059 – Scratches
***
The capital of Nettlewreath sat in the middle of an estuary, the river forming a massive moat around its grand walls. The wealthier townsfolk lived protected inside this fortress while the lower classes occupied suburbs and satellite towns along the river shores. Nothing grew in this region except nettles and thorny plants and burrs, despite the rich, alluvial soil. Fownst and I walked down a worn lane past a large saltworks giving off steam.
“Don’t let these impoverished hamlets fool you. We walk through one of the richest farmlands on the continent. Nowhere else is as bountiful as these green fields,” the old man said.
“It must not benefit the locals. They look half starved.” I picked a burr from my cloak. The commoners here commonly wore leather trousers and cloaks to protect themselves from these obnoxious plants.
“No food crops can grow here, but it’s a cornucopia of herbs with mystic virtues. Mixed in among these scratching weeds are rare treasures, such as the white thorn vines, which only the trained eye of a master herbalist can recognize.” As we walked, Fownst stopped frequently to pluck flowers or leaves from certain plants and stuff them into his satchel. “To the ignorant, this land’s only value is to serve as the capital’s third layer of defense after its walls and the river. Armies that come to besiege Nettlewreath find it very inhospitable.”
“Do you think a civil war will break out between the king’s children?”
“I hope so. War is good for business!”
We hiked past the saltworks and out into the wilder sections of the overgrown fields. Humans couldn’t live here, but small birds and lizards feasted on the clouds of bugs swarming above the greenery. The chorus of singing birds and buzzing insects was louder than being inside the city.
“We’re almost to the site,” I told him and pointed down a narrow trail diverging from the road.
The tangled masses of prickly plants opened up into a wide clearing next to a rundown shack. Few trees grew around Nettlewreath, so the shack had packed clay walls and thatched roof. The wooden doors and fencing were old and weather beaten. A man reclined on the shack’s front porch, smoking a long pipe and staring at the cloudless sky.
“Ah. I almost dozed off there,” Iiyluzh said as we approached.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Fownst snapped at me. He had expected me to introduce him to a peasant worker, not a foreign swordsman.
“You must be Fownst the Alchemist. I’ve looked forward to this meeting. It’s very rare I get a chance to meet another practitioner of our art.” Iiyluzh stood up and casually tossed his cloak aside.
“Is this is a trap?”
“I’m sorry, Master Fownst,” I replied guiltily. “You are to be the first casualty of the coming war.”
“The war? What do you mean? I’m no knight. I don’t serve any of the nobles or side with any faction. My services are available to anyone willing to pay. I’m completely neutral.”
Iiyluzh drew his stained sword and sauntered forward. “Oh. The war isn’t important to me really. Forget that. This is a personal matter. I want to test my poisons against yours.”
“I don’t make poisons. I’m a healer.” He pulled out his own sword in response. The old alchemist usually kept his inner flame cool, but it flared up brightly now. The stronger his flame, the faster the insidious poison ate away at his life. He grimaced in pain and clutched his chest.
“Not a very good healer by the looks of it,” Iiyluzh taunted him. “Don’t be coy, old man. Do you think I can’t recognize a fellow assassin? You’re from the Black Scorpions.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! You’ve got the wrong person.”
“Not at all. I can tell by your wavering flame that you’re a remnant of the Black Scorpion Sect. There’s no mistaking the signs of your affliction. You’ve been poisoned by the unholy Aloxia fruit.”
Fownst gasped and stepped backward. This may have been some shocking revelation for these two swordsmen, with heretical sects and cursed fruit, but I had no clue what they were talking about. It sounded sinister.
“What’s an Aloxia fruit?” I asked from the sidelines.
“You see, disciple, there are many ways to learn forbidden techniques. Most can be learned from study and hard work, but others require difficult feats or special circumstances. One method is to consume rare elixirs that will unlock strange powers, or even to devour the raw hearts of monsters or fruit of daemonic plants. One such fruit, of the Aloxia tree, can vastly improve one’s augmentation abilities. However, that method has great risks and high costs. The Aloxia is incredibly toxic. Only the strongest can digest it without dying a gruesome death. Alas, none of my own apprentices have passed that trial.” Iiyluzh pointed his sword at Fownst accusingly. “This sickly alchemist here is another failure, but one who lacked the decency to keel over dead. He’s kept himself alive with medicines. A sad reject of the Black Scorpions.”
“Not true!” Fownst protested “I was never a part of your accursed sect, may they all burn in hell. I merely found one of the daemonic trees while exploring the continent. I attempted to distill the fruit into a safer elixir, one which would not risk killing the imbiber. Unfortunately, I failed to do so and suffered from the awful poison which has crippled me for life.”
“How foolish! You can’t eliminate the poison; the poison is what transforms you. Trying to resist it is pointless. You have to embrace the poison. Give yourself to it as a living vessel. Let it’s gifts flow darkly through your blood. Only by accepting the corruption can you comprehend its true power.”
“Monster!” Fownst yelled.
“Maybe. If that’s where the path leads, I will follow it. That fate is better than ending up a weakling like you who quits at the first trial.” Iiyluzh removed a small sponge from his belt and wiped it along the length of his blade, leaving a dark fluid that looked like motor oil. It glistened in the morning sun. “Come, old man. Let’s have a proper duel between alchemists. I could cut you down with strength alone, but there’s no fun in that. Instead, we will compare our best creations.”
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Iiyluzh waited patiently as Fownst removed a glass bottle of some alchemic substance and poured it along the edge of his sword. Now they both wielded poison blades. I kept back from this fight. There was no telling what awful things those drugs would do to a person.
The alchemist darted forward to slash at Iiyluzh. The fight began without warning. Fownst swung his sword to spray droplets of his poison in his opponent’s eyes, but Iiyluzh was wise to such tricks. He spun out of the way and deflected a flurry of wild sword strokes.
Fownst was old and sickly, but with his flame burning hot, he moved with superhuman speed and precision. He was a magical swordsmen. He might even have played up his disability to hide a measure of his true strength. It wasn’t that he was weak, it was that using his powers slowly killed him, so he was always holding back.
Iiyluzh counter attacked with a rapid series of thrusts and drove back the old man. I tried to observe as much of his swordcraft as the opportunity allowed. Iiyluzh had a strange style that, at first glance, looked clumsy and sloppy, almost amateurish. It made no sense that this was the person who hunted down swordsmen for the Void Cult. It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing.
The assassin had developed a style exclusively based on using a poisoned blade, and thus he didn’t rely on solid hits. He could kill with a scratch. His style employed weird and unpredictable footwork, an excessive amount of feints, off tempo attacks, and a highly flexible blade that could bend around a sturdier sword. Everything was geared to get in minor cuts and jabs at unexpected angles. It was discomforting to watch, and must have been worse to fight against.
Iiyluzh sliced Fownst across the shoulder. Fownst recoiled in pain as a thin whisp of smoke rose from the wound.
“How unexpected! You have so overloaded yourself with antidote that it’s reacting with my venom. That must be incredibly painful.”
Fownst went pale. He charged forward to attack, mindless of the further cuts and nicks Iiyluzh scored on him. He was rewarded for his recklessness with a hit of his own on Iiyluzh’s left forearm.
“Gah! A good hit with a potent dose. Well done, old man.” Iiyluzh held up his bleeding arm and bit into it violently. I’d heard of people sucking venom out of snake bites, but Iiyluzh went a step further by actually drinking the stuff. He gulped down several mouthfuls of blood and then gave a deranged smile through red teeth. “Amazing! A novel poison with a brand new taste. This fight was worth coming to this ugly wasteland. What a treat.”
“What? My potion should have ended you,” Fownst said in disbelief. “That dose was enough to knock out a titan.”
“You can’t kill me so easily. Don’t you understand? I’ve surpassed the normal bounds of humanity. All my elixirs boil within me. I no longer have to trifle with a lab full of bottles and cauldrons.” To demonstrate, Iiyluzh wiped his sword across his wounded forearm. He could use his own blood as a venom.
Horrified at the sight, Frownst turned and fled. He shot into the thickets of thorny vines like a rabbit bolting from the shadow of a hawk.
“Coward! I should have known one too frail to accept his fate wouldn’t stand and fight. Come disciple. If we lose him in the gloam, he might get away.”
Iiyluzh rushed headlong into the tangle fields. He whipped his sword in front of him to clear a path through the dense underbrush. I hesitantly followed him, trying to avoid the throny plants raining down from his clear cutting. The thorns clung to my cloak, and they even scratched up the whirling assassin.
“He’s got to be heading for the road,” I shouted.
Iiyluzh changed course, angling toward the lane. If we caught the fleeing alchemist there, we might be able to catch up to him, or at least we could run without getting scratched raw by the local flora.
The short chase ended as we emerged from the fields onto the road. Fownst had beat us there. He might have gotten away from us, but he couldn’t escape the poison of the unholy Aloxia fruit, an enemy that had been following him tirelessly for many decades. His burning flame activated the dreadful poison. Fownst crawled on his knees, wheezing and coughing. The thorns had reduced him to a bedraggled state, tearing his clothes to shreds.
Iiyluzh looked almost as bad as his victim. His wild run through the brush had covered him with scratches and ripped away sections of his robes. He approached the crawling old man with his sword raised high.
“Old man. Accept your fate!”
The old man, Fownst the Alchemist, refused to accept his fate. He had fought his affliction for years, always looking for a permanent cure, and he wasn’t about to give up to some creepy assassin. Fownst turned around and threw a handful of sparkling, white powder towards his enemy. The powder burst into a cloud that settled across Iiyluzh. I could sense that he also projected his flame through the cloud, adding his own power to that of the alchemic substance.
“Gah!” Iiyluzh screamed and fell to the ground. The many tiny scratches across his body made him vulnerable to the powder, letting it seep into his blood stream. He jerked around in spasms of pain, as if he were being electrocuted or suffering from a seizure.
“So, you thought you could beat an alchemist in a duel of alchemy! How conceited. Don’t you understand that I’ve been studying the Aloxia for my entire life? I know its secrets better than anyone. I devised the special antidote for it. And since your body has adapted to that vile substance, my antidote is an unbeatable poison for you.” Fownst got to his feet and approached the fallen swordsman. “Die, you monster!”
I had not anticipated, at the beginning of this assignment, that our cult’s top assassin would lose to a sickly old man. I didn’t even consider it a possibility. But now, that looked to be happening. Technically, that left it up to me to finish our mission, to jump in and kill the target. He was so weak and injured that even a young disciple could beat him in a physical fight. But on the other hand, I could hold back. I could just let him kill the assassin.
My main loyalty wasn’t to the Void Phantoms after all. They were my temporary allies, not real friends. And even if I was loyal Lord Hrolzek, that didn’t necessarily extend to his other followers. The officers in his court had their own deadly rivalries. Malisent wouldn’t save Veylien in a situation like this. If Iiyluzh died here in Nettlewreath, he couldn’t hunt me down after my eventual escape. This solved a future problem for me…
Fownst stepped forward with his sword, ready to slay the man who ambushed him. He stuck the blade against Iiyluzh’s chest– and then began coughing violently.
“No! Not yet!” he cried. He dropped his sword and licked the traces of white powder off his hands. The alchemist had thrown away all his precious antidote in a desperate ploy, and now he had no way to stave off the poison rising within. He fell again to the ground, and this time he didn’t get up.
The alchemist was dead, the duel over. If I wanted get rid of the cult’s assassin, inaction wouldn’t be enough. I’d have to do it myself. I gently placed a hand on the hilt of my dress sword.
“Disciple!” Iiyluzh barked through clenched teeth. He twitched and jerked his limbs erratically. The white powder sizzled where it touched his skin. His eyes were bloodshot. “Go to the river and fetch me some water. I need to tidy up before we return to the city.”
“Uh. Right. As you wish, Master Iiyluzh,” I said. No. This wasn’t my moment. He was still too strong, and I was too unskilled.
“What a day this was,” he mumbled. With some difficulty Iiyluzh found his pipe and took a few leisurely puffs while lying face up in the middle of road. “Better than a vacation, I’d say.”