The Power of Ten

“Her name is Edwina Clark. She’s a witch with ties to both the temple of Eryl and the Imprusar. Tragic backstory of sister raped by an orc, hated non-humans ever since, takes mercenary work related to killing and humiliating them. Probably been dumped by halvyr and elves in the past too, no doubt,” Shiv informed Sama later that night over the phone in her normal flat, cutting voice, perhaps with just a tiny hint of sarcasm there.

“Eryllians?” Sama repeated. “Wonderful. First the racist men, now the racist women.” Eryllians considered themselves the ‘true’ Amazons, and were ultra-feminists with delusions of leadership, and aggressive mindsets. There were only five hundred of them worldwide, of course, but there was literally no end to the number of oppressed, beaten, abused, and humiliated women happy to make a pact with the Storm Queen and get the strength, power, and beauty to taken on all their oppressors.

As Amazons couldn’t be spellcasters, they depended on the Storm Queen’s faithful and associated Casters to fill that role... but they never accepted the domination of the clergy over those who swore the Pacts, and as a result, a ‘secular’ force, such as it was, actually dominated the Eryllian faith.

While Eryllians weren’t as rabid about being humanocentric as the Imprusar were, only humans could become Amazons, which meant they were unquestionably superior to non-humans, who could thus only serve Eryl’s true faithful.

The fact that an experienced, well-trained Amazon was one of the strongest and most dangerous personal combatants on the planet made sure their voices were heard, and the fact that the number of Amazons would literally never run out as long as there were weak women looking for strength meant you didn’t cross Amazons lightly. They took their sisterhood bonds very seriously, and pissing off one of them often involved pissing off all of them, and so earning a whole bunch of very dangerous opponents.

On the other hand, the Amazons of the Good Goddesses considered the Eryllians arrogant bitches with sticks up their arses, and rather embarrassing to boot. This was a sore point with the Eryllians, as Amana, Flora, Sylune, Nuava, and Aethra all got five hundred Amazons, too, which meant the former were vastly outnumbered, and the latter typically had a lot of enthusiastic friends to call on, while the Eryllians really rubbed just about everybody the wrong way.

There was an Amazon temple in town, which recruited any and all women enthusiastically, as long as Pacts were open to be sworn. On the other hand, there weren’t that many Amazons actually in the city, as Amazons were meant to fight, and so got their initial training and were sent out to beat on things.

Eryllians, on the other hand, were more about dominating active governments (that didn’t throw them right out) then going and picking fights and attempting to liberate oppressed women. The Storm Queen wanted women to rule, and the best way to do that was to dominate existing governments, not just empower rabble-rousers in revolutions and chaotic situations.

It was not a stretch to say that Eryllians getting killed under the ‘Warlock conflict’ laws was a pretty common thing, and their attempts to get into positions of power in a modern society were pretty much ignored. Trying to do so by force ended up getting them dead from all directions, and their outspoken sexism and racism meant getting into power on a populist basis didn’t happen, either.

All of that terribly frustrated the Church, of course, and naturally enough everyone was responsible for the situation but them. The situation being what it was, a lot of Eryllians undertook mercenary work to pay the bills, having remarkably few qualms about beating up just about anyone, since few people had qualms about seeing them get beat up in return.

Sama was one of those people. She’d been beating up Amazons in general, and Eryllians in particular, on Fight Night for nearly two years now. Amazons and Hags got along like fire and water at first sight, and the Amazons always sent out someone ready and eager to try and get revenge on her for womanhandling them every Tuesday. They were supposed to be the ultimate women warriors, not some disfigured Hag with no chest and a laugh like screaming demons dragging shrieking nails down sinslate.

Sama didn’t mind teaching them repeated lessons about underestimating opponents and controlling their emotions. It also earned her a good amount of money from the bets, and she drew a lot of crowds always impressed to see a woman beating up Amazons...

“Why was Mohono a target, and was it because of me?” Sama asked calmly, rapidly thinking through all of this, and how a Witch was involved.

“He seems to have been randomly chosen by her, as she just thought he looked revolting,” Shiv answered.

Mohono? Mohono had a wonderful singing voice, had an endless tolerance for tall jokes, and really was a rather mild-mannered, long, tall drink of purple puissance.

“And then she looked into his parentage, and it seems his father’s deeds really set her off.”

“Ah.” Well, given the tragic nature of his birth, and the fact his father was a shape-changing ogre mage (Note: In this instance, this is pronounced oh-gur mah-gee, not mayge), he was being held responsible for his father’s conduct as a living example of the unclean origins of non-humans.

Sure, that was a more than sufficient excuse to kill him in a lot of people’s eyes... or at the very least, they wouldn’t care at all if he died fighting in a bloodsport game under mysterious circumstances.

“She was tasked by her employer to kill a non-human, and make it public and messy and a show of their decadence and corruption.”

“Ignoring that ninety percent of the crowd is human, got it.” Hey, double standards for everyone were the norm, Sama mused grimly. “You got a name?”

“I got a name.”

“Does it point to a certain arsehole sequestered up in a slum lord’s house down on the river?”

“In an amazing coincidence, said person does seem to domicile there. Indeed, they may have had certain romantic entanglements in the past.”

“Some people really do have no taste. Well, that’s fine, I suppose.”

“Would you like to arrange to do something about it?” Shiv asked, only a little hesitantly.

“I might be a little ahead of you in that department,” Sama said conversationally.

“Oh, how so?” Shiv asked.

“The prick’s name is Malcom Morgan the Third, right?” Sama asked.

“That is right.”

Sama turned the phone around, and held it up in the face of the man hanging an inch off the floor, her hand around his throat like a steel pincer. “Hear that gasping sound? Malcolm, on the other end of this line is the sister of the fellow your lover tried to kill tonight. She has all sorts of wonderful things planned for you.”

Malcom Morgan III gasped and floundered as Sama squeezed his carotid artery. His Soak was pretty much shattered after being slammed through a wall, off the ceiling, and smashed along the side of his head by the skull of one of his bodyguards. His eyes rolled up in his head, Sama tonked her finger on his skull to make sure he wouldn’t wake up, and tossed him over her shoulder.

“You move quick,” Shiv noted apathetically. “What do you need from me?”

“Well, you can get some special ingredients together,” Sama said calmly, stepping over one of the bodyguards, sprawled on the floor amid the ruinations of a fancy table with his skull fractured, his suit sliced in two diagonally from the Mercied slash that would have cut him in twain, and instead had rendered him very, very unconscious from spiritual shock. It would be hours before he or any of the residents of this house woke up, given that many of them were sticking in walls, sticking out of windows, denting the roofs of cars, sprawled over railings, or lying down on the job in the messily-disturbed gardens and flower beds. The gardeners were going to have to put in a bunch of time to make it all presentable again.

Sama strolled into the twat’s office, toppled over his bookcase of questionably intellectual materials, dug her nails in, and expertly sliced through the paneling that covered his personal safe: electronically powered, magically helped, securely locked.

Tremblesense showed Sama the layout of the wiring around it, which she calmly thrust Tremble into, Nulling the Wards carved into the thing first, then severing the alarm wiring, followed by the power wiring, and then feeding an electrical charge to the magnets and locks by inserting through Tremble’s point into the proper point with the sparking and sizzling before popping it right open.

It was a different use of Shocking, but no less useful for it. After all, you could freeze your drink with Frost and start a campfire with Flaming, so why not use electricity to mess that sensitive computer tech and circuitry all up?

The Disable Device and Open Locks Skills worked perfectly well on tech. She wasn’t going to bypass the programming and enter a false access code or something, but just breaking down the parts of it was all a part of safe-cracking, updated for the times.

Without really looking at them all, she swept all the contents of the safe into the Masspack on her back, enjoying the clinking of metal and clatter of gemstones, among other things. She had naturally been slipping the expensive watches, necklaces, rings, bracelets, tie tacks, and belt buckles of these fellows off them as she went through them... purely because she didn’t want Imprusar to be making use of the gold, of course, of course...

Did they really need pearl-handled semiautomatics, after all?

There were still working cameras by the front gate... then there was a bunch of sparkings and hissing of fusing cables, and suddenly there weren’t.

Klitza, showing a bit more fur than normal, reached over and tossed open the door as Sama strode through the partly opened gate, politely closed it, patted the wrought iron kindly, and wandered over and into the van, dumping her very unconscious load into the back seat as she flicked the door shut.

The lead-footed werewolf driver took off smoothly, NOT burning rubber from tires, as Diviners had worked with less, and drove off quickly but in control, nothing to see here...

“Where to?” Klitza growled back, lips drawn back to reveal more pointed teeth than belonged in a human jaw.

“Crumbly’s. There’s a shed back there we can use for this.”

Sama heard Shiv hang up the connection silently. Certain alchemical things would be coming with her to that shed, really a cleaned-up cement low-roofed garage on the back of the property that the junk yard owner kept clean and loaned out for certain purposes. That there were anti-divinatory Runes chipped into the walls, and the lead foil behind the paneling was something that you noticed and didn’t comment on.

“Didn’t go overboard, did you?” Klitza asked, sniffing and finding a rather remarkable lack of the bloody smell of death about her passenger.

“Oh, no, I Mercied the lot of his bodyguards... not that I’m sure a bunch of them didn’t deserve to be in multiple pieces, and of course I looted all the goldweight.”

“Well, of course. Just get it melted down fast.”

“It won’t make it to morning,” Sama assured her calmly. Her Floating Forge had no problem melting even gold, and platinum was at the edge of things it could handle. Without magical trackers on them, gems were almost impossible to track unless you were the person who actually cut them and knew them well enough... and she thoughtfully pulled out the bags of them, stuck her hand into the small velvet pouches and stirred the stones around, generating the vibrations for acute and finely detailed tremblesense reading.

She lifted out two of the precious rocks, smiled at the literally microscopic Runes etched on two of them, and reflected that dear Malcolm Morgan III probably didn’t know his emergency funds were being tracked.

Golden points curled into claws with impossibly keen and sharp edges, and began to dance on those miniature Runes...