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Verse can hardly contain her excitement as they complete their circuit of Lethian’s Crossing and approach the door that has made the last two mind-numbing hours worth it. She reflects that tagging along with the boss (who seems to have slipped back into the role of Governor as stoically as she took slaughtering the Disfavored she had personally garrisoned here) as she checked permits and grilled the locals about contraband would once have absolutely been the most boring experience of her life. That was before she had met Lantry. Another thing she puts up with for the upcoming payoff.
Or the climax, maybe?
She snickers aloud at that. Satrapis, predictably, doesn’t react in the slightest as she pushes open the door to the brothel.
Almost certainly, this isn’t going to be the thing that finally flusters the Archon of Ice’s bastard daughter, although that tiny chance is definitely one of the reasons she’d tagged along. And, yes, a lot of it was for the sex. But mainly, she has been looking forward to watching a bunch of horny pricks try to deal with the icicle up the ass that is the Fatebinder. No one knows what the fuck to do with their faces under that glare when they’re outside in the sun, at their most Kyros-fearing and well behaved. This? This will be priceless.
And, as soon as the door closes behind them, priceless it is, because the sultry murmur you hear in the front room of every brothel goes dead.
To her credit, the madame’s polite smile is only a little bit twitchy. “Governor,” she says, dipping the local variation on the bow. “An honor to have you here at last.”
Verse swears she can actually hear people going soft in the blast of icy silence that follows.
“Well! You’re… here for the permits, then?” the madame burbles. She’s not sweating yet! This one’s got balls.
“Mm,” says her ever-eloquent boss, snapping the scroll of figures to check against out of the case at her hip without breaking eye contact.
And there, right in the entrance, they begin to go over the figures together. Verse leans back against the door, confident no one will be choosing to follow the Fatebinder into a whorehouse this evening, and briefly struggles to control her grin before wondering why the she’s trying and baring her teeth in delight at the crowd. In the back of the room, a crowd playing a game of cards and bones (Kyros has not outlawed gambling, but has not not outlawed gambling. The loopholes are huge and obviously intentional) tries to slip back into their clothes without a single noise of fabric.
It’s glorious, it really is. It absolutely makes up for the gut wound she took diving in front of Eb’s well-turned but deeply stuck up ass last week. Gut wounds fucking hurt, and she’d caught one for an Oathbreaker, and it was all worth it for this.
But, the boss being the boss, a human abacus sliding icy little beads up and down, it’s over all too soon. Now they’re onto the signing of writs of what the fuck ever. It is, at least, well timed, because Verse has actually gotten pretty pissed over that stabbed-for-an-Oathbreaker thing and could really stand to fuck some anger out once the boss leaves. She’s got eyes on that little bitch working the oh-so-innocent angle, and-
Satrapis pulls a bronze ring from her pouch, and hands it to the madame. By the time Verse has caught up with that she has matter-of-factly marched up, snatched the one with the prodigious tits by the hand, and begun leading her towards the curtain to the back rooms.
“Wh-” she finally manages as the curtain falls again behind them. The madame, all professional courtesy until that moment, darts a look of unmistakable what-the-fuck? at her, along with probably half the patrons. Being the subject of that much attention smacks her back out of her stupor, and she closes her mouth (which had actually been open this whole time, like she’s a fucking gawking teen again) and gives the room at large her best Fury face. Questions not accepted at this time.
They get the hint. It takes a bit for them to stutter back to life, but… memory is short when you’ve got a good rut on, and they seem to be relaxing again. Like that colossal upset in the order of the world didn’t just happen.
The madame clears her throat. “Well. Yes. Someone for you, tonight, my lady?”
Yeah. Someone for her. The one who’d been trying out her best innocent pout when they’d come in. She’s got to-
She-
She’s blushing. She is actually fucking blushing. She is looking at this little waif, the kind she likes to break in, and she might as well be staring at the Oldwalls instead.
“Just a drink,” she croaks.
The madame offers her a sympathetic smile that is very unwelcome, apparently soothed to know that not even the boss’ crew has any idea. “I’ll keep them coming, dear.”
“Not your fucking dear,” she snaps automatically. And this woman had faced down the Fatebinder Look almost entirely intact, so Verse isn’t that surprised when the smile just gets a little meaner. “You’re my dear for the night, they’re on the house. Deal?”
This withered old bitch is wasted in this shithole. That is the kind of striking while the enemy is weak that’d get her a hell of a gang, if she was in the Chorus. Verse doesn’t answer. But she doesn’t reach for her ring pouch, and when the first drink turns up no one asks her to, so first blood to the whoremonger, apparently.
Half that drink goes down in one, and she lets it hit her in the gut like that spear had and spew fire up into her skull for a while. Then, finally, cautiously, like probing a wound to see if any cloth fiber has wormed into it, she begins to think about what just happened. Is happening.
Because it’s not like she hasn’t noticed. She’s not fucking blind. No one gets to be precious about private bathing in an active warzone, so they’ve scrubbed off dried gore together plenty of times. Of course she’s noted that for all the discipline and training and dropping people in iron plate with one extremely well placed ice-infused punch, Satrapis is softer than you’d expect. Not at the expense of anything else, she is a perfectly designed engine of war, but… just a bit more around the hips. What must be some truly astonishing abs, invisible behind smooth pale skin.
And then of course it turns out that gaudy Fatebinder chestplate is doing a lot of squashing. And she’d long since had her curiosity about the tattoos of some law shit that cover both arms satisfied. Because they do thin out a bit, but yes, they’re everywhere else too. What the fuck kind of law would you choose to put there-
She chugs the rest of the mead and slams the tankard down, the traditional Chorus signal of “get me another one or I’ll fill this one with your blood.” The burn scrambles her brain like a robin’s egg on a hot stone for a moment.
But all that was just… observation. Like pointing out that the Spire here is more greenish on the inside than the one in Vendrian’s Well. Because all those parts are attached to Fatebinder Fuckng Satrapis.
It’s not that she thinks the boss isn’t a person. She knows there’s someone in there behind all that law and glaring, and has ever since she’d gotten her first clue to look for it in Satrapis dropping a joke on Barik. She’d said it in a scratchy deadpan so identical to every other word she said that it was Barik who’d figured it out first. But it was an unmistakable sign of life in someone she’d been ready to write off as a statue. And, once you know what to look for, it’s not hard to see the person in there. Little twitches of the lips that would be laughter in anyone else. The way the glare with eyes narrowed this way means ‘are you fucking kidding me’, but narrowed this way means ‘I am trying to think of a legal reason to execute you right now.’
The way Verse had been so mortified when she’d offered to teach her how to read, until Satrapis had broken eye contact and it hit her very hard that this was not a commander correcting a weakness in a soldier or a boss whipping a lackey into shape, and that neither of them quite knew what it was instead.
So, yeah. The boss is a person. She’s the very rare type of person that Verse likes. Quite a lot, actually. A frozen stiff hardass who is law first and human second, and is still somehow almost as comfortable to be with as her wild, untamed sisters had been.
She doesn’t acknowledge the second mug as it is placed in front of her, but she does take this one a bit slower.
You can be a person without sex. Lots of people can be people without sex. It had seemed a perfectly obvious thing that Fatebinders had some sort of code against it, or maybe knew some obscure law that made it weird for them, or some shit. Satrapis’ body was an instrument of Kyros’ will, with no time for anything else, and Verse had never even needed to make peace with that, it was so very obvious.
Except at this very moment someone is playing that instrument
So all this time-
She stops. Then she lets the mead buy her some time for that one. ‘A bit slower’, what is wrong with her tonight?
So all this time what, you dumbass little farm girl? her brain.manages to choke out over the alcohol sizzling into it.
So all this time nothing. So the boss fucks, so what? That doesn’t jar with anything she’s known so far. Satrapis is the sort of duty-cranker that would put her own needs a distant fifth anytime any Fate needs Binding. And they have been doing nothing but splitting skulls and spitting road dust since… pretty much the moment they met. So there hasn’t been an opportunity.
So all this time- drink number two rings its death knell against the table- Verse has been right here. And her morale has been suffering.
People get the Chorus wrong, a lot of the time. Not that Nerat would have it any other way. Your average Tiersman thinks of the Chorus as a mob of psychotic, sadistic lunatics who would do anything for a moment of pleasure. Which is insulting, because that’s really only true of the top ranks, like her. The point is- she does not even allow the third mug to be set on the table before she snatches it, spattering the gnarled old wood with drops of amber- that people forget that the difference between them and your average Chorus member is one very bad day, and either a bit of luck or a spontaneous discovery that yes, they can and will kill to save their own lives. That’s not some kind of magical transformation, although Nerat loves that rumor too. The people who go on to be the worst of the Choir were just waiting for any excuse to be the monsters they’d always been.
Like her.
The mead doesn’t burn the way it has been, have they been watering it?
No, not like her. Because she gets her kicks the nice wholesome way, through blood and blades and agony. And not even that much agony, everyone talks a big game about the people they’ve flayed, but she’s put enough blades through skin to know that every one of them is bluffing. It doesn’t just come off, it would be a huge pain in the ass.
A burst of laughter nearly chokes her on another mouthful. That’s good, she’s gotta remember that one.
The point is; when she was first blooded into the Chorus, she ran into a few people who had always wanted to be a different kind of monster. And she’s not the only Fury who did. The result being that some gangs sunk to terrible lows, but… if there’d been a Fury around when that Fatebinder from the court had found that gang, standing over a tierswoman? There wouldn’t have been a case to drag to Tunon, just a few beautiful splashes of red across the dusty road.
The point isn’t that, either. It’s that Verse had gotten used to living among people who did what they wanted, when they wanted, and had always run with gangs that had a Blue Flag Of Rut policy enforced on pain of… well, pain. And she had left that- she had chosen to leave that- to march all around the Tiers and up half the Spires in them. And it has been fun. She thought emerging from the corpse of a farmgirl who had looked like her into Verse the Scarlet Fury had been fun, and she wouldn’t have been able to believe that real fun was trudging after a stonefaced lawpusher into one absolutely insane situation after another.
But… all this time?
At least she hasn’t had it as bad as Barik- the rest of that thought is drowned under too big a gulp to take at once, and she chokes and sputters for a second while mead burns her nostrils.
And when she can breathe again, the woman who takes in that breath is one who is over it. Fuck her. Her loss. She can have the bitch with the udders if she likes, because Verse is now done feeling weird about this. Everyone else has already forgotten Satrapis was here, and the muffled sound of moaning and slapping from the back rooms is churning her head and her sheath into pleasant foam, and maybe she will give the little waif a scar to remember her by and just pay the rings for damages in the morning. The boss will be mad at her, but oh well.
The empty mug smacks down onto the table, and she uses it to push herself upright. She’s barely wobbly, because if you can’t kill as many people drunk as you can sober you are not going to survive the Chorus. One bronze? Yeah, she’s got one bronze. One of the rare moments where she benefits from how well this job pays. Actually, she’s got two bronze, and she wonders, looking at the solemn-faced boywhore down the way, if she can fit a ring over-
The noise is back to its usual level. People are enjoying themselves loudly and thoroughly. No one is listening for one voice over any other. Verse certainly isn’t.
But she’s the only person here who has heard enough of one particular voice, in sparing little bits, that she can recognize it. And the jagged, sawtoothed, primal sound from the rooms in the back cuts straight through everything else, drags its rusty blade down her spine, and turns her legs to jelly.
She thinks, distantly, that she has only ever heard that voice get that loud twice before, single words over the din of battle.
She thinks, wow, so her voice really does just sound like someone using a whetstone all the time.
She thinks several things in rapid succession that are hard to keep track of but leave her mouth suddenly bone-dry.
And then she thinks of the girl who was the shell that Verse hatched out of. 14 years old, and still ashamed of the way her heart sang when she took a chicken’s head off from 20 paces. In the loft of her family’s barn, too distracted to care how cliche that was, with the girl whose parents came to trade for their grain twice a season. Her skin coming alive at the slightest touch, everything fast and hot and sharp. Thinking, this is real. This is Important. This is something special.
It hadn’t been. She doesn’t even remember the girl’s name. She certainly doesn’t think much of the chances of her first awkward, fumbling fling, the one that gave her a taste for the shy type ever since.
It hadn’t been special. Nothing about it was special other than some fun, the warmth of a body, taking what you can without caring if you gave anything back. It is not-
The fourth mug of mead is placed, softly, next to her elbow on the table she hadn’t noticed she’s sitting at again. She absently rests a hand on it, and looks up.
“I think I’m in real fucking trouble,” she says blankly.
The madame, who had come to serve this one personally, nods. “Dear, I think you have been in trouble.”
And she’s not quite sure what that means but she knows she does not want to figure it out. So she lets the mead provide an alternative.
Sometime later, she is outside, slumped back against a wall a short distance away from an oily amber puddle. She’s coming around already, of course. Alcohol is a poison like any other; a quick retch, aided by a fist into her own stomach if necessary, a pinch of rotspear up the nose, and she’ll be good to go in no time.
Just, not yet. Right now she is admiring the way the Spire and the Oldwalls combine to carve a giant swathe out of the night sky, reaching so high as to nibble at the side of Terratus Grave just above. Even the stars bow to the might of the Spire. That’s… she doesn’t know what that is. She’ll have to think about it. Maybe she’ll figure it out when she’s inside the Spire, which is somehow now something a bit like her home.
She becomes aware that her eyes have drifted closed when a hand falls on her shoulder. Immediately, Red Rivers is free of the sheath and on the way up to take the offending hand at the elbow.
The hand leaves her shoulder, easily catches her wrist, and slams it back against the wall hard enough she nearly drops her blade. The figure crouched next to her is unmistakable; if the white hair belonged to Bleden Mark, or even possibly Eb, she’d be dead already.
“Don’t wander off like that,” Satrapis’ rusty voice emerges as she pins Verse to the wall by her wrist.
And Verse suddenly remembers what kind of trouble she is in. “‘kay,” she breathes.
The Fatebinder narrows her eyes, just slightly; the ‘considering’ glare. Then she actually spares a few more words. “Two hours. Started to worry.”
“Sorry,” Verse squeaks, as every single one of her organs feels like they begin to fight to the death.
And there are only a few people in all of Terratus who could tell that the boss’s minute widening of eyelids and thinning of lips means wow, you are really fucked up tonight, huh? So when the hand on her wrist steadily and firmly pulls her to her feet, she doesn’t fight it.
Satrapis’ head tilts half a degree to the left. You okay to get back up to the Spire?
She absolutely is, she’s practically sober already. And the Fatebinder is, necessarily, excellent at telling when someone is lying. But she has had a surprisingly tumultuous evening, so Satrapis can keep any observations about it to herself. “Mllgh,” she says. Not quite, give me a hand?
A tiny hint of confused furrow appears between the ice-white eyebrows. But she does, indeed, keep the observations to herself. The two of them get all the way to the portal with her arm around the boss’ shoulders, and the question of how she feels about the places their torsos are touching being warmer than it feels like they should be is one she will manage in the morning at least, and ideally never.
Although, by the time the morning actually comes, she’s settled on an answer. All things considered? Still definitely worth two hours of permit-filing bullshit.