Shadow Rogue Ascendant

by Mike Truk

  “Cerys,” I said, voice broken.

  “And last night, as I lay awake, I wondered: would I be able to turn you in even if I saw you break your oath? What if… what if my feelings for you stayed my hand? What if I chose to follow you down into the dark… do I have it within me to do that? Could I be so weak? And if so… wouldn’t that make me as bad as you? As monstrous?”

  Tears glimmered in her eyes, brimmed over and ran down her cheeks. I didn’t know what to say. How to comfort her. The very act of trying to change her mind would make my words suspect. Would reinforce her fears.

  Instead, I placed my hand over hers where it rested on my chest.

  She looked up at me, eyes wide, lips parted, vulnerable and raw and afraid.

  I leaned down and kissed her.

  She didn’t respond, remained frozen, and just when I was about to pull back, certain I’d made a terrible mistake, she moaned and kissed me back.

  It was like a torch being touched to oil-soaked kindling. I pulled her against me even as her fingers sank into my hair and we kissed passionately, our tongues touching, sliding over each other, heads turning from one side to the other as my hands moved down to clench her tight ass and press her against my throbbing cock. She moaned, gasped, and pulled her head back, eyes closing, as I bit her lower lip.

  Then her hand was under the hem of my pants, her cool fingers curling around my straining cock, and I knew exactly what she wanted. No time to play, to tease, to arouse each other further or explore each other’s bodies - she wanted, needed, for me to fuck her.

  I dropped into a crouch, undid her drawstrings and then yanked her pants down to her ankles, exposing her pale, sculpted legs, and could smell immediately her arousal. No time. I stood, grabbed my dick by its base and then guided it into her pussy as she pulled her panties aside, revealing but a glimpse of her red pubic hair before I slid all the way in.

  She cried out and then clasped a hand over her mouth as she clung to me with her other, and I curled an arm around her slender waist, my other hand clenching a fistful of her crimson hair as I began to pound into her, my own anger and misery, fear and doubt fueling my lust till all I wanted to do was obliterate her for fearing me and destroy myself for giving her justification.

  Cerys held on for dear life as I pounded into her, one hand remaining pressed over her raw lips so as to muffle the cries that our fucking tore from her depths, bouncing up and down jerkily with the force that I was driving myself home into her. We staggered back, back to the cabin wall, and there I pressed her hard against the bulkhead as I leaned in to bite the side of her neck, lick her from collarbone to the hollow behind her ear, and always, faster and faster, I drove into her pussy, into that tight wetness that was so slick I could feel her juices running down my cock.

  She shoved me away. Turned, put both hands against the wall, and pushed her perfect ass out toward me, not even looking over her shoulder as she waited. Her red hair had slipped free, hung over her face, her chest heaving as she panted for breath, and then I was on her, hands on her hips, cock sliding in even deeper, all the way inside her till I could go no further.

  “Hard,” she whispered, voice raw with need. “Fuck me hard, Kellik. Harder.”

  I complied, and fingers pinching cruelly into the flesh of her hips I hammered at her, drawing a rising wail that she couldn’t bite back, her whole body shaking as we came together again and again, my own orgasm appearing like an exploding sun in the back of my mind, rising, growing, consuming all thought, all emotion, leaving only my need, my desire, my lust.

  She screamed, her pussy clenching tight around my cock, her whole body shaking like a sail that had slipped its ropes, and then I came explosively deep inside her, bent over her back, one arm wrapping around her chest to pull her tight against me, up straight so that my cheek was pressed to hers. I felt her shiver in my grip as I pulsed again and again, her hands on my forearm, her eyes closed, berry-ripe lower lip bitten on one corner as she rode out her orgasm which hit her again and again and again, drawing whimpers even as I groaned and thrust into her, until at last, after an eternity, I was spent.

  Cerys turned within my embrace and pressed her brow to my shoulder, her own arms crossed over her chest as if she lay within a coffin and were ready to be presented to the Hanged God. For a long while we said nothing, simply gasped together, fought to catch our breath, sweat mingling where our temples touched. I held her against me, reveling in the afterglow of our fucking - only to feel like a bucket of ice cold water had been dumped over me when I realized she was crying.

  “Cerys?” I pulled back, uncertain. “What is it?”

  She wouldn’t meet my eyes. Reached down to pull her pants up, tied them off quickly, then rubbed her sleeve across her cheeks and sniffed sharply. “Nothing.”

  “Cerys, wait.” I took hold of her shoulder, but let go when she pulled gently away. “What - what happened?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?” I felt bewildered, lost. “Hey, talk to me. Cerys -”

  She moved to the cabin door, paused, then looked back over her shoulder at me. “Don’t worry about it, Kellik. Just promise me something. Promise you won’t try to be something you’re not. Whether it’s bad or good. Just be yourself, and - and then at least I’ll know who it is I’m with.”

  I reached for her. “Cerys -”

  But she opened the door and slipped away.

  I dropped my hand. “Fuck. Fuck!” Finished lacing myself up, and then sat on the edge of one of the chairs, chin resting on my hands, staring out at nothing. Promise you won’t try to be something you’re not. Did she mean stepping up to men like Bennie, or…? I felt her lips again on my own. Or did she doubt that I was actually interested in her? Did she think I’d made that move to quiet her doubts? That I could be so cold and calculating?

  That sent a chill through me. She couldn’t think that. She had to have felt my ardor. Unless - was she worried I was using her for her body, to bring her to my side, while secretly not caring for her?

  I pressed my thumbs into my eyes and grimaced. How by the Hanged God’s dolorous visage had things become so complicated?

  * * *

  A diaphanous fog had arisen by the time we quit the Bonegwayne, gifting every torch and lantern along the Port Lusander docks with its own amber corona of light. Buildings loomed before us quite clearly, but quickly faded into indistinct squares and rectangles just a stone’s throw away. The boards beneath our feet were wet with dew, the air thick with a swampy taste shot through with salt, and the raucous laughter and shouts that spilled out from the many tavern windows that dotted the breadth of the docks above somehow made me feel more alone and cut off from society than anything else.

  Still, there was work to be done, and that alone helped center my mind, turn my thoughts away from the labyrinth of perplexities into which I’d spent the remaining evening hours steeped in. I’d borrowed a serviceable blade from the Bonegwayne’s armory, and its comforting weight at my hip seemed to balance me out, as if I’d been listing to one side without a sword’s presence to keep me level.

  Tamara and Yashara stalked by my side, Pony bringing up the rear like a slow-moving avalanche. The pier groaned piteously beneath his weight and I heard more than one plank actually crack under his stony feet. Down the pier we went, past the pylons at their end where a couple of watchmen nodded dismissively at us until Pony appeared out of the fog, upon which they simply gaped and then ran away.

  “Pony’s officially arrived,” I said, patting him on the arm. “Of course, their fellows are more likely to believe those two hallucinated than an actual war troll came off the Bonegwayne.”

  Yashara’s expression was all business. She’d donned her cruel iron armor, had her great scimitar lashed to her hip, and wore her iron crown of spikes so as to keep her glorious mane of hair out of her face and cascading down her back. She didn’t see fit to acknowledge my quip, and instead led the way along the dock
s, down to their very end at the far right where they dwindled away to muddy banks that hugged the far bay’s curvature before giving way to marshy jungle and miserable shacks.

  Jessie’s warehouse was one of the last serious buildings along the final stretch of boarded docks. It rose three stories high with a peaked tile roof, the ground floor being of worked stone, the upper two of well-built wood. It wasn’t a neat building, but rather something that had accreted additional wings and sections seemingly over the years, giving it an irregular footprint and a complex perimeter composed of small indentations, tiny courtyards, and cramped alleys. The word ‘STORAGE’ was painted in large, faded black letters across the front, and scaffolding was erected over various small courtyards from which pulleys and ropes hung, ready for the loading and unloading of wares.

  There had to be at least a dozen entrances, ranging from massive double-wide loading doors beneath the faded stencil to various side doors seemingly punched into the walls at random. Few windows though, and those that I spotted as we drew close were boarded over.

  “Cerys said she’d take care of the two guards up top,” said Yashara, drawing us to a standstill about a block from the warehouse. “They apparently circled a parapet around the base of the roof. She said there were two guards in the courtyard off the main loading doors, and another human with a hound that patrols the perimeter.”

  A flash of a random memory: Cerys and I creeping down Skurve’s stairs to the ground floor, and there coming across his sleeping hound. I felt a twinge of guilt. “Let’s not kill the dog unless we have to.”

  “Unless we have to,” said Yashara. “We’ll intercept the patrolman when he’s on the opposite side of the building from the courtyard. You approach him openly asking him for directions to the Mermaid. I’ll knock him out from behind. Pony will make sure the dog becomes very interested in being anywhere else but here.”

  “Simple enough,” I said.

  “Then we’ll walk in through the front like we own the place,” said Yashara, eyes gleaming. “Which, in short order, we probably will.”

  “I like it.” I felt a flicker of excitement. Nothing like the prospect of well-controlled violence to help quell the doubts and insecurities of an anxious mind. “Shall we?”

  “Cerys was going to light a candle from the roof when the - ah. There. You see?”

  I peered up into the foggy night and saw a tiny yellow star incandesce in the shadows beside the tile roof. “Let’s go.”

  The fog dampened all sound, so that the merriment and occasional shout from the docks behind us were almost inaudible. Rats with far too many arms rippled like small shadows along the edge of the building as they fled before me, diving into countless holes, and up ahead as I rounded the corner, I saw a lantern swaying gently as the sentry made his way toward me.

  He was an older man, long of face and with a lugubrious expression, unshaven and with a three-cornered hat shoved so far back on his head that it looked as if it should have slipped right off. He wore a heavy crimson coat that had once no doubt been quite fine, and slouched along, lantern raised, a bloodhound at his heels who looked so comically like his master that I almost expected him to wear a small hat of his own.

  “Who goes there?” he called as I drew near. “Private property of the most private kind, that’s what you’re trespassing on, so private it’d make your own privates as public as the public square in relative comparison, if you’re catching my meaning. You’d best be off, my good man, off to the haunts of men, for this here is the domain of shadows and regrets, the harbor of -”

  Yashara appeared behind him like a vengeful shadow, and with one cuff of her fist sent the man sprawling to the ground even as she reached out to snag his lantern from his relaxing hand, catching it before it could fall.

  I have to admit, it was masterfully done, all the more so for how easy she made it seem. The hound turned about stiffly, chuffing and snuffing angrily as if working up the energy to bark, and then Pony stepped into the lantern light and the poor dog whined and hunkered down beside the man, burying its nose in his armpit.

  “You know, I actually wanted to hear more of what he had to say.” I crouched beside the man, watching the shivering dog cautiously as I patted his pockets and drew out a ring of keys. “He was just about to tell me what this place harbored.”

  There was a strong reek of alcohol coming from the sentry’s supine form, and I pulled out a half-empty flask from a second pocket. At this the hound raised its silvered snout and growled at me.

  “Ah,” I said, freezing. “You know what your master values, do you? Fair enough, loyal friend. Fair enough.” I slipped the flask back into the man’s pocket, and the hound cast one fearful look up at Pony and dug his snout back under the man’s arm.

  I stood up. “Shall we?”

  We rounded the warehouse, passed the huge double doors through which you could have driven an entire wagon, and rounded the corner to enter the small pocket courtyard in which the two guards stood within a pool of honeyed lantern light, both of them smoking ratty cigarettes as they spoke softly to each other.

  “Private property,” said the first without unclenching his jaw from around his cigarette. “Bugger off befoooooore -” He elongated that last word as it turned into a moan of disbelief and then fear as Pony came into view. I turned to appraise him, trying to see him as the sentries might, and had to admit he was an absolutely terrifying sight.

  His cobalt-blue hide was rough and pebbled, looking to be made of actual stone chunks around the shoulders and down the length of his lean forearms, though his bare chest and paunch of a belly were a pale gray. His massive head hung down over his chest, great, tattered bat-wing ears spreading out like sails, his nose hanging down to his chin while his mouth seemed to split his head nearly in two. Massive hands that looked like they could crush rocks to fragments ended in huge black talons, and a warhammer bigger than I was tall was slung over his shoulder.

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling like the poor men deserved some commiseration. “Not exactly fair to bring a war troll to a knife fight, is it? But sometimes Blind Fortuna goes down on your eager cock, sometimes she pegs you in the arse with the leg of a splintery bar stool. Which one do you think’s happening to you tonight?”

  The shorter of the two men - I recognized him as one of Bennie’s lads from the Mermaid - made a croaking sound and began to edge toward the door.

  “Easy there,” I said. I passed his still-stunned companion and placed my hand on the shorter man’s shoulder. “You wouldn’t want to make a mistake right now, would you?”

  The man gazed up at me. Even at night, in this foggy gloom, I could tell he’d gone pale under his sailor’s tan. “N-n-no.”

  I reached down, pulled his blade free of his scabbard, and then turned him around so I could take the knife socketed into the side of his boot. “Good man.”

  Yashara had relieved the other guard of his weapons, which we dropped into an empty barrel, and then glanced at each other. “Ready?” I asked.

  Yashara tapped the pommel of her scimitar as if debating the need to draw it, then chose not to. “Yes.”

  “Tamara,” I said, turning to where she stood at the entrance to the courtyard. “This should go smoothly, but stay clear and close to the door, all right?”

  She swallowed and gave a sharp nod.

  “Well then,” I said, smoothing down my coat, cracking my neck, and shooting my cuffs. “Let’s say hello to Jessie. Gentlemen, anything I should know about this door and the protocol for going in?”

  Pony chose that moment to rest one of his huge hands on the taller man’s shoulder, who immediately began to hyperventilate.

  “The - ah - you give a knock, it goes like this -” The man’s face gleamed in the lantern’s light with sweat as he turned to rap his knuckles on the barrel, a jaunty little series of knocks with complex pauses. “Ernie then slides open the panel, checks its us, and opens the door.”

  “Hmm,” I considered. The urge to
have Pony just shove the door in was tempting; it would alarm everyone inside, immediately let them know what sort of danger they were in… but also raise the odds of someone doing something stupid, like firing a crossbow at us in a state of panic. Also, it would simply portray us as brutes. We could use a gloom key to subtler effect, but still, Ernie might shout, draw his blade, get killed by accident as he charged us…

  “Go ahead then,” I said. “Pony, will you stand with Yashara to the side here? Tell Ernie that Kellik of Port Gloom has come to pay his respects to Jessie.”

  “Yes sir.” The shorter man took a deep breath, held it for what must have been a five count, then knocked on the door. The panel slid open and I smiled pleasantly at the incredibly bearded face that peered out suspiciously at us. The man’s brows were bushy beyond anything I’d ever seen, while his beard grew so high up his cheeks they almost reached his eyes.

  He squinted at us suspiciously. “Aye?”

  “Ah, a Master Kellik of Port Gloom here to speak with Jessie,” said the short man, voice tight with fear.

  I gave the hairy man a pleasant smile. “Just a quick chat.”

  Ernie peered at the three of us, but his fears no doubt allayed by the short man’s giving the right knock and vouching for me, he unbarred the door and swung it open.

  Ernie revealed himself to be an inordinately tall man who stood so stooped over as to be of normal height; his beard was chopped off just below his chin, but grew into a perfect brown rectangle so dense it was like a sponge. “Leave your weapons here with me. Mistress Jessie’s got company, so you’ll have to waaaaaaaaait-”

  “Interesting how everyone drags out their last word when they see Pony, isn’t it?” I said, tone conversational as I stepped between the guards to pat Ernie on the shoulder. Pony had ducked his head into view. “It’s as if the sight of a war troll causes people to immediately forget how to speak. Excuse me, let me just take this hatchet, and this knife - thank you.” I passed them out to Yashara, who dumped them into the barrel. “Now, hands behind your back?”