The Exorcist Doctor

Lorcawn had turned his office chair to face the window hours ago and never bothered to turn it back.

The view outside was the only thing worth owning tonight.

Two weeks. It'd been two weeks since his first base fell, and the day after that, he'd thought things would right themselves. He'd thought the math still added up. He had more men, more weapons, more rounds, more everything except for money—that accolade still belonged to the Rot Merchants—so by all maths, nobody should be able to challenge his rule in the southern ward.

But the Raven didn't do math.

After the second base fell, his men armed themselves to the teeth and swore they'd stand their ground, but the Raven didn't fight like men fought. He was like a plague: never arriving in the mornings, and never when sunlight crept through Blightmarch's crack, but always there at night. Whispers on the wind say he always rose out of the Gulch pipelines, as though the tunnels themselves blessed him with their fortune, and then the first thing he did after that was always the same:

Turn the dial on his Vile Eater.

The Raven drowned every Repossessor base in toxic green. The slaughter always came afterwards, and not once were there any demands. The Raven had no deals to make. No questions to ask. The insult to injury was the fact that he'd always announce the bases he was going to attack that night. Letters were scattered in every gutter and alley, warning the people nearby to run south to that clinic if they wanted to live. A mockery of kindness. Civilians had fled by the hundreds, and even some of his men had deserted, taking their blades and guns with them.

Two weeks after the first letter and thirty-five bases annihilated later, Lorcawn had lost over four hundred men. Four hundred. The number knifed him in the gut whenever he counted it. Worse, he'd lost all four of his Fingers.

Tobias, the whisperer, had been hacked to pieces and left to bloat across the flooded bar where he'd run his information business. Luthien, the trafficker, had been flayed, disemboweled, and plastered against the side of a blood-thrall carriage like a grotesque tapestry. Drenn, the treasurer, had been nailed seventy-two times to the top of his belltower where he'd overseen the gang's coffers. And Sorrel, the smith, had been force-fed a toxin so cruel it turned his body and his seventeen apprentices into brittle glass where he'd run his weaponsmaking operations.

He shifted in the chair and peered down at his empty bazaar. Storm rain gathered in the pitted stones in dark coins. The one hundred men he had left were all recalled to the Bazaar, because at least here, he knew the alleys by taste. Here, they could fight as a knot. He fancied his headquarters building, and he fancied the Raven would fancy it too.

He wanted that man to come.

He'd also wanted to march south and rip the Raven's clinic out from its roots, but even his pettiness understood arithmetic when it came in this flavor. Too many civilians had packed themselves around the clinic like mud around a foundation, and it didn't help that the first group of assassins he sent to destroy the clinic had been destroyed before they even got to the clinic. Then every other group of assassins he'd sent the past two weeks had been utterly annihilated by the hellhounds, the iridescent forest, and the shadows guarding the general neighborhood. At least fifty of his men had died trying to assault the clinic already.

Oh, he could go down there himself and launch an all-out war against them, but the big three in Vharnveil wouldn't appreciate sudden and massive piles of civilian dead.

The Mortifera Enforcers, especially, liked to pretend to be watchers with clean hands. They enjoyed equilibrium down here because it meant their records could be read like scripture, so he couldn't afford to stain the record so red it reflected onto their windows. If he slaughtered a clinic full of petitioners and civilians, he'd have a prayer on his door and a hammer on his head. He couldn't go too far.

And yet the Raven could slaughter his men in return, because why would Vharnveil care about a boy scrubbing filth out of the lower city for them?

Through the stormwater, through the thundering night, he glared up at the distant City of Splendors until the golden lights there became a rake of hard gem bites through the fog.

"... So this is the deeply repressed cruelty of a Demonic Plagueplain Doctor, huh?" he said softly.

No answer, of course.

As the lamps outside flickered on one by one, lining the mist-choked streets with dim orange lights, he scratched his armrest and cracked his neck.

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This was his headquarters. He wouldn't give it to the Raven. He wouldn't give the boy the honor of believing he was a plague that couldn't be fenced. There was a monster in his heart, so damn if he went down tonight without a fight.

He tore his eyes from the window and glanced around, long enough to bark, "You."

A guard flinched in the doorway. The man was young and all the soft places were still visible under the iron. Lorcawn had never bothered to learn his name; boys with names believed they could outgrow them.

"Go downstairs," he said, "and bring the Exorcist girl up from the basement. We'll use her as a hostage."

The man paled. "Right away." He bowed his head, almost to hide the tremble that rattled the words, and then he bolted, boots slapping out of the office towards the stairwell.

Lorcawn swiveled back to the window and let the dark press his thoughts into hard shapes.

This wasn't one of the throwaway bases he'd scattered across the southern ward, those ramshackle rat warrens the Raven had been burning like kindling. This was the house, the original headquarters where the Repossessors had first been formed. It'd survived three purges, two famines, and a siege of seven days back when he was still new and his hands shook when he cut. His Repossessor Bazaar outside, too, had teeth. He'd shut it down this afternoon, and now thirty men were posted across the square, every approach watched. Ten more crouched down in the pipes, lights hooded, axes ready. The remaining seventy Repossessors filled the headquarters itself, and they were only his strongest men, all fitted with Jumping Spider Classes.

They knew all of the Raven's tricks by now. They'd memorized his toys. Tonight, Lorcawn would kill the Raven with his two hands, and with the death of the Demonic Plagueplain Doctor, none would challenge him in the southern ward ever again.

And that's if he can even get up here to my office.

How will he even step foot into this Bazaar, let alone my building, without me knowing?

Marrowe sat in the foyer of the mansion, boots crossed at the ankle, pistol slack in her lap. Five Repossessors lounged around her in the lamplight, their morphing weapons clinking softly as they toyed with them to pass the time. The air smelled of oil and polish, because the boss had made sure this place, unlike their ruined dens, still looked like power.

They cracked jokes and muttered wagers on how long the Raven would last—anything to keep their nerves from chewing them hollow—until there came a sound outside the grand double front doors.

A cart. Rolling slowly across wet stone, wheels squealing like knives drawn too thin.

Every back in the foyer stiffened. Their pistols came up as one. Marrowe was the first on her feet, the way a leader's had to be, and leveled her pistol at the doors.

"Up," she muttered. "Now."

Her men quickly fell in line around her. Stormwater pitter-pattered against the murky glass on the doors, and all six of them held their breaths as there came another sound: a knock.

Almost gentle. Almost polite.

"Fire!" Marrowe barked.

Six pistols thundered. The doors spasmed under the hail of iron, wood spitting splinters, and light smoke veiled the foyer, the smell of powder clawing at their lungs.

When the last hammer clicked dry, they pulled back to reload, quick fingers trembling.

And then—

"What the hell was that for?" a man's voice called from outside, muffled and dripping with confusion.

Yemin, her youngest subordinate, froze. "That doesn't sound like the Raven."

"No way," Mardo hissed. "We've had no alarm from the bazaar or the pipe-men. There's no way he can get past forty men without a sound, even if he's going through the pipes."

"Then who the fuck is it?"

Marrowe's eyes narrowed. She hated hesitation—it spread like rot if left too long.

"Open the door," she ordered.

Yemin muttered a curse but obeyed, inching forward. Putting on his mask, he pulled the door open, rain bleeding in.

On the porch stood a man in robes so tattered they might've belonged to a beggar. A cleaning cart slouched before him, sagging with mops, rags, a slop bucket, and all sorts of other tools for filth. Three ravens perched on him like ornaments of grief—one on each shoulder, then one on his rain-slick head. A crude iron mask covered his face, circular holes punched out for eyes.

Not the Raven.

The man simply looked down at the bullet holes peppering his coat.

"You didn't have to shoot," the man mumbled, his voice flat behind the iron. "I'm just here for the job."

"What job?" Marrowe snapped, pistol rising a little higher.

"The cleaning job."

A pause.

Marrowe's men traded uneasy looks. A second passed—two—long enough for her to wonder if the boss had, in some fit of vanity, actually ordered cleaners to come polish the foyer tonight.

Then, from inside the cart, came another muffled voice:

"No, no, no. I need the other cleaner."

The man tilted his head, as if remembering a detail he'd misfiled.

"Oh."

And the greatsword came out from behind his cloak in one fluid arc. Yemin barely had time to react before his head spun off his shoulders, blood geysering across the doorframe.

At the same instant, the cart blew apart in a storm of splinters, and from the wreckage burst a figure black as plague, lenses glowing green, beak mask catching the lightning behind him.

Cane in hand, laughter wild.

"What's up?" the Raven cackled.