The Tenement District. The rest of Ortheoc wanted nothing better than to forget the existence of this cesspit; this memory of their failings, this afterimage of their avarice. Reflected in the gaunt face of a panhandler they saw their own apathy for The Other. In the flights of crows and vultures they were reminded of their own fear of death, the only collector they could not bribe away with gold or sex or a favor at court. Would that these hypocrites could cut the decrepit apartments from the skyline, like cutting a cancerous growth; or scrub the stench, as with some stinging balm smeared over a streak of gangrene; simply discard somehow this collection of outcasts and untouchables. Here, nonetheless, stood "The Seeds," the hardy weed of Ortheoc, mocking the gardens with all their ritual and pomp. Here, a museum to the true humanity of the city masters: bodies in the street, unpaved mud, rain-rotted domiciles.
Dezeric had dressed in mottled browns for his venture into this place: muddy shoes, a moth-eaten cloak, cotton wraps about his neck and legs. But the misfortunes of a Seed dweller were not so easily counterfeited. Layers of sweat and stink had not so permeated his crevices—the armpits, the groin—as to discolor the fabrics through weeks of constant wear. No boils went unlanced on his skin, no warts unburned, til they had grown as large as crabapples. He tiptoed to avoid the lumps and puddles of frozen excrement, not at all like the resigned trudge or the purposeful flutter of the locals. Moreover, although Dezeric swigged whisky straight from a sea-glass bottle (an elegant detail, he thought), his hand didn't shake as he did it; he didn't get the craving pangs of a man whose drink was his only warmth on a night like this one, the howls of winter rasping at his feet, his hands, his nose, his ears. Thankfully, most were huddled in the taverns or around their anemic hearths at this hour, unconcerned with the business of the conspicuous outsider. And the Seeds were not thick with people like they would have been twenty years ago, a natural consequence of the wars, first against the Báthory pretender, then the Futhurlings, then the Carling queen.
What did he even hope to find here? Eyes and teeth—eyes and teeth, and hair, by his contact's description. What a waste of an evening, skulking around glowering at beggars, who often enough didn't even possess those three in the right quantities. But just as Dezeric passed the Bull & Brazen, its hall bright with fire and raucous with laughter, a familiar tension shivered up his spine, and he knew that he could not have come in vain. He was being watched: from the darkness, from a distance, with that intimately predatory intent that could chill an already-icy street.
Despite his trusty instincts, honed over years, the hunter was well out of practice with his profession. He stopped and looked about, trying to pinpoint the source of the dread which crept over his body, but no doubt managing only to let the creature know, wherever it was, that he had noticed its presence. How Master Valnorn would have scolded him for such an amateurish mistake! But this was not a time for reminiscing; Dezeric pushed that thought aside, warming as it was. Now the joy of the hunt had splayed its full grasp over he, who could only push further, deeper into the heart of the noxious aura. The beggars, noticing his frenzy, gave him a wide radius as they passed, wanting no part of whatever sickness, madness, or hysteria had come over this stranger to their territory.
It seemingly led him off to a ruinous square, the fountain empty and crumbling and overgrown with dead lichen. But the oppressive atmosphere thinned as he walked, whereupon he doubled back toward the Bull & Brazen. Dezeric then investigated another direction, behind the tavern, but nearly touched the city wall, and again could feel that he had been driven astray. Was this an aspect of the creature's sorcery? The very same adaptation by which it had eluded the land's cleansing for all this time? The hunter looked into the orangey glow of the windows, then up at the tavern's sign, depicting a horned beast and a human pugilist, both in bombasted trousers, each throwing punches at the other. He did not imagine that a vampire would hide where the locals had lit so many candles and ovens and braziers. The flames were one of its few banes, capable of marring its hideous form with permanent and agonizing damage. Some subspecies even reacted to fire as to the sun itself; doubly cursed were they against the purifying light. But it was near; near enough, in fact, for that to seem the only likelihood, until a bundle of black rags moved in Dezeric's peripherals.
He had thought it a swimming-headed drunkard at first, or even a corpse, that bony framework propped up against the side wall. But at its first twitch he did not even need to see its fangs or the supposed green-glow of its glare to know. Too pale to be human, too thin to be half-orc, and too—
aromatic—to be any breed of elf, even those who delved deep in sulfurous caverns and fungal forests. It could be nothing else. The scent of putrefaction was everywhere in the Seeds, diluted to a gentle perfume on the circling winds; but here it clung to this animal, surrounded it. It raped the senses and sent Dezeric heaving to shove his nose into the crook of his elbow, while also drawing his sword. It was no Pthaalma, if the legends were true, but small runic shapes had been cut out of the flats of the blade, then inlaid again in silver. The writing shone black with age and tarnish, standing out against the dull snow-grey of the pitted steel.
"Stand and die with dignity, monster," said the slayer through his cloak, his eyes watering, "or flee, and die in disgrace. It makes no difference to me."
The eyes were not catching the light at the right angle, or the right intensity, to give off that supposed green glint. Thus, Dezeric could only see the vampire's features in their outlines: a narrow chin supporting a long, yearning mouth; a hooked nose with wide, flappy nostrils. A hood concealed its ears but its hair hung in greasy coils. Its lips broke as it moved to speak, revealing incisors as long as fork prongs and as yellow as fried pork fat.
"Monthter?" it lisped, flicking a black tongue through the gap between those knobby teeth. "Do you greet everyone like that? And what have I done to you and yourth, to detherve that epithet, '
monthter'?"
"You and your race have sown countless lamentations upon this land. Orphans—widows—fathers bereaved of their sons," the hunter replied. "You have withered crops and poisoned rivers. You have spread plague and terror. You have gamed with human lives in pursuit of vampiric ideals."
"I did all that?" the creature cooed, looking terribly sorry.
"Stand, wretch. Stand and face silver judgment."
"'Wretch' now! And didn't you thay I could choothe?"
Dezeric would not be mocked. "
Stand!" he snapped, the rage flung from his lips in a delicate spray.
After, he heard what he could swear was the vampire's sigh, like the gases belched from the stomachs of the freshly dead as their bowels loosened and their insides jellified. It stood with a similar croak; was it struggling to move? Perhaps it had not fed in some time. Dezeric could not bring himself to pity something so ghastly, however.
"So you carry a blade as well," he said, nodding to the black shape at the vampire's waist, curved and wicked. "I could fell you in a proper duel, if you would prefer that over a hunt."
Another sigh. "Don't you think you're enjoying thith a bit too much?" said the vampire. "No, let'th play. I've not had a good hunt in a while."
"With pleasure," Dezeric said, simultaneous to his surprise attack. For a human his step was quick, his lunge deep. But the blade made no purchase as the monster began to blur, and shift. It seemed to draw its sword too, and even swing at its foe, though the weapon dematerialized before the blow landed. A ghostly
image of a sickle-sword hit Dezeric's side, where it broke and scattered like a smoke ring. "Hah!" guffawed the hunter, feeling no worse for taking the blow than if he had parried it. In fact, behind his mail shirt and his thick woolen robe, his flank scarcely tingled.
He had to expect as much from such a cowardly race. At first sign of peril they scurried and skittered into their dark corners even in the company of their detestable packs—their "families"—never mind a lone specimen like this one. Dezeric threw open his cloak with a flourish, and reached for one of the glass flasks at his hip. The creature was fully transmuted now into a cloud of mist, silvery-pale, but what would it do, he wondered, when the very air was hostile to its new form? With a swing of his arm he sent the vial flying and then falling in a cacophony of shattered glass as it sundered against the tavern's stone wall. Forth spilled its contents, which stuck to the wall, and trickled down to its base, and sprayed out into the air. The liquid soon started reacting to the atmosphere, crackling with an arcane vitality, almost a life of its own. Sparks took to flames, which shifted from lazy, listless reds to a sharp, baneful yellow-white as they grew hotter, hotter, devouring more and more essence from the nearby air. Finally, the flames fanned out and flapped, mimicking the very phoenix of whose feathers the potion had first been distilled.
But Dezeric was not watching this spectacle. He watched the mist as it attempted to diffuse toward the other end of the alley, the cold end, the dark end, but was snared in flames which were too quick, lashing it and licking at its heel, as one could imagine the mist having a heel while it was in full retreat. Indeed, Dezeric watched as more and more of the mist was kissed with light and heat, until, unable to bear it, the vampire was forced to disperse, and melt down the walls.
The slayer shook the sweat from his brow, and grimaced a triumphant grimace. He had not killed it yet—not until he watched it die with his own eyes—but the pain he had inflicted, the wounds, had to be giving his quarry some serious contemplation and regrets. Moreover, it could not have gone far with such injuries; Dezeric had hoped the fire might force the thing back into its corporeal form, but it mattered not if the final staking and beheading happened that night or the next, in this district or that one. He had already won. It was just a matter of following the stench to the site of Final Death, a site of the vampire's choosing.
He was still chuckling, even as the magic fizzled out and its smoke wisped away toward the moon. "Come for me whenever you like, you parasite," said the hunter. "Come and get your revenge. I'll be ready. Do you hear me out there, you gust of stinking breeze? Come as a wolf, a bat, or whatever you wish. I'll be ready."
There were beggars leering. Dezeric sheathed his sword, and slit a purse full of pennies as he made his way west, back toward the civilized side of town. The coppers spinning across the ground helped most of them to forget what they had just seen.
The hunter himself, however, was slower to forget. In fact, he could not help but feel like that oppressive presence was following him; like it hadn't let up ever since he stepped foot near the Bull & Brazen tavern ...
Fish of Oblivion,
Izurich,
CyclingTortoise,
Zygfryt,
dianthuspetals,
sassy1085,
deegee,
Ti,
DELETED35894,
Kuro
