Tallah

Vergil listened to the peter-patter rhythm of rain falling on the eaves of the Sizzling Boar. The Guild’s bell tolled somewhere to the side, a late hour of the night when the flow of custom to the Boar diminished to a trickle. He liked listening to the rain and wincing as sheets of thunder sent the world vibrating, the narrow alley howling with echoes.

Funny thing, though. He was certain he’d counted more than eight bells. Even as lightning cracked the sky and thunder rumbled unhappily, the bell kept on tolling. And tolling. And getting louder by the strike, the sound booming now above the rattle of rain.

Something slammed him awake with the suddenness of a flash of lightning. He fell out of the memory into a pounding headache that set fireworks behind his eyes.

“Wake up, you skin-bag of useless bones!”

He recognized the voice, made almost incoherent by the great tolling of the bell still pounding his brain into mush. In the pitch black it seemed to be coming from somewhere beneath him, but the—

“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” The bell insisted, each tolling turned to a physical blow to the side of his head.

It stopped. Ragged, sobbing gasps of breath replaced it and he could think for a moment.

“Sil?” he asked. His throat was parchment dry and it took several attempts before his voice managed shaping the syllable.

No matter how he blinked and moved his head, the darkness wouldn’t go away. Insane messages crowded up in his vision, bright red against the black, garbled and chaotic. They made even less sense than Argia usually did.

“You’re awake!” Sil’s voice sounded terrible in the dark. Was the healer moving? Why so much? It made him dizzy to try and pin her position. “You’re alive. Oh my soul, you’re alive.” Coming and going like the unhinged swing of a pendulum.

Vergil licked his lips and felt them cracked and tasting of dried blood. His nose was stuffed with crusts and he could barely breathe. Worse yet, his head was filled with gauze, thoughts slow and confused. Trying to marshal any sort of wit was akin to wading through thigh-high mud.

Something took hold of his head and pulled sideways. He tried to raise an arm to protect himself but could barely move one. Both were pinned to his chest, stuck tight there by some unseen force.

“What’s going on?” he asked, panic rising. “I can’t move. I can’t see.”

“This will hurt a bit… I think. Sorry.”

“What—”

Another tolling of the bell and his helmet twisted around, painfully mangling one ear. Light flooded through its visor.

“Bugger.” Sil’s voice went sideways.

The world spun and swayed sickeningly. It was also upside-down, tilted at a strange angle. It took some time before the whole place stopped bucking and throwing him about. Someone seized his waist in a tight embrace and gently stilled him.

“You’ll need to make due with your helmet like that,” Sil said. Her breathing was loud and pained.

Vergil craned his neck to get a better view of their predicament.

“I’m upside-down.” Thoughts tried filtering through his blood-heavy skull.

“Yes. And we’re both swaddled in spider shit. You have one arm almost free and Tallah’s sword stuck to your stomach. Got all that?”

He swung his head around, trying for a better view and maybe drain some room in there for thinking. All he could see was that Sil held on to him with her knees, and a whole mess of red staining her clothes. Too much red.

“You’re bleeding.”

“Yes, I am. I don’t want to think about it. You need to get us down.”

“Are you all right?”

“No, you imbecile, I’m not. Get us down.”

How would he even go about doing that?

“Why me?”

“Because I don’t have any arm free. Your right’s nearly free and the sword should be in reach.”

He looked up and regretted it the very next moment.

“We’re high up.”

“We’re very high up, yes,” she confirmed. “I don’t know how long we’ve been here but those monsters may return any moment. We need to do something and get down.”

He tried moving his arm. “Well, bring the dwarf. He’s strong.”

“I can’t or I would’ve.”

Right. Perfect time. He couldn’t remember anything about what had got him into this particular situation and forced the recollection out of mind. More urgent things to consider, such as Argia’s increasingly alarming messages.

SEVERE BLOOD LOSS detected. Risk to life imminent. Please consult—

Disregard previous message. Inaccuracy. Please consult Engineering urgently!

Dryshite milksop buggered tit-suckling whelp! Move or I start kicking in yer teeth.

Lovely. Argia was having a stroke for some reason. No help there. How to get down? What would Tallah do?

Tallah would use her monstrous strength and be down on the ground without breaking a sweat. No help from that line of thinking either. Like wondering about what a single-minded storm would do.

“Where’s the sword?”

Sil didn’t answer. Was the pressure of her knees around his waist slackening?

“Sil? Answer, please.”

“Across your stomach.”

“Hilt?”

“Near left hip.”

Her voice sounded hoarse and strained, like she’d been crying. A sudden flash of Sidora behind black bars, hateful curses on her tongue, all directed at him with the same tone of voice. Cold sweat broke against his back and he was shunted into himself properly, wide awake in terror of remembering something that had never happened.

He groped for the blade, arm barely moving from the shoulder down. Twice he was sure his fingers had touched the naked blade. The third time he managed to wrap them around its leather-dressed hilt. What a change having a weapon in hand made for his confidence.

“I have it,” he said. “I’ll try to pull it free.”

“Just do it. I need to dress your wounds.”

Well that sounded jolly. The concern in Sil’s voice and how she wasn’t using magic to do it got him a fresh surge of adrenaline to work with. His own words to Tallah echoed in the depths of memory. If you or Sil get hurt wherever we go, I’ll become a liability. Here was the chance to prove himself wrong.

Careful what you wish for or you might find yourself hanging upside down in a fantasy city filled with murderous creatures.

“Did we find bigger spiders?” he asked. Hard to imagine they’d been dragged all the way here by a swarm of those small ones that Tallah kept popping.

“Yes. And you don’t want them coming back. Get moving.”

It was easy enough to get the sword free after undoing the clasps of his chest piece. Cutting away at the fucking sticky webs without stabbing himself, not quite so simple.

A complicated dance, wiggle, and flailing later, he got his other arm free. Sil held on to him through it all and that helped him twist around to grab hold of the line holding him aloft. It was as thick as any rope he’d ever seen, and looked twice as difficult to cut.

His head pounded as blood drained away and the red haze began to clear from the edges of his vision. He ignored the worrying messages from Argia for fear of crumpling in panic otherwise.

They’d been swaddled in silk and hung from the arms of some statue decorating the chamber’s high ceiling. A vein of crystal shone dimly above, soft light spilling down to show his circumstances.

They’d been brought into a kind of wide, circular storeroom dotted with windows and exits. Webs and dust covered the walls, and ancient pottery was strewn about on the floor. Chests, books, and other assorted knick-knacks were unrecognisable under the patina of age. Could have been any place in Grefe from what he’d seen of the city so far, except that a look out the high-arched windows showed a view of an opposite wall dressed in buildings. They were someplace deep into the city, away from the naked chasm, in one of the ravines.

Sil looked ashen-faced, cheeks and lips near parchment white. Silk bound her arms tight to her body and a bright red blotch seeped through her side. Beads of blood dripped off into a worrying puddle beneath them.

“I can’t cut you loose like this.” They swayed too much whenever he tried to move and he worried that he might accidentally cut her. By her pallor and breathing, she had lost enough blood without him adding to the toll. “I can cut you down. Will you be alright if I do that?”

He grabbed hold of her line and she relaxed her grip on him. They swayed ominously for a few heartbeats more.

“Just cut me down before I hurl again. Be careful you don’t fall on your sword afterwards.”

A tremor shook them and a flash of light flooded into their dimly-lit room, followed by world-shattering noise that brought down cascades of dust. Echoes screamed through Grefe for a long time before the city resettled into its eerie silences.

“What was that?” Vergil asked, holding on to Sil for dear life.

“What do you think? That’s Tallah. She’s going to level the city looking for us.”

“She’d do that?”

“You have no idea. Get us down.” If anything, the prospect of rescue blanched Sil.

He cut the thick rope holding her with a clean sweep and she dropped like a stone to the floor beneath, sprawling in a spattered puddle of blood. How high up were they really? Too late to think on that. He waited with bated breath for her to move. After what seemed like an eternity, she did, rolling to her side awkwardly to get away from his fall.

A deep breath. A slow swing away from Sil. A clean swipe of the sword and Vergil fell. The distance to the floor suddenly seemed much longer than he’d imagined prior. He shut his eyes to the ground’s rapid approach and braced. Air burst out of him on impact and his helmet hit the stones with a dull clang and a flurry of Argia messages.

Blessed dark took him.