The Exorcist Doctor

Pistols came up like a forest of iron thorns. Tables screeched backward, legs splintering. Benches went belly-up and became barricades. Every Repossessor in the Black Chalice shrank behind overturned oak and cracked quartz tabletops, angling barrels and cleavers and bone-saws at the Raven.

The Raven only laughed. He sprang lightly onto the counter and threw his arms wide, cane tucked in the crook of an elbow, top hat canted against the light. The giant canister on his back growled, valves hissing like serpents snoring.

"Esti–ma–ted time of death," he sang, tapping his beak with a gloved knuckle, "for everyone who tasted my drink, thirty minutes! But chin up! There's an antidote on me somewhere." He patted his chest, his belt, his coat. "Trade me a rumor for a vial, and maybe you'll live to drink another glass: where's my fucking wife, you plague-sired gutter-whores?"

But the Raven didn't wait for an answer at all. He twisted the dial on his big canister, and the world immediately changed colors.

Thankfully, Grigor had a front-row seat to everything the Raven did behind the counter, so he immediately ducked and grabbed the brass-mouthed gas mask beneath the counter precisely for this flavor of trouble. He wrenched it free and cinched the straps over his nose and mouth, filters rasping. A heartbeat later, the Raven's canister screamed and vomited a dense torrent of Vile, and the Black Chalice drowned in a bloom of toxic green mist.

Choking erupted like a rough hymn. Coughs hacked. Lungs tore. The smell was chemical winter—biting, metal, and medicinal—and then the guns started firing.

Black powder boomed. Bioarcanic pistols cracked like breaking bones. The wooden ribs of the bar jumped under the barrage as the Raven leapt forward with a cackle, and Grigor yelped as he dove behind his counter, rag in one fist like a rosary. He squeezed his eyes shut. He begged the Saintess—under his breath, so she couldn't hear his tone—to let this night pass through him like a bad drink.

Ten seconds passed.

Twenty.

Thirty.

Eventually, curiosity, that traitor, reached up his spine and hooked a claw behind his eye. He crept a finger up, then another, set them on the counter edge, and hauled his head until his eyes could clear the wood.

And what he saw through the Vile was not so much a man fighting as it was a shadow botching a surgery.

The Raven jumped from table to table in laughing, skipping arcs, never where a bullet arrived, always where fear would bloom. A bladed cane flashed; two heads went up like corks pulled free, red geysers making sick little fans across the mist. He slid past a shotgun's roar like smoke chooses a crack, then crossed the space between one breath and the next to lay a clean line across a throat—one motion, honed into a signature. More pistols coughed at him. His coat took the rounds and spat them out dull; the leather under that coat wasn't leather. Grigor saw the rip of shot plop into the ground like pebbles in a pond.

"Where's my wife?" the Raven snapped. "Where the fuck—" A parry, a twist, a reverse cut; another man folded apart. "—is my wife?"

Three came at him from behind, their spider-arms reared like scorpion tails. The Raven whirled, and threw his right arm out.

"Dinner time, fat boy!"

A giant, shadowed flower tore out of his right hand, teeth lining the petals, and it lunged at the Repossessors. There was chewing. There was the sound wet wood would make if wood could scream. The three men screamed as the flower eviscerated them, and then the Raven dragged his arm around in a circle, making the flower spat meat chunks everywhere to knock down half a dozen more men across the bar.

"Where's my wife, bitches?"

Shots kept cracking through the haze. He danced through them. Grigor realized with a small jolt that the lenses in the Raven's mask glowed the same wicked green as the gas—the Raven saw through poison the way sailors see through rain.

Still, muscle and luck had limits. As a wall of lead began to herd him, the Raven skidded behind a turned table to take cover for a moment.

Then he reached back with casual boredom and thumbed down a little lever on a metal canister mounted crosswise at his lower back.

The bar birthed birds.

Two dozen tiny metal ravens exploded from that cylinder, each screaming like a kettled cicada. They tore the bar into lines. They ricocheted off walls, lodged in beams, and then sprang free again, carving curls out of chair backs and forearms. A man lost an ear. Another lost an eye. Grigor felt the air change a split second before one little metal raven scissored towards his face, so he dropped under the counter and heard it stitch a war-line across a row of bottles. Booze bled out, flooding his floor.

Oh, damnit. Not the Hinterland floorboards.

When Grigor risked another look over the counter, the Raven was strolling through the bar as if through a greenhouse aisle, dodging his own metal ravens effortlessly as he cut, slashed, and hacked with his bladed cane. His flower devoured everyone else he couldn't slash, and on more than one occasion, he kicked entire tables at hiding Repossessors—until, at last, only two men stood upright in the Black Chalice.

The Raven and Finger Tobias.

The six-armed spider-handed brute snarled through his teeth, clutching six blades in six hands. "This is war, Raven," he rasped. "Do you really intend on—"

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But the Raven didn't answer. He did a little dance instead–a half-mocking twirl—before clicking his heels together.

A real cicada shriek exploded outwards, so sharp it shattered every glass in the bar at once. Windows split, bottles exploded, and the dome overhead rained down in glittering shards. Stormwater poured through the broken ceiling in cold torrents, and the poisonous mist immediately swept away as if the night itself had decided to cleanse the air.

Grigor reeled back, clutching his ears. Even Tobias buckled, growling in pain, but the Raven stood steady, cane glinting in the stormlight.

"Where's my wife, Finger man?"

Tobias lashed out with a blade, faster than Grigor's eye can follow. Steel hissed—but the Raven was already inside his reach, severing one of his spider arms in a clean, contemptuous stroke. Blood sprayed, and Tobias staggered back with a roar.

"Where's my wife, Finger man?"

Tobias swung again and again, teeth gritted against the storm, but the Raven's bladed cane flashed with a pitiless rhythm, shearing off each arm one by one.

"Where's my wife, Finger man?"

The Finger barely had a chance to breathe before the Raven drove a boot into his chest, slamming him against the counter beside Grigor. The bladed cane hovered at his throat, and the Raven's mask tilted just very, very slightly, voice lowering to a growl.

"I'm not messing around," he said. "Where's my fucking wife, Finger man?"

Tobias snarled through the blood and rain. "Fine. I'll… tell you, so just let me go—"

The Raven sliced shallow across the man's throat instead. Tobias immediately choked, silenced mid-sentence as the Raven leaned in closer.

"Oh, Saintess. You're a snitch?" His tone dripped with mockery, almost delighted. "That won't do at all. I hate snitches."

With that, he seized Tobias by the collar and flung him to the ground. Grigor didn't look this time. He ducked beneath his counter, trembling, and heard only the crash of bodies and Tobias' screams as the Raven went to work.

Grigor counted thirty more seconds until—eventually—Tobias stopped screaming, and he peeled himself up from his crouch to peek over the counter.

The Black Chalice was gone. What stood in its place was a graveyard wearing his bar's skin. Tables overturned, benches cracked to splinters, the once-polished floor warped with floodwater that glistened red in streaks and pools… His eyes traveled slowly, as if dragged against his will, across forty bodies scattered like dice thrown by a careless god.

Arms. Legs. Limbs twisted and broken. The spider-armed gangsters who'd been laughing and drinking the night away just a mere ten minutes ago now lay cut down to fragments. And slumped against the base of the counter—little more than a wet bundle of meat and bones—was what used to be Finger Tobias. Grigor felt his throat dry out as he looked, not sure if he was seeing a corpse or a riddle.

The Raven simply let out a sigh.

He twisted the dial on the canister on his back, and it gave one last hiss before it started sucking in the Vile across the bar. Grigor blinked. If he didn't know any better, he'd say that canister's snarl was almost like that of a Vile Eater's, but he didn't know any that was this small and portable.

The Raven didn't care to enlighten Grigor, though. He simply cracked his neck, rested his cane against the counter, and pulled out the single surviving stool so he could lower himself down on it.

"Barkeep," the Raven said, waving Grigor over. "Do me a Fenrick."

For a moment, Grigor simply blinked at the figure in black. His hands shook at his sides. His bar was ruined, his floor was blood and stormwater, and…

And yet his body knew the request better than his mind.

Before he realized, his fingers had already found a metal flask. They moved out of habit, guided by muscle and ritual, and he measured. He mixed. He poured. Smoke curled out the metal cup as he poured the Fenrick, and then he slid it across the counter.

The Raven caught it, and he unsnapped the lower half of his mask, pulling it free. Grigor was only half-surprised there was a human-shaped jaw beneath that beak, but he was more surprised to see the Raven downing his drink in one long gulp.

When the cup clinked back onto the counter, the Raven exhaled a laugh. "Fuck yeah. That's a good drink."

With that, the Raven reached into his coat and pulled out a heavy leather sack, dropping it onto the counter. It hit with a heavy thud. Grigor didn't even need to pull out the cord to know it was hefty with more Marks he'd seen in his life.

"For the drink, and…" The Raven gestured behind him idly. "For the mess. And the renovations."

Grigor stared. His lips parted, but no words came.

"Oh," the Raven added, as if remembering, "and one more request."

This time, Grigor managed to swallow. His voice cracked dryly. "What… request?"

"Leave the corpses. All of them. Don't sweep, don't shovel, don't burn, and just leave them here. In the meantime, you can go down to the Heartcord Clinic. They'll let you stay there, and then you can get yourself a new bar after this storm blows over."

Grigor looked again at the blood, the corpses, and the broken glass dome overhead.

"... Sure," he said slowly.

"Good man."

The Raven pushed off the stool, cane in hand, and walked towards the door. His boots sent ripples across the shallow water flooding the bar, and it wasn't until he reached the front door that Grigor's breath caught.

"Wait!" he called out.

The Raven paused, glancing over his shoulder.

"I heard them! Before you came!" Grigor continued. "Finger Tobias said their newest batch of blood-prisoners is held down in Smogglass Lane! If you're looking for someone—"

The Raven's laugh cracked open the storm. "No need," he said. "I was just fucking around with them. Their prisoners are probably kept under their headquarters, and I know where that is, but I still gotta hit every base of theirs to whittle them down first."

Grigor blinked. "You're… going to kill them all?"

"Uh-huh. You got friends with them?"

"A couple."

"Well, I'm gonna kill them."

"I'll tell them to get out before you get there."

The Raven flashed him a grin before snapping the lower half of his mask back on, and then away the shadow went, stepping out into the night.

Grigor stood behind the bar, staring at the storm, his rag still clenched in his fist. His hands shook. His jaw trembled.

Then—slowly—his lips pulled back, and a laugh cracked out of him.

He vaulted over the counter, boots splashed in the red water, and searched the floor for what he sought: one of Tobias' severed hands.

He grinned at it as he lifted it up, rain washing off the blood.

Now this is a good luck charm.

I'll pin you to the counter of my new bar.