Excerpt: Madmen's Tango

The five mercenaries and the angel made their way up the meager steps and onto the planked wooden porch. Rohmelith passed a pale hand in front of the door before nodding absently to himself. “No traps or wards on this door, at least.” Taking the lock upon the door in one hand, the angel gave a single tug, and it shredded like paper. He set the two pieces gently and quietly on the porch before sliding the door open and entering, moving aside to allow the others entrance as well.

The inside stretched out into a wide hallway with several other sliding shoji doors visible from where they created a lighter contrast against the walls. Directly in front of them lay one of these doors, open, that revealed the rock garden in the inner sanctum of the house, as well as the porch that circled the inside perimeter, leading to the more rooms through other doors. All was quiet and still, save for the sound of the bamboo fountain where it poured into the pond. Faintly, the colorful backs of large koi were visible under the surface of the water.

Mutually silent, the six men padded out onto this inner deck, the angel once again taking the lead position. By now, all the warriors save for him had their respective weapons at the ready, and the two wizards looked ready to rattle off a spell at any moment. Through his innate sense of demonic-aura-finding ability, Rohmelith led them around one side of the deck before pulling open another shoji door, this mysteriously dark, to allow light to pour into the room.

What they found in there was sparse. A few sticks of burnt incense, a dark, brooding atmosphere that the light did nothing to dispel, and not much else. The three warriors lowered their weapons a little, but the wizards and the angel did not appear to let their guard down at all.

All six nearly jumped out of their skin when a harsh, female voice behind them spat a series of quick words in a keening, strange language.

Whirling, they all fixed their eyes upon the short, black-haired woman standing a few feet away from them, on the porch. She had what looked like a broom in her hand, and her dark, narrow eyes had a half surprised, half angry look in them. Her hair was pulled up in a tight bun, pulling at the skin of her face, slightly wrinkled with age, and she was dressed in a lavender kimono. She rattled off another sentence, and raised the broom threateningly.

Once again surprising his companions, save for perhaps Rohmelith, Mezoar shot off a few sentences of his own in the same strange language that the woman was speaking—a language which Faelar assumed to be Durobanese. The sylph’s expression was a little testy, and when she heard what he had said, whatever it was, her cheeks puffed up somewhat like a chipmunk’s, and her red lips pursed in angry disapproval.

For the first time, the five mercenaries saw an expression of surprise, and perhaps shock on the angel’s pale, beautiful face. “Don’t say that to her!” he protested, before turning his gaze to the woman, who was by now speaking again in her quick tongue, and he now said something else in Durobanese, obviously trying to calm her down and remedy whatever misstep Mezoar had made. Bantar, despite himself, was trying to hold in the laughter that threatened to break loose; having traveled in the country before, he knew just what was being said.

Intrigued by the exchange, Mylzorix looked to his black-haired friend with an inquisitive look. “What exactly did you say to her, Mez?”

The sylph made an exasperated sound. “She’s yelling at us because we’re trespassing, and she’s threatening to call the police because she won’t stand to be intimidated by thieves and criminals. I told the old hag to shut her damn mouth, there’s nothing here worth stealing, and that set her off.”

“So Rohmelith is trying to calm her down now?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure why though. It’d be easier just to kill her.” The sylph half smiled when the angel broke off in his speech in Durobanese in order to cast a dark, dark glare at Mezoar.

Taeghen’s own look was fairly dark as well, but even it didn’t compare with Rohmelith’s. “Cripple,” he began, his voice low and taut with annoyance, “your skills at fucking up simple things sometimes impress me.”

“How many fucking times do I have to ask you not to call me that, you gold son of a bitch?!”

Taegehn began to frame a reply, but stopped as the wrinkled, kimono-wearing woman’s voice reached a new crescendo, pitch reaching a horrifying new high as she screamed out the same several syllables in a row repeatedly. The look on the pale angel’s face as he looked at Mezoar was pure murder, if angels had been possessed of the lack of conscience to murder anyone.

“I hope you’re happy, sylph,” he spat, bright blue eyes flashing in withheld anger. “Now she’s screaming about thieves, ‘Stop the thieves’, and I’m not sure it is possible to calm her down from such a tirade.”

“Don’t blame me!” The winged faerie bared his teeth in a snarl, displaying his own anger. “She’s the one who started to throw a hissy fit the second she sees us in here. For all she could have known, we could have been friends of the two who you said were here. And you didn’t do us any favors by asking her if she’d seen them around. Now she’s convinced that we’re here to kill and rob them, as you can obviously tell by her fucking shouting!”

“Both of you, shut up.” Faelar began to make arcane gestures with his hands. “I’m going to teleport all of us out of here, so just hold on a se—uhn…” His frame suddenly trembling, he sank to his knees, sucking in deep, quick breaths as he struggled to keep his vision from blacking out completely. His hands were now occupied in bracing himself on the floor in order to keep from tipping over.

“Can’t do any magic inside the city unless you have a ‘key’,” Mezoar supplied glumly. He glanced at the woman, who was still shouting, and let out a shout of his own in Durobanese. From the tone of his voice, it was easy enough to deduce that he was telling her to be quiet. She only screamed all the louder. The sylph sighed, and began to lead the way back out of the house with quick steps. “Come on. The only way we’re going to get out of here is if we can run fast enough to get outside the city limits before someone else shows up—oh, shit.”

Framed in the light streaming through the front door, still open from when the six men had broken in, were at least two Durobanese men, attracted by the short woman’s screams about thieves and murder. One held what looked like a rake for use in rock gardens, held like a seasoned warrior holds a trusty weapon. The second—and third man, as he appeared in the doorway behind the previous two—held a slightly curved, sharp-bladed sword that some members of the party recognized as a katana.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.” Mezoar drew his own two swords again, falling into a fighter’s stance and eyeing the three men at the door. Behind him, Mylzorix had hefted the war hammer he held, its metal head gleaming dully in the sunlight.

“Now what do we do?” By now, Bantar had helped the still-wheezing Faelar to his feet, and had his own sword in his hand from the first time they had stalked through the Durobanese house.

“I am not sure,” Rohmelith conceded. Reluctantly, he had pulled his own weapon from its place at his belt, half uncoiling the cord of the meteor hammer and idly swinging one end from his right hand. “There is no reason to take innocent life, but we cannot be delayed in our mission, either. We seem to be stuck in between a rock and a hard place.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Mezoar was still eyeing the Durobanese men, who had sidled through the doorway and entered the first hallway. All three of them were watching the six foreign men with apprehensive looks. From her safe place several feet away, the woman berated her fellow natives in their strange language, urging them on to apprehend the thieves, and to hurry up about it.

Taegehn let out a sound that was half sigh, half growl. “There’s only one way out of this that I can see,” he said with typical calmness, before pulling a dagger from where it was sheathed along his bandoleer, and advancing towards the woman.

He moved surprisingly quickly for a wizard, no doubt owing it to the fact that he was of faerie blood. In the first instant, he was standing next to Bantar, and the next he was behind the wrinkled old woman, pinning her arms behind her back and holding the knife against her throat. He twitched it a little and she shut up, eyes wide with fear.

“Lords above, wizard. I didn’t know you knew how to use a dagger. Are you sure you know which is the right side?”

“Shut up, Mezoar. Tell them,” he began, before pausing to lick his lips and continuing. “Tell them that if they move aside and let us go, we won’t have to kill the woman.”