Chameleon in Chrome Ch. 11

It bothered her now, all of it.

From her attempts to find work and being feared for nothing to one of her old standbys; the sadness that she'd carried all of her life about her body. When she was alone, she didn't mind it, even liked the gifts which she'd been given and the way that she looked. But that was only good if she was alone.

She sighed.

At least when she was alone nobody feared or hated her.

She caught sight of something attached to the corpse's belt and a little hope sprang up in her that it might be his purse - and that it wasn't completely empty of coins as it looked to be a little full. She held her staff in one hand and her sword in the other.

She was about to sheath the blade and kneel when she heard heavy, wet footfalls approaching and she groaned, deciding it was best to remain standing for the moment.

She didn't turn right away. She knew this one just by the feel of his gaze.

She did turn to face him after another moment and saw the last one living from the other side of this fight. One last man to face, she guessed. She didn't need to look any closer. There was an air to him and it permeated things for a good distance around him.

Challa's frustration and her slightly upset state was giving her a far better read on the man than she needed and it also kept her longer range senses a little dulled. Otherwise she'd have felt the way that she was being watched from farther away, almost at the lip of the valley.

She could already feel her ire toward this man rising - and he hadn't even opened his mouth yet.

He was large, too proud by half, wearing an arrogance derived from that absurd pride, and bone-stupid head to foot. She even knew who he was; the slightly-distant nephew of the other dead lord in this mess.

They looked at each other for a time across about sixty feet of wafting fog and smoke, wet ash, and steady rain.

"This is all your doing," he said slowly, putting as much malevolence into his tone as he could.

She nodded, "Oh aye.

"None of this slaughter would have happened at ALL if I were not here. Very clever of you to lay the blame so craftily. I see that you were not fooled even a little.

"Are we now to stand here and consider this brilliant deduction, or ...?"

"Filthy stinking witch," he growled.

She almost laughed at him. "I smell no worse than you, I imagine. We are both wearing the same blood and offal, no?"

She sighed and continued airily, "Though I daresay that going in, I probably smelled a fair bit better than you do on your best day."

She bit back most of the things which she now wanted to say as she turned to him fully, "So now what is it to be, fool?

"The forces of two of the most common, low, brutish, manor lords in this land who imagined that they were aggrieved nobles were joined in battle this day. It probably came about because neither of them could convince their liege lord that it was anything other than a petty argument that he had no interest in.

"One of them hired a battlemage to help his cause and here I stand. What of it?"

When he stood looking as though he was thinking of his own witty reply but couldn't decide on just the right one, Challa forged on after another moment.

"I know that you were here to fight for your half-uncle. I gave him the first chance to hire me, but he didn't like my price and sent me off. So I was hired by his enemy in this stupid fight."

"This was no stupid fight!" he exclaimed, "My lord sought battle as redress for his grievance."

She groaned as she looked up, "Fuckwit, your relative sought what we stand in the middle of here as a barely legal way of stealing from a like-minded twat who stole most of his land from somebody else."

"And you killed everyone!" he bellowed. "Who paid your fee for the treachery of it?"

She shook her head, "You know, I first took you to be an armed simpleton, but the twist in your logic has forced me to revise my thinking. If you really believe what you have just shouted at me, then you are beneath a moron. Who but the liege lord himself might gain from what you have just said? And since he's dumber than the lot of you all, I know that he'd never have thought of it.

"This mess was already two hours old and more than half of the fools on both sides here were already dead. I saw that this witless killing would go on all afternoon and I saw how your uncle thought that riding men down from the back of his horse made him look a bigger man somehow.

"Mostly, I felt for the horse."

She shrugged, "His horse reared up because of the fear that I put into her large breast and the stupid git fell off and was trampled by his own mare because he was even less a horseman than he was a wise lord or a leader of men.

"The daft little prick that I was working for had already been killed, but his men kept up the fight because your two kinds only know of one way to deal with those they defeat. T'is very, very hard to run for one's life as the loser if the hounds of the victor are feeling just and full of bloodlust.

"Knowing what was to come, some of the ones left on my side fought for their lives as they knew they were dead men anyway. Most of the ones who hadn't had that thought, I guess, ran. Some on your side ran. What I cast only killed the ones facing it who were in the middle - here. Any who were running when it began were not harmed - either side. I killed no one who was farther out than the wagons, though most of them were ruined"

"It was enough. Most of the menfolk around these parts who were able-bodied now lie on this field. What I did ended it and left no injured alive who were looking at it and could not get away.

T'was a kindness for later when the animals come following their noses from the scent of spilled blood.

Someone has to bring the harvest in before the snows or most around here will starve. I doubt that these two lords ever had the thought of saving some for the next year.

She looked at him, "I was told beforehand to do whatever was needed to bring victory. But once you get past a certain point, it goes far beyond stupid.

We should both be gone from here soon, long before dark at any rate. By then, this little place will be crawling with wolves. The ones that I have seen near here looked to be half-starved.

"Listen. You can already hear the first of the true victors in this. The crows are already laughing.

"I do not care about the victory itself. The squabbles mean nothing to anyone but the two dead fools. I won't see a single coin for anything that I did - but I knew what I'd get if I let your dead lord win.

I even knew what I'd probably get from my own side if they won. I needed to win and keep my patron in fear as I reminded him of our agreement until he opened his purse to pay me. There are lords whose memory sometimes fails after a victory and they face a line of people with their hands out.

"But with him dead and all, I had to do things a little differently.

"So I won the day by myself and I still draw breath as my prize. That makes ALL of this MY fault to you? That your kin lost?

"Idiot. Did you not see the rest of what I did here? A little hard to miss, I'd have thought."

She laughed a little then, "No, you did not see it, did you?

"You were on your knees with your face pressed to the wet reeds, trying not to soil yourself at what I was doing then. After I stopped, you got up and wandered around like a tit in a trance for long minutes, not believing what you saw with your own eyes."

As he stared at her, she grinned and pointed at him, "Now THAT was a storm, was it not?"

"I did only what I was hired to do, nothing more than you'd have done in my place if you could. And I did not kill all of these here, far less than half, more like one in four.

"There were others in this fight, you know. You were busy also, by the blood that you wear. Though as I recall it, you were not fighting whenever I looked for you. Yet you declare that this was my doing."

He looked at her for a moment, tilting his head, "You're a woman."

She nodded with a laugh, "Oho! A fighter who possesses a startling ability to see what stands unhidden before him. Again, what of it?"

She almost wanted to hold her breath waiting for the next piece of his wisdom. That it was all that he'd come to if that was what his eyes had brought him flat-out amazed her.

She shook her head. Some people's whelps ...

"You don't need to be here," he said.

She lifted her chin challengingly, "No?

"What am I to use for coin then? How am I to get food in your wondrous little world?

"Fuck off, sellsword," she grunted as she tightened a bracer without looking at him.

"Sellsword?" He echoed, "I am none such, foul witch. I'll have you know - "

"You'd have me know a lot of horse shite," she replied hotly.

"Think a moment before you try to knit me a blanket of lies now. Most of the dead here bear the marks of battle. Some few over this way died at my hand in that way. The ones I felled with magick do not bear marks such as that as they were far fewer, idiots whose small minds had not told them that there no longer was a need to kill, other than perhaps out of hatred."

She pointed, her finger sweeping around in an arc to indicate the ruin around them. "If - as you charge - I am responsible for all or most of this mess here, killing wantonly with dark magicks, do you really think that I would not KNOW who you were to the other dead lord lying back there?

"I know your fool thoughts just as I know your name, Breck. And so that you might know a little, what was done by me was not dark.

"I only ended it, that is all," she said.

"You would now try to tell me that you were an ally? An esteemed relation and colleague whose mighty arm was sought to stand and kill alongside all of these others? You would say that that you fought until the last?"

She laughed coldly, "T'would be a bold lie, but a bald one nonetheless."

"It would be no lie," he said, "That was the way of it!"

She shook her head with a chuckle. "I was here, do you not remember? Why is it that you were not leading the charge to butcher the ones who were running, Breck? Do you hold yourself to be noble in some way that I cannot see? Or were you holding back out of a higher need? And I say it to mean the single highest one to you, that of avoiding risk at all costs.

Breck glared, but said nothing.

"Oh yes," she nodded, "you were busy hiding in the rushes, doing your utmost to keep from soiling your drawers. And that was BEFORE I caused the earth to shake under those piss-covered boots of yours."

He was about to contest her remark, but she pointed a little gleefully, "Oh come now, mighty warrior.

"If that is not yours that you wear on your boots - which I can smell plainly from where I stand, whose could it be then? I saw none here who had the time to seek you out for insult, though t'would have been deserved for how cravenly you did NOT fight. After my first volley, I saw you hiding among the dead and the dying! T'is how you come to wear that gore.

"T'would be best that you kept this single thought in your otherwise empty head: I was here. I saw you. I even watched you. I saw what you did not do. You did no fighting at all - in any of this here.

"Fighting differs from hiding by a large measure. And if you were not hiding, why is it that the most unsoiled thing on you is that battle-axe?

"I know that you were sent here to learn at this late stage by your father, the dead lord's half-brother, yet your half-uncle over there in the grass thought so little of you that once you came to him, he hired you just as he hired any of the other thugs in his employ - no better than they, though it chafed you to hear of it."

She leaned forward a little, "By that, he did not even consider you as kin, not even as one that he could trust. If indeed, you were any good at this sort of thing, you'd have a reputation and been treated far better for it, no?

"I was there the day that you came though I stood in the shadows. I heard what was said of you by the lord and by his men-at-arms. I watched your ears grow red as your half-uncle told you that you were as worthless in a fight as your father and like him, he had no trust in you."

She snorted, "Do not even try to tell me that you fought your way here to me. I saw you as you hid in the thickets, craven lout. I knew that you were there and I have been standing here waiting for you to regain your wits for half an hour, for that is how long all of the others here have been dead."

She tilted her head, noticing that he was edging slowly closer. She was unconcerned, still working at her bracer, "Or do you think to strike now - when all of these others failed? Almost all were better at this business than you, from what I saw."

She chuckled, "I would say that you have likely never seen a little fight like this one before in your life."

She looked up from her bracer at him, "Do the right thing here, fighter. Turn around and walk."

She pointed, "Walk that way and I'll let you live.

"In order to tell your lies in a tavern of how noble you are and how bravely you fought this day, you need to be alive. If no one knows that someone else lives who actually won this fight then you may claim the victory - maybe even become the new bloodthirsty little lord hereabout, eh?

"I offer you the chance of it.

"It matters not to me. But you should choose and be gone ere long either way, before I change my mind."

She waited while he thought it over and in that time, her mind went to the natural forces waiting overhead. The thunder rumbled and rattled anew from one cloud to the next as they began to gather quickly, some of them going against the predominant wind in order to do that.

But he saw none of these things.

"I'm no sellsword," he stated in a low voice.

"What then?" she asked with a grin from inside her helmet, "A sell axe, since you carry that battle-axe and not a sword?

"You're out of luck the same as I am, since your lord is dead and cannot pay you.

"Whether the weapon be a sword, a bow, a pike - or a staff, we are all of us sellswords here in some way excepting the ones sworn by oath in exchange for a little land to farm. Many new widows will wail this night on those little farmholds.

"Only the two unimportant little lords here fought without the promise of payment - and they had visions of other wealth in their tiny heads.

"But they're dead now and hunger will never bother either one ever again. You and I are not that lucky.

"Walk away now and cut a few purses from these corpses as you go and I'll do the same. We might each of us find enough to buy a room and some food from it.

She looked across into his eyes, "You never answered my question. You remarked upon my being a woman. I asked what of it," she said as the thunder rumbled louder overhead and crackled hollowly.

"Nothing" he replied as he looked at what he took to be her helmet, "I merely noticed it.

"Strange to find a woman in a fight like this. How many fucking horns have you got on that helmet? It looks daft."

She shook her head, "This was no fight. Neither was it truly a battle. T'was but a brawl such as these two fools knew of fighting and nothing more.

"Did this wisdom that I am female come to you by looking at my hips? My little bosoms, as hidden as they are here, was it the sight of their slight swell in my breastplate that sent this flare of brilliance into your mind?

"Blind as well as witless," she spat, "Do you not see what I carry behind me? Do you think that it is a part of my fine evening costume here?"

She saw his eyes flick toward what she mentioned and he looked uncertain for the first time in this - as though it took this detail to shake his foolish faith in himself.

She watched his eyes widen as she caused her tail to wave back and forth for a moment.

His slowness astounded her. She wondered briefly if he often pissed himself because the message that he needed to piss came too late to him. She began to feel anger over it.

"Fucking stupid dolt," she growled under her breath, "By what I see in your eyes now, I am no longer even a woman to you. Perhaps it is best that way."

She reached up and taking hold of her mask, she pulled it back and dropped it. That brought the number of horns visible on her head to just the two that she was stuck with.

"Look you," she sneered, "These horns are NOT part of my mask! They are what grew from me as I was a child. Like this tail, they are the things which have cursed me to be friendless and alone for all of my life.

"See what you have been thinking to lull with your slow approach. Save the honeyed words that you thought to speak so that you could get close enough to harm me."

He almost dropped his battle-axe at the sight of her as her long hair flew around her head, now that it had been set free to blow in the wind. To him, it revealed her power, looking like a silvery-white aura somehow. In truth, it was only her hair, but then in some ways, he was easily impressed.

He thought to himself that he was very near to where he'd be able to rush her.

She read his thoughts and regarded him as she looked through her eyebrows, doing her level best not to laugh, since a good deal of it would be bitter.

"You should run," she said, "now."

"You shouldn't be allowed to draw breath, you foul, wicked thing!" he shouted as he came at her.

She turned away with a curious wave of her hand and his world erupted in a blinding white flash. He felt searing pain as he was cast down onto his face in the mud. All that he could hear was the tortured keening from his eardrums.

But he wasn't dead.

He couldn't move a single thing; his breaths were hot murder in and out of his lungs. His armour - what was left of it - felt like it was melted against his skin. His eyes burned from the flash and he couldn't see.

But he wasn't dead.

She went back to the body and kneeling quickly; she cut off the lord's purse and looked inside. Almost what she'd have said that he owed her.

She walked here and there, looking for the other lord's body, where she remembered that she'd last seen him sitting on his horse prancing about and yelling at his men. When she found his body, she also found that his purse had already been cut. Her sense told her what had happened.

She turned back and walked to where they'd glared at each other.

He was still there, squirming a little in the mud. She saw that his purse was very fat and heavy. She knelt with her knee on his back as she cut it free.

"So you took your uncle's gold yourself," she chuckled, "Such honor your family has."

"Useless," he mumbled, "All melted together, the coins. I - I cannot see."

"His gold is stuck to your own now, I imagine," she said quietly, "Lightning can do that. Too bad that I'll have to take yours along with it now."

She grinned just a little, "More's the pity, of course.

"Just lie still and rest," she said, "I think that your sight should return to you over a little time, though your eyes will burn and run tears for a day or so. Then you should be fine - your same large, strong, and stupid self in no time, or almost.

"We two are all that is left and yet you are too stupid to see your luck when it comes to you. You still wanted to fight?"

She laughed softly for a moment as his intent came to her, "You wanted to murder me and then tell anyone who might listen that you bested a battlemage? Leave me out of your lies.

"To be heard clearly by you, idiot - and I'd hope that it is understood at last; I did not choose what I was birthed as any more than you did.

"I had no voice in what an ancestor did far back in my line ages before I was cast into this world - where most of the people revile me to even lay their eyes upon me. So to hear wisdom such as what falls from your lips like the shit out of a mare's arsehole gets a bit hard to listen to after you hear it a few hundred times.