleasing. It meant she would be taking something unprepared. Like frost taking a warm field before dawn.
Above, the ember on the balcony moved along its habitual track. Out. Pause. Lean. Flick. Turn. Back.
She watched the ember for a long moment. Then spoke again, not loudly. “Do what you bragged you could do. Climb. Cut. Conceal. If I have to step over a screaming sentry because you grew sentimental, I will count that as treason.” She commanded.
Waves chewed the quay into a permanent bruise. White froth raged against the pylons. Salt wind crawled through streets of limestone and mushroom flesh. It carried tar and brine. Old fish. Wet rope. The whole harbor breathed like a wounded leviathan that refused to die.
Terraces of white stone climbed from the water in precise, imperial bands. Each block of limestone wore tide scars. Thin horizontal stains where past floods had licked and receded. Lichen formed chalky beards along the seams. Between these terraces rose districts of cultivated fungus. Towers of pale mushroom flesh thrust upward like pallid obelisks. Some were thin and spear-straight. Others bulged into parasols that overlapped the streets in layered canopies. Their gills pulsed with bioluminescent veins. Turquoise. Sickly jade. Filmy violet. Spores drifted from them in an endless, lazy fall. A false snow made of living dust that shimmered before it sank into grime.
Closer to the water, elegance rotted into utility.
Warehouses squatted along the quay. Brutal volumes of stone. Their walls sweated condensation in long vertical rivulets. Efflorescences of fungus gnawed at corners and seams. Shelf mushrooms laminated the eaves in overlapping crescents. Rope-thin stems erupted from cracks underfoot. Each supported a small cap the color of drowned parchment. Lanterns hung crooked above loading doors. Their flames burned low and yellow. Each cast a sick halo that smeared across puddles of oil and seawater.
One warehouse claimed the farthest stretch of quay like a clenched fist.
It rose on foundations sunk deep into the tide. The façade held a single pair of iron-banded doors. No windows. No ornament, save for a guild sigil whose blue paint had bled into the stone until it looked like a bruise beneath watery skin. Above the doors jutted a narrow balcony. Its rail of white stone caught wind-slung spray. Droplets beaded along the underside and fell in patient threads. From that perch a man could see the forest of masts. The black water. The glow of distant taverns. He could not see his own insignificance.
To the right of the warehouse a service alley slit the city.
The neighboring mushroom tower leaned over it in a slow collapse. Its colossal cap drooped low. Gills hung like rows of damp parchment. They wept cold dew that pattered onto the stones below. No lanterns burned within this gap. The walls pressed close. The air stank of tar and mildew. Rotting nets. Fish viscera forgotten in barrels. Runoff from both buildings met in the alley’s spine and congealed into a permanent film. The paving stones shone dark and slick.
The harbor made its own music. Chains clanked against mooring posts. Hulls groaned. Ropes creaked as the tide shoved itself between pilings and withdrew. Somewhere a crane shrieked as it lifted cargo from a groaning hull. Voices of stevedores and sailors rose and fell, blurred by the humidity into one long, irritable growl.
Then a new rhythm entered the orchestra.
Claws on stone.
A single impact. Razor on limestone. A high, clean shriek. Then the almost inaudible crackle of ice.
Another impact. The same shriek. The same spread of frost.
The alley’s breath steamed once and then ceased
.
Ixqueya came out of the deeper black as if the dark itself had decided it required a queen.
Her arrival began at the ground. Her feet were not feet in any human sense. They were fans of chitin and sharpened inevitability. Each foot comprised overlapping plates of lacquered carapace, glossy as black jade. From the front of every plate emerged talons. Curved. Narrow. Razor-thin along their edges. When she set one down the talons dug into the stone. Limestone groaned. White dust curled up in fragile ribbons. Frost rushed to occupy the wound. It spread outward from each print in lace-like crystals. Within heartbeats the slick grime of the alley floor became a thin, glassy skin.
Heat peeled away from her shins.
Above those claws, bronze calves rose with the heavy grace of statues that decided to walk. Muscle worked under the skin in dense cords. Chitinous greaves clung to them, grown rather than strapped. Each greave bore ridges along the front where Necro Ice had erupted in jagged clusters. Crystals thrust outward like a bouquet of frozen knives. Their interiors glowed with a subdued aurora. Hints of teal. Hints of corpse-light green. Droplets of mushroom dew that struck those facets solidified at once. Beads of pure ice studded the jagged edges like cold pearls.
Her thighs were almost bare. Bronze flesh and ritual pigment. Warpaint climbed them in deliberate geometry. Thick turquoise bands crossed the fronts. Thin strokes of vermilion slashed diagonally across those bands. Bone-white dots marched along the outer ridges of muscle. The pattern evoked claws. Teeth. The rising stem of some monstrous blossom. It was not decoration. It was heraldry written on skin.
Around her hips hung a war-skirt of feather and carapace.
Plumes from jungle birds had been pressed into service. Their quills dyed deep teal. Their barbs left in gradients of white and blood-red. Each feather had been lacquered in alchemical resins until it hardened into something between plume and scale. Slivers of Necro Ice capped their tips. The skirt fell in stiff, overlapping panels that whispered when she moved. The sound resembled tiny bones rattling in a velvet pouch. Chitin plates anchored the plumes along a belt of golden rings and jade lozenges.
Behind that skirt, her true abdomen dominated.
Where a human spine ended, hers joined to a wasp-slender petiole that swelled into a massive queen’s thorax. Segmented armor wrapped this volume in bands of dark carapace. The surface shone with an oily iridescence. Hues flickered along it in the thin light. Wine. Deep green. Occasional hints of purple. Each segment bore small ridged nodes along its margins. Frost gathered in their valleys and drew tiny, radial patterns that resembled sigils of ice. At the lowest point of that swollen thorax jutted a stinger. Thick at the root. Tapering to a murderous needle. It carried a faint inner glow. A vein of frozen light waiting for a reason.
The thorax moved with her gait. A slow, hypnotic sway. Heavy and entirely under control. With every step the armored mass swung just enough to remind any watcher that it could smash bone as easily as it now tolerated air.
From the upper half of that insect mass sprang her auxiliary limbs.
Eight in total. Four on each side. The anatomy evoked both ant and wasp. The first segment of each limb rose sharply from the thorax. The second bent forward with a predatory curve. The third extended like a long, serrated scythe. Carapace plate overlapped carapace plate along their lengths. Closer to the tips, the plates narrowed and left exposed ridges lined in barbed spurs. Runes etched in turquoise fire crawled along the inner surfaces. The light within them pulsed in time with the slow beat of her heart.
At the terminus of each limb rested a talon. Some curved inward like hooks. Others sharpened to straight spikes. All looked fully capable of punching through armor or spine. Two of these limbs currently gripped the Sukegei. One claw hooked the back strap of his cuirass. Another had claimed the waist of his belt. His body dragged behind her like an inelegant accessory. Each swing of her thorax bumped armored chitin against his skull. Thud. Step. Thud. Step. A pendular cadence. An object lesson in who determined the rhythm of his life.
Other limbs spread around her in a living halo of blades. Some brushed the alley walls in exploratory touches. One ran lightly along a fungal stalk, leaving a narrow groove of ice in its flesh. A few arched above her head in high curves, as if they wished to spear the very air and pin it in place.
Her humanoid torso rose from that monstrous chassis with terrifying ease.
The waist narrowed as if the thorax had simply decided to pinch inward and display a woman. Bronze skin stretched over solid muscle. Her abdomen bore a central stripe of turquoise paint that climbed from navel to sternum. On either side, short crimson hash-marks indicated campaigns ended and enemies extinguished. Faint pale scars intersected the pigment here and there. Not many. Enough to prove that she had stood under steel and claw and lived.
Armor grew from her upper chest like an exoskeleton imitating couture.
Chitin cups molded flawlessly around the weight of her breasts. They did not flatter. They asserted. The sheen of the material caught rivulets of alley light. At their center, where cleft met sternum, a shard of Necro Ice rested in a golden setting. The shard glowed from within. Not with warmth. With the pale light of frozen moons. Thin channels scored the armor around it. The channels looked like veins. They implied that the crystal fed cold directly into the exoskeletal weave.
Below the cups, strips of carapace crossed her ribs in an X. They met at a small bone ring above the solar plexus. From that ring hung trophies. Teeth from large beasts. Jagged fragments of enemy blades set into resin. Tiny segments of vertebrae. They chimed softly when she walked. Memory made into percussion.
Her shoulders bore large pauldrons of carapace and crystal.
Each pauldron began as a hugging base plate over the deltoid. From that plate rose a fan of articulated shell segments. These climbed in a ridged arc and ended in a spray of Necro Ice spines. The crystals projected backward and upward, catching light from behind and framing her head in a ragged nimbus. Frost smoked gently from them. As if the air itself suffered minor wounds each time they encountered it.
Her upper arms remained mostly bare. Bronze flesh encircled by turquoise bands of warpaint. From those bands dripped thin strokes of red, like stylized blood soaking downward. Her forearms wore bracers grown from the same chitin as her greaves. Raised ridges traced the line of bone beneath. Along the outer edge of each bracer grew a line of short, hooked barbs. Useful for catching blades. Or throats. Votive knots of leather and tooth dangled near the wrist. Each knot marked a kill she deemed personally instructive.
Her hands were instruments rather than hands.
Palms broad and calloused. Fingers long. At their ends, talons of dark keratin extended in lethal curves. Not clumsy claws. Fine. Delicate. Capable of picking a lock or disemboweling a man with equal intimacy. Tiny shards of Necro Ice glittered beneath the cuticle line of each talon. Her grip on the Sukegei’s harness looked casual. It restrained him with the effortless authority of a vise that had forgotten how to open.
Her neck carried a heavy torque.
Segments of bone shaped like compressed vertebrae alternated with lozenges of green jade. Each piece bore minuscule runic etching. Gold wire threaded them together. The whole collar sat at the base of her throat with the weight and certainty of a decree.
Above it, her face ruled the rest of her with tyrannical poise.
Her skin held the burnished bronze of late sunlight over desert dunes. High cheekbones cast sculptural shadows. Her nose ran in an uncompromising line. Her mouth was full without softness. Designed for verdicts. Not mercy. The corners rested in a faint downturn that made every silence sound like disapproval.
Her eyes glowed in the alley gloom. Cold sapphire irises ringed in a corona of pale frost. Pupils narrowed to blade-thin slits. When she shifted her focus the movement felt like the swing of a guillotine. Warpaint reinforced their severity. Turquoise strokes swept from inner corners toward the temples. A short vertical streak descended from the lower lid of each eye. Farther down her cheeks, three vermilion bars marked one side. Two bone-white stripes crossed them at an angle on the other. Together the markings suggested claws raking outward. Any gaze that met hers did so through that painted geometry. It felt like staring into a snare.
At the center of her forehead sat a turquoise dot. Encircled by hair-fine spokes of pigment. A frozen sun suspended above a mind that measured the world in cold increments.
Her headdress turned that mind into a visible empire.
A circlet of carved bone sat low on her brow. Its surface engraved with dense, almost microscopic glyphs. From this band erupted a fan of feathers. Hundreds of quills. Their bases dyed deep teal. Their midsections left pale. Their tips soaked in carmine. Necro Ice shards had been bound to those tips. The crystals extended each feather into a narrow spear of glassy blue. When she moved, the entire crown swayed with deliberate majesty. Bone and jade disks dangled from golden wires between the plumes. They clicked against one another. A soft, incessant percussion that lent her every gesture the feeling of ceremony.
Black hair poured from beneath this crown in heavy rivers.
It cascaded over her shoulders. Over the upper segments of her thorax. Strands clung to carapace here and there. Streaks of teal glimmered within the mass like submerged blades. When the wind from the sea pushed into the alley, it caught those rivers of hair and stirred them. The motion contrasted with the stillness of her body. A storm around a glacier.
Her demeanor matched the architecture of her form.
She carried no visible anxiety. No haste. No visible excitement for the violence to come. There was only attention. Cold. Exact. The kind of focus with which a surgeon chooses where to place the knife. Each step said she owned whatever she walked upon. Each breath said she considered the air a temporary loan.
The Sukegei dangling behind her existed, at present, as a piece of luggage. He collided again with the thorax. Another dull thud. She registered the impact with the same notice she gave to the creak of rigging outside. An ambient noise within a theatre she had already rented for the evening.
The alley pinched tighter near the quay. The warehouse wall leaned inward on one side. The mushroom tower bulged closer on the other. Dew dripped from the overhanging gills in slow, fat drops. They hit the frost that crept along the stones and froze in place. Beads of ice formed a necklace at the alley’s center.
Ixqueya halted just before the alley’s final angle.
Her claws settled with surgical precision. The great thorax slowed, then stilled. The pendular impacts to the man’s head ceased. Silence gathered. The harbor’s distant noise receded until it felt like it came from another life.
The auxiliary limbs lifted her captive.
A single, economical motion redirected his weight. He sailed forward on a bed of air so cold it hurt. His boots skidded over ice-slick stone. He struck the warehouse wall with a short, ugly clang. Before he could rebound, one of the spider-limbs drove a talon into the space just above his sternum. It did not pierce the armor. It simply occupied the idea of escape.
She turned her head slightly. One sapphire eye cut toward him. The limb at his chest pressed down with the lazy inevitability of a falling slab.
“Stay.”
Her voice was low and clear. The syllable landed like a stone dropped into a shallow grave.
A heartbeat later she allowed herself another sentence. “I did not drag you across half a city to watch you improvise. You will be where I place you. Until I decide otherwise. That is the entire arrangement.”
She gave him no time to protest. That would have suggested negotiation.
Ixqueya shifted back toward the mouth of the alley. Her shoulder met limestone. Carapace rasped softly. Frost blossomed outward from the contact, veining the wall in white. She rolled her weight along that surface with the slow confidence of someone who trusted her own footing more than she trusted stone. Her thorax compressed nearer to the wall. Spider-limbs folded close until they became jagged extensions of the masonry.
She reached the edge of shadow and leaned forward.
Only the sharp plane of a cheek and the ridge of one eye crossed the line. The rest of her remained a presence in blackness.
The quay opened before her. A broad sheet of damp stone that mirrored the bruised sky. Lanterns along the water smeared their light over the surface in sick arcs. Crates formed irregular barricades. Some bore stamped sigils. Others remained deliberately blank. Unnamed cargo. Unregistered sin. Coiled ropes lay like discarded serpents. Nets hung from hooks in sagging swathes. Their weights brushed the ground with the faint clink of beadless jewelry.
Two guards stood before the main doors.
Their stance stank of complacency. One leaned on his spear. Weight dumped onto a crooked hip. His armor had never seen proper oil. Verdigris ate at the rings along his shoulders. The other had a wineskin at his mouth. Head tilted back. Throat exposed. Hand nowhere near any weapon. Their gazes wandered through the middle distance. They watched the sea. The lamps. Each other. They did not watch the alley that mattered.
Above them, the balcony cut a spare line against the sky. A figure paced along its narrow span. The man’s existence was marked not by presence but by ember. A red coal flared near his face. Drifted along the parapet. Paused at the outer corner. Leaned. Flicked ash into darkness. Turned. Walked back toward the opposite wall. Repeated. A neat pendulum of negligence.
Ixqueya’s attention deepened.
She drew a long, slow breath. Held it. Let the cold within her breastbone gather. The Tlāzōtlalpan in her chest contracted like a clenched fist of ice. Necro Ice within it drank heat. The air close to her skin dropped. Frost thickened around her feet. A pale corona expanded along the stone.
Her awareness sank into the wall beneath her shoulder.
Vibration climbed her bones. The warehouse spoke in tremors. Footfalls thudded through the stone. She counted three distinct rhythms. Two lighter. Quick. Burdened by crates. One slower. Heavier. The stride of someone who expected things to move out of his way. The sound of sliding wood. The thump of cargo set down without care. Occasional bright chime of coins. No one inside believed they would be interrupted. That belief tasted sweet. She enjoyed the flavor.
Behind her, the pinned man shifted by a fraction. Metal groaned. The spider-limb at his chest answered with a small increase in pressure. Enough to crush air from lungs if she wished. Enough to remind him that every twitch of his muscles was only permitted because she had not yet revoked it.
She spoke without turning.
“Look.”
The word slid into the cold like a blade into a throat. The limb eased by the width of a breath. It allowed him to lean, to see past the sculpted mass of her shoulder. She did not check that he obeyed. Obedience was the assumed default. Anything else would be a brief and terminal anomaly.
“Fix this in your memory.” Her tone did not rise or fall. It remained level. “Every guard. Every lamp. Every ladder. If someone dies because you failed to see what lay in front of you. They do not die for want of courage. They die for your laziness. I do not accept that cause on any ledger with my name on it.”
Her chin lifted a fraction. The feathers of her headdress whispered against the stone. Ice-shards tied to the plumes scraped tiny white lines into the limestone.
She tipped her gaze toward the balcony. “The one above believes height is power. It is not. Height is exposure. Height is a promise that when you fall you will have time to think about why. Correct him.”
She let the words settle between them. Then added, almost as an afterthought, “Quietly. Permanently.”
She felt more than heard his reaction. The subtle constriction of muscle under armor. The way breath shifted. It satisfied her for now.
Her eyes returned to the door guards. She studied the spread of their feet. The slackness in their knees. The distance between them and the nearest crate. The arc each spear could cover before the arm tired. She ran those details against old experience. Against the catalogued failures of other men who had stood before her and thought steel or numbers mattered.
“Attend to the balcony.” she said, voice dropping again. “When that ember goes out, I move. Until then, you will not blunder across my line of sight. If you must gamble tonight, gamble with your own blood. Not my plan.”
The instruction carried no fire. Fire could be argued with. This sounded like gravity.
Her gaze did not follow him if he left his pin. She knew where he should go. She would know soon enough whether he had gone there properly.
Wind surged up the quay. It shoved against the warehouse fronts. It pushed the sea’s salt into the alley. The current met the colder air around her and condensed into a faint brume. A low, thin veil gathered at the alley mouth. Sea salt glittered inside it like dusted glass. Spores drifting from the mushroom tower descended into that chill and froze mid-air. They fell as tiny, crystalline husks. They shattered beneath her claws with soft, brittle pops.
Ixqueya inhaled. The scent reached her in layers. Tar and pitch from ship hulls. Cheap wine on guard-breath. The richer smell of spices trapped inside certain crates. Sweat baked into leather. Beneath it all, a faint metallic tang. The subtle perspiration of men who did not yet know they were afraid. She found that early perspiration pleasing. It meant she would be taking something unprepared. Like frost taking a warm field before dawn.
Above, the ember on the balcony moved along its habitual track. Out. Pause. Lean. Flick. Turn. Back.
She watched the ember for a long moment. Then spoke again, not loudly. “Do what you bragged you could do. Climb. Cut. Conceal. If I have to step over a screaming sentry because you grew sentimental, I will count that as treason.” She commanded.
The talon at his chest did not quite pierce. That, Sukegei decided, counted as affection. Cold gnawed through his cuirass where Ixqueya pinned him to the warehouse wall. The chitin hook had all the give of a buried spear. Frost crept around the contact point in a thin ring. He could feel his heartbeat thudding against it. Steady. Annoyed.
She told him to look. To count. To remember. Her voice slid along his ribs like a drawn knife. Orders, not requests. He looked. He counted. He remembered. Not because she told him to. Because men who did not died with very surprised faces. Two guards at the front. One already half drunk. One pretending not to be. A third idiot pacing up on the balcony with his little ember of courage. Inside, from the footfalls in the stone, at least three more. Maybe four. All of them about to have a very educational evening.
Her last command landed in his ear. Do what you bragged you could do. Climb. Cut. Conceal. Treason if she had to step around a screaming man. Gods above and below. She really did know how to flirt. The pressure eased from his sternum by a hair. Enough to breathe. Enough to move. He pushed off the wall. The talon slid back with the sound of ice breaking. Sukegei exhaled, rolling his shoulders until the joints popped. The head-bumps from the walk down the alley had left a faint ache at the back of his skull. He made a note to complain about that later. If she did not kill him for sport first.
He tipped his chin toward her, dark eyes running up over the wasp-thorax, the warpaint, the halo of blades and feathers and Necro Ice. Anyone sane would have dropped to their knees and started praying. He only snorted. “You know,” he murmured, just loud enough for her to catch it over the harbor growl, “you are a crazy bitch. Just how I like them. If I ignore the insect bits.” The joke smoked in the cold. He gave her a crooked grin and a shallow half-bow that was pure mockery of court manners.
Then he straightened, stretching his arms until the leather straps of his sun-etched armor creaked. The gold-trimmed plates shifted against the black cloth beneath. His cloak slid off one shoulder. Sand-colored. Frayed at the edges. He rolled his neck until it cracked, then flexed the hand sheathed in the glowing gauntlet. Light pooled briefly around his fingers. Warm, stubborn color in the edge of her winter. “Should I be off?” he asked, tone light as if he were talking about a stroll to the market. “I got where I am in life by killing enough men. What’s a few more.”
He did not wait for permission. She had already given it, wrapped in threat. He peeled himself from the wall and slipped toward the alley mouth, staying low. The air beyond the corner was brighter, smeared yellow from the quay lamps. He paused at the edge, pressed one shoulder to cold stone, and let his eyes adjust. The scene out there looked smaller from his height than it had from hers. Same layout. Less drama.
Damp stone. Crates stacked in ugly piles. Ropes coiled like dead snakes. Nets hanging in limp curtains. Two guards framed in lantern light. One still nursing his wineskin. One jabbing the dull point of his boredom into the quay with his spear. Up above, the balcony man plodded his little route. Ember. Step. Step. Lean. Flick ash. Turn. The rhythm flickered against the dark like a weak heartbeat. Sukegei watched for a few breaths. Mapped the distances. Crate to crate. Shadow to shadow. Balcony pillar to rail. He did not bother clothing it in poetry. It was a ladder of problems. He picked rungs.
He checked his sword at his hip. The familiar weight sat right. The red sash around his waist kept the scabbard snug. Good. He would need silence first, steel second. He glanced once back along the alley. A silhouette of chitin and feathers filled the space where Ixqueya waited. The cold around her thickened the air. Even from here he could feel his lungs protest. He lifted two fingers in a lazy salute. “Try not to eat everyone before I get a turn,” he muttered under his breath, then slipped out.
He moved with a mercenary’s economy. No flourishes. Boots brushed the ground instead of slamming it. He crossed the first open stretch at a casual walk, cloak drawn close, head slightly bent like any other hired blade cutting through the night to take a piss. The guards did not even glance at him. Of course they didn’t. Their brains were soaked in salt air and cheap wine. They had never been paid enough to imagine something like her.
He angled away from them toward a knuckled tower of crates stacked against the warehouse wall. Once in the deeper shadow, he let his shoulders loosen. The lazy swagger peeled back. What remained was lean and precise. He picked a seam between two crates and slid into it sideways, armor scraping wood. It smelled of spices and mold. Someone had stowed cinnamon and forgotten about the rats.
Handholds came easily. Rope. Nail heads. Small gaps where planks did not meet. He flowed up them like someone climbing the memory of a wall he had scaled a hundred times before. The glow at his gauntlet dimmed until it was only a faint smolder. Enough for him to see his own fingers. Not enough to give him away. Halfway up he paused on a narrow ledge of timber, pressed flat against the stone. From here he could see down onto the two door guards. One had his head tipped back. Wineskin at his lips. The other had started humming to himself, some tuneless thing meant to keep sleep at bay.
Sukegei weighed the angle. He could drop on either of them now. Quick. Clean. But Ixqueya wanted the ember first. Her plan. Her order. Also, if he started with the balcony man, he could use that body to frighten the others. He believed in efficiency. He continued up. The wall changed texture near the balcony. Old repairs. New mortar. A line of slimy fungus smear where the runoff from the rail had carved a path. Fingers dug into that, ignoring the stink. He hauled himself up until his eyes just cleared the stone lip.
The smoker’s back was turned. Hands on the rail. Shoulders slouched. The ember glowed near his cheek, cupped against the wind. Sukegei could hear him sucking on the pipe. Wet and lazy. For a moment, the Shaitan considered saying something. A joke. A last honest sentence. Then he remembered the claw at his chest and the word treason. He did not say anything.
He vaulted the last distance in a surge of motion. One armored forearm looped around the man’s throat, dragging him back against Sukegei’s chest. The other hand clamped over his mouth. Pipe and ember crushed between palm and lips. The glow vanished with a small, angry hiss. The guard thrashed for three heartbeats. Maybe four. Sukegei squeezed. He felt the tendons in the man’s neck seize, then slacken. The fight went out of him in a slow, pathetic leak.
“That is what you get,” Sukegei muttered into his ear, voice conversational, “for smoking on the job. Lung disease or me. The odds were never good.” He eased the body down to the floor of the balcony. No clatter. Just the heavy exhale of dead weight. He pried the crushed pipe from between slack lips and sniffed it. “Cheap stuff,” he decided. “You died for very bad taste, friend. I hope the afterlife has better merchants.”
He slid the pipe into his own sash. Not for the smoke. For the story. Then he moved to the rail and leaned out, peering down into the quay. The two guards were still at their post. One had turned a little, frowning up at the balcony as if he sensed something missing. He stared at the spot where the ember should have been.
Sukegei raised one hand and wiggled two fingers at him in a mockery of a greeting, hidden by the shadow of the stone. “Ember’s out,” he murmured, knowing Ixqueya would see the darkness, feel the absence. “Your turn, my lady.” He stepped back from the rail, rolling his wrist, feeling the gold in his gauntlet stir and warm. Down below, frost was already crawling out of the alley mouth onto the quay. He grinned to himself. Still casual. Still half bored.
Another night. Another set of idiots. Another ledger to stain. “Right then,” he told the corpse at his feet. “Let us see how loudly your friends can die.”
She told him to look. To count. To remember. Her voice slid along his ribs like a drawn knife. Orders, not requests. He looked. He counted. He remembered. Not because she told him to. Because men who did not died with very surprised faces. Two guards at the front. One already half drunk. One pretending not to be. A third idiot pacing up on the balcony with his little ember of courage. Inside, from the footfalls in the stone, at least three more. Maybe four. All of them about to have a very educational evening.
Her last command landed in his ear. Do what you bragged you could do. Climb. Cut. Conceal. Treason if she had to step around a screaming man. Gods above and below. She really did know how to flirt. The pressure eased from his sternum by a hair. Enough to breathe. Enough to move. He pushed off the wall. The talon slid back with the sound of ice breaking. Sukegei exhaled, rolling his shoulders until the joints popped. The head-bumps from the walk down the alley had left a faint ache at the back of his skull. He made a note to complain about that later. If she did not kill him for sport first.
He tipped his chin toward her, dark eyes running up over the wasp-thorax, the warpaint, the halo of blades and feathers and Necro Ice. Anyone sane would have dropped to their knees and started praying. He only snorted. “You know,” he murmured, just loud enough for her to catch it over the harbor growl, “you are a crazy bitch. Just how I like them. If I ignore the insect bits.” The joke smoked in the cold. He gave her a crooked grin and a shallow half-bow that was pure mockery of court manners.
Then he straightened, stretching his arms until the leather straps of his sun-etched armor creaked. The gold-trimmed plates shifted against the black cloth beneath. His cloak slid off one shoulder. Sand-colored. Frayed at the edges. He rolled his neck until it cracked, then flexed the hand sheathed in the glowing gauntlet. Light pooled briefly around his fingers. Warm, stubborn color in the edge of her winter. “Should I be off?” he asked, tone light as if he were talking about a stroll to the market. “I got where I am in life by killing enough men. What’s a few more.”
He did not wait for permission. She had already given it, wrapped in threat. He peeled himself from the wall and slipped toward the alley mouth, staying low. The air beyond the corner was brighter, smeared yellow from the quay lamps. He paused at the edge, pressed one shoulder to cold stone, and let his eyes adjust. The scene out there looked smaller from his height than it had from hers. Same layout. Less drama.
Damp stone. Crates stacked in ugly piles. Ropes coiled like dead snakes. Nets hanging in limp curtains. Two guards framed in lantern light. One still nursing his wineskin. One jabbing the dull point of his boredom into the quay with his spear. Up above, the balcony man plodded his little route. Ember. Step. Step. Lean. Flick ash. Turn. The rhythm flickered against the dark like a weak heartbeat. Sukegei watched for a few breaths. Mapped the distances. Crate to crate. Shadow to shadow. Balcony pillar to rail. He did not bother clothing it in poetry. It was a ladder of problems. He picked rungs.
He checked his sword at his hip. The familiar weight sat right. The red sash around his waist kept the scabbard snug. Good. He would need silence first, steel second. He glanced once back along the alley. A silhouette of chitin and feathers filled the space where Ixqueya waited. The cold around her thickened the air. Even from here he could feel his lungs protest. He lifted two fingers in a lazy salute. “Try not to eat everyone before I get a turn,” he muttered under his breath, then slipped out.
He moved with a mercenary’s economy. No flourishes. Boots brushed the ground instead of slamming it. He crossed the first open stretch at a casual walk, cloak drawn close, head slightly bent like any other hired blade cutting through the night to take a piss. The guards did not even glance at him. Of course they didn’t. Their brains were soaked in salt air and cheap wine. They had never been paid enough to imagine something like her.
He angled away from them toward a knuckled tower of crates stacked against the warehouse wall. Once in the deeper shadow, he let his shoulders loosen. The lazy swagger peeled back. What remained was lean and precise. He picked a seam between two crates and slid into it sideways, armor scraping wood. It smelled of spices and mold. Someone had stowed cinnamon and forgotten about the rats.
Handholds came easily. Rope. Nail heads. Small gaps where planks did not meet. He flowed up them like someone climbing the memory of a wall he had scaled a hundred times before. The glow at his gauntlet dimmed until it was only a faint smolder. Enough for him to see his own fingers. Not enough to give him away. Halfway up he paused on a narrow ledge of timber, pressed flat against the stone. From here he could see down onto the two door guards. One had his head tipped back. Wineskin at his lips. The other had started humming to himself, some tuneless thing meant to keep sleep at bay.
Sukegei weighed the angle. He could drop on either of them now. Quick. Clean. But Ixqueya wanted the ember first. Her plan. Her order. Also, if he started with the balcony man, he could use that body to frighten the others. He believed in efficiency. He continued up. The wall changed texture near the balcony. Old repairs. New mortar. A line of slimy fungus smear where the runoff from the rail had carved a path. Fingers dug into that, ignoring the stink. He hauled himself up until his eyes just cleared the stone lip.
The smoker’s back was turned. Hands on the rail. Shoulders slouched. The ember glowed near his cheek, cupped against the wind. Sukegei could hear him sucking on the pipe. Wet and lazy. For a moment, the Shaitan considered saying something. A joke. A last honest sentence. Then he remembered the claw at his chest and the word treason. He did not say anything.
He vaulted the last distance in a surge of motion. One armored forearm looped around the man’s throat, dragging him back against Sukegei’s chest. The other hand clamped over his mouth. Pipe and ember crushed between palm and lips. The glow vanished with a small, angry hiss. The guard thrashed for three heartbeats. Maybe four. Sukegei squeezed. He felt the tendons in the man’s neck seize, then slacken. The fight went out of him in a slow, pathetic leak.
“That is what you get,” Sukegei muttered into his ear, voice conversational, “for smoking on the job. Lung disease or me. The odds were never good.” He eased the body down to the floor of the balcony. No clatter. Just the heavy exhale of dead weight. He pried the crushed pipe from between slack lips and sniffed it. “Cheap stuff,” he decided. “You died for very bad taste, friend. I hope the afterlife has better merchants.”
He slid the pipe into his own sash. Not for the smoke. For the story. Then he moved to the rail and leaned out, peering down into the quay. The two guards were still at their post. One had turned a little, frowning up at the balcony as if he sensed something missing. He stared at the spot where the ember should have been.
Sukegei raised one hand and wiggled two fingers at him in a mockery of a greeting, hidden by the shadow of the stone. “Ember’s out,” he murmured, knowing Ixqueya would see the darkness, feel the absence. “Your turn, my lady.” He stepped back from the rail, rolling his wrist, feeling the gold in his gauntlet stir and warm. Down below, frost was already crawling out of the alley mouth onto the quay. He grinned to himself. Still casual. Still half bored.
Another night. Another set of idiots. Another ledger to stain. “Right then,” he told the corpse at his feet. “Let us see how loudly your friends can die.”
The ember on the balcony winked out.
Ixqueya felt its extinction as a surgeon feels the falter of a vein beneath the fingertips. A small occlusion in the night. Precise. Irrevocable.
Cold answered.
It rose in her like something ancient remembering itself. The harbor’s humid breath recoiled. Sweating stone tightened under a film of rime. The air around her ceased to be mere temperature and became intention. A sentient frost that remembered glacial epochs and ossuaries packed to the rafters.
She stepped from the alley’s throat and took the quay as a verdict.
Her claws struck stone with the metallic clarity of chisels biting marble. From each imprint frost branched outward in delicate, fractal arabesques. Puddles seized in an instant. Their surfaces paled. Fine fissures spidered across them until they resembled maps of dead continents. Lanternlight skated over this newborn skin, breaking into scattered constellations that shivered at her approach.
The door guards gaped. Mouths open. Thoughts lagging several heartbeats behind the catastrophe walking toward them.
Ixqueya drew breath. Long. Proprietary. As if inhaling the deed to the place.
The exhalation came out transformed.
Vapor thickened around her left arm. At first it was nothing but a low wreath clinging to bronze flesh and chitin. Then the fog stiffened. Strands of rime twisted through it, braiding into helixes inscribed with minute runes. Droplets that should have fallen paused instead. Hanging in the air like beads on invisible wire. Each drop flashed white as it froze. The beads collided. Merged. Lines of turquoise witch-light stitched between them, forcing them into angles no natural frost ever chose.
Geometry conquered chaos.
Plates of Necro Ice grew outward from her forearm with accelerating inevitability. Flat facets extruded. Edges sharpened themselves. The forming mass shuddered once, as if clearing its throat.
A tower shield resolved around her arm.
It was not forged or assembled. It condensed. A monolith of glacial crystal taller than most men and twice as broad as their resolve. Its outline suggested a coffin stood upright, sides toothed, crown jagged with cruel crenellations. Across its face pale runes burned very slowly, as if etched by some imprisoned aurora. Each sigil lived just beneath the surface, trapped as cleanly as insects preserved in amber.
On the inner face meat followed ice.
Necrotic hide oozed into being, flowing over the crystal in sluggish tides that hardened to leather as they cooled. Straps grew themselves. Bone spars thrust through from nowhere and anchored deep within the shield, forming a bracing lattice. They wrapped around her bracer with intimate certainty. When the last ligament knotted shut, the shield released a single sonorous tone that hung in the air like the toll of a distant bell remembering a funeral.
Her right hand rose into its own storm.
Here the condensation did not drift. It convulsed. The air around her palm compressed into a dense, palpitating knot of hoarfrost. Shards erupted from it in all directions, razor fragments spinning away only to be yanked back along invisible vectors and slammed against her fingers. Each returning piece scored a luminous groove through the mist.
Mass accreted in ruthless rhythm.
Crystals fused. Rotated. Locked. A brutal star of wedges and spikes assembled around her fist. Every facet glared with an almost painful clarity. At its center a sluggish, lunar glow pulsed, as if a deranged god had torn a chip from a dead moon and hammered it into the shape of malice.
The haft spiraled down from her grip.
Bone and petrified heartwood twined together into a single long shaft. Runes had been burned deep into that hybrid grain. Frost poured from her talons, sank along the carvings, and ignited them in a slow, glacial phosphorescence. When the weapon’s full length settled into being, its weight dropped into her hand like a remembered sin returning to its owner.
A Necro Ice war-mace. Vast. Overwrought. Entirely at home there.
She rolled her wrist once. The head trembled. The clustered spikes sang a thin crystalline harmony that sounded very much like hunger.
Only then did the guards catch up to the moment.
One wrenched his spear up into something that wanted to be a guard’s stance. The other fumbled his wineskin away, reflexes struggling to reverse hours of soporific negligence. Their voices tore loose from their throats. Half-shouts. Half-prayers.
Ixqueya moved.
Her body translated from stillness into doctrine. Claws hammered the stone, detonating tiny avalanches of ice from every step. The queen’s thorax swung in counterweight behind her, a polished wrecking-ball guided by anatomical genius. Her spider-limbs flared wide as a halo of bladed intent, then narrowed into a cage that contained only her purpose.
The shield lifted. It caught the quay’s sick lanternlight and turned it into an aurora fit for executions.
The spearman stepped forward to meet her. Brave. Idiotic. Almost touching.
He drove the point for the small gap he imagined he saw between shield rim and greave. A respectable thrust. Against most things it might have found purchase.
The spear-tip met Necro Ice with a high, skirling shriek. Sparks skated sideways along the crystal plane. The ash-wood shaft bowed into a shallow arc. For the span of a heartbeat man and weapon believed they had held.
Then the shield chose to disagree.
Ixqueya sank every ounce of her obscene height into the push. Shoulder braced. Hips turning. Thorax swinging in perfect concert. Eight chitinous limbs stabbed into the stone and heaved, turning her entire frame into a single, ruthless vector.
The spear shattered with a dry crack. The broken butt leapt backward and punched into the guard’s own sternum. The shield caught him across both forearms and the upper cage of his ribs, pinning his arms to his sides.
He left the ground.
The iron-banded door behind him received the combined mass of woman, shield, and man like an unwilling altar. Oak boomed. Iron yelped. Bone detonated.
His spine traced the impact in a grotesque curve, shoulders folding in, hips snapping forward. He became briefly longer and shallower, body trying to find room where none existed.
Ixqueya did not let the collision dissipate. She denied him the charity of inertia.
She leaned.
Claws gouged deep furrows into the quay. Bronze thighs knotted into living cables. The enormous thorax swept in, inertia stacking on mass. Pressure climbed from intolerable to impossible.
Man. Shield. Door. The three flattened into layers of one calamity.
His cuirass failed first. Decorative embossing drove into flesh and then through it. Metal folded like poorly cast tin, edges shearing skin and muscle. Ribs surrendered in a stuttering cascade, snapping inward in uneven waves. She heard the wet implosions as organs gave way under the compression. Lungs collapsing into bloody foam. Liver bursting along its seams. Something soft and unimportant in the lower gut tearing like ripe fruit.
Blood found every escape route it could.
It jetted out from beneath the lip of his gorget. From the mail at his armpits. From the hairline split along his cuirass’ lower edge. Thin arterial fans sprayed across the outer curve of the shield. The cold arrested them mid-flight. Each ribbon froze into a string of rubescent glass and clung there in delicate arcs.
His scream tried to climb his throat and found no space. It emerged as a compressed wheeze. Then as a broken gurgle. Then as silence.
When she finally allowed the shield to recede, what came away from the door was not a man but an impression. A limp, sagging silhouette of armor stuffed with slurry. Limbs slopped downward, articulations lost. The torso sagged like a ruptured wineskin full of gravel and offal. Dark, viscous matter leaked from rents and seams, hissing into steam where it touched the cold flagstones before freezing into dull, veined clots.
She turned. Ice hissed under her claws, protesting in thin, crystalline squeals.
The second guard wrestled with his scabbard. His hands remembered drink more clearly than drill. He yanked. The sword jerked halfway free. The blade flashed once in the lanternlight like a frightened fish. His pupils blew wide. His gaze met hers over the crenellated rim of the shield.
Her eyes slid past him with the same faint attention she might grant a cracked tile.
She struck from the hip.
The shield scythed sideways, edge-first, low and remorseless. It hit him at the hips. Bone and iron met Necro Ice and lost. The impact tore him from his feet so completely that, for an instant, his body existed in the air as a loose collection of parts waiting to decide how to fall.
He chose badly.
He slammed into a high stack of crates. Timber screamed. Boards fractured and flew. The top half of the column toppled, crates spilling down in an avalanche of splinters, shattered slats, and burlap-wrapped cargo. He vanished under the collapse, swallowed by his own negligence.
Ixqueya stalked toward the heap.
The shield carved a wake through the air, a moving wall that bullied atmosphere aside. Frost crawled across the wreckage before she reached it, grain and dust locking under a thin vitreous shell. Jumbled stenciled letters blurred under the whitening.
He fought to emerge. Of course he did.
A single arm scrabbled free, dragging the rest of him from the wreck. One hand clawed at the ice, leaving short, bloody streaks. The other arm bent at an angle that offended anatomy. His legs twitched in several directions that did not agree with one another. A raw, panicked moan leaked from his throat.
The shield fell.
She brought it down in a vertical chop that would have served just as well at an execution block. Necro Ice and man and crate smashed together. Bone cracked. Pine exploded. His back arched and then flattened again, breath blasted from his lungs in a hoarse bark that sounded like someone trying to cough up their own soul.
She raised the shield. Dropped it again.
Each descending stroke worked him further away from the category of “person” and closer to “substance.” The slab met meat and wood without distinction. Spinal vertebrae gave in stages, popping one after another like knots pulled through wet rope. The crates beneath fragmented into tinder that ground his organs into a smoother paste.
On the third blow the spine surrendered in full. She felt the collapse through the shaft as a damp, collapsing crunch. On the fourth, the skull imploded. Bone fragments and brain tissue sprayed out around the rim, fountaining along the ice like a spoiled halo.
The fifth strike she delivered purely by habit. Repetition made law.
When she lifted the shield at last, what lay beneath had lost both contour and dignity. Rags of torn clothing and twisted armor jutted from a central heap of red-brown pulp. The mass oozed into the fissures between stones. The advancing frost caught it, encasing the smear in cloudy ice shot through with darker, coagulated veins. A butcher’s bucket overturned and flash-frozen.
Ixqueya drank in a slow, cavernous breath. Her chest rose behind the enamel sheen of her armored cups. Warpaint stretched across the bronze swell, lines of turquoise and vermilion flexing over the rhythm of her lungs.
The exhale left her as a long, almost sensuous sigh.
No fatigue stained it. Only a deep, marrow-level satisfaction. The part of her that convened tribunals and weighed testimony hummed with cold assent. The older, more primordial strata of her being, the hive-queen instinct coiled in her thorax, purred outright. The world had dared to interpose two obstacles. She had converted them into resources. Broken meat. Cooling blood. Fright. The books balanced.
Necro Ice within the Tlāzōtlalpan drank in the sudden spill of warmth. Feedback shimmered through bone and chitin. Her eight auxiliary limbs flexed in involuntary pleasure, talons tapping against stone in a syncopated tattoo like impatient fingers on a judgment seat.
This, more than treaties or decrees, justified the continued existence of everything that irritated her.
The sea wind tried to resume its old dominion.
It slid across the quay, slick with salt and the sour odor of kelp and ship-tar. It hit her radius of cold and curdled, writhing around her thorax and spider-limbs. Feathers snapped softly. Strands of black hair, streaked with teal, billowed and then froze in underlying patterns. The wind seized the metallic tang of spilled blood and hustled it toward the harbor, a breathless herald bearing news of catastrophe.
Ixqueya lifted her gaze.
The balcony projected above, a pale stone lip biting into the sky. Shadows moved along its edge. She did not need to see Sukegei’s features to know exactly where he stood. His presence prickled along the edge of her consciousness, a flare of hot insolence and cheerful amorality against the background murk. Somewhere up there a body was cooling that had been choking on its own surprise only moments before.
One of her spider-limbs unhooked from the shield’s inner bracing.
Segment by segment it unfolded, rising into a vicious arc. Its talons extended, glinting a dark gold where blood still steamed along their barbs. She lifted the limb toward the balcony, wrist cocked with languid disdain. Claws shifted until a single digit stood alone.
The gesture was obscene. Precise. Ridiculously petty for a creature of her scale. It delighted her regardless.
Her mouth curved. Not into warmth. Into the anticipatory smile of someone selecting which bone to crack next.
“Fucking sand-born vermin…”
The words rasped out of her as a thin, contemptuous exhalation. Half swallowed by the cold. Seasoned with loathing and a faint thread of jaded amusement. An epithet tossed upward toward the balcony and downward toward the species in general.
Then she let even that indulgence evaporate.
The spider-limb folded back into the shield’s bracing architecture, rejoining the geometry of her silhouette. She turned toward the door.
The iron bands now bulged outward where the first guard had been used as improvised filler. Oak around them had crushed and splintered. Hinges sagged, nails drawn halfway from their sockets. The entire slab leaned inward as if seeking escape from its own injuries.
Ixqueya rolled the mace to her other hand and considered the portal for a heartbeat. Not wondering if it would yield. Merely weighing whether there was any strategic merit in leaving it mostly intact.
The conclusion came with the slow certainty of a falling mountain.
She drew her right leg back. Muscles beneath her skin coiled into tense, braided cords. Frost condensed around her ankle in a whirling nimbus. Claws curled, biting into the stone for purchase.
She kicked.
Her foot crashed into the door beside the smeared remains of the guard. Talons punched clean through the planking, splintering oak as if it were kiln-dried parchment. Necro Ice erupted along the fracture lines in jagged, luminous splines that pried wood and iron apart. The bands screamed as they tore. Hinges wrenched free of their housings with a guttural rip.
The door did not swing open like a polite invitation. It tore free.
It flew inward as a single brutal slab, a battering ram reversed. It smashed into an interior wall of stacked crates. The nearest row exploded under the blow. The tiers behind them toppled in a cascading avalanche. Timber and rope and cargo roared down together, a collapsing palisade of commerce.
Dust, grain, and powdered fungus burst outward in a choking plume. The shockwave of displaced air slapped back against her face, hot and stale, tasting of old sweat and mildew and spilled oil. Years of smug labor exhaled in one rancid gasp.
Silhouettes flinched away from the collapse.
Some went down under the stampede of falling wood. Others stumbled, caught their balance, and stood blinking through the storm of particulate. All of them stared. At her. At the colossal shield rim rimed in fresh gore. At the mace that still bled steam where warm viscera clung to its spikes.
Ixqueya stepped across the threshold.
Stone froze under her claws the instant she claimed it. Frost surged inward through the warehouse like a silent tide, sheathing floorboards and flagstones in a growing lacquer of glassy white. Lantern flames along the walls shivered. Their color bled from yellow to blue to pinched, miserly white.
Then they shrank and guttered. Suddenly, brutally starved of heat.
Ixqueya felt its extinction as a surgeon feels the falter of a vein beneath the fingertips. A small occlusion in the night. Precise. Irrevocable.
Cold answered.
It rose in her like something ancient remembering itself. The harbor’s humid breath recoiled. Sweating stone tightened under a film of rime. The air around her ceased to be mere temperature and became intention. A sentient frost that remembered glacial epochs and ossuaries packed to the rafters.
She stepped from the alley’s throat and took the quay as a verdict.
Her claws struck stone with the metallic clarity of chisels biting marble. From each imprint frost branched outward in delicate, fractal arabesques. Puddles seized in an instant. Their surfaces paled. Fine fissures spidered across them until they resembled maps of dead continents. Lanternlight skated over this newborn skin, breaking into scattered constellations that shivered at her approach.
The door guards gaped. Mouths open. Thoughts lagging several heartbeats behind the catastrophe walking toward them.
Ixqueya drew breath. Long. Proprietary. As if inhaling the deed to the place.
The exhalation came out transformed.
Vapor thickened around her left arm. At first it was nothing but a low wreath clinging to bronze flesh and chitin. Then the fog stiffened. Strands of rime twisted through it, braiding into helixes inscribed with minute runes. Droplets that should have fallen paused instead. Hanging in the air like beads on invisible wire. Each drop flashed white as it froze. The beads collided. Merged. Lines of turquoise witch-light stitched between them, forcing them into angles no natural frost ever chose.
Geometry conquered chaos.
Plates of Necro Ice grew outward from her forearm with accelerating inevitability. Flat facets extruded. Edges sharpened themselves. The forming mass shuddered once, as if clearing its throat.
A tower shield resolved around her arm.
It was not forged or assembled. It condensed. A monolith of glacial crystal taller than most men and twice as broad as their resolve. Its outline suggested a coffin stood upright, sides toothed, crown jagged with cruel crenellations. Across its face pale runes burned very slowly, as if etched by some imprisoned aurora. Each sigil lived just beneath the surface, trapped as cleanly as insects preserved in amber.
On the inner face meat followed ice.
Necrotic hide oozed into being, flowing over the crystal in sluggish tides that hardened to leather as they cooled. Straps grew themselves. Bone spars thrust through from nowhere and anchored deep within the shield, forming a bracing lattice. They wrapped around her bracer with intimate certainty. When the last ligament knotted shut, the shield released a single sonorous tone that hung in the air like the toll of a distant bell remembering a funeral.
Her right hand rose into its own storm.
Here the condensation did not drift. It convulsed. The air around her palm compressed into a dense, palpitating knot of hoarfrost. Shards erupted from it in all directions, razor fragments spinning away only to be yanked back along invisible vectors and slammed against her fingers. Each returning piece scored a luminous groove through the mist.
Mass accreted in ruthless rhythm.
Crystals fused. Rotated. Locked. A brutal star of wedges and spikes assembled around her fist. Every facet glared with an almost painful clarity. At its center a sluggish, lunar glow pulsed, as if a deranged god had torn a chip from a dead moon and hammered it into the shape of malice.
The haft spiraled down from her grip.
Bone and petrified heartwood twined together into a single long shaft. Runes had been burned deep into that hybrid grain. Frost poured from her talons, sank along the carvings, and ignited them in a slow, glacial phosphorescence. When the weapon’s full length settled into being, its weight dropped into her hand like a remembered sin returning to its owner.
A Necro Ice war-mace. Vast. Overwrought. Entirely at home there.
She rolled her wrist once. The head trembled. The clustered spikes sang a thin crystalline harmony that sounded very much like hunger.
Only then did the guards catch up to the moment.
One wrenched his spear up into something that wanted to be a guard’s stance. The other fumbled his wineskin away, reflexes struggling to reverse hours of soporific negligence. Their voices tore loose from their throats. Half-shouts. Half-prayers.
Ixqueya moved.
Her body translated from stillness into doctrine. Claws hammered the stone, detonating tiny avalanches of ice from every step. The queen’s thorax swung in counterweight behind her, a polished wrecking-ball guided by anatomical genius. Her spider-limbs flared wide as a halo of bladed intent, then narrowed into a cage that contained only her purpose.
The shield lifted. It caught the quay’s sick lanternlight and turned it into an aurora fit for executions.
The spearman stepped forward to meet her. Brave. Idiotic. Almost touching.
He drove the point for the small gap he imagined he saw between shield rim and greave. A respectable thrust. Against most things it might have found purchase.
The spear-tip met Necro Ice with a high, skirling shriek. Sparks skated sideways along the crystal plane. The ash-wood shaft bowed into a shallow arc. For the span of a heartbeat man and weapon believed they had held.
Then the shield chose to disagree.
Ixqueya sank every ounce of her obscene height into the push. Shoulder braced. Hips turning. Thorax swinging in perfect concert. Eight chitinous limbs stabbed into the stone and heaved, turning her entire frame into a single, ruthless vector.
The spear shattered with a dry crack. The broken butt leapt backward and punched into the guard’s own sternum. The shield caught him across both forearms and the upper cage of his ribs, pinning his arms to his sides.
He left the ground.
The iron-banded door behind him received the combined mass of woman, shield, and man like an unwilling altar. Oak boomed. Iron yelped. Bone detonated.
His spine traced the impact in a grotesque curve, shoulders folding in, hips snapping forward. He became briefly longer and shallower, body trying to find room where none existed.
Ixqueya did not let the collision dissipate. She denied him the charity of inertia.
She leaned.
Claws gouged deep furrows into the quay. Bronze thighs knotted into living cables. The enormous thorax swept in, inertia stacking on mass. Pressure climbed from intolerable to impossible.
Man. Shield. Door. The three flattened into layers of one calamity.
His cuirass failed first. Decorative embossing drove into flesh and then through it. Metal folded like poorly cast tin, edges shearing skin and muscle. Ribs surrendered in a stuttering cascade, snapping inward in uneven waves. She heard the wet implosions as organs gave way under the compression. Lungs collapsing into bloody foam. Liver bursting along its seams. Something soft and unimportant in the lower gut tearing like ripe fruit.
Blood found every escape route it could.
It jetted out from beneath the lip of his gorget. From the mail at his armpits. From the hairline split along his cuirass’ lower edge. Thin arterial fans sprayed across the outer curve of the shield. The cold arrested them mid-flight. Each ribbon froze into a string of rubescent glass and clung there in delicate arcs.
His scream tried to climb his throat and found no space. It emerged as a compressed wheeze. Then as a broken gurgle. Then as silence.
When she finally allowed the shield to recede, what came away from the door was not a man but an impression. A limp, sagging silhouette of armor stuffed with slurry. Limbs slopped downward, articulations lost. The torso sagged like a ruptured wineskin full of gravel and offal. Dark, viscous matter leaked from rents and seams, hissing into steam where it touched the cold flagstones before freezing into dull, veined clots.
She turned. Ice hissed under her claws, protesting in thin, crystalline squeals.
The second guard wrestled with his scabbard. His hands remembered drink more clearly than drill. He yanked. The sword jerked halfway free. The blade flashed once in the lanternlight like a frightened fish. His pupils blew wide. His gaze met hers over the crenellated rim of the shield.
Her eyes slid past him with the same faint attention she might grant a cracked tile.
She struck from the hip.
The shield scythed sideways, edge-first, low and remorseless. It hit him at the hips. Bone and iron met Necro Ice and lost. The impact tore him from his feet so completely that, for an instant, his body existed in the air as a loose collection of parts waiting to decide how to fall.
He chose badly.
He slammed into a high stack of crates. Timber screamed. Boards fractured and flew. The top half of the column toppled, crates spilling down in an avalanche of splinters, shattered slats, and burlap-wrapped cargo. He vanished under the collapse, swallowed by his own negligence.
Ixqueya stalked toward the heap.
The shield carved a wake through the air, a moving wall that bullied atmosphere aside. Frost crawled across the wreckage before she reached it, grain and dust locking under a thin vitreous shell. Jumbled stenciled letters blurred under the whitening.
He fought to emerge. Of course he did.
A single arm scrabbled free, dragging the rest of him from the wreck. One hand clawed at the ice, leaving short, bloody streaks. The other arm bent at an angle that offended anatomy. His legs twitched in several directions that did not agree with one another. A raw, panicked moan leaked from his throat.
The shield fell.
She brought it down in a vertical chop that would have served just as well at an execution block. Necro Ice and man and crate smashed together. Bone cracked. Pine exploded. His back arched and then flattened again, breath blasted from his lungs in a hoarse bark that sounded like someone trying to cough up their own soul.
She raised the shield. Dropped it again.
Each descending stroke worked him further away from the category of “person” and closer to “substance.” The slab met meat and wood without distinction. Spinal vertebrae gave in stages, popping one after another like knots pulled through wet rope. The crates beneath fragmented into tinder that ground his organs into a smoother paste.
On the third blow the spine surrendered in full. She felt the collapse through the shaft as a damp, collapsing crunch. On the fourth, the skull imploded. Bone fragments and brain tissue sprayed out around the rim, fountaining along the ice like a spoiled halo.
The fifth strike she delivered purely by habit. Repetition made law.
When she lifted the shield at last, what lay beneath had lost both contour and dignity. Rags of torn clothing and twisted armor jutted from a central heap of red-brown pulp. The mass oozed into the fissures between stones. The advancing frost caught it, encasing the smear in cloudy ice shot through with darker, coagulated veins. A butcher’s bucket overturned and flash-frozen.
Ixqueya drank in a slow, cavernous breath. Her chest rose behind the enamel sheen of her armored cups. Warpaint stretched across the bronze swell, lines of turquoise and vermilion flexing over the rhythm of her lungs.
The exhale left her as a long, almost sensuous sigh.
No fatigue stained it. Only a deep, marrow-level satisfaction. The part of her that convened tribunals and weighed testimony hummed with cold assent. The older, more primordial strata of her being, the hive-queen instinct coiled in her thorax, purred outright. The world had dared to interpose two obstacles. She had converted them into resources. Broken meat. Cooling blood. Fright. The books balanced.
Necro Ice within the Tlāzōtlalpan drank in the sudden spill of warmth. Feedback shimmered through bone and chitin. Her eight auxiliary limbs flexed in involuntary pleasure, talons tapping against stone in a syncopated tattoo like impatient fingers on a judgment seat.
This, more than treaties or decrees, justified the continued existence of everything that irritated her.
The sea wind tried to resume its old dominion.
It slid across the quay, slick with salt and the sour odor of kelp and ship-tar. It hit her radius of cold and curdled, writhing around her thorax and spider-limbs. Feathers snapped softly. Strands of black hair, streaked with teal, billowed and then froze in underlying patterns. The wind seized the metallic tang of spilled blood and hustled it toward the harbor, a breathless herald bearing news of catastrophe.
Ixqueya lifted her gaze.
The balcony projected above, a pale stone lip biting into the sky. Shadows moved along its edge. She did not need to see Sukegei’s features to know exactly where he stood. His presence prickled along the edge of her consciousness, a flare of hot insolence and cheerful amorality against the background murk. Somewhere up there a body was cooling that had been choking on its own surprise only moments before.
One of her spider-limbs unhooked from the shield’s inner bracing.
Segment by segment it unfolded, rising into a vicious arc. Its talons extended, glinting a dark gold where blood still steamed along their barbs. She lifted the limb toward the balcony, wrist cocked with languid disdain. Claws shifted until a single digit stood alone.
The gesture was obscene. Precise. Ridiculously petty for a creature of her scale. It delighted her regardless.
Her mouth curved. Not into warmth. Into the anticipatory smile of someone selecting which bone to crack next.
“Fucking sand-born vermin…”
The words rasped out of her as a thin, contemptuous exhalation. Half swallowed by the cold. Seasoned with loathing and a faint thread of jaded amusement. An epithet tossed upward toward the balcony and downward toward the species in general.
Then she let even that indulgence evaporate.
The spider-limb folded back into the shield’s bracing architecture, rejoining the geometry of her silhouette. She turned toward the door.
The iron bands now bulged outward where the first guard had been used as improvised filler. Oak around them had crushed and splintered. Hinges sagged, nails drawn halfway from their sockets. The entire slab leaned inward as if seeking escape from its own injuries.
Ixqueya rolled the mace to her other hand and considered the portal for a heartbeat. Not wondering if it would yield. Merely weighing whether there was any strategic merit in leaving it mostly intact.
The conclusion came with the slow certainty of a falling mountain.
She drew her right leg back. Muscles beneath her skin coiled into tense, braided cords. Frost condensed around her ankle in a whirling nimbus. Claws curled, biting into the stone for purchase.
She kicked.
Her foot crashed into the door beside the smeared remains of the guard. Talons punched clean through the planking, splintering oak as if it were kiln-dried parchment. Necro Ice erupted along the fracture lines in jagged, luminous splines that pried wood and iron apart. The bands screamed as they tore. Hinges wrenched free of their housings with a guttural rip.
The door did not swing open like a polite invitation. It tore free.
It flew inward as a single brutal slab, a battering ram reversed. It smashed into an interior wall of stacked crates. The nearest row exploded under the blow. The tiers behind them toppled in a cascading avalanche. Timber and rope and cargo roared down together, a collapsing palisade of commerce.
Dust, grain, and powdered fungus burst outward in a choking plume. The shockwave of displaced air slapped back against her face, hot and stale, tasting of old sweat and mildew and spilled oil. Years of smug labor exhaled in one rancid gasp.
Silhouettes flinched away from the collapse.
Some went down under the stampede of falling wood. Others stumbled, caught their balance, and stood blinking through the storm of particulate. All of them stared. At her. At the colossal shield rim rimed in fresh gore. At the mace that still bled steam where warm viscera clung to its spikes.
Ixqueya stepped across the threshold.
Stone froze under her claws the instant she claimed it. Frost surged inward through the warehouse like a silent tide, sheathing floorboards and flagstones in a growing lacquer of glassy white. Lantern flames along the walls shivered. Their color bled from yellow to blue to pinched, miserly white.
Then they shrank and guttered. Suddenly, brutally starved of heat.
Sukegei had seen siege engines do less to a door. From his perch on the upper balcony, he watched Ixqueya’s kick turn an iron-banded slab into flying debris and bad decisions. The door left its hinges like it had been praying for this moment. It flattened the first wall of crates, punched halfway into the second, and buried itself in a small landslide of smuggled goods and wounded pride. The whole catwalk shuddered. Dust belched up in a thick, choking cloud.
Sukegei rested one elbow on the railing and let out a low, appreciative whistle. “There she is,” he muttered. “Delicate as a brick to the face.” Cold rushed in behind her. Frost crawled along the warehouse floor, wiping out puddles and footprints. Lantern flames shrank and sulked. Men below did that stupid statue thing people did right before they died. Eyes wide. Mouths open. Brains somewhere three rooms behind the current situation.
Ten paces along the balcony, an arbalist was crouched at the rail. Elf. Fresh armor. Crossbow braced. He had Ixqueya in his sights. Or thought he did. The bow shook more than the elf did, and that was saying something. Sukegei eyed him, then the lumbering necro-ice juggernaut stomping into the warehouse. “Of course,” he sighed. “I ruin my boots chasing down informants, she kicks one door and everyone remembers their gods.” He stepped away from the post and strolled along the catwalk. Not sneaking. Just not bothering to be loud. The boards creaked under him. No one noticed. Every soul on the ground floor was too busy rethinking their career choices.
The arbalist had all his attention fixed on the giantess. Poor boy. As if she was the problem. Sukegei came up right behind him, close enough to smell the sour wine sweating out of his skin. “Easy there, hero,” he murmured. Then he drove his boot straight between the elf’s legs. He put his weight into it. Years of practice. A proper professional effort.
The elf made a noise like someone stepping on a flute. The crossbow jumped from his hands. The quarrel fired wild, ricocheting off a beam, nowhere near Ixqueya. The poor bastard folded over the rail, both hands grabbing himself, eyes rolled up to the ceiling as if appealing to any god except the one who had just arrived downstairs. Sukegei clapped him on the back, all sympathy. “Bad news, cousin,” he said. “You just peaked.” He shoved.
The arbalist tipped over the edge and disappeared from sight with a flail of limbs. Sukegei leaned on the rail and watched him fall. The man hit a stack of barrels, bounced, and landed flat on the ice. Something in his back went very wrong with a loud, crunchy insistence. He stopped moving.
Sukegei clicked his tongue. “Should’ve stayed home. Had soup. Married a mushroom girl. But no.”
Below, Ixqueya strode through the dust cloud like an offended god. Shield of frozen nightmare in one hand, mace big enough to break architecture in the other. The first guard in her way braced. She hit him and the door together. When the shield came back, there was a lot less guard and the door looked like it regretted ever being built. The second tried to run. She made him into a lesson and some stains. Sukegei watched for a moment, head tilted, genuinely impressed. “Crazy bitch,” he said under his breath. “Just how I like them. Lose a few legs, we could really talk.”
The last elf still standing on the ground planted himself between her and the interior. Sword up. Knees shaking. Very noble. Very doomed.
Sukegei rolled his shoulders and turned away from the show. She did not need help with one terrified knife-elf. If she tripped over him, that was her fault. He sauntered along the long side of the balcony. One hand on the kilij’s hilt, thumb idly stroking the curve of the pommel. The other hand swung loose. He looked, to anyone glancing up, like a man out for a late stroll, humming to himself while a massacre happened underneath.
Which was accurate. He started whistling. Old marching tune. The kind you sang when you were drunk and two days from payday. Half the verses weren’t fit for priests. The other half were about priests. Men on the floor scrambled between crates. A few fired wild shots. Most were trying to decide whether to hide, surrender, or cry. None of them looked up. Why would they. The real problem was nine feet tall and currently driving people into furniture. Sukegei’s grin slanted.
“Bet she’s dripping for me right now,” he muttered. “All this hard work I’m doing. Two stairs. A nut-kick. Really carrying the team.” The thought of morning ambushed him mid-stride. Reports. Witness statements. Some humorless scribe demanding he explain why there was a guard embedded in a crate and why half the cargo now had teeth marks. He winced. “Ah,” he said. “Paperwork.” Future Sukegei groaned somewhere in the back of his skull. Present Sukegei shrugged.
“Not my problem,” he decided. “That bastard gets paid the same and sits down more.” He reached the far corner of the balcony. From here he had a good angle on everything. Ixqueya. The lone guard in front of her who, to his credit, hadn’t dropped his sword yet. The bodies. The ice. A rather nice stack of crates that was never going to see its destination now. Something big moved in his peripheral vision. A guard thundered along the catwalk, armor clattering. Human. Broad, sweating, eyes wild. He had the look of a man who had decided if he was going to die tonight, he would at least take one problem with him.
The problem he had chosen was Sukegei. The Shaitan sighed. “All right,” he muttered. “Come on then. Make it interesting.” The man lowered his shoulder and charged. A proper tackle. Full commitment. He roared as he came, which would have been impressive if it didn’t ruin what little surprise he had. Sukegei waited. Let him get close. Closer. Close enough to smell his fear over the metal and sweat. At the last instant he stepped aside. A lazy little shuffle, cloak swirling. The big man hit nothing at all.
He went straight into the rail. The impact shook the whole run of boards. For a heartbeat the wood held. Nails screamed. Rope creaked. Then one old spike gave out with a tiny, defeated ping. The rail snapped. The guard pitched over with it. Arms pinwheeling, mouth going from roar to strangled yelp. Sukegei leaned over in time to watch him fall. “Should’ve led with the sword,” he called down conversationally. The man hit the floor hard and wrong. His back took it. His legs tried to keep going without him, then folded. The warehouse echoed with a single sharp crack and then, mercifully, nothing from him at all.
Sukegei winced theatrically. “Ouch. We’ve got a live one down there somewhere!” he shouted toward the floor. “Spine on that one might be questionable, but he’s blinking. Maybe. If you need someone to ask ‘why did you think this was a good idea’ to.”
He pushed off the rail and turned as two more guards came along the catwalk behind him. These had seen what just happened. They approached slower. Weapons up. Trying very hard not to look at the missing rail and the spread-eagled corpse below.
One had a sword and shield. The other a spear. Both had “not paid enough for this” written all over them. Sukegei raised his hands slightly, palms out. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Let me save us all some time. You try something heroic. You die. I feel mildly entertained. My very large friend down there finishes the rest of you and then we all have an awkward conversation with my superiors about why the floor looks like stew.”
They hesitated. Looked at each other. Looked down at Ixqueya as she smashed some unfortunate soul into a stack of crates with the flat of her shield. A spray of timber and panic answered.
The spear-man tightened his grip and lunged anyway. Young. Too much pride. Not enough imagination. Sukegei sidestepped. The spear slid past his ribs. He caught the shaft with one hand, guiding it along, using the man’s momentum to drag him close. “First lesson,” Sukegei said, jamming a boot into the man’s ankle from behind. “Don’t bring a long stick to a close conversation.” The guard’s balance went. Sukegei drove his knee up between the man’s legs. Again. Professional accuracy. The spear clattered from numb hands. The poor bastard folded in half with a strangled squawk.
“Second lesson,” Sukegei added, grabbing his collar and belt. “Always protect the family jewels. Monsters love going for easy targets.” He hauled the man up and over in one smooth heave. The guard vanishing over the broken rail with both hands cupped between his thighs, expression frozen in a perfect portrait of regret. The thud that followed was ugly. The little chorus of shocked gasps from his friends below almost made it worth it. The sword-and-shield man took a step back. “Smart,” Sukegei encouraged. “Very smart. In fact if you just put the sword down, I’ll—” The fellow roared and charged. Sukegei rolled his eyes. “Of course.”
He didn’t even bother drawing the kilij. As the guard closed the distance, shield up for a bash, Sukegei turned slightly, planted one boot where the man’s foot was about to land, and hooked. The guard’s legs went out from under him. He flew forward with a surprised grunt, arms flailing. Sukegei eased aside and watched him slide, armor scraping the planks, shield scraping sparks. The man skidded across the missing rail and vanished with a startled shout. “Whoops,” Sukegei said cheerfully, leaning on the nearest post. “My bad.”
This time he didn’t watch the landing. The loud double thump and abrupt silence told him all he needed. He stretched, joints cracking pleasantly, and let his shoulder rest against the support beam. The kilij stayed sheathed, his hand resting on the hilt in a casual, almost affectionate way. Below, the warehouse floor had become an ugly painting. Ice. Blood. Splintered wood. Elf bits. Giantess. Ixqueya moved through it like she owned the color red.
She broke shield walls by walking through them. Turned men into problems for the cleaning crews. Every time the tower shield swung, someone became less complicated. Every time the mace came down, theology shifted. Sukegei watched, grin slow and crooked. “Brute,” he said fondly. “No finesse at all. Hit it until it stops existing. Gods, I’m going to climb that woman like a siege ladder.” His gaze lingered on her thorax, the shimmer of ice along her chitin, the spider-limbs carving lines of cold through the air. He could practically feel the vibrations in the catwalk every time she drove someone into a support pillar.
“Sturdy hips,” he murmured. “Good bone structure. Terrifying temper. She’d throw excellent heirs. Loud ones. Probably bite.” The thought pleased him more than it should have. Down below, one of the men he’d helped along had survived the fall. Miraculously. He lay near the tangle of barrels, breathing in short, panicked bursts, trying and failing to get his limbs obeying him. Not going anywhere. Eyes still moving. Useful. Sukegei cupped his hands around his mouth.
“Big one!” he called down, voice lazy over the noise. “We’ve still got a live one by the barrels. Try not to turn that one into soup. You’ll want at least one idiot who can still scream answers.” He dropped his hands and resumed his stroll along the catwalk as if they had come here to inspect the roof. Somewhere in the rear of his mind, the thought of morning and its ink-stained consequences stirred again. Inquisitors. Forms. Very serious men asking very serious questions like “why is there a man lodged in our chandelier” and “do you have any idea how much that door cost.”
Sukegei patted his own chest lightly. “Future Sukegei,” he said. “Your problem. I believe in you.” He shot one last look down at Ixqueya as she advanced, all ice and ruin, and shook his head with a soft snort. “Crazy bitch,” he repeated, almost dreamy. “I swear I’m going to find a stool one of these nights and just climb up there. Let the world scream. Strong heirs. Terrified neighbors. Worth every scar.”
Then he went back to whistling, stepping over scattered splinters and fallen dust, a relaxed devil promenading above a massacre, while below his monstrous “bodyguard” turned the last brave souls in the warehouse into cautionary tales.
Sukegei rested one elbow on the railing and let out a low, appreciative whistle. “There she is,” he muttered. “Delicate as a brick to the face.” Cold rushed in behind her. Frost crawled along the warehouse floor, wiping out puddles and footprints. Lantern flames shrank and sulked. Men below did that stupid statue thing people did right before they died. Eyes wide. Mouths open. Brains somewhere three rooms behind the current situation.
Ten paces along the balcony, an arbalist was crouched at the rail. Elf. Fresh armor. Crossbow braced. He had Ixqueya in his sights. Or thought he did. The bow shook more than the elf did, and that was saying something. Sukegei eyed him, then the lumbering necro-ice juggernaut stomping into the warehouse. “Of course,” he sighed. “I ruin my boots chasing down informants, she kicks one door and everyone remembers their gods.” He stepped away from the post and strolled along the catwalk. Not sneaking. Just not bothering to be loud. The boards creaked under him. No one noticed. Every soul on the ground floor was too busy rethinking their career choices.
The arbalist had all his attention fixed on the giantess. Poor boy. As if she was the problem. Sukegei came up right behind him, close enough to smell the sour wine sweating out of his skin. “Easy there, hero,” he murmured. Then he drove his boot straight between the elf’s legs. He put his weight into it. Years of practice. A proper professional effort.
The elf made a noise like someone stepping on a flute. The crossbow jumped from his hands. The quarrel fired wild, ricocheting off a beam, nowhere near Ixqueya. The poor bastard folded over the rail, both hands grabbing himself, eyes rolled up to the ceiling as if appealing to any god except the one who had just arrived downstairs. Sukegei clapped him on the back, all sympathy. “Bad news, cousin,” he said. “You just peaked.” He shoved.
The arbalist tipped over the edge and disappeared from sight with a flail of limbs. Sukegei leaned on the rail and watched him fall. The man hit a stack of barrels, bounced, and landed flat on the ice. Something in his back went very wrong with a loud, crunchy insistence. He stopped moving.
Sukegei clicked his tongue. “Should’ve stayed home. Had soup. Married a mushroom girl. But no.”
Below, Ixqueya strode through the dust cloud like an offended god. Shield of frozen nightmare in one hand, mace big enough to break architecture in the other. The first guard in her way braced. She hit him and the door together. When the shield came back, there was a lot less guard and the door looked like it regretted ever being built. The second tried to run. She made him into a lesson and some stains. Sukegei watched for a moment, head tilted, genuinely impressed. “Crazy bitch,” he said under his breath. “Just how I like them. Lose a few legs, we could really talk.”
The last elf still standing on the ground planted himself between her and the interior. Sword up. Knees shaking. Very noble. Very doomed.
Sukegei rolled his shoulders and turned away from the show. She did not need help with one terrified knife-elf. If she tripped over him, that was her fault. He sauntered along the long side of the balcony. One hand on the kilij’s hilt, thumb idly stroking the curve of the pommel. The other hand swung loose. He looked, to anyone glancing up, like a man out for a late stroll, humming to himself while a massacre happened underneath.
Which was accurate. He started whistling. Old marching tune. The kind you sang when you were drunk and two days from payday. Half the verses weren’t fit for priests. The other half were about priests. Men on the floor scrambled between crates. A few fired wild shots. Most were trying to decide whether to hide, surrender, or cry. None of them looked up. Why would they. The real problem was nine feet tall and currently driving people into furniture. Sukegei’s grin slanted.
“Bet she’s dripping for me right now,” he muttered. “All this hard work I’m doing. Two stairs. A nut-kick. Really carrying the team.” The thought of morning ambushed him mid-stride. Reports. Witness statements. Some humorless scribe demanding he explain why there was a guard embedded in a crate and why half the cargo now had teeth marks. He winced. “Ah,” he said. “Paperwork.” Future Sukegei groaned somewhere in the back of his skull. Present Sukegei shrugged.
“Not my problem,” he decided. “That bastard gets paid the same and sits down more.” He reached the far corner of the balcony. From here he had a good angle on everything. Ixqueya. The lone guard in front of her who, to his credit, hadn’t dropped his sword yet. The bodies. The ice. A rather nice stack of crates that was never going to see its destination now. Something big moved in his peripheral vision. A guard thundered along the catwalk, armor clattering. Human. Broad, sweating, eyes wild. He had the look of a man who had decided if he was going to die tonight, he would at least take one problem with him.
The problem he had chosen was Sukegei. The Shaitan sighed. “All right,” he muttered. “Come on then. Make it interesting.” The man lowered his shoulder and charged. A proper tackle. Full commitment. He roared as he came, which would have been impressive if it didn’t ruin what little surprise he had. Sukegei waited. Let him get close. Closer. Close enough to smell his fear over the metal and sweat. At the last instant he stepped aside. A lazy little shuffle, cloak swirling. The big man hit nothing at all.
He went straight into the rail. The impact shook the whole run of boards. For a heartbeat the wood held. Nails screamed. Rope creaked. Then one old spike gave out with a tiny, defeated ping. The rail snapped. The guard pitched over with it. Arms pinwheeling, mouth going from roar to strangled yelp. Sukegei leaned over in time to watch him fall. “Should’ve led with the sword,” he called down conversationally. The man hit the floor hard and wrong. His back took it. His legs tried to keep going without him, then folded. The warehouse echoed with a single sharp crack and then, mercifully, nothing from him at all.
Sukegei winced theatrically. “Ouch. We’ve got a live one down there somewhere!” he shouted toward the floor. “Spine on that one might be questionable, but he’s blinking. Maybe. If you need someone to ask ‘why did you think this was a good idea’ to.”
He pushed off the rail and turned as two more guards came along the catwalk behind him. These had seen what just happened. They approached slower. Weapons up. Trying very hard not to look at the missing rail and the spread-eagled corpse below.
One had a sword and shield. The other a spear. Both had “not paid enough for this” written all over them. Sukegei raised his hands slightly, palms out. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Let me save us all some time. You try something heroic. You die. I feel mildly entertained. My very large friend down there finishes the rest of you and then we all have an awkward conversation with my superiors about why the floor looks like stew.”
They hesitated. Looked at each other. Looked down at Ixqueya as she smashed some unfortunate soul into a stack of crates with the flat of her shield. A spray of timber and panic answered.
The spear-man tightened his grip and lunged anyway. Young. Too much pride. Not enough imagination. Sukegei sidestepped. The spear slid past his ribs. He caught the shaft with one hand, guiding it along, using the man’s momentum to drag him close. “First lesson,” Sukegei said, jamming a boot into the man’s ankle from behind. “Don’t bring a long stick to a close conversation.” The guard’s balance went. Sukegei drove his knee up between the man’s legs. Again. Professional accuracy. The spear clattered from numb hands. The poor bastard folded in half with a strangled squawk.
“Second lesson,” Sukegei added, grabbing his collar and belt. “Always protect the family jewels. Monsters love going for easy targets.” He hauled the man up and over in one smooth heave. The guard vanishing over the broken rail with both hands cupped between his thighs, expression frozen in a perfect portrait of regret. The thud that followed was ugly. The little chorus of shocked gasps from his friends below almost made it worth it. The sword-and-shield man took a step back. “Smart,” Sukegei encouraged. “Very smart. In fact if you just put the sword down, I’ll—” The fellow roared and charged. Sukegei rolled his eyes. “Of course.”
He didn’t even bother drawing the kilij. As the guard closed the distance, shield up for a bash, Sukegei turned slightly, planted one boot where the man’s foot was about to land, and hooked. The guard’s legs went out from under him. He flew forward with a surprised grunt, arms flailing. Sukegei eased aside and watched him slide, armor scraping the planks, shield scraping sparks. The man skidded across the missing rail and vanished with a startled shout. “Whoops,” Sukegei said cheerfully, leaning on the nearest post. “My bad.”
This time he didn’t watch the landing. The loud double thump and abrupt silence told him all he needed. He stretched, joints cracking pleasantly, and let his shoulder rest against the support beam. The kilij stayed sheathed, his hand resting on the hilt in a casual, almost affectionate way. Below, the warehouse floor had become an ugly painting. Ice. Blood. Splintered wood. Elf bits. Giantess. Ixqueya moved through it like she owned the color red.
She broke shield walls by walking through them. Turned men into problems for the cleaning crews. Every time the tower shield swung, someone became less complicated. Every time the mace came down, theology shifted. Sukegei watched, grin slow and crooked. “Brute,” he said fondly. “No finesse at all. Hit it until it stops existing. Gods, I’m going to climb that woman like a siege ladder.” His gaze lingered on her thorax, the shimmer of ice along her chitin, the spider-limbs carving lines of cold through the air. He could practically feel the vibrations in the catwalk every time she drove someone into a support pillar.
“Sturdy hips,” he murmured. “Good bone structure. Terrifying temper. She’d throw excellent heirs. Loud ones. Probably bite.” The thought pleased him more than it should have. Down below, one of the men he’d helped along had survived the fall. Miraculously. He lay near the tangle of barrels, breathing in short, panicked bursts, trying and failing to get his limbs obeying him. Not going anywhere. Eyes still moving. Useful. Sukegei cupped his hands around his mouth.
“Big one!” he called down, voice lazy over the noise. “We’ve still got a live one by the barrels. Try not to turn that one into soup. You’ll want at least one idiot who can still scream answers.” He dropped his hands and resumed his stroll along the catwalk as if they had come here to inspect the roof. Somewhere in the rear of his mind, the thought of morning and its ink-stained consequences stirred again. Inquisitors. Forms. Very serious men asking very serious questions like “why is there a man lodged in our chandelier” and “do you have any idea how much that door cost.”
Sukegei patted his own chest lightly. “Future Sukegei,” he said. “Your problem. I believe in you.” He shot one last look down at Ixqueya as she advanced, all ice and ruin, and shook his head with a soft snort. “Crazy bitch,” he repeated, almost dreamy. “I swear I’m going to find a stool one of these nights and just climb up there. Let the world scream. Strong heirs. Terrified neighbors. Worth every scar.”
Then he went back to whistling, stepping over scattered splinters and fallen dust, a relaxed devil promenading above a massacre, while below his monstrous “bodyguard” turned the last brave souls in the warehouse into cautionary tales.
Moderators: Ixqueya Jorgenskull (played by The_Diva)