Private Tales Nothing is Possible

The sun glared down, the heat oppressive. Summer clamped down on the city like a vicious predator, drawing sweat from its inhabitants like blood from the neck. People moved at lethargic paces through city streets, going about only the business that needed to be done. Nobles remained in their manors. Along with the wealthiest of Alliria, leaving the poor to do the work while the sun burned high overhead. It was so hot that even the ever present pickpockets and thugs maintained a low profile. The most active thing in the city were the flies.

She moved through the streets, seemingly unconcerned with the heat. Her usually tan skin had darkened considerably as the summer waxed on, until it was a healthy bronze gleaming with a film of sweat. In deference to the heat, she wore little more than she had to for the sake of decency, the top half of a shirt cut to expos e her midriff to the flow of air, and 'pants' that ended high on her thighs. Both were stained dark with sweat.

She moved with purpose through streets filled with slow people melting under the sun. Weak, she scoffed in her mind. The climate reminded her very much of the plains she had come from. The Norei were primitive by comparison to the city folk, but these people had grown soft with their comforts and their luxuries. The former tribal warrior had vowed long ago not to allow the sickness of the cities to infect her, and so far she had been successful in that

Loose braid of white hair flipping back and forth behind her as she moved, she made her way towards one of Allirua's commercial districts. She had a meeting to make with an informant, someone who might have a lead on the criminal Two-Faced Eddie. It was not a contract for money that she sought this information, but rather a personal debt. The sonofabitch had killed one of her people, right on her own property. They had tried to do her in as well, but failed at it. The resulting fines for breach of the peace had been unpleasant - she hated the idea of money, but had to accept it as part of the bargain she had made long ago.

Regardless, some debts required blood to be paid. Honor was a thing the civilized peoples did not understand; honor to the self, to the ancestors, and to the enemy. Eddie had no honor, and he and his - like so many she had faced - would get none in turn.

There was a crowd gathered despite the oppressive heat in one of the markets, which was where she was headed in any case. Heavy sword on her back blanking in its harness, rubbing at the calloused shoulders, she made her way to the meeting point.

Which was where the crowd was gathered.

Aeyliea grunted, already not looking where this was going. The crowd was sparse, but still thick enough to slow her progress. She resorted to elbowing people out of her way, receiving dark looks and temporarily raised fists. She had the look of a fighter about her, lean and athletic, well sculpted. Beautiful, really, in a hard way.

She did not have to push all the way through the crowd. A couple rows back, she could see the corpse dangling from the corner of a roof, bllod-smeared face ghastly for the lack of eyes and tongue. Someone had even hammered a stake through a rat and then through his chest, a ham fisted declaration of his crime.

She stopped, and looked at that face. In all truth, that was her contact and, true to the crimelord's code and methods, he had caught him before any information could he disseminated and tortured him to death, making an example out of him too.

Always wanted to know how they get their victims in place without being seen in broad daylight, though. A question to be answered a different time.

Pushing down annoyance - nearly rage - she turned and pushed her way back through the crowd with a scowl on her pretty face.

She moved with the grace of a feline, beautiful in a predatory fashion. The gleam 9f sweat added something to the overall effect which, had it not been hot enough to melt candle wax in direct sunlight, might have been enough to leave mens tongues lolling. A calculated thing, to be sure - she wanted to be looked at.

Her destination was the Slums of Alliria, the place she called her home. The poor, the destitute, the downtrodden all gathered in the refuse heaps of the poorer quarters of the city, and it was there that Aeyliea had purchased her compound. Rei Company had only been there a handful of years, but she liked to think that it had brought a certain measure of honor back to the thieves that inhabited this part of the slums.

Failing that, a healthy degree of fear was acceptable.

Sadly, it did not apply to all. There were those that seemed to be above the law, beyond reproach. The Great Houses, criminal houses organized around a handful of families that took on the appearance of their betters, paid no heed to the law, to the leaders of the city, or to anyone else that got in the way of profit. And they were ruthless, if they did not possess any finesse.

Like the one trailing her now.

She might have been more at home on the grasslands stalking buffalo, but she was not an ignorant savage. She had become every bit aware of her surrounding in the city as on the plains. The thug in shorts and rough shirt had the broken nosed face of a brawler, but he moved with the sureness of a predator. If he thought she would be easy pickings....

She turned a corner, stopped, and waited for him.

A snort for an initial response. The Norei spit on the ground in a very definite way, stormy blue-grey eyes sharp as a hawk circling high overhead on the thermals of her native land. "Think me a fool, do you?" she replied in thickly accented common. She stood ready around the corner, willing to do violence to this thug of a man. She had little love for such to begin with, especially those working for Eddie. "Eddie, he sent you, yes? My ass he can eat, tell him I said this. All is not forgiven. Only his blood will balance honor."

She considered drawing the blade on her back right then and there, coming around the corner wide to avoid the inevitable counter to such a ploy. She figured the thick, ugly fellow she had seen tailing her could not possibly be greatly skilled, let alone quick - thugs hired by the great criminal enterprises tended to be of the meanest class. Bullies were prized, it seemed, as enforcers. Aeyliea had little time for the honorless pigs that ran those criminal enterprises, and even less for the lackeys.

Oddly, she had not though that the broken-nosed brawler would sound like he did. It was always possible that she was mistaken in who this was.

But who the fuck would speak to me so? Most of the denizens of this part of the Slums knew who she was, after all. "Your boss, you can tell him he is a goat-sodomizing pig." She spit again, and lapsed into more words, much harsher but spoken in her own native Norei tongue. Most of what she said sounded distinctly vile.

She could not believe this man. Tell her to calm down, when he had been the one stalking her? Foolish at best. "My life, it is full of danger. I welcome it, for honor of my ancestors," she said.

He came around the corner to wave his scrap of paper with her likeness on it. She laughed - laughed - at the threat it contained. "Eddie, that pigfucker, is the head of a crime House," she said, accent thickening. She gave the man in front of her a looking over, and then frowned. "The tail I watched you are not. Where did he go?" She said suddenly.

The mercenary captain appraised their surroundings. The thug that had tailed her this far was nowhere to be seen, which did not mean anything good. "In trouble, we are. In broad daylight they will murder, I know this for fact."

She felt the need to point out that the reason someone would kill someone in broad daylight was because they did not care if they were caught. Some of the syndicates were powerful enough, had enough of the right connections, to get away with literal murder.

Of course, some people just didn't care anyway.

"Some milk-skinned city dweller, I am not," she replied to the the man. She spit to one side, making a warding gesture against evil. "Help, I need it not." Especially from a demon, she did not add. She was familiar with werewolves and did not like them anymore than any other magic creature, or any magic for that matter.

Her eyes kept scanning their surroundings. "Hired muscle for Eddie I have seen, but distract me you have. Danger," she said.

"Fool, not here," she practically hissed at the man, then turned. Another arrow whistled through the air. "A place I know where no innocents get hurt," she added. Not waiting for confirmation on whether he had heard her or not, she took off at a dead run.

She was an athletic woman, and ran like the wind. Her people were better warriors astride a horse, but she had chosen a different route to master, and that required different things. Speed and agility were among them.

She quickly was out of bow shot for the archer, heading into one of the narrower streets of the slums. She knew where this one headed, down towards the docks. There would be a lot of people there, but it was the winding and wending alleys she was looking for. She could either lose trouble in them or, failing that, be in a place that greatly favored small numbers. A narrow street was harder to he outflanked on, after all.

Behind them, the archer vanished back through a trapdoor on the roof, and hurried to the ground level to relay words on to another, who took off.

This hunt had just begun. Eddie had had enough if the white-haired captain's shit.

The docks were thronged, as she expected. The heat did not seem to the art the dockmasters' work hours, and burly men without shirts carried crates and barrels and sacks from platforms loaded and lifted by booms from sea going vessels. Aeyliea did not dive into that crowd though. Instead, she darted into an alley, and immediately slowed down.

Breathing hard, she turned to see the man from before still with her, and scowled. She turned, and maintained a brisk pace down the crooked, refuse strewn lane, sweat gleaming on tanned skin and darkening her clothes.

She thought about the one behind her. Clearly he thought he was in charge right now. After all, she was a woman that both needed saving and was incapable of handling herself. It was a thing of civilized lands that made no sense to her.

She loosened the two-handed sword at her back, ready to out sword and carve a path at the first sign of trouble.

A crunch ahead. She could hear the sound of feet before she saw the source, and when she did she could only marvel at how quickly they had been found, and how quickly word had been relayed.

In the alley in front of them, five figures revealed themselves. One at the front was short and stocky, with a powerfully built body despite that. He held a heavy cudgel in his hands, a short sword at his hip. The others all carried crude weapons, swords and knives and clubs. They looked exactly like what they were: thugs. Hired muscle.

Somewhere, there would be one with more brains than brains

"Aeyliea," the stocky one said, eyes running over her lithe frame, then over the man as well. "Don't know you. Persn'l business between us and the Captain here." He gestured back the way they had come. Three other street toughs blocked the exit. "Piss off, mate. Don't need to involve y'self. Boss just wants 'er."

Five in front, three behind. Likely more above, too. Credit where it was due, the criminal work was thorough about much of their work, even if they were in the habit of underestimating their foes. Sooner or later they would get the message, and then real threats would surface. Thugs like these were seldom deadly dangerous.

Except in numbers.

"Deal with them," she hissed, gesturing at the five in front if them. She turned her back on them, facing the three from behind. "These, I will take. Cowards they are, but dangerous."

At her words, the ones at the back drew their weapons - two swords and a dagger. The ones in the front chuckled to themselves, and advanced.

She had no time or attention for her unwelcome companion. There was only time for the dance, and the dance was a thing she was good at. And she had to be, because she had no special skills, no superhuman strength. She was not inhumanly fast, she could not regenerate, or any of the myriad of things that so many adventurers were capable of.

But she could swing a sword. More, she could dance with it, a beautiful ballet, for and deadly grace melding into a whirlwind of death.

The blade was out immediately, and she spun to face her attacks even as the began to approach. They knew the mettle of their foe, having heard of it and, for one or two of them, maybe having seen it in action before.

Clash of steel on steel as the first met her headlong, her longer, heavier weapon casually batting it aside as if it were nothing. She danced to one side, footwork very much like a dancer as the assailant tried to stab at her with his shorter weapon, but she casually knocked that aside too, then thrust the hilt of the weapon into his face, stepping close to deliver a non-lethal blow to the head.

And dancing sideways as one of his companions lashed out with their sword. The dagger wielding fellow hung back, knowing full well - as did she - that he would have the advantage if he could get inside her guard. Her longer weapon had the reach, but she couldn't effectively use it if he got too close.

The seconds swordsman jumped back as she lashed out with a foot, intending to kick him in the crotch. Instead, while he was off balance, she made a lazy backhand slash at him, which was clumsily fended off. Followed by her foot, using the momentum of the swing and the weight of her own blade behind it to give it extra impetus. She kicked him in the chest, for there was no way to avoid that after so quickly dodging her last attack.

Knife guy moved in. There was really no way, committed as she was to her last attack, for her to do much about this, and he stepped neatly into her personal space, driving the heavy knife at her middle. She deflected the blade with the back of her arm, feeling the blade bit to the bone, feeling her grip immediately weaken on the sword in her hands. The thug seemed utterly flabbergasted that she woukld use her own flesh to block the blade, and was even more surprised whehn she dropped the hilt of her sword on his head, the crunch of bone audible in the alleyway.

One of the swordsman was getting back to their feet, a little woozily. She turned to face him, blood streaming down her arm to drip from her elbow in a steady stream. The pain was distant, someone elses pain - a mental trick that could stave off such things for a time.