Cupper's Noo

As usual, the skies were gray and it was raining softly. Apega was on lookout duty in Lower Lanovul, staring wearily out the windows of an upstairs corner room whose house's occupants owed money to the Hoolheith family. She was trying to stay warm in the chilly chamber (the wind kept blowing the misty rain in through the two unshuttered windows) without making any noise. All while keeping watch over the streets below. She'd wrapped a ratty, slightly moldy old quilt around her shoulders, and her legs ached a little from doing leg exercises, in various successful but short-lived attempts to warm herself up.

The small corner room, overlooking two busy streets, had smelled dusty and mildewy when Apega had first shown up here. Now it stank of Apega. More specifically, it stank of her unwashed body and clothing, dried blood (not hers) and cheap wine. And piss. And shit. The last two were currently a fairly minor note to her stink, but they were there.

Her blonde hair had very obvious clumpy streaks of dry crap in it. Dense flecks of feces had turned her pale eyebrows a patchy brown. And her pale skin under her stained clothing was either densely flecked or still crusty with dry crap. She was deeply conflicted about how filthy she now was. A couple times, she'd considered going to wash herself in the river. Except, a part of her was terrified that she might throw herself in once she got there. Meanwhile, there were other parts of her that

liked

being disgusting like this. Even if she washed, people would still remember all about what kind of sick deviant she was. So she just stayed filthy, openly flaunting her filth. A bit like Stench had.

Before she'd died.

So far, Apega had more or less gotten away with it. Just another confirmation that Hethaltie wasn't the benevolent God that the Shrine insisted He was.

After her little... incident of brutal revenge, in which the man who'd thought it was so funny to tell everyone about how she lusted after Stench had wound up forced to cut his own tongue off (she wasn't so much guilty about what she'd done, as she was disturbed by how little she'd actually felt as she'd done all that), she'd expected disaster to follow. She hadn't really cared. Some fighting amongst their Hands was tolerated by the Hoolheiths, but certainly nothing that extreme. She had been certain that someone would piece together that she was the one that assaulted her fellow Hand, and she would be punished for it. So be it. She hadn't exactly been trying to cover her tracks. What was the point? She deserved it.

But then someone from the Hands, a buddy of that mute fucker, stupidly concluded that it must have been the Glass gang who had attacked his friend. Since the mute fucker was illiterate, he couldn't exactly given a clear account of what had happened to him afterwards. He'd been given a shard of broken glass to mutilate himself with. It had just been the cheapest sharp thing Apega could find in a hurry! She hadn't even considered that someone in the Hands might decide it was 'proof' that their rival gang was the culprit!

His buddy had decided to get revenge on the Glass gang, had snuck into Upper Lanovul along with a few equally idiotic companions (there were so many 'secret' passages under the town walls that it was almost comical) and the lot of them had burnt down a warehouse the Glass gang used for their smuggled booze, killing like three Glassholes in the process. Since, to the Glass gang,

that

had been an unprovoked attack, they had retaliated in kind. But their attempted retaliatory strike on the 'secret' brewery over by Hoolheith Place had failed miserably. Apega had been one of the reasons it had.

In the aftermath of that bloodbath, the boss of the Hoolheiths had figured himself a tactical genius, and had decided that the Hands, with their superior strength of numbers (despite how the Glass gang was much better-equipped), couldn't help but win a conflict against their rival, and that this was the Hoolheith's chance to finally seize control over all of Lanovale's remaining underworld assets. So he'd arranged some more raids, and had used those raids as a misdirection so that a strike force could assassinate the leader of the Glass gang. Apega was among the fighters in said assassination attempt. It had not been a quiet assassination. Everyone in that fancy townhouse had wound up slaughtered along with the target, and then they'd burnt the place into a hollow stone shell afterwards.

She'd killed... seven people?- during that attack. All she remembered of that night was a bloody blur, save for the various bits that stuck around afterwards to haunt her.

She remembered standing in a hallway. She and two other Hands had wound up cornering five of the Glass fuckers. (They weren't gang members specifically;

officially

they were servants of the rich fuck the Hands had come to assassinate, who was not just a gangster but also had a high-ranking position in the Lanovale Glassblower's Guild.)

The only way for those five Glassholes to get out of the burning building had been through the three Hands, and they'd figured the short skinny girl was the weakest link out of the three. And then she'd wound up doing most of the work in that fight.

She vividly remembered a young woman who'd shot at her with a crossbow in the confined space of the hallway. The bolt had just barely grazed Apega's cheek. She remembered how pretty that girl had been. Remembered her lovely face turning ugly from agony and horror, as blood and guts had spilled out onto the floor, because Apega had just disemboweled her. She remembered feeling

triumph

.

The Hands had stolen lots of booze, thanks to their various raids on the Glass gang. Apega had

distinguished

herself, so she got given a few bottles of cheap wine. She had gone off by herself, had drank until she was numb, and then she'd smoked a bunch of the witch-hemp that Stench had given her.

Then she'd messed herself on purpose. She'd gotten her pussy all shitty. She had fucked herself to orgasm after orgasm as she smeared the whole turd all over herself, her numb horror and self-loathing forgotten about as she basked in a haze of weed and how good it felt to just give into her newfound filthy depravity. She smeared shit onto her face on purpose. Got some of it in her hair. She'd eventually washed her pussy after she'd sobered up, but nothing else. Everyone already knew she was a filthy degenerate.

She

knew she was a monster wearing human flesh. Why even bother hiding what she was?

Most of the Hands were now sufficiently scared of her that no one was willing to call her out for any of that. At least, not to her face. She'd take it. The Hoolheiths seemed willing to ignore her descent into sick depravity, so long as she continued to be useful.

After that assassination's rousing success, Apega had been 'rewarded' with this relatively cushy job, on lookout duty down in Lower Lanovul. She was one of a few dozen Hands lurking around town. Not lying in wait for anything specifically, but they had a list of things to watch out for, and a shorter list of

matters

to address. (Apega, as one of the small number of street-level Hands who was literate, had been given an actual list.) She was watching out for Glass gang movements, or the Lanovins trying to buffoonishly meddle. There were a couple traitors/deserters who were dead men/women if they ever showed their faces again. That sort of thing.

There was one particular traitor to the Hands that her bosses suspected was hiding somewhere in the countryside. Apega didn't know exactly what that traitor had done, but it was telling that the Hoolheiths expected one of the Lanovins' intelligence operatives to go looking for him. Her bosses were better informed about who these operatives were than the Lanovins would have liked.

So far, no sign of any known operatives making a move, and the single most interesting thing Apega had seen happen today was some freshly homeless little kid try to pickpocket someone. (He'd had no idea what he was doing, his would-be mark had practically beaten him to a pulp, but at least he'd survived the beating to slink away afterwards. Apega remembered being that inept once.)

All this time lurking up here had given her too much time to think. Most of her thoughts felt like whatever the mental equivalent of self-flagellation was. There were parts of her soul that felt like they were spitting acid on other parts, and so the whole thing was numb as it withered away.

One of the better ways of banishing the dark thoughts was to find some happy ones.

She shoved her self-loathing aside as she reached down into her knickers, through her lousy blonde pubic hair, and began to stroke at her clit. Her knickers were damp from when she'd pissed herself earlier. The odor from her unwashed pussy wafted out of her pants, up to her nose, and she liked the smell. She sniffed her smelly fingers. Took in the stench that wafted off her unclean flesh.

It was so wrong to enjoy this. But it was all she had to enjoy. She had a terrible certainty that even this was probably going to get taken from her soon enough, so she ought to enjoy it while she could.

She kept stroking herself, breathed in her smell, a revolting yet strangely appealing (to her) reek of unwashed body odor that combined interestingly with shit. She ran a hand over her torso as she rubbed herself. She'd smeared herself most thickly with crap all over her chest (she barely had anything by way of breasts). It felt oddly prickly on her skin. As sensations went, it actually wasn't the most pleasant, but it was an intensely tactile reminder of how the shit she'd smeared all over herself was still on her skin days later, and that just made her feel so

dirty.

The part of her that

loved

that just seemed like it was growing stronger day by day. She was letting it.

She was nearly to orgasm when a little ball of orange light shot into the sky, a few streets over from her, indicating that one of the other Hands on lookout was requesting immediate backup.

Oh come on!

Growling with frustration, she pulled her hand out of her pants and wiped her slimy fingers off on her own dirty skin. A little awkwardly, given how her pussy was engorged and sensitive and Gods damn it she'd been

so

fucking close, she dropped the moldy quilt to the floor, laced up her pants, grabbed her stuff, and jumped out the window. She grabbed on a gutter pipe and slid down it, landing lightly on the dirty street below.

After jumping fences and squeezing through narrow gaps, she joined up with the Hand who had launched the lantern-ball, less than a minute after seeing it. Four additional Hands arrived soon after. Apega noted with some satisfaction that she'd been the first to arrive, and was barely short of breath while others were flagging. She also noted that the other Hands shied away from her now that she was here. Possibly because she stank even worse now that she'd worked up a sweat. Also possibly because everyone had decided she was some kind of psycho.

It was good that they'd decided that. She was one, after all.

"That way" said Teeja, pointing out of town. She was serf-born, and Apega didn't know her story, but could guess. Her dirty face (and the rest of her, supposedly) was speckled with odd random symbols, paler than the rest of her Lanofolk-brown skin, that Apega swore looked a little different each time they met, even though she claimed they were just tattoos done in white ink. "Spy bitch. On horseback. She had a

friend

." She snorted with derision. "Get this! It was that fuckin' skull guy! They was in a hurry."

"After them" commanded their leader, a gawky young man who was a junior member of the Hoolheith family. Which was easy to tell, because he was the tallest of the lot of them, had well-made clothes that actually fit him which were only a little bit worn and grubby, and he had that whole 'consistently ate three meals a day' look.

The six Hands started running through Outer Lower. They weren't confined to roads, and all of them were good at navigating the various obstacles in and around town, though Apega was among the best of them, and she had to slow down so that the slower ones would catch up. A few times, Apega caught a glimpse of the pair that they were pursuing. Hard to fucking miss them, since they were on horseback, but they were practically screaming 'look at me!' on top of that! It wasn't just that swordsman in his ridiculous-looking armour up on top of his dapple gray horse; the spy bitch was riding a piebald horse, and was wearing a black leather longcoat and a broad-brimmed black hat that practically screamed 'I'm trying to look all sneaky and mysterious!'

Once the two riders made their way out of town, the half-dozen Hands started to fall behind, but maintaining sight of the pair got even easier now that they were out in the fields. Neither of the pair seemed to realize they were being pursued.

('Gianne'

absolutely

knew the Hands were after them and intent on their murder. Zake was starting to come to the conclusion that whatever was about to happen, it was way more than he had agreed to.)

That swordsman in the skeleton armour was the talk of half of Lanovul at the moment. Supposedly, he was named 'Muurg the Unrepentant'; and the most common rumour was that Stench had personally offended the Wandering Duke in some fashion and his man was here to find her and repay that debt. Hardly anyone actually believed that rumour to be the truth though (Stench ought to be dead. If she wasn't, then she'd gotten swept downriver. 'Muurg' hadn't left Upper Lanovul since the Wandering Duke departed), so the current pastime seemed to be conjecture about who he really was, and what he was

really

doing here. Some bored musician had even written a song about the guy offering some rather wild speculation as to what his story might be, which was being sung at least once a night in the Hoolheith-run beer-house. Whoever had written that song, they had a twisted imagination.

Apega hadn't been impressed upon hearing about him, and she was even less impressed now that she'd actually seen the guy. Who the fuck decided to wear a

cape

?

The two riders eventually made their way to a barn, about twenty minutes' ride out into the fields. Apega caught a glimpse of them dismounting. The next she saw of that barn, the horses were tied up outside, and the two were presumably inside looking for their guy.

The group convened behind a dry stone wall. As they crouched in the dirt and caught their breath, their glorious leader laid out his plan. It was simple enough. Even if the barn had a back door, those two would have to come back for their horses. Try to get the skull-guy first, the spy-bitch would go down easy by comparison. They had the element of surprise so long as they stayed hidden.

The six Hands spread out, preparing their weapons. Their leader looked upon those horses with a certain eagerness, probably as he imagined how much money they'd be worth on the black market (not a silver of that money would reach Apega, she had little doubt).

She pulled out a shepherd's sling. She'd made it herself out of rough twine and leather. She quietly filled up several little hollow clay-and-felt lantern-balls from a bottle of oil, and set them in a pouch on her belt that they shared with a flint-and-wick firelighter. Her daggers were freshly sharpened to an edge fine enough to shave with. They were plain, well-made, mismatched in design (one of them was single-edged, the other double-edged), and they were nicked from hard use and occasional abuse.

The moment she saw that armoured idiot, she intended to strike him in the face with a bullet full of burning oil, and then they'd move in to cut him to ribbons while his head was on fire. Easy.

Very obligingly, the armoured idiot emerged straight out the barn door and made his way towards the horses, oblivious to his immanent demise. Apega, obscured behind a dry-stone wall, lit a lantern-ball, slipped it into her sling's leather cradle, positioned herself, and started to spin up her bullet. The 'whoosh' noise ought to draw his attention so he'd look this way. This would be child's play; she had

excellent

aim with this thing, she could-

Her sling abruptly snapped, the lantern-ball shattered against the wall, and burning oil (not very much) suddenly spattered all over Apega. She yelped in surprise.

The swordsman turned and came charging towards straight towards Apega and the two Hands nearest her, moving faster than she would have thought a man wearing that much armour could move.

What was that on his shoulder?

A couple of the Hands had come with short bows. Their arrows had already been nocked, and they drew. And then they both cursed in surprise, then fear, as their bowstrings snapped, one an eye-blink after the other.

And then the dark swordsman leaped over the wall, and was abruptly in the midst of them.

Apega, still spattered with burning oil and trailing a cloud of smoke (her filthy clothes were damp, so the flame wasn't spreading passed the oil-soaked sections. A bit of her hair was on fire too), drew both her daggers and charged towards the guy, screaming. He had a black-painted broadsword in one hand, and he'd drawn a black parrying dagger in his off-hand as soon as he'd vaulted the wall. Apega was the first to charge towards him.

Mid-stride, her clothes became incredibly stiff. Dressed for the cold and damp, she'd been wearing several layers, and her clothing abruptly stopped acting like wool and linen were supposed to act. Abruptly, it was like every fiber was made of stone. The stone cloth still flexed, just not nearly as well as it once had. And the sheer unexpectedness of it made Apega stumble, her foot caught on a clod of grass, and she fell.

Naturally, she happened to land right on top of a good-sized pile of fresh horse crap.

As she was scrambling to her feet, she saw the next Hand who'd reached the swordsman get skewered through the chest by a foot of steel. Another Hand tried to flank him, but the swordsman almost casually parried an attack with his dagger and then followed through to cut the boy's throat open, in a move so practiced that it looked automatic. Then the swordsman casually stepped out of the way of the third attacker, Teeja. He wrenched his sword free of the dead Hand with the same movement, and started to press a fierce attack on that girl. Teeja was a good enough knife-fighter that she didn't die immediately, at least.

Apega scrambled to her feet, and lunged for the swordsman's cape with one hand, a dagger readied in her other. She would yank him off balance, get a good angle so she could stab him through the thin metal, and maybe Teeja would find an opening once he was distracted by a dagger in the ribs. They could still win this!

Her hand found purchase on his cape. And then abruptly lost it. Not because she'd slipped or lost her grip in a mundane sense, but instead because, impossibly, the fabric weave opened up where she'd grabbed, so she found herself with nothing to hold onto. It was almost like the tattered black cape had become immaterial, but in a manner that involved twisting the laws of geometry until they broke.

Up on the swordsman's left shoulder, clinging to the cape, was a human skull sprouting white spider legs. The eye sockets of the skull were wafting some kind of greenish, luminous vapour. (A vapour that, though Apega was far too preoccupied to notice, she wasn't actually seeing with her physical eyes.)

Apega's brief tug on the swordsman's cape had drawn his attention. He was still engaging Teeja (and, judging by the yelp of pain just now, she wasn't winning), but he spun so that he had both of them in his sight. His black and white armour was spattered with blood, both his sword and parrying dagger were dripping crimson.