The foremost guard was the first to recover and grabbed Tif by the front of her shirt, yanking her close. The only light in the building was from the moon outside filtering through some high set windows, but it was enough to make his wide jaw and angry stare easy to see.
“What do you think you’re doing, strolling in here? It’s the middle of the night!”
“We’re closed,” the other man grunted, easing his hand away from the shortsword strapped to his side. Apparently he wasn’t worried about someone like Tif, and apparently he also thought he could convince her that this was a regular shop.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Ya should b--” The man who held her stopped talking when Tif put her hand on his bare arm, his frown deepening. “I’ve got a wife, girlie, and you’re too young by half.”
Tif smiled at the sentiment and then yanked at the connection she felt through their skin. When Tif had touched Awt outside her cell, she had purposely kept the pull light and brief, and after, she had started to wonder what effect doing the opposite might have. The Blood tattoos across her body heated and then new warmth flooded through her muscle and bone, filling her up much faster than normal. As for the guard, his eyes rolled up into his head, and he collapsed on the floor with a thump, thump as his hip hit, then his shoulder.
“Jep?” the other man flinched but then whipped his shortsword out in a practiced motion. “What did you do?” he asked, keeping the point of his blade between him and her.
Tif felt flush to the brim with energy, and so wasn’t concerned at all as she walked straight toward the naked blade.
“You crazy?” he said, backing around the counter of the store. Tif hounded him and must have stepped into more moonlight because his eyes noticeably widened. “You’re a blooder.”
He turned around to run, but Tif wasn’t about to let him get away. She created a brief hold on the wooden floorboards with the ball of her right foot, giving herself the perfect brace to dash off of. She caught only fabric with her outstretched arm, a half cloak he wore over one shoulder, but Tif instantly stuck to the wooly fabric, jerking his forward momentum backward.
“Get off!” he said, twisting around, but the movement let Tif touch his neck and with another pull, he landed face first on the ground.
Tif could barely hold still, her skin buzzing with extra energy, but she made herself squat by the man, putting a hand in front of his face. He was breathing but shallowly, which meant she needed to be careful using her ris to accelerate things.
That done, she popped back up to her feet and dashed around the counter, pushing through the swinging doors to the back room. Any worry that the entrance to the underground would be hard to find was swept away when she saw that not only was there a large trap door in the floor but it stood wide open, a lit lantern hanging from a metal hook on the inside of the door.
“How thoughtful,” Tif said, sharing a quick laugh with Pep.
Tif was down the steps in seconds, lantern in hand, not bothering to hide her presence in the slightest. With her Blood tattoos she was practically invincible, especially against people without ris. Of course, her parents weren’t so protected, which was exactly why she needed to find them quickly before Vak-Lav tried to use them against her.
What should have been a chilling cellar in a real dairy was instead a brick tunnel that curved up ahead, probably snaking around the basements of other neighboring shops. Tif spared a glance behind the stairs, but it was just a wall, so she headed down the tunnel at a run.
Not long after she was greeted by, “Fom? Jep? That you?” The voice came from behind another twist and only moments later Tif was around it, spying two new human guards with their own lantern.
“Night!” the man said and then Tif heard a double twang.
There was no escaping the bolts that thudded into her, the first striking her shoulder and the second her head, not even a breath apart. They would have knocked her clean over, but after hearing the man shout, Tif had stuck both her bare feet fully to the ground. Because of that, the top half of her body was shoved back while her bottom stayed rooted, leaving her blinking up at the brick ceiling, arms splayed out at her side like she was floating in a bathhouse. She had dropped the lantern at some point, but Tif concentrated instead on pulling herself upright, her stomach burning from the effort. Of course, that was nothing compared to how her head and arm had felt, but the twin hurt had been exceptionally brief--here and gone along with most of her extra energy, which must have greatly increased her healing speed. One of the bolts was still in her though, so as soon as Tif bent herself back upright, she ripped it from her shoulder by the prickly fletching. This caused a fresh jolt of pain, but then barely any bleeding, her remaining ris sealing the small wound easily.
“Aspect save us,” the female guard said, moving to reload while keeping one eye on her, and the other guard wasn’t far behind.
Tif was just glad they were using crossbows--regular arrowheads would have been much harder to pry out of her body. Not to mention, them working to get the tightly wound string back gave her a chance to try something else she’d been wondering.
Tif slid the thumbs of both her hands along the side of her head and then continued the motion, running her thumbs through the air toward both guards. Just like it had with Udaru, a gray line snapped into being from her chest straight to the center of each guard, followed almost immediately by a second line of red to each. Also like before she had a sudden awareness of where each one was beyond what her eyes showed her, and she felt a small trickle of energy coming her way from both. Tif was tempted to use the Blood line to pull like she would with touch, but at this range she wasn’t sure how fast she could sap their energy even if she burned some ris to do it.
Besides, she had a different theory that she wanted to test.
Tif took hold of the two red lines, wrapping her fingers around each. It wasn’t as solid as say a rope, but she could feel it—a hot, wispy thread against her flesh, and an odd numbness from the Death lines that were caught in her grasp as well.
The female guard finished reloading first and raised her weapon. Before she could let loose, Tif yanked. If it had been something they were both pulling on, Tif doubted she would have moved the woman at all, but with her feet cemented to the ground and the guard unaware that they were tethered, the woman toppled over with a cry, her bolt loosing into the brick floor and ricocheting harmlessly to the side.
“What the—” the other guard said, head jerking up from his crossbow.
Tif released her feet and spun her body around, wrapping it in the Blood line, which pulled at the man, making him stumble forward a step. What was strange though was that right before he moved, Tif had felt a ghost of tension in the muscles of her legs. She was trying to figure that out when she felt the same sensation but going the opposite direction, and suddenly Tif knew exactly what it meant and what she needed to do.
She dashed forward, right as the man took a big step back, perhaps trying to pull her off balance. Tif had felt the move coming with her Death Mark though, and the sudden lack of resistance from her made him fall on his rump with a cry.
Tif was on top of him in moments, slapping her hand on his bare forehead and pulling, which dropped him back to the ground like he had decided to take a nap. There was a shout behind Tif, and she didn’t even need to turn around to lift her hand up and catch the female guard’s wrist before she plunged some sort of weapon into her–Tif had felt her coming with the Mark the entire time.
The woman gasped in surprise at being stopped, and--back still to her--Tif pulled with her Blood ris, letting go as she felt the guard drop unconsciously away from her.
Tif turned her hand over, the nearby lantern illuminating Pep in flickering light. “I don’t know why spidra bother having a second set of eyes when they can feel everything with the Mark. It’s amazing!”
Pep gave her a look, the, ‘You’re having too much fun when you should be taking things seriously,’ look. But buzzing with borrowed energy from the last two guards, Tif had trouble feeling very remorseful.
That was until she realized that she was still connected to both bodies.
A surge of worry rose up in Tif, more frightening than any weapon that had been leveled against her tonight. If she kept taking from them, they might die. Without thinking, Tif jerked her hands through the lines, frantically trying to dismiss them, but they just slid and bent against her fingers like smooth taffy. Then she remembered the solution Udaru had shown her.
Tif grabbed the nearby lantern from the ground and took off down the tunnel. She rounded two twists and then used the light to check her trail. All four lines were gone, just like when Udaru had ported outside her line of sight.
“Thank goodness for that,” Tif said with a sigh. “Pep, remind me to find a cyclops to learn from after saving ma and fa. This is getting silly.”
Pressing forward, the tunnel ended only a few turns later at a wide, wooden door with no one in front of it.
“Guess this is what they were guarding. And that it’s the only way to go…” Tif would have much preferred it if her journey had ended with multiple doors to choose from since then one of them might have held her parents. But just one door? She couldn’t imagine a basement this long being built for a single cell, which meant that the tunnel she was in probably just connected to more of the underground. If Tif had known that was how it was going to be, she would have tried slow draining one of the guards to ask some questions about the layout down here and where prisoners were kept.
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Tif wasn’t going to turn around to shake one awake now though, so she pushed on the door. Much like the entrance to the upper story building, it wasn’t locked, though being considerably thicker, it did take a good bit more effort to make it move.
The door opened into a much larger room than the tunnels that Tif had been traveling through. The ceiling was still curved like the passageways but with a lazier slope to account for the extra space. Firelight chased away some of the darkness, coming from torches set along the brick walls and also from various points in the middle of the room--though the latter struck Tif as odd since it seemed to be emanating from the ground itself. She took a few steps toward the nearest and found herself looking down at a ten foot drop. Below here was a pit of sorts, but walled and floored just as carefully with brick as the rest of the space. There were barrels in the sunken enclosure, stacked flat side up and three high, the collection of them looking like a horseshoe from above. A brazier sat on a metal tripod in the middle of the barrels, giving off a soft glow from its slowly dying embers and revealing some steps to the right that led from the level Tif was standing on down into the space.
Now that she knew what it was, Tif counted at least three other similarly lit places in the room, which meant that this chamber was likely used by the underground for storage. She didn’t have a clue what was in the barrels, but she was sure that it was something that Vak-Lav and his people weren’t supposed to have.
Walking on the narrow paths between the proportional pits, Tif discovered that the room wasn’t just being used to keep things but also people. At least that’s what she assumed from the snoring she heard coming from the second she passed on her left. The torches around the perimeter of the chamber let her just make out the square, top edge of the space but nothing more than shadowed shapes within. After passing a handful of these brasier-less holes, with their sounds of rustling sheets or occasional coughing, Tif dared to hope that her parents might be kept here, but Pep quickly dismissed the notion since neither of them had seen the glint of prison bars on any of the sunken rooms, just open tops. More likely, this was a barracks of sorts for the underground, and if the size of the barrel room was any indication, along with the distance to the furthest wall torch which was little more than a smudge, there were probably fifty or more such “rooms.” Not an army by any stretch, but certainly a large number of people. And who was to say if this was the only such chamber like this or not?
The only other enclosures she passed that were lit from within were ones that seemed to be for peoples’ use, like one with a number of chamber pots that smelled near as bad as the sewer and another with a square well. Perhaps the barrels she had passed were pickled food.
It wasn’t a neighborhood like Tif had seen in the mids or highs, but it definitely felt to her like a community.
“But why isn’t anyone guarding it then?” she whispered to Pep. Of course, the answer was obvious as soon as she paused to think. There had been guards. Four of them in fact. Enough to make the people here feel safe enough to slumber. “They really should have done a better job,” Tif grumbled, though in truth it was better for her that they hadn’t. It was also good that she was thinking about them because the guards were probably getting up around now and would be rushing here to warn everyone about her, which meant that she needed to get a move on.
Tif made her way to the far side of the room, looking for an exit. There were two more sunken lights she hadn’t investigated, one or both of which might be someone awake she could question. But that could as easily go poorly for her as help, so instead, Tif stalked the outer walls, trusting that there had to be another entrance to such a large place. She had just rounded one corner of the chamber, when she was rewarded by an arched tunnel with no door. Tif was so eager to find it, that she walked straight through, coming face-to-face with an older woman.
The newcomer looked surprised for only an instant and then her eyes settled into a comfortable expression. “Ah, Tif I presume. I’ve been expecting you.”
Tif shared a quick look with Pep to see if she was forgetting someone she should know. The woman had her white hair pulled back, accentuating prominent cheekbones and leaving her wrinkled skin bare.
“Who are…” Tif started and then her eyes dropped lower, only to discover that from the waist down the woman had the body of a white serpent. “...you?” Tif finished without really meaning to. She most certainly didn’t know this person.
“Why, my name is Vak-”
That was all Tif needed to hear. Human or half snake, she wasn’t going to give the leader of the underground a chance to escape. Tif reached forward, ready to incapacitate the creature with her Blood ris. Before she could connect though, something struck her from the side. Tif tried to latch onto it, but the surprise blow hit her where her shirt covered her, so she only stuck her skin to the inside of the cloth. Tif did however succeed at attaching her feet to the floor only a moment after the impact, so she barely moved.
She turned, seeing that her second opponent was a tall human. He wasn’t as elderly as Vak-Lav but was definitely older than any of the other guards, which meant he’d probably only need the barest touch to knock out. Quick as can be, Tif marked him, grey and red lines snapping into being between them. Before she could pull on them though, her feet--which she had just released when turning--were yanked out from under her.
Tif landed on her back, feeling more frustration than pain as the connections of Blood and Death dispersed. Only as she jerked upright did Tif see what had pulled her down: the end of the snake woman’s tail whispering back to its owner.
“Stop this foolishness,” Vak-Lav hissed, and Tif used the reprieve to scramble all the way up, putting both of her enemies in front of her where she could watch them. “A snap of my fingers, and you’ll be swarmed by a hundred of my men. If you hadn’t already noticed, they live here.”
“That will just charge me up,” Tif replied, not backing down.
“Yes, giving me plenty of time to stroll to your parents' chamber and eat their faces off.” Vak-Lav smiled, revealing two long fangs, longer even than a keshe’s sharp teeth.
While Tif never could have guessed that this was where her rescue attempt would lead, she and Pep had talked about what to do if she found herself in a situation she couldn’t fight her way out of.
Tif immediately abandoned her stance and even gave a nod of deference to the creature. “You’re right, of course. I’m sorry for making you feel threatened.”
“You? Made me feel threatened?” Vak-Lav said, with the air of someone not quite believing what they were hearing.
Tif went for a touch of a frown. “Isn’t that so? Why else would you have him attack me?”
Vak-Lav and the man raised an eyebrow at each other, sharing a look so familiar to Tif she almost laughed--he was clearly her Pep. What caught the sound in her throat though was noticing that the man had tattoos along his arms but of the wrong color: they were pink and made of sinuous lines that curved around the occasional circle. Tif didn’t know of any pink Aspect. However, she’d also never heard of snake people…
“Indeed,” Vak-Lav allowed. “Well, now that we’re being cordial with each other, I’m sure you won’t mind returning my property.”
Unlike some of the other mysteries before her, that request was something Tif had prepared for. “Again, sorry, but this Blood ris was given to me freely by Targoth of the Blood Plains. You weren’t part of the transaction.”
Vak-Lav quirked a grin. “She’s clever. Ssuran, why did no one tell me she was clever?” The creature didn’t seem to expect a reply from the man and went right back to speaking to Tif. “I had heard you made a living haggling on the streets, but that won’t serve you here as you don’t have all the information. I paid that whining lump of cyclops for his ris, every red speck, so he was not free to give it to anyone.”
Tif had to stop herself from correcting the creature about how she spent her time on the streets because it didn’t really matter. For the other…Vak-Lav could easily be lying, but coming right out and saying that would be an insult--Tif didn’t need to be able to read people at das to see that. So she paused and then added a touch of regret when she did speak. “You will forgive me if I require more proof than your word regarding something of such value.”
If Vak-Lav had frills like aquaros, Tif was sure they’d be quivering from the look the woman gave her. “I…should forgive you? After you’ve stolen what is mine, broken into my home, and now questioned the truth I give you?” Vak-Lav sighed, looking at Ssuran. “The youth of today, mmm? All take, no give. I worry for this world when we leave it.” As usual, the tattooed man’s only reply was silence.
Tif didn’t let herself get flustered by the pair, keeping her breathing and voice even, just like she was talking down a customer she had won too many flats from. “I have shown you courtesy. Is it wrong that I should expect it in return?”
Vak-Lav’s eyes narrowed, and with her sharp cheekbones and fangs, she looked very much like the snake her lower body proclaimed her to be. “What courtesy? I have seen none of it.”
Tif took a breath. This was her gambit, one that Udaru had shown her about herself. “I didn’t kill the people you sent after me when I first gained this ris, nor the ones I just fought on my way to you tonight.”
“And?” Vak-Lav said, looking bemused. “I haven’t killed your parents. Yet, but I am not nearly as patient as you seem to think me.”
Tif hadn’t expected to convince the creature with only a single thing, so she went right onto the next.
“I didn’t reveal the identity of the person who came to tell me you had my parents, even though he nearly gave himself away, and we were in a tent alone with a division leader.”
Vak-Lav’s expression soured. “Byr…all conviction, no sense. Frankly, I might have thanked you if you had gotten rid of him.”
Tif felt a touch of worry, she was running low on reasons but wasn’t out yet!
“I helped Plumya when she fought against the underground in Sah’Sah. They tried to capture her with a net but I caught it before it could cover her. I probably wouldn’t even have these tattoos anymore or be standing here if they had succeeded. They wanted the ris for themselves.”
This time, Vak-Lav paused. “That…sounds like it might have happened.” The old woman considered Tif a moment more, swaying slightly back and forth as she did. “So, you’ve been considerate to my people, and again I say, so have I with yours. I’ve kept them fed and even let their adopted son visit them. If you wish to impress, tell me something you’ve done for me.”
Tif was surprised she actually had an answer about that. She wasn’t entirely sure it counted in the ways the other did, but it was true. “I never told the knights about you.”
“Forget what I said, Ssuran, she’s not clever at all it seems.” The creature gave her a flat look. “You kept your silence because I had your parents held hostage, simple as that. And now you will give me my ris, and perhaps, if you are very lucky, I will let you and yours leave here whole.”
“At first that was the reason,” Tif agreed, speaking quickly before either Vak-Lav or Ssuran made a move against her, “but last night I was in a closed meeting with the Archon, and I didn’t tell her even though there was no chance you had anyone listening in.”
Vak-Lav leaned forward, seeming to do it without even realizing she was. “You were with the Archon last night?”
From the creature’s eager tone and posture, Tif could tell Vak-Lav meant when the Archon was killed. She nodded.
“Interesting,” Vak-Lav said, arching back.
Tif heard a rustling from the floor and saw the end of the snake woman’s white tail spooling and unspooling. Maybe that was how her kind showed excitement?
“Very interesting. Let us talk some more, you and I. Come with me.” Vak-Lav turned down the tunnel she had previously been leaving, and with a look at unmoving Ssuran and a rather large gulp, Tif followed after.