Deviant Mage Pt. 03 - Lower Lanovul

"Good..." she whispered.

The corporal yanked on the rope, the noose tightened, but the thick coating of crap on the filthy girl's neck solidified, resisting the noose's tightening. She pretended to wheeze, unable to breathe, clawed at the rope like she meant to loosen it, but her bound hands meant she couldn't do much. The corporal reluctantly released tension on the rope, and she clawed the knot looser. She made exaggerated gasps for breath as he dragged her over to his horse and tied his end of the rope to the saddle.

She was dragged away from the serf cottages. The only witnesses to this whole event besides the Lanomen were the various kids, who watched the utterly filthy, sewage-dripping topless girl with wide eyes and expressions that varied from disgusted to awed. A few of them pointed and laughed at her. She stuck her tongue out at them- someone among them was probably the reason the Lanomen had been called.

"Quit gawkin', ya little shits!" snapped the sergeant. A couple of the kids jeered back at him, but then some of those kids silenced the jeerers. Which turned into several fights amongst the kids. "Fuckin' vermin..." he muttered, loud enough that Stench heard him clearly. The kids probably did too.

"Don't call 'em that, Sarge" said the corporal, warningly. And the sergeant, to Stench's surprise, actually went quiet.

While Stench got half-dragged behind the horse, she focused on the microbes in the rope. She had never tried this before, but it ought to be the same idea as those times she'd turned shit to dust to clear her tracks. If it didn't work, she could use coprokinesis to pull the knots apart, but this would hopefully be harder to notice. She gave the various bacteria and fungi that lethargically ate at the damp fibers of the hemp a command to work harder. And they did.

But she was already well-aware that there was a hard limit to how much she could encourage germs without killing them, and that damp hemp rope was far from a perfect habitat. Building up the population enough that they would rot the rope wound up taking significantly longer than she had hoped. There was a place along this road that was lined with mortared stone walls, and she'd hoped to escape somewhere around there. But, by the time she actually did get the ropes to the point where she was confident they'd break if she strained them, the Lanomen had managed to drag her to Lanovale's main road, and there was nothing around her except low stone walls their horses could jump, and hedges which she could climb only a little faster than a regular person.

It occurred to her that she probably could just snap her bindings as they gave her a dunk in the Lan, and then she could let the river carry her away. And she was frantically trying to think of anything other than that!

Stench and the Lanomen passed many people, who stood and stared at the crusty half-naked girl as she was half-dragged behind the horse. Absolutely no one she passed bore anything resembling a sympathetic expression, even though as far as they knew she was being dragged off to her death. It was a little depressing, but mostly it enraged Stench. All she'd done so far was offend people, trespass, and a bit of petty theft, but most of them sneered upon her with the same venom she'd once seen directed at a serial arsonist about to hang.

On the off-chance she survived, she would remember this.

The main road crossed the River Lan before it reached Lower Lanovul. So they would probably stop to dunk her off somewhere very near the bridge. She had an idea for how to escape using the bridge. Oh, Gods, and if she fucked this up, then she'd get her bath in the Lan anyway...

Dammit. It was her only chance. She could now see glimpses of the river, and its roar was pervasive. The Lan was a torrent right now thanks to the persistent rain. The main road spanned the river by a four-arched stone bridge, plain and sturdy, its stones filmed with algae and speckled with moss.

There was an unpaved side-road that branched off the main road and wound its way down to the river, and there was a relatively gentle bit of the Lan just downriver from the bridge, with fishermen's shacks and a smokehouse built just off the stony riverbank. The horse started to drag the filthy girl down that way.

Right. That was far enough. She gave the ropes a good yank, and the now utterly rotten fibers ripped apart. With her hands free, she wrenched at the noose around her neck. She heard the corporal behind her curse, he yanked at the noose, but she'd gotten shit into the knot and solidified it- it wouldn't tighten. Her head popped free, and she took off.

She could see the corporal's man-catcher with her shit-sense, from how he'd hit her with the butt and had gotten it dirty. She managed to infer that he was thrusting it at her, and she leapt to the side as he went for her neck. He missed, thank fuck, and she made it off the road before he had a chance to try again. She scrambled up an embankment, frantically making her way up to the bridge. The horses would have to circle around, following the path. That would buy her a few precious seconds.

She burst out onto the bridge. It was about seventy paces long and fifteen paces wide, its roadway was so thick with dirt that patches had become full-on soil with grass growing on them, and there was currently no one on it, though there was a guy with a donkey cart on the opposite side of the bridge heading her way. She didn't glance behind her, because she could see both the Lanomen just fine with her shit-sense, through the back of her own head. As soon as their horses galloped up onto the bridge, she jumped over the bridge's low guard wall.

Both her hands had been smeared thickly with the freshest shit still on her, the very crap that the corporal had shat onto her. She wished she could tell him just how helpful he'd been. She used that fresh crap to slide down the masonry, purposely making it so the adhesion only barely slowed her fall. At the last possible moment, she solidified the crap to its maximum stickiness and leather-like toughness, her shoulder was wrenched painfully, but it held, and she used the momentum of the fall to swing herself. On the up-swing she glued her other hand to the top of the arch.

And then she had to fight the urge to scream, because that had been her injured hand, and by sticking herself to the masonry she now had about half her body weight pulling at whatever had broken. It was agony, and the only reason she managed to stay silent was because of how high her pain tolerance was. She instantly solidified the shit that covered her broken hand, and the pain became only mildly excruciating.

She had kept the broken, half-rotted rope that the corporal had used to bind her. With no better options, she had stuffed the rope fragments down into her shitty knickers, and now that she was hanging securely (she hoped) from the arch, she used her coprokinesis to eject it. Hopefully, the second or so of delay wouldn't be noticed. The corporal had used a lot of rope, and its rotten fragments fell over a wide area, making a big splash. A splash that she could only hope sounded like she'd plunged into the Lan.

Her heart pounded in her ears. Her every breath sounded deafening. She felt like she ought to pray not to be discovered, but she refused to.

"Oh, you gotta be shitting me..." she heard the corporal say above her. "How many people just saw that?"

"That guy over there" said the sergeant, voice extremely calm, but with a very dangerous edge to it that spoke of tightly-reigned fury. "And then there's all the folks we met on the road who saw we caught 'er."

"Sarge, I swear. That rope was good. There's no way she could'a reached the knots. You know I'm good at that kinda thing!"

"So how'd she escape?"

"I don't know!"

"You'd better have a good explanation by the time we get to the station, Corporal! It'd better be good enough the Lanovins think you don't deserve to get impaled! Oh, Gods. They're gonna stake me just as high!"

"I swear, Sarge, this wasn't my fault! Something weird's goin' on! Good rope doesn't just snap like that!"

"Did you search her before you bound her?"

"No, because she was covered in shit! I was gonna search her once we'd got her clean!" There was a short but significant pause. "Oh, fuck me..."

"She must'a had another blade hidden, you serf-born idiot! Gods damn you! And me for thinking you were competent!"

"What, can you blame me for not wanting to touch her?!"

"Yes! You were already a mess! Does your foreign blood make you squeamish, too?!"

It was kind-of amusing to hear the corporal sputter.

"We can still catch her, Sarge! Just send everyone down the river! She'll wash up eventually! Might even be alive!" The corporal sounded desperate.

"Good idea! How about I go gather up our volunteers to arrange that, while you go an' explain this whole situation to the Captain! And if you don't own up to not searching 'Stench' properly, then I'm gonna have to try'n explain things myself!"

"Yes Sergeant!" The corporal's horse thundered up the bridge, towards Lanovul.

"Merciful Shut, I beg your aid..." muttered the sergeant, and then his horse thundered off in the opposite direction.

If they hadn't been Lanomen, Stench might have felt sorry for them. They were going to get screwed hard for catching her and then losing her. They probably wouldn't wind up impaled (Dovian could only hand out that punishment sparingly, to the people who truly enraged her) (which meant Stench was quite possibly due for one), but they probably would get get flogged, or maybe get branded with the word 'fail' on their foreheads, or whatever else it was that Dovian felt counted as just retribution for what seemed to be an honest mistake.

The whole time the two of them had been conversing, Stench had been afraid that they would smell her, or hear her if she tried to move. All she could do was stay still, and hope that the wind (there was a good breeze down here, something to do with the river) was blowing away from those two Lanomen. She refused to pray. She doubted any God, yet alone Hethaltie (who was also known by the archaic name 'Shut', but the Shrine thought that didn't sound divine enough), would appreciate it if she asked for Their aid.

Then she had realized that she could actually see the stink getting blown off of her with her shit-sense. It had appeared as a very faint discoloration of the air downwind of her, and it got sucked along by the steady breeze. The breeze was blowing in the direction of the Lanomen, but some down-draft was sucking it well away from their noses. They wouldn't be able to smell her.

Was that new?

She almost sobbed with relief once the two Lanomen galloped off, one to get chewed out, and the other to organize a wild goose chase.

Well, it appeared she'd basically just faked her own death. By accident. How about that? She was tempted to giggle from a mixture of stress, relief, and the sheer absurdity of what had just happened. After everything she'd gotten away with, she'd nearly ruined everything, because she'd just loved the idea of wallowing under a shit-house so much that it hadn't occurred to her that it could possibly be a stupid place to hide! And then she'd fallen asleep, because she'd felt just so damn safe! That was probably what it felt like to be delusional! Was she delusional?! Was this how a sane person was supposed to think?!

She took a few deep breaths, trying to calm herself. What mattered was that she had managed to avert disaster yet again. It hadn't even felt like she'd gotten lucky: she actually had been prepared to deal with that situation, and she hadn't fucked it up when it counted. This was progress! And now, as far as everyone in Lanovale was about to be concerned, she'd thrown herself into the raging river of death, and was possibly, but far from certainly, dead. It had never been her intention to fake her death, but now that she had, she could certainly make use of it.

Meanwhile, though, she'd just lost her dagger, probably her rain cloak, and it was even quite possible that someone would search the outhouse and find her dagger belt, dress and everything in her pouches down in the shit-pit; it all depended on whether anyone actually got curious enough to look.

She needed to go and confirm whether her stuff was still in that outhouse. She had so little, she couldn't afford to lose any more. At least she knew that her knapsack, with her food and journal, was still hidden in the heart of that manure pile.

And in the mean-time, what? Keep dangling under this fucking bridge? Her shoulders were already starting to ache, and she only barely trusted fresh shit to adhere her to the stone above. As it aged, it would grow weaker and weaker.

Right. First thing. Get to the other riverbank without being spotted.

Very slowly, the utterly filthy, nearly-naked girl peered out from the shadows under the arch. It was just passed mid-day, cloudy as was most often the case at this time of year, and the shadows under the bridge were deep and dark. She saw a guy over on the riverbank who was poking around at the water's edge, and she stayed hidden for the few minutes it took him to pick his way down the riverbank and out of sight.

Once there was no one watching, she started to make her way along to the next arch, slowly moving hand over hand while trying not to hurt her injured hand, clambering around the bridge column like a bug. As she made her way across, she overcharged the germs in the hand-prints she left behind, so all trace of her passage crumbled away. From shadow to shadow, she made her way unseen to the duskward side of the bridge. The final pier of that bridge was set onto what was currently dry land (though the river got this high several times per winter), and an embankment led up to the fields.

The final half-arch of that bridge was known to be a place where vagrants liked to make their camps. She saw the remnants of one such camp. Someone (probably Lanomen) had come and smashed it to the best of their ability, and she saw a few stains on the wall that looked like blood.

Right. A lot of Lanovale's horses were raised near here, and she knew of several manure piles among those farms. She just had to make it to one of those piles without being seen, and she also had to avoid leaving any trace that she'd survived. She'd figured out a way to clear her hand-prints- even to her shit-sense, there was no trace. Now she just had to do something about the poop-dust she'd inevitably shed. It was actually mostly still moist, she'd been rained on the whole time she'd been dragged to the river. The properties of the shit covering her were still malleable enough that she could command it to stay cohesive. She hoped.

She wiped her hands off on her knickers, encouraging the filth on her hands to join the muck saturating the fabric. Then she climbed up the embankment, commanding the filth upon her body to stay cohesive, watching with her shit-sense to see if she'd left any residue behind. She hadn't.

There was some traffic on the road and bridge, and she had to wait until no one was looking her way. Silently, she darted to some nearby bushes, hid in them until the traffic was completely gone, and then hopped a dry stone fence by purely mundane means. She disintegrated the various shit-smears she'd left once she was on the other side, and skulked through a barnyard behind some stables. There were some farmhands around, but not many. Most of the horses were out doing whatever was required of beasts of burden.

She managed to avoid being noticed, and she made her way to a manure pile. It wasn't a very big manure pile, only as high as her knee. There was a much larger one just a little further away. This one would work, though, and she was done with today and everything it had thrown at her and just wanted some peace, now.

She opened up a hollow in the crap-pile that was as deep as she could get it (she was clearly feeling morbid, because she was immediately struck of how much the hole reminded her of an open grave), flopped down into the hole, and covered the hollow over, completely burying herself. She left a tube to breathe through. After a few minutes, she opened up a cavity around her body so that she could move around a little. And she tried, and repeatedly failed, to not vividly imagine a spear-point, sword-point, or some other pointy object stabbing into the dung pile, and for that to become the beginning of another thing. But time passed, and no one bothered her.

Lying there in the dark, stinking, her-shaped cavity, she wanted to fall asleep, but she physically couldn't- her coprokinesis didn't work when she was asleep, so her air-tube would collapse if she lost consciousness. Plus, she'd gotten the shit kicked out of her because she'd gotten too comfortable in her last hiding place.

Lying there, sore, tired, hungry and thirsty, she also quickly grew desperately bored. After what had just happened, she was on the edge of being disgusted with herself and her deviant sexuality, but only the edge. She was supposed to be done with self-loathing.

With literally nothing else to do for several hours, and with a great need to distract herself from her anxiety and aches, she started to pleasure herself with the filth around her, while thinking about all the stuff that had gone right. She had promised herself she wouldn't regret what she'd done; she would keep that promise.

After she'd orgasmed a few times, she felt a lot better, but it also became even harder to keep herself awake. She actually did nod off, only for the cavity around her to collapse and her air-tube to implode the moment she fell asleep. She woke up instantly, nose and mouth plugged with dung, and re-made both the tube and the cavity before even consciously thinking about it, then grumpily spat out a glob of dung she had nearly inhaled. Well, at least she had an idiot-proof way of staying awake...

***

Eventually, the sun set. The 'morning's' rapid sunrise meant the day was a few hours shorter than it should have been, which was poor consolation. Hungry, thirsty, tired and sore, Stench rose up from the pile like she was rising from a grave, and felt roughly as dead as a corpse. There were breaks in the clouds overhead, and she glanced up at the uncommon sight of the actual night sky. Tonight, the black void of the night sky was streaked with glowing threads, like luminous veins in black stone.

She found a rain barrel and drank thirstily from it, even though the water was probably used for washing up, and carried the vague taste of horse manure. Whatever. It wasn't like germs could sicken her.

She snuck her way back across the valley, and it was a relief to have the cover of darkness once more. She stopped at the manure pile she'd buried her knapsack in, and recovered it with considerable relief, even though she'd been practically certain it was safe. She scarfed down a quick meal of some nuts and dry fruit (flavoured slightly with the excrement that she didn't bother cleaning from her hands), after which she felt much better. Then she went for the dawnward hills, back to that damn outhouse.

She approached the 'compound', fully expecting a trap. She had a general idea for what to do if there was an ambush, but didn't like her idea much. That outhouse was well within range, and she could cause quite a lot of nice distracting mayhem with coprokinesis. She wasn't sure if she was actually prepared to go that far, though.

There was no ambush. The outhouse had had its seat re-secured, and a half-hearted attempt at cleaning up had been made. And her dagger belt, dress, pouches and water-skin were all still there, half-sunken into the muck.