Even when Marianne had set the task to him, Ellis had wondered: if we're to do this quietly, am I the best choice?
But he doesn't argue. He doesn't argue now, as his quiet murmuring tapers off and he lifts his palm from the symbol he'd drawn in the dirt. They aren't trailing something undead as far as anyone knows, but turning away anything lingering is worth the whisper in the back of his head, the trilling hoot that chills him to the bone as he gets to his feet. Ellis swings his mace back over his shoulder as he reaches for her elbow, whispering for guidance as they move forward.
"I'd say we're off to a promising start."
Malevolent presence notwithstanding.
"We were meant to take it back alive?" Ellis asks, tone light even as he they start downwards at a brisk pace. The hairs on the back of his neck are standing up, but he doesn't flinch. If anything, he speeds up slightly. All the better to get close enough to bury his mace in this creature's face.
"Were we?" Ah yes, now that he mentions it she does remember that little note in the dossier. How far down the page was it? She can hardly recall. Perhaps she'll become distracted and forget that particular directive once more. "Well," she says, letting him guide her by the elbow. "These things happen."
The shriek of the transformed figure pierces the night. It's the hair raising sound of a hundred shears snapping closed, the snip-snap of of something terrible and sharp and unrelentingly dangerous. It strikes a terrorizing chord, the tang of fear jagged in the air about them. Then, from hilltop, the creature takes a deep snarling breath. A moment later it turns, and it's obvious when it looks in their direction. It's staring eyes glint in the darkness, two fine points in a face otherwise lost entirely to shadow.
"Ah," says Fitcher. She levels the hand crossbow and pulls its trigger a second time.
"Fuck," says Ellis, more resigned then apprehensive.
There's something birdlike enough about this creature to be unsettling on a more personal level. Hunched, avian, horrific. It's familiar territory. But in the immediate sense, it's likely about to try to kill one of them.
The ear-rending screech it gives when that crossbow bolt strikes home twists into Ellis' head, rings in his ears, amplifying and echoing well-remembered sounds. He drops his mace, braces his feet and brings his palms together with a crack, following the crossbow bolt with a streak of radiant white light.
"Fire again. Before it fades," Ellis tells her, though Fitcher knows her business, won't need the instruction. He's painting a target for her, caution thrown to the wind as their quarry screams in rage, unfurling to it's full, inconveniently massive size. It's seen them.
At this point, Ellis' priorities are narrowing from "possibly take it alive" to "leave enough of a corpse to bring back samples."
Fire again Fitcher does, a bolt all but springing into her hand to be loaded into the crossbow.
"My, aren't you useful." It's so much easier to strike the beast somewhere tender - the inside of a jointed limb the causes the creature to jerk and recoil - when all its sharp shapes, a shifting mass of feather and tar black sinew, are cut out from the dark about it.
And then she's off, abandoning him and his brilliant beam of light. The strange mottle of her bottle blue coat, hideous in daylight, breaks her figure into a confusion of patches quickly lost to the dark. Have fun with that giant, snarling shadow of a beast descending now through the church yard toward you, Ellis.
But how mad can he really be? She's better from a distance, and Ellis prefers to be as close as he can. All the better to put his mace to work, and forgo the borrow and barter of spell work.
Backpedaling, he grabs for the handle of his mace as the creature descends. There's not time to get a proper grip, but his first swing clips beak or snout, enough to hold it's attention. Enough to keep it angry and focused on him, he's hoping. If it gets back into the air then he'll be set back again. There's blood dripping down onto his face from the wounds Fitcher's created. This close, he can smell the sickly scent of rot and the scent of charred wood. This close, it's harder to avoid the sharp swipe of claws.
"Fitcher! Fitcher!"
It occurs to him suddenly: just where did she take off to? To find a better vantage point or to leave this mess for Ellis to finish?
Which is more or less when something sparks in the darkness from the flank, then comes hurtling out of toward the pair of them. The flaming bolt drives into the fetid, feathered thing. It's punctuated by a shriek, a brief stench of burning, and then the wet tarry substance of the transformed beast swallows the heat entirely. From somewhere in the dark, Fitcher says something distinctly unladylike as the mass of sinew and feather and bone and rot swings to face her.
There's something chilling about that shape in the darkness. For a moment, she's pinned by its stare-- How many shots will it take before it founders? If fire doesn't work, what comes next? A rapid, dreadful, alien and monstrous uncertainty grips her with the stare fixated on her.
The creature leaps toward her through the night. Fitcher scrambles hard up the fog slicked grass toward the church yard's crumbling wall and crooked iron gate.
From behind that creature, heard by no one: Fuckfuckfuckfuck.
It moves too quickly, and covers too much distance. Ellis is briefly livid, choked with frustration as he speeds after it. Even when stood directly beneath that creature, it had been hard to tell exactly what toll their efforts had taken. Ellis' borrowed radiance has begun to fade; there's a moment where he wavers between casting it again and trying a different approach.
He can hear the sound of Fitcher's further retreat, curses under his breath and takes a running leap forward and launches himself at the creature. There is, as always, the moment when Ellis thinks he'll regret getting this close just because of the stink of it, but it's too late for a change of course. Trying to choke this thing with the long handle of his mace might at least keep it on the ground long enough for her to get another shot off. His mouth and nose are filled with the scent of decay. There's something slick clinging to his skin, soaking all down his front.
The walk back to the carriage is going to be miserable.
"Try something else! Another bolt!"
Which are probably Ellis' famous last words before this backfires on him.
She's scrabbling, not quite hand over fist but near enough to it that the idea of drawing another bolt, pausing to set and swing the crossbow about to take aim feels disastrous. Every instinct screams to ignore that, to let Ellis take what he's given so she might reach that wall and jump across it. The momentary safety of that cover would give her plenty of time to be selective.
But it would be a shame to have to haul two corpses back, and she cannot abide by the prospect of having to share the carriage with Ellis' body presuming this one will take up the entirety of the luggage rack. So halfway to cover, Fitcher veers hard to the left. She twists as she goes, another bolt set as she throws herself sideways.
This bolt has no spark. It cuts the air with no fanfare at all. But when it strikes the writhing creature, the beast shudders as if it's hit some barrier. The blood pouring from it seems not to have slowed it at all, but the white fletched blessed bolt buried in its side sends it staggering up the hillside under Ellis' weight.
"It's a curse! It's--" A sudden, horrible certainty grips her.
"Damn." And for good measure as she makes for the church yard: "Damn, damn, damn. It's not Bradshaw! It's a spirit! A summon of some kind!" She sees it before she even clears the wall: the body of the sorcerer Bradshaw sprawled face down with a crossbow bolt in his throat.
Even muffled, half-lost as Ellis struggles to keep his grip while the creature bucks and thrashes beneath him, he hears enough and catches enough dread in Fitcher's voice to understand that they're fucked.
Potentially fucked.
Ellis doesn't say as much, because opening his mouth is sure to invite more of whatever this creature is excreting in. The noises it's making are horrendous. He tightens his grip on the mace, tries to draw it closer to choke it more effectively. The calculation he's making is...less than ideal. If he wants to tear wounds open across this beast's form, he'll have to let go of the mace. But he keeps relying on Fitcher, this could go poorly.
"Can you—"
Shoot it again? It's probably just as well Ellis is choked off by the creature's disjointed twisting beneath him. Ellis digs his heel in hard to the first foothold he finds (a hip bone??? maybe??) and spits out the disgusting taste in his mouth.
"Oh hell, stop!"
There's power imbued in that word. The vibration of it echoes outward from Ellis like a struck gong. He doesn't use this spell often enough to know immediately whether or not it works, and there's a pause, everything freezing while the creature struggles against the effect.
Which is as telling as the rest, isn't it? It isn't undead - Ellis' radiance hadn't stricken it -, but it is something terrible if the blessed bolt had caused so much harm. And there, bound briefly in place by that spoken word, it must be really here, a physical thing rather than a spectral one. And with Bradshaw there, dead as anyone else in the cemetery before the creature had even manifested, it must be tied to something rather than the someone who had summoned and bound it.
"Oh well done, Mr Ginsberg!" Fitcher raises a congratulatory fist. She flashes him a broad smile. "Keep it occupied!"
Then over the wall she goes, hurrying to inspect Bradshaw's corpse.
Draped across the creature's back, he can hear the growl rumbling in it's chest. The spell holds. Ellis very carefully lets go of his grip on the mace and drops to the ground. As predicted, his front is smeared black. He spits on the ground at the creature's feet. He picks his way over to the wall, pulls himself up to look down over the wall at her while keeping one eye on their furious quarry.
"This is temporary. I have a few other tricks, but it'll be better for us if we can kill or it capture it before I hit the end of my rope."
He squints down at Ellis, braces a flithy elbow on the wall as he leans further over.
"It's a shame he didn't have a spell book."
Which, sure, would have made this easier but also because Ellis would have liked to see it.
"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}
i'm here.
But he doesn't argue. He doesn't argue now, as his quiet murmuring tapers off and he lifts his palm from the symbol he'd drawn in the dirt. They aren't trailing something undead as far as anyone knows, but turning away anything lingering is worth the whisper in the back of his head, the trilling hoot that chills him to the bone as he gets to his feet. Ellis swings his mace back over his shoulder as he reaches for her elbow, whispering for guidance as they move forward.
"I'd say we're off to a promising start."
Malevolent presence notwithstanding.
"We were meant to take it back alive?" Ellis asks, tone light even as he they start downwards at a brisk pace. The hairs on the back of his neck are standing up, but he doesn't flinch. If anything, he speeds up slightly. All the better to get close enough to bury his mace in this creature's face.
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The shriek of the transformed figure pierces the night. It's the hair raising sound of a hundred shears snapping closed, the snip-snap of of something terrible and sharp and unrelentingly dangerous. It strikes a terrorizing chord, the tang of fear jagged in the air about them. Then, from hilltop, the creature takes a deep snarling breath. A moment later it turns, and it's obvious when it looks in their direction. It's staring eyes glint in the darkness, two fine points in a face otherwise lost entirely to shadow.
"Ah," says Fitcher. She levels the hand crossbow and pulls its trigger a second time.
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There's something birdlike enough about this creature to be unsettling on a more personal level. Hunched, avian, horrific. It's familiar territory. But in the immediate sense, it's likely about to try to kill one of them.
The ear-rending screech it gives when that crossbow bolt strikes home twists into Ellis' head, rings in his ears, amplifying and echoing well-remembered sounds. He drops his mace, braces his feet and brings his palms together with a crack, following the crossbow bolt with a streak of radiant white light.
"Fire again. Before it fades," Ellis tells her, though Fitcher knows her business, won't need the instruction. He's painting a target for her, caution thrown to the wind as their quarry screams in rage, unfurling to it's full, inconveniently massive size. It's seen them.
At this point, Ellis' priorities are narrowing from "possibly take it alive" to "leave enough of a corpse to bring back samples."
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"My, aren't you useful." It's so much easier to strike the beast somewhere tender - the inside of a jointed limb the causes the creature to jerk and recoil - when all its sharp shapes, a shifting mass of feather and tar black sinew, are cut out from the dark about it.
And then she's off, abandoning him and his brilliant beam of light. The strange mottle of her bottle blue coat, hideous in daylight, breaks her figure into a confusion of patches quickly lost to the dark. Have fun with that giant, snarling shadow of a beast descending now through the church yard toward you, Ellis.
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But how mad can he really be? She's better from a distance, and Ellis prefers to be as close as he can. All the better to put his mace to work, and forgo the borrow and barter of spell work.
Backpedaling, he grabs for the handle of his mace as the creature descends. There's not time to get a proper grip, but his first swing clips beak or snout, enough to hold it's attention. Enough to keep it angry and focused on him, he's hoping. If it gets back into the air then he'll be set back again. There's blood dripping down onto his face from the wounds Fitcher's created. This close, he can smell the sickly scent of rot and the scent of charred wood. This close, it's harder to avoid the sharp swipe of claws.
"Fitcher! Fitcher!"
It occurs to him suddenly: just where did she take off to? To find a better vantage point or to leave this mess for Ellis to finish?
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There's something chilling about that shape in the darkness. For a moment, she's pinned by its stare-- How many shots will it take before it founders? If fire doesn't work, what comes next? A rapid, dreadful, alien and monstrous uncertainty grips her with the stare fixated on her.
The creature leaps toward her through the night. Fitcher scrambles hard up the fog slicked grass toward the church yard's crumbling wall and crooked iron gate.
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It moves too quickly, and covers too much distance. Ellis is briefly livid, choked with frustration as he speeds after it. Even when stood directly beneath that creature, it had been hard to tell exactly what toll their efforts had taken. Ellis' borrowed radiance has begun to fade; there's a moment where he wavers between casting it again and trying a different approach.
He can hear the sound of Fitcher's further retreat, curses under his breath and takes a running leap forward and launches himself at the creature. There is, as always, the moment when Ellis thinks he'll regret getting this close just because of the stink of it, but it's too late for a change of course. Trying to choke this thing with the long handle of his mace might at least keep it on the ground long enough for her to get another shot off. His mouth and nose are filled with the scent of decay. There's something slick clinging to his skin, soaking all down his front.
The walk back to the carriage is going to be miserable.
"Try something else! Another bolt!"
Which are probably Ellis' famous last words before this backfires on him.
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But it would be a shame to have to haul two corpses back, and she cannot abide by the prospect of having to share the carriage with Ellis' body presuming this one will take up the entirety of the luggage rack. So halfway to cover, Fitcher veers hard to the left. She twists as she goes, another bolt set as she throws herself sideways.
This bolt has no spark. It cuts the air with no fanfare at all. But when it strikes the writhing creature, the beast shudders as if it's hit some barrier. The blood pouring from it seems not to have slowed it at all, but the white fletched blessed bolt buried in its side sends it staggering up the hillside under Ellis' weight.
"It's a curse! It's--" A sudden, horrible certainty grips her.
"Damn." And for good measure as she makes for the church yard: "Damn, damn, damn. It's not Bradshaw! It's a spirit! A summon of some kind!" She sees it before she even clears the wall: the body of the sorcerer Bradshaw sprawled face down with a crossbow bolt in his throat.
"And now it has no master."
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Potentially fucked.
Ellis doesn't say as much, because opening his mouth is sure to invite more of whatever this creature is excreting in. The noises it's making are horrendous. He tightens his grip on the mace, tries to draw it closer to choke it more effectively. The calculation he's making is...less than ideal. If he wants to tear wounds open across this beast's form, he'll have to let go of the mace. But he keeps relying on Fitcher, this could go poorly.
"Can you—"
Shoot it again? It's probably just as well Ellis is choked off by the creature's disjointed twisting beneath him. Ellis digs his heel in hard to the first foothold he finds (a hip bone??? maybe??) and spits out the disgusting taste in his mouth.
"Oh hell, stop!"
There's power imbued in that word. The vibration of it echoes outward from Ellis like a struck gong. He doesn't use this spell often enough to know immediately whether or not it works, and there's a pause, everything freezing while the creature struggles against the effect.
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"Oh well done, Mr Ginsberg!" Fitcher raises a congratulatory fist. She flashes him a broad smile. "Keep it occupied!"
Then over the wall she goes, hurrying to inspect Bradshaw's corpse.
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"This is temporary. I have a few other tricks, but it'll be better for us if we can kill or it capture it before I hit the end of my rope."
He squints down at Ellis, braces a flithy elbow on the wall as he leans further over.
"It's a shame he didn't have a spell book."
Which, sure, would have made this easier but also because Ellis would have liked to see it.
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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.
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"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."
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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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!"
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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.
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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?"
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"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.
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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?
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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."
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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"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."
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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.
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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?"