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“Will we make it?”
“... one way or another.”
The new Vestal is a shrinking thing, wrapped in her warm red robes and carrying butter-soft scrolls under her arms. She trails behind, looking about the Ruins as they go, first with curiosity, and now with growing unease.
Against the blue and gray stone, she stands out like a fresh wound.
Like blood in the water.
Two days later, Dismas stumbles into the Hamlet, accompanied by nothing but overladen, bloodsoaked bags, and a strip of warm red fabric tied tight around his sluggishly bleeding leg.
The surgeon takes it away. He says nothing when they return it hours later, freshly washed and laundered, but loops it round his neck silently.
“Good work,” the Heir breathes, pawing through the goods dumped at the side of his sickbed.
The austere noble has never stepped foot in the Ruins, not that Dismas knows of. But the look in those eyes - that, Dismas knows. He wonders if the Heir sees in him what he saw in the Vestal.
“Thanks,” he mumbles instead, eyes fixed on the window.
There’s a fat pouch left behind when the Heir departs, along with a shiny new belt buckle.
Something extra for your troubles , his strange employer said with a crooked smile.
“Where do you think they get the horrors from?”
“What?”
“The whores, highwayman, the whores - where do they come from?”
“Same place as the rest of the flesh, I reckon.”
They have no Vestal this time, just a crotchety Doctor. It’s impossible to judge her age through the layered tunics and strange mask, but Dismas has seen her around. She’s been into the Ruins before.
She smells like a dead thing. Like formaldehyde, and rot. Like poison.
The bones always smell like fresh blood.
He wonders where they get the flesh from.
“Lucky haul,” the Doctor hazards as they trudge down the steps. Behind them trails the bedraggled Jester, idly strumming his loot.
“Yeah,” Dismas murmurs. Behind him, going thunk thunk thunk as they bounce down the steps, is the Shield Breaker. He drags her by her feet. It's surprisingly hard to keep a firm grip on a wrist with no hand at the end. Like a bottle neck with no lip - impossible to stopper.
They split her share of the loot, and sell the spear back to the armorer to await its next wielder.
He buys a new pistol.
The Doctor is missing.
They find her the next morning, slumped outside the door of the room they camped in. A shiny gun winks innocuously from her hand.
Dismas returns it to his holster, and shoulders her pack.
Time passes strangely in these parts - even more strangely than an outsider might imagine.
The sky lightens and darkens, but neither moon nor sun are ever visible. The weeks pass quickly, but the season never seems to change. He planted a poppy bush over Reynauld’s body, he knows he did -
But all he can ever find in the graveyard is dirt and stone.
“Five years, huh?”
Liquor flows down his throat like so much smoke, choking him out with sweet abandon. There’s a new sachet at his waist, full of a virulently green powder. It still carries a whiff of formaldehyde.
“What’s it been like?” The Hellion asks eagerly, leaning in as if to better discern his stories from the bob of his throat, and the glaze of his eyes. Next to her sits a wicked poleaxe.
It looks like it should be heavier than her and two of her sisters put together.
Dismas is aware that the Hellions carry no weapons they cannot wield.
“The same,” he says.
“Ain’t that the way it goes,” she replies with a wicked smile.
She invites him along to the Warren - her sister-valkyries and her cannot bleed bone, so they stick to the corpulent underbelly of the Estate.
He goes once. Twice. Thrice.
Come the end of the month, he invites her to come along with him to the ruins.
A new knife hangs from Dismas’s belt.
“Hmm,” the Heir hums, not looking up from the ledgers, “did you buy that from the merchant in the square? Haven’t seen one like that before.”
“The sheathe, yeah,” Dismas admits. The sky is amber gold today. He doesn’t look out the window. “The knife’s a hand-me-down. Had to put a new handle on it though.”
“Not great against bone, are they?” The Heir asks with a smile.
Dismas hums.
They cannot be bled, but they can bleed. It takes one hand to fend off the fumbling bayonets and pikes, and one had to hold his stomach together. Both are losing fronts.
Behind him, the Occultist is swearing freely - both the mundane sort and the, well, occult sort of cursing. The Grave Robber and Jester are laughing in unison, weaving in and among each other like crashing rapids.
Fetid wine splashes in Dismas’s eyes, and he grunts as he stumbles backwards, narrowly avoiding a follow-up disembowelment.
Louder still is the cackling of the priestess-witch, who raises her staff high and -
Dismas withdraws his knife and takes true aim and -
thunk thunk thunk goes the body down the hallway stairs.
The Grave Robber is still laughing when they make it back to the Hamlet. She’s leaning heavily on the other two, almost as heavily as Dismas is, and casts her head back like a cackling hyena as they drag her down the muddy road.
“You pulled your hand back,” she says with a wild smile, “and I thought, there’s no way he’s gonna make it! No fucking way! ”
She pauses for dramatic effect, and then breaks into even louder laughter, braying to the stars.
“And then you made it! ”
“No one died on that last one,” the Heir observes, looking down on the scruffy delinquent with a knowing smile.
What do you see? thinks his companion. Where are we going?
“We all made it,” Dismas mutters instead.
The Heir leans in, and slides a paper across the bartop. A map, showing a stretch of land beyond the Warrens, beyond the Cove, beyond the Ruins.
“I have a proposition.”
The Occultist dies before they can set out - some kind of wasting disease, hidden from everyone else until they found him breathing his last on a narrow cot in the backrooms of the Inn. Probably from one of the whores , the Grave Robber whispers with a snicker.
“No matter,” the Heir informs them, “I found you a fourth.”
This Vestal is no shrinking flower, and she frowns at her new company.
“Pleasure,” and holds out her hand. Dismas shakes it, and wonders which piece of her he’ll get to carry home.
They get a move on.
“You think they’ll write songs about us?” The Jester asks as they slither down a dark hallway. It’s deadly still, and yet the air flexes with intent, as if they are inside a pair of bellows.
Or lungs.
“Why would they?” The Grave Robber retorts, dragging one lazy finger across the wall. It’s greasy, when she pulls back. “We haven’t written any songs about the dumb fucks who died to get us here.”
Dismas’s gaze catches the new Vestal’s.
He looks away first.
There is no night in the Estate, only the everpresent thrum of something in the walls and floors. Still, their steps slow, and stomachs growl, and they settle in for a respite.
The Jester strums a few tunes, bawdy and laughable irreverent in the face of the truly blasphemous. The Grave Robber settles down with her tinctures and tools, sharpening her weapons and mind alike. The Vestal… prays. Of course.
Dismas strings up warning bells, and starts a fire, and warms some meat for each of them. Slivers of cheese and bread, a handful of nuts - the Heir spared no expense in arming their packs this time. There is no weather to shelter from and no enemy that cannot find them if desired, so he forgoes the tents and lays out the bedrolls in a practiced motion.
He looks up to see her staring back. Again.
“... what?”
She opens her mouth. Once, twice, working her jaw like she was still chewing, though they stowed their tins long ago. Finally:
“Why are you here?”
He blinks.
“Because I was paid to be?”
She glares at him, and goes back to reading her scrolls.
“I don’t remember why I came.”
Somewhere, far away, the sun has just broken the horizon, and they are all just barely awake. She rolls over and looks at him. Under her white habit, she wears a red tunic.
“But I remember why I’ve stayed.”
After a moment, the Vestal nods. It’s the last they speak of it.
He can smell blood. Taste it too. But this time, it’s not the bone’s and it’s not the flesh’s.
It’s his. Hot, and iron-heavy on his tongue. Flowing down his nostrils and throat, clogging his lungs and sticking to his hands. Re-staining his neckerchief the same rusty tint it was when he first held it.
The room is a cacophony of violence, and Dismas heaves even as he raises his gun high. His gunpowder sachet is spent, his knife is in a wall he can’t quite see from this vantage point.
He’s got one bullet. One shot.
It’s got too many legs, and a glittering carapace and strange tail - but just one heart. Just one more target, one more bridge, one more homecoming, and-
The floor heaves under them, and the shot goes wide.
The Jester is lying on the floor like a ragdoll thrown wide, and the Grave Robber has run out of all her knives and tricks. The wet, crackly impact of her pickaxe on flesh fills the room, even as a strange ringing sound overtakes Dismas’s ears.
The Vestal is planted in front of him, chanting furiously. The beast screams and thrashes against the holy light and raises its tail high in the air, poised to split her in two.
Without thinking, Dismas lunges.
In the aftermath of battle, the three of them each set quietly to their own tasks.
The Grave Robber hacks apart the beast’s body with a grim smile, and the Jester stumbles about the room, haphazardly throwing their scattered supplies and curios into a sack.
She rolls the Highwayman’s body over. He doesn’t have much of a torso left, but his face remains mostly intact. Idly, she thumbs his sharp cheeks, smearing the tacky blood across both his skin and her’s.
“I guess we don’t all get to make it out, huh?”
Shuffling, she goes to stand.
And then pauses, at the glint of something around his neck.
With a grimace, she kneels back down and feels around the awkwardly snapped tendons, and finds - a chain, of all things.
A locket.
Inside, a picture of the Highwayman, and an unfamiliar woman and child.
She stares at them for a moment.
Then, she slips it under her habit and around her neck.
There’s a Highwayman in the newest batch of recruits. He wears blue and grey.
She wonders what he’ll bleed.