Topic: A Whisper of Flame

Alain DeMuer

Date: 2007-11-04 03:20 EST
The House Tiroste knew its enemies well. Families in their homeland far to the south made open war with them there, and here also at the beginning of their supply line. The Six Houses had been in conflict for almost a year, and it did not take long for Tiroste's three enemies to begin raids on supplies coming out of RhyDin. Some had been stolen from their very warehouses, some even in broad daylight.

Alexander Albion Tiroste IV, old enough for wisdom but not so old for the stunning clarity of his mind to obscure, made the call to transport gunpowder by sloop from Dragon's Gate into the West End under the cover of night. He hired a man to drive a carriage of the House south across the bridge at the same time, in the quarter of an hour before midnight.

The diversion worked perfectly. Spies from House Alorca sent messages into the West End the moment the carriage departed the manor of House Tiroste. The driver was experienced, unwilling to stop for anything, but going down a narrow street, an overturned cart with a woman laying injured nearby overrode his sensibilities. He stopped the carriage and went for a closer look, and a man stepped out of the nearby inn, walked into the street, and shot him point blank with a flintlock pistol. The carriage was then hijacked, taken to an Alorca warehouse, inspected, and found to be completely empty. They had even removed the upholstery before sending it out on its diversionary mission.

The sloop Prometheus had nothing to worry about, it seemed, from House Alorca that eve...

* * *

"The report, Lord-Listener." The voice was scarcely a whisper, and black-clad hands laid a paper on the low wooden table. Bare feet padded backwards from it, almost silently. Even by dim candlelight, he could see rather than hear the tap of a single fingertip, likewise clad in black, on the surface of the paper. "Our contact in the Tiroste Manor penned it eight hours ago."

A long pause; an uncomfortable shift of bare feet.

"Alorca will fall for the ruse, unless we alert them."

The fingers, young in their smoothness but as grey as death, curled around the flame and danced inattentively.

"...I can alert them now, if it pleases -- "

Two taps.

"My lord..." The whisper was excited. Nervous. "Do you think we can really -- ?"

One tap.

"...Very well." Feet shifted again, away from the table. "Our brethren will conduct the raid themselves at midnight." Dry lips were licked, spit was swallowed. "Without House Alorca."

Another tap.

"Lord-Listener. Spirits keep you." Leather creaked with the slow bow... the bare feet padded out of the study, boots scraped as they were collected off of the floor, and light spilled in across the room for only a moment as the door was opened... and shut.

The Lord-Listener's young but sallow face stared over the candle flame, and he let his fingers continue their dance. A grin, painfully constrained, stretched at his lips and tested their boundaries until he could feel warm coppery blood on the tip of his chin. Then two fingers came together, quite suddenly, and pinched the flame.

Plunging the room into darkness.

Alain DeMuer

Date: 2007-11-06 17:18 EST
The Prometheus

Except for the occasional wooden groan and the flutter of sails as winds changed, the sloop was silent. The sailors stayed low, relying on the moonlight to see. These were men who had worked for the House for years, more than one of them a distant cousin of the family, and they knew firsthand what Alorca and the other Houses were capable of.

The ship stayed in close to shore, which brought it close to the rocks. One man stood with a foot propped on the railing, staring out ahead of them. He saw a large, dark shape looming ahead of them and turned to motion to port, and the ship turned to port. Wood groaned... with a few faint thuds.

The sailor frowned at the noise, leaned to peer over the railing... and saw a dark mass there. Before he could puzzle out in the frustratingly dim light what it was he was seeing, a strong arm pulled him straight down into an odd black blade. He gurgled faintly and fell into the water with a splash.

It took the other sailors too long to react. Bare feet padded over to them as they turned around, and quiet grunts were the only noises as sailors and the dark shapes, men in black clothing with their mouths gagged with black cloth, grappled with one another. The defenders could not get to their weapons, and it was long enough for the attackers to arrive from the other side of the ship... and strangle to death every last sailor, with gloved hands or piano wire.

The rest of the bodies were dumped overboard, and the ship's new owners required little communication between them. Only a few hand gestures, and the Prometheus turned towards a new destination in the city, laden with enough gunpowder to supply a whole company.

* * *

"It is done, my lord."

A match struck in the dark room, illuminating grey hands, watery grey eyes, and scabbed and withered lips punctuated by criss-crossing black string that sewed them shut.

"The gunpowder is all accounted for. It will be some time before Tiroste discovers it was not Alorca."

The grey fingers began spinning the match, faster and faster.

The other began with some nervousness and desperation in his tone: "Perhaps we could -- "

The match broke suddenly, and fell to the table in two pieces. The grey hand, illuminated by the candle, shook.

A creak of leather as a small bow was made... and the door to the study was opened just enough to allow him out, and quickly but carefully shut.

Alain DeMuer

Date: 2007-11-26 15:24 EST
Swish, crack! Swish, crack!

There was a time and a place for necessary noise, and the Lord-Listener's study was not it. The floor of the Chamber of Atonement one story down was sticky with blood and filth, but discomfort was a common state for the model of superhuman discipline.

Pain still took practice.

Swish, crack! His forearm jerked, snapping the leather tails of the whip across his back. Flaying was a new practice for them, only as old as the Rebirth. At first only used for initiation, Lord-Listeners often worked into frenzies flaying their own backs to enforce that perfect, absolute silence... and to atone.

Crack! He bit abused lips, loosened from their prison of black thread, but did not utter a single sound. He did not focus on the lips, or the taste of his own blood, or any of a number of mantras commonly used to work through pain. He wanted to be fully aware of every moment of it and put the Vow to the test.

The sin was shortcoming. He had fallen short of his own expectations. Crack! The jaded, slumbering, decadent Beast that was RhyDin had only stirred in its sleep. Another dose of destruction would be sent their way... but something greater, he was sure would have to be done.

The Lord-Listener held out the whip to one side, and his lieutenant emerged from the darkness to take it. Parchment was folded and placed within his coat, his master's thoughts - they were plans only in the loosest sense. The thoughts were frenzied and scattered, but he knew it was the language of genius. It fell upon him, one on his way to greater, deeper service and a Vow of his own, to interpret the message and create a plan for his unenlightened brethren to carry out.

He would gladly do it. He grit his teeth at the Lord-Listener's back, wished for a moment it was himself up there, thought it ought to be... and swung. Crack!

Alain DeMuer

Date: 2007-12-10 15:00 EST
The night after the second bombing, Alain spoke to the guard who had been tailing the bomber. There was nothing that stood out in the description but a single detail - he put on a gag moments before the detonation.

In nearly a year on the West End murders, the detective had read many texts on cults and mythologies. Though not well-versed enough to recall the cult off the top of his head, he had the feeling the group responsible was a cult, and if there was anything written about them, it would be in the chilling books he had bought over the summer.

It took two weeks picking through those books, but at last, he found them.

* * *

"The report, my lord."

The words were hissed as the paper floated to the tabletop in front of the Lord-Listener. The eyes that carried a thousand brown bags lowered to read silently, and his ashen fingertips wiggled and would have drummed but that they never quite touched the wooden surface. He read swiftly, and then procured another paper.

Orders. They'd already been prepared, even before the Lord-Listener knew the full impact of the last bombing. It made the lieutenant seeth with rage.

"My... my lord... Again, my lord?"

There was a pause, and a single, pointed tap. Another time, this simple gesture would've had him backpeddling and bowing his way out the door... but not this time.

"We could divide our resources, and use the shipyard base to - "

Another tap.

"My lord," he growled, "you have heard my plan, and you know it would - "

SLAP! The Lord-Listener's open hand struck the tabletop loudly, and he looked up at his lieutenant expectantly. A small nail was relinquished, and the listener shut his eyes as he twisted it into his arm. A rivulet of blood ran down over his hand as he did something very rare in his anger, and began signing.

The shipyard base would hold onto their share of the gunpowder for further attacks. Headquarters would take care of everything else.

The lieutenant looked at the orders once more... managed not to sneer, and gave a curt bow. "My lord. Spirits keep you."

* * *

It is unknown how the Servants of the Dead got their start, or if it was in this plane, but when they surfaced in the accounts of the traveler Arsevel the Green, there had recently been a schism, but both groups remained more or less peaceful. The old group remained only in their native villages to concern themselves with protecting the graves of their ancestors and giving them offerings, and the new group left to spread their mission across the continent.

It was the new group that retained the title Servants of the Dead, and that, in each village (Oseron, Calee, and Jinarr) they were ultimately chased from, they took to wearing gags when they performed their cemetery rituals.

There is evidence of another schism after they were chased from Calee. In subsequent years, small monasteries were established at the three villages, while travelers began to fear the graves of the abandoned city of Ysett. It is here that historians including Richard of Dragon's Gate and Ulric Albric suspect Arsevel the Green met his demise.

In Ulric Albric's travels, he notes hearing tell from farmers outside Ysett and, in his later travels, Oseron, that men without tongues or, more commonly, with lips sewn shut performed strange rituals at night and attacked unwary travelers from the shadows...

* * *

The Lord-Listener expected the orders to be copied, and for the original to end up in the hands of the listeners at headquarters, and the second with the listeners at the shipyard base. So he delivered the orders to a scribe, who copied them carefully, and waited for him to be done.

"Deliver this to the listeners," he said curtly, and snatched up the copy for himself. On his way out the door, in an empty hallway, the copy was tossed into a lit brazier.

There would be new orders.

Alain DeMuer

Date: 2007-12-19 04:55 EST
It was nearly ninety kilometers from RhyDin to Ysett. Alain packed up a rifle, pistol, and two days worth of supplies, left in the Security Division's jeep at noon, and anticipated being there by three.

Naturally, he did not arrive until sunset. Winter nights darkened fast, and he proceeded on the last leg of his journey on foot. Frozen grass crunched with each step, and to clear his mind of the usual demons, he soaked in his surroundings.

The city was barely a city, and in Alain's mid-twenty-first-century home country, it would only be a town. Most of the buildings were round, made with large brown bricks well on their way to crumbling into dust. Whenever a breeze blew, khaki-colored clouds swirled and then settled it into the snow, turning pristine snowbanks into piles of an ugly muddy slush. What looked to be old farmhouses surrounded the city, and the further he went, the smaller but more numerous the buildings became.

On one end of one of the odd circular structures, he was aware he was being watched and followed. He heard a twig break up the hill, off to the right. He continued to listen as he walked, but got only as far as the other end of the building when the next thing he heard was something whipping through the air. He twisted away, and it saved his life.

"Unh!" The knife buried itself in his hip. He coughed and wanted to double but knelt instead, blinking back tears. He could see his attacker as a dark shape running straight away from him. Apparently had counted on the knife being fatal. He raised his rifle, aimed low, and squeezed off a shot.

The pop of the shot rang through the empty city, followed by the man's cry, and even Alain could sense the sacrilege of it. He scanned left and right and looked at the dagger. He could feel the hot blood lingering at the top of his thigh. Not bleeding enough to rush down to his knee so fast. He pried the knife out, tucked it simply into his belt, and hobbled and stumbled his way over to his fallen attacker.

A man dressed entirely in black, wide eyes staring up at the sky, his mouth gagged, clutching at a small hole in the back of his leg. He moved to fend Alain off, who coldly clubbed him with the butt of his rifle and brought out his pistol instead. Better for keeping a prisoner at short range.

"You're going to speak to me," he said coolly as he yanked off the man's gag, "and tell me what I need to know, or I'll make you scream, and the spirits won't speak to you ever again."

"You know nothing of my discipline! I will never - ah...!"

Alain had dug a finger into the hole in the back of his leg, and the man screamed and howled.

Alain DeMuer

Date: 2007-12-20 03:27 EST
They arrived in September - men dressed like a nobleman's guards. Fine clothing, fine weapons... and the way they threw around money.

The windshield wipers worked. That's good, Alain thought to himself. The jeep bounced as it rolled over another bumby spot in the dirt road, and he shifted gears.

Our Lord-Listener was a zealous but reverent soul... but our brother Grigory never had the respect for silence the rest of us did. His commitment to his vows was... nominal, at best.

The surreal quality of his surroundings in the headlights made it easier to see things. The rubble in the marketplace. A Stitch in Time, in ruins. The dead and dying filling the makeshift clinics. Cassie taking the case publically, and telling her he didn't have time for it... He switched hands on the steering wheel to crack his knuckles.

Grigory gained his ear. It was he who protected the noble's men and spoke so very highly of their offer... The explosives are his doing. They must be.

He fiddled with the radio, and Irish music poured into the vehicle. He was close to RhyDin. He leaned back into his seat and sighed. He wished the roads were more level, the night not so black, the weather better. He wished he could relax.

Grigory is ambitious and power-hungry. If the Lord-Listener listens to him more than the spirits, they will do anything until Grigory's ambitions are satisfied... and, I imagine, your crowded, bothersome city is empty.

He turned up the radio. It was late - 3:45, the bright green LCD displayed - but the music would keep him awake.