"Ah yes. Quite the polymath, aren't you?" This said in conversational tones as she sets the crossbow on a near to hand headstone (with unspoken apologies to Our Sweet Mother Louise Lynne Murdoch, 1751 - 1805) and hauls Bradshaw over onto his back. As if there isn't presently some kind of evil monster a measly few yards away flexing and bending at the bonds Ellis has placed upon it.
When that binding breaks, the two of them will be in all kinds of trouble if they aren't ready for it. How long do they have? A minute? Seconds?
Best to sort through the dead man's pockets quickly then.
"He'll have some kind of object of power on him. Cross your fingers that Mr Bradshaw was the type to inscribe its word of power on it." Or-- a pause. She checks the palms of the dead man's hands. No, she thought not. But still, best to check. One never knows when they'll find a telling ink smudge.
"Otherwise, we'll have to destroy it." Which would make no one happy, least of all the Guild. "Oh, where did you keep it, you--"
Fitcher opens a wallet, searches its billfold, and then tosses it aside with a frustrated sound.
There's something to be said about having a partner so casual about handling a corpse. Ellis will have to save the compliment for later. He's thinking about the bit of forked twig in his pocket, alongside the little strip of metal. It's one or the other. Stronger bindings for the monster bent on killing them, or ten minutes to find the object Fitcher is talking about. Ellis leans back slightly, turns to look fully at the creature. It's panting. He's running out of time to make this decision.
"I can find it."
Maybe.
"But you'll be on your own for a few minutes until I do."
Assuming it took Ellis out of this graveyard. Surely it can't be far. Bradshaw would have needed it. He hears a cracking noise behind him, a slowly-rising growl.
If there's an assessment to be made of Ellis' capabilities, she must have done them at some earlier hour - in the carriage, at some point on the long road here to this gentle country quarter said to be ravaged by some dark and nameless thing; or earlier still, in the palatial sitting room of the Guild's clubhouse as she'd folded down the top half of the evening paper as smiled at him from where had she sat position so near the fire. For instantly she says, "Do it," and abandons Bradshaw's corpse in favor of the crossbow.
Thank you but she'll have that back now, Our Sweet Mother Louise Lynne Murdoch, 1751 - 1805.
Then she's off once more, swinging over the low wall with a flap of coat tails and a flash of wire already being drawn from its reel on her belt.
Ellis hauls himself quickly over the wall as Fitcher leaps back towards the creature. The spell is dwindling. Ellis can feel it stretching thing, flinches at the moment when it snaps and the ensuing roar. His fingers twitch towards the bit of iron, but he brings out the twig.
Unnecessary. It's all unnecessary, but it makes Ellis feel less indebted. A little buffer against the overwhelming flow of radiant power. He closes his fingers around the twig, looks down at the corpse where Bradshaw had fallen.
"Alright, let's have it," Ellis says, lifting his hand to his lips and blowing through the loose fist he'd made. A dusting of shimmering light flows forth, hovers and expands outwards in a circle. It's a dicey gamble. Ellis is hoping against hope that what they know is enough, and it—
It is. He feels the tug like a serrated hook in his gut. He takes off running back the way they came, towards the carriage. Just don't die, Fitcher. He'll be right back.
When the moment comes, she's ready. The inhuman, gargling shriek pierces the night like the voice of a dying thing - only it isn't. Dying. Not yet. It's just angry as it bursts free of its bounds, made all the more so as it's struck by yet another flaming bolt in its horrible roiling face.
"Come this way, sweet thing! Let me shoot that other ugly eye out."
And either the creature is intelligent enough to be infuriated, or its basic instinct is so plain that it can't help itself. It dives after her, all jagged edges and fetid stench. Run now, say her skin and bones. Instead, she sets and fires a second white fletched arrow. This one flies poorly thanks to its wire tether, but the range is so short that it's impossible to miss her target. In the moment the beast recoils, Fitcher does take off, the hiss of the wire unraveling at her side.
As long as she's shouting, she's alive. That's something, isn't it?
Ellis tells himself he isn't actually worried for her. She's going to be fine, one way or another. Or she will be, if he can just—
The magic ripples across the ground and pings off something bright and mostly obscured by overgrown foliage. Ellis dives after it, raking his fingers through the grass. Something slices his finger (glass?) but he comes up with a large flat gold coin.
"I have it!"
Whatever, he can shout that. The issue now is the lack of light. Ellis shoulders his mace anyway, begins running back as he holds the coin up, trying to read the word carved into it.
"Kill it if you can!"
Because Ellis's patience is dwindling, and delaying to parse this word isn't worth anyone's life.
If she hears him, she ignores him - too busy ducking and dodging in an attempt to avoid the thrashing of the creature as it twists after her. The horrible nearness of it looms large. She leaps in tandem with one of its blinded swings, and just misses the wretched curled talons gutting her lengthwise. But the swing of the swipe catches her, something heavy and feathered clipping hard enough to dash her to the loamy earth with a blunt cry.
The summoned horror blunders after the sound. Blood or tar or something too terrible to put a name to pours of of its great black shape as it pounces.
Snap! goes the spring in the wire spool under the wrench of her hand. The tethered bolt rips free of the monster's ruined face and flies as if enchanted back to Fitcher's waiting hand. She stabs up at it from where she's fallen prone, driving the blessed iron into whatever sloughing portion of the half formed creature she can reach.
There had been a moment when Ellis had considered that they might manage a capture after all. But Ellis would have needed time to puzzle out how to wrench mastery of this beast into his own hands, and with Fitcher on the ground—
They'll have to be disappointing, one way or another. If it's gone, at least they can find some way to drag it back if
"Fuck," Ellis hisses under his breath. He vaults over the wall, blood-smeared coin in hand. If this doesn't work, he'd at least like to be within range to keep it from biting Fitcher's head off.
There's magic in the coin. Ellis can feel it pulsing like a heartbeat as he focuses all his energy on the coin. He speaks three words and feels a snapping. The pulse comes apart in his hands, snaps and shatters. Ellis staggers, still propelled forward to where Fitcher is lying on the ground.
She strikes again and again with the bolt, one arm covering her face in desperation. In her mind, as if summoned, appears the body of young Jenny Brooks whose aunt had been the to first write the Guild regarding the strange and unnatural happenings here in Post Market Green. There is something terrible about the wet, rotted smell of the creature as it tears at her that reminds her of that dead girl, her talon mutilated and exsanguinated body strangely unable to fill her pin neat Sunday dress as she had lain quietly in her family's sitting room surrounded by garlands of wild spring flowers and ashen faced relations.
Something stinking and horribly warm pours out of the beast. It smells like metal and Fitcher is certain it is blood, she just can't say to whom it belongs. Belonged.
And then the great black shape ratchets backward. With a grotesque scream, it accordions unnaturally back on itself, collapsing into stranger and stranger angles of black feathers and black bones until it is nothing more than a shapeless thing pin-cushioned by a series of crossbow bolts. With a final pop of air filling emptied space, it disappears entirely. The bolts, blackened with gore, fall from where they'd been suspended and scatter like loose twigs on the ground about her.
Fitcher lies very still. She's curled into a tight ball, the white fletched bolt clenched in her fist. In the dark, with her mottled coat and the terrible splatter of blood in every direction, it would be entirely impossible to say much of anything about her condition if it weren't for the fact that - given a moment of silence -, she comes uncurled to lay on her back in the beaten grass. She tosses away the blessed bolt. As Ellis swims into view:
Everything smells of blood and rot. Ellis feels an incredible sense of dread begin to permeate the momentary thrill of success. His hand tightens around the coin as he tumbles to his knees by her side. Ellis has the presence of mind to put it into his pocket; he can turn it over when they return to the Guild.
"Depends," Ellis tells her. "You'll have to tell me if you're bleeding out or not before I decide how well we are."
There are better clerics than Ellis. But Ellis is the person who's here, and he would prefer it if Fitcher didn't die on his watch. He'd do what he must to prevent that.
Maybe it's all the dark about them, how her eye has labored so hard in the last minutes to pick shadow from night, but he seems very pale above her. Lying there, Fitcher takes account of herself by slow degrees. For a long moment, she has no answer for him.
Then she decides: "Cuts and scrapes, I'll give you. But I don't believe the majority of this is mine, no." That said, she makes no effort to sit up. Instead, Fitcher tips her face so she might give him a thorough once over.
"Good Lord. We'll have to put a sheet down inside the carriage, else the league will press us for the cost of reupholstering."
Reassured, Ellis spills from his knees into a sitting position on the grass beside her as he exhales a hard breath. Dread subsides. He touches her shoulder in quiet, shared congratulations.
"It seemed like a good move at the time."
Which is as far as he'd ever planned in the midst of a fight. Get in close, hit as hard as possible, fight dirty if you have to. As it stand now, the latter had turned out very literal. He pats his palm lightly over the tacky mess of his shirt and shakes his head.
"Do you think we'll need to haul Bradshaw back?"
Unspoken: will Ellis need to heave his body onto the luggage rack of the carriage?
"And set a precedent for collecting the corpse of every third rate spell caster we stumble over? Don't be absurd. The value of this evening is in that bound spirit, not in Mr Bradshaw."
This said from lying still in the long, wet grass. At length, Fitcher begins to wipe her hands clean on the overgrown green about her. Speaking as if she is not splattered with every manner of viscera, nor splayed on the ground, nor battered by the buffeting of the freshly dismissed summons: "What was it? Our object of power."
Ellis sighs. No, no value in the corpse. Some muted urge demands that Ellis try to give Mr. Bradshaw some kind of dignity in death, but ignoring it, he digs the coin out of his pocket to hold it up for her to see.
"A coin."
Blood-smeared. Ellis hasn't tried to clean it. His palm is crusted over already, and he'll deal with the slash in the carriage.
"Not very imaginative, but at least it's easily portable."
And they can give it to Mr. Roscoe to examine. Ellis has a spell he could try, but he'd rather leave off. They've done enough.
"Do you want some whiskey?" Ellis asks her abruptly, as if just remembering that they might want to celebrate being alive or take the edge off nearly dying.
"Oh desperately," she says in the rapturous tones of, 'My dear Mr Ginsberg, you really do say the nicest things.'
Propping herself up on one elbow, Fitcher pauses to examine-- ah yes. She pokes her fingers through the lapel of her mottled coat from the inside, wiggling them through the slash. "Now there's something which will need some stitching." The coat, not her skin. The layers beneath have absorbed the mutilating slash very nicely indeed.
"I can stitch it, if you haven't the inclination," Ellis tells her, trading the offer as he extends a small, silver flask. Tarnished, round, toted in his pocket for who knows how many years. The ridges on it's stopper have been worn smooth. "I'm a fair hand at repairs."
It's what comes of doing your own. He supposes she's taught herself that skill as well. Whatever she'd been doing before the guild, it'd likely required a fair amount of tailoring if it was anything like the scrapes Ellis had found himself in.
"Your offer and resourcefulness are both appreciated," she says, accepting the flask and removing the stopper. She takes a fortifying swig from it, pauses, then downs another before passing it back.
"But I'm afraid I must decline. I've a seamstress in Stryevaek who would gut me more surely than our dearly departed demon if I went anywhere else with my repairs. I couldn't bear to lose her over professional discourtesy."
In response, Ellis makes a noise somewhere between impressed and amused. Subtext: How fancy.
But really, what must it be like to return to places regularly? What must it be like to have such connections? Though maybe the real question is what kind of seamstress tends to a monster hunter's dress?
"Maybe you'll have to introduce me," Ellis says, looking down at his front before taking a swig from his flask. "I'm going to need some tailoring done after I burn this lot."
One particular perk of joining this guild: having the space to expand his wardrobe, just slightly.
"I'll consider it. You will certainly need someone."
She is loathe to sit fully upright just yet - there is an ache in her side that seems like it will become deeply unpleasant when she does -, and so she neglects to do so for a few moments more. The night is cool, the view down into the meandering valley to the little winking lights of the village is pleasant enough and, with the exception of escaping the fetid smell, there is no reason at all to be in a hurry.
"It occurs to me that I neglected to ask when first we set out, Mr Ginsberg. What has brought you to our strange little coterie?"
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
When that binding breaks, the two of them will be in all kinds of trouble if they aren't ready for it. How long do they have? A minute? Seconds?
Best to sort through the dead man's pockets quickly then.
"He'll have some kind of object of power on him. Cross your fingers that Mr Bradshaw was the type to inscribe its word of power on it." Or-- a pause. She checks the palms of the dead man's hands. No, she thought not. But still, best to check. One never knows when they'll find a telling ink smudge.
"Otherwise, we'll have to destroy it." Which would make no one happy, least of all the Guild. "Oh, where did you keep it, you--"
Fitcher opens a wallet, searches its billfold, and then tosses it aside with a frustrated sound.
no subject
"I can find it."
Maybe.
"But you'll be on your own for a few minutes until I do."
Assuming it took Ellis out of this graveyard. Surely it can't be far. Bradshaw would have needed it. He hears a cracking noise behind him, a slowly-rising growl.
"Quick decision, Fitcher."
no subject
Thank you but she'll have that back now, Our Sweet Mother Louise Lynne Murdoch, 1751 - 1805.
Then she's off once more, swinging over the low wall with a flap of coat tails and a flash of wire already being drawn from its reel on her belt.
no subject
Ellis hauls himself quickly over the wall as Fitcher leaps back towards the creature. The spell is dwindling. Ellis can feel it stretching thing, flinches at the moment when it snaps and the ensuing roar. His fingers twitch towards the bit of iron, but he brings out the twig.
Unnecessary. It's all unnecessary, but it makes Ellis feel less indebted. A little buffer against the overwhelming flow of radiant power. He closes his fingers around the twig, looks down at the corpse where Bradshaw had fallen.
"Alright, let's have it," Ellis says, lifting his hand to his lips and blowing through the loose fist he'd made. A dusting of shimmering light flows forth, hovers and expands outwards in a circle. It's a dicey gamble. Ellis is hoping against hope that what they know is enough, and it—
It is. He feels the tug like a serrated hook in his gut. He takes off running back the way they came, towards the carriage. Just don't die, Fitcher. He'll be right back.
no subject
"Come this way, sweet thing! Let me shoot that other ugly eye out."
And either the creature is intelligent enough to be infuriated, or its basic instinct is so plain that it can't help itself. It dives after her, all jagged edges and fetid stench. Run now, say her skin and bones. Instead, she sets and fires a second white fletched arrow. This one flies poorly thanks to its wire tether, but the range is so short that it's impossible to miss her target. In the moment the beast recoils, Fitcher does take off, the hiss of the wire unraveling at her side.
no subject
Ellis tells himself he isn't actually worried for her. She's going to be fine, one way or another. Or she will be, if he can just—
The magic ripples across the ground and pings off something bright and mostly obscured by overgrown foliage. Ellis dives after it, raking his fingers through the grass. Something slices his finger (glass?) but he comes up with a large flat gold coin.
"I have it!"
Whatever, he can shout that. The issue now is the lack of light. Ellis shoulders his mace anyway, begins running back as he holds the coin up, trying to read the word carved into it.
"Kill it if you can!"
Because Ellis's patience is dwindling, and delaying to parse this word isn't worth anyone's life.
no subject
The summoned horror blunders after the sound. Blood or tar or something too terrible to put a name to pours of of its great black shape as it pounces.
Snap! goes the spring in the wire spool under the wrench of her hand. The tethered bolt rips free of the monster's ruined face and flies as if enchanted back to Fitcher's waiting hand. She stabs up at it from where she's fallen prone, driving the blessed iron into whatever sloughing portion of the half formed creature she can reach.
"Dismiss it, Mr Ginsberg!"
no subject
They'll have to be disappointing, one way or another. If it's gone, at least they can find some way to drag it back if
"Fuck," Ellis hisses under his breath. He vaults over the wall, blood-smeared coin in hand. If this doesn't work, he'd at least like to be within range to keep it from biting Fitcher's head off.
There's magic in the coin. Ellis can feel it pulsing like a heartbeat as he focuses all his energy on the coin. He speaks three words and feels a snapping. The pulse comes apart in his hands, snaps and shatters. Ellis staggers, still propelled forward to where Fitcher is lying on the ground.
no subject
Something stinking and horribly warm pours out of the beast. It smells like metal and Fitcher is certain it is blood, she just can't say to whom it belongs. Belonged.
And then the great black shape ratchets backward. With a grotesque scream, it accordions unnaturally back on itself, collapsing into stranger and stranger angles of black feathers and black bones until it is nothing more than a shapeless thing pin-cushioned by a series of crossbow bolts. With a final pop of air filling emptied space, it disappears entirely. The bolts, blackened with gore, fall from where they'd been suspended and scatter like loose twigs on the ground about her.
Fitcher lies very still. She's curled into a tight ball, the white fletched bolt clenched in her fist. In the dark, with her mottled coat and the terrible splatter of blood in every direction, it would be entirely impossible to say much of anything about her condition if it weren't for the fact that - given a moment of silence -, she comes uncurled to lay on her back in the beaten grass. She tosses away the blessed bolt. As Ellis swims into view:
"All well, Mr Ginsberg?"
no subject
"Depends," Ellis tells her. "You'll have to tell me if you're bleeding out or not before I decide how well we are."
There are better clerics than Ellis. But Ellis is the person who's here, and he would prefer it if Fitcher didn't die on his watch. He'd do what he must to prevent that.
no subject
Then she decides: "Cuts and scrapes, I'll give you. But I don't believe the majority of this is mine, no." That said, she makes no effort to sit up. Instead, Fitcher tips her face so she might give him a thorough once over.
"Good Lord. We'll have to put a sheet down inside the carriage, else the league will press us for the cost of reupholstering."
slides a tag over to you on the break
"It seemed like a good move at the time."
Which is as far as he'd ever planned in the midst of a fight. Get in close, hit as hard as possible, fight dirty if you have to. As it stand now, the latter had turned out very literal. He pats his palm lightly over the tacky mess of his shirt and shakes his head.
"Do you think we'll need to haul Bradshaw back?"
Unspoken: will Ellis need to heave his body onto the luggage rack of the carriage?
no subject
This said from lying still in the long, wet grass. At length, Fitcher begins to wipe her hands clean on the overgrown green about her. Speaking as if she is not splattered with every manner of viscera, nor splayed on the ground, nor battered by the buffeting of the freshly dismissed summons: "What was it? Our object of power."
no subject
"A coin."
Blood-smeared. Ellis hasn't tried to clean it. His palm is crusted over already, and he'll deal with the slash in the carriage.
"Not very imaginative, but at least it's easily portable."
And they can give it to Mr. Roscoe to examine. Ellis has a spell he could try, but he'd rather leave off. They've done enough.
"Do you want some whiskey?" Ellis asks her abruptly, as if just remembering that they might want to celebrate being alive or take the edge off nearly dying.
no subject
Propping herself up on one elbow, Fitcher pauses to examine-- ah yes. She pokes her fingers through the lapel of her mottled coat from the inside, wiggling them through the slash. "Now there's something which will need some stitching." The coat, not her skin. The layers beneath have absorbed the mutilating slash very nicely indeed.
no subject
It's what comes of doing your own. He supposes she's taught herself that skill as well. Whatever she'd been doing before the guild, it'd likely required a fair amount of tailoring if it was anything like the scrapes Ellis had found himself in.
no subject
"But I'm afraid I must decline. I've a seamstress in Stryevaek who would gut me more surely than our dearly departed demon if I went anywhere else with my repairs. I couldn't bear to lose her over professional discourtesy."
no subject
But really, what must it be like to return to places regularly? What must it be like to have such connections? Though maybe the real question is what kind of seamstress tends to a monster hunter's dress?
"Maybe you'll have to introduce me," Ellis says, looking down at his front before taking a swig from his flask. "I'm going to need some tailoring done after I burn this lot."
One particular perk of joining this guild: having the space to expand his wardrobe, just slightly.
no subject
She is loathe to sit fully upright just yet - there is an ache in her side that seems like it will become deeply unpleasant when she does -, and so she neglects to do so for a few moments more. The night is cool, the view down into the meandering valley to the little winking lights of the village is pleasant enough and, with the exception of escaping the fetid smell, there is no reason at all to be in a hurry.
"It occurs to me that I neglected to ask when first we set out, Mr Ginsberg. What has brought you to our strange little coterie?"