Where Sall We Gang And Dine To-day
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_Mid-day, and the bells ringing from the Temple of the Triad signaled the end of her lunch break. Duty called!
With an audible creaking she rose, rusting platemail complaining at the movement. It had been Peltarch field green once. Somehow she never seemed to have the time to care for it properly, under battle conditions. And her appearance was no longer regulation. She needed to cut and wash her hair, to bathe properly, to change her smallclothes. When time permitted. The war was in a critical stage, and she could not absent herself from the front.
Tossing the remains of her lunch carefully in a brazier (burn refuse and no vermin shall feed thereof), she proceeded down the byways of the Dock Quarter. An offensive was planned from Forward Post Dock Charlie against a particularly vicious nest of Sembian Black rats. She intended surprise to be total and had cautioned her troops about letting rumors of the operation leak.
As always, her progress through the city was of two minds, two halves. There was the half of her alert, on duty, planning last details of the operation and making sure she wasn't run down by a horsecart before reaching the Forward Post.
Then there was the other half, sitting quietly in a sort of mummer's-play of the mind, watching this and things past as if they were one and the same.
How she'd drilled and studied, wanting to serve as her hero General Lavindo had. The pride she took in the severity of the training and the skill she had learned and displayed. A cool, crisp morning, dew on the green, trimmed grass, two squads of Defenders marching to cadence as she called eyes right. Nights on the walls, tactical problems against real kobolds or imaginary renegades. Endless nights of talking with Laura, the two of them making Sergeant the same day, an epic drunk with her and Tomas and Hegward.
The news of Jiyyd. The endless bulletins of the slow holding action of the Legion back up the pass, until N'Jast was at the watchtower. Hegward's company had gone out as part of the defense. It came back shattered. Hegward wasn't with them.
The siege. Days of sleepless desperation. The wail of the Strauss Organs as they rained fire into the city. The smell of burning flesh, a hand or a foot poking, like a rag doll, from a heap of rubble. Orders she had shouted, orders she had received, a mad charge across the commons against mounted knights in black and silver. The gates exploding, a splinter taking the bottom of her left ear off. The metal giants lumbering through, hellish energy blazing from their hands, as the shout went up that the renegades were storming the west gate.
The hideous banshee laughter from the prison. Tomas' skull being crushed by an armature as she tried to rally what was left of her squad. She was being flanked. There were undead in the city in the docks. General Ash flowed past, the one thing that let her extract the few people she had to huddle on the smouldering wreck of the town hall and wait for the end, as her city burned around her, the city she had sworn to defend and proven singularly unable to.
Then the world split, and what followed in the days to come was unclear, a blur, save for the hour in which she went out into the commerce district at the head of a patrol. There was no opposition now. Her squad halted briefly at the mouth of a shallow, bloody hole, where she recognized what little was left of Laura, best of friends, her better in all respects. The rats at their feasting upon her were beyond count.
There had been a flood. There were ruins and many dead. She could not remember why, but it was so, and to the profit of the rat. And when she would awake in the small hours of morning from that bloody ditch, screaming and howling in rage and agony, she would realize anew that the real enemy has four legs and scurries.
They would not see her point, would not give her the manpower she needed, but they were willing to let her fight, even to place responsibility for the front in her hands. Victory was just around the corner. Then the city would be as old, cobbles and clean sheets, peace and ease, no more dreams and the shadow off her mind. Just let her win the war and it would all be as it had been.
Her mind slipped back again, to classroom and field problem, the smell of cut grass and polished steel…
...with a jolt the other half of her mind, which had been watching and alert the whole time, saw the man draw the knife and start to stab with it.
Without thinking, her sword rasped free of the rotting scabbard, flashed to knock the shorter blade aside less than an inch before it could reach the woman it had been intended for. Who spun, made a surprised noise, and backed away in fear.
Armor creaking, she placed herself between the man and his target, sword ready. "You are under arrest, as per the Guard and Defenders Act of 1274 regarding the ability of city employees other than the Guard to make arrests in the absence of-"
Without a word, he produced a short rapier from his bag. Well.
He was a grey, nondescript, clean-cut fellow, utterly unremarkable. But the way he held blade and poniard bespoke training, and not of her sort. His first cut she parried with difficulty. The second cut a line across her cheek. The third she stopped a bare eyeblink from her throat.
Her side was wet and dripping. He had stabbed her with the poniard sometime in that exchange. When?
The woman behind her was yelling for the guard. Good. This was a busy quarter, and if she could hold-
Another set of slashes. Another desperate set of parries. Too little bladework... too many traps and poisons and too little bladework the last years... though even at her best she knew she was not this man's equal with a sword... another futile last stand...
A red rage filled her then, and behind him, urging him on, she saw the shape of the Traitor DuMonte, leading an army so big that they'd had no chance fighting it, with metal golems just in case the huge army wasn't enough, a damn slaughter, it had all been pointless, pride and elan and comradeship ending in a gore-choked ditch of seething rats...
She screamed a battle cry and charged, her Defender's broadsword flashing out, the corroded but still intact arms of Tidus on it catching the rays of the sun in the dark and fetid street.
He pivoted and moved fast as a striking adder, faster than a rat, and as she stumbled down into darkness she tried to aim a falling slash at the laughing form of DuMonte._
