[While on a rescue mission gone crazed, a holy warrior and a rogue fight bandits, demons, and the urge to rip each other's clothes off.]
The mission, rescuing a princess, could be going better.
Séa is an earnest paladin, honest and gullible. Tash is...
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Tash got three screams out before they stuffed a dirty rag in her mouth. For the sake of increased volume, she left off the consonants. Her three incomprehensible messages dissipated into the woods.
"Séa, come get me."
"Pray to your god if you must."
"Get off your fat ass and hurry."
The bandits slapped her face and roped a wad of wool to her mouth. She hung from her ropes, stung and throbbing. Like a geyser after an eruption, her surge of rebellion trickled away. A gloom like cold tar blackened her outlook. She hung her head as pain throbbed in her face and shoulders. Dully, she stared at the rock and the pine needles by her bare feet and half-listened to the outlaws squabble.
"Why do you get a double share?"
"I always get a double share. That's the rule. I'm the leader."
"But you didn't work for this. You didn't plan it."
"Shut your hole before I shut it myself, permanently. Be rich or be dead."
Longbeard spoke. "We need to know if this haul is safe to handle. I mean, what if it's got magical protection of some kind? Also, who was in that carriage?"
Tash didn't know him, but he seemed to have more brains than the rest of them combined. His boots appeared among the pine needles near her feet, but she didn't bother to raise her head to see more of him.
"Lookit this thing," said Slick, the lamed bald one. "It's like a black diamond inside a white diamond. It's huge."
That caught Tash's attention, and she glanced up. With avid greed widening his eyes, Slick held the massive gem up to the light of the moons. The female rogue hadn't had a chance to do an inventory on the bag of gems, and she had never seen anything like this spectacular stone. It was spindle shaped, and the darkness inside made it resemble a black-irised eye. An eye that seemed to stare malevolently at Tash.
Blood drained from her face. Something wasn't right about that gem.
"It's worth half the King's treasury. I'm rich!" Pogrosh crowed.
Longbeard, however, sounded dour. "Let's ask this witch about it before you get all excited."
But instead of pausing to converse, Pogrosh tried to snatch the monstrous gem from Slick. With a snarl, Slick snatched it back and slapped it against his chainmail. A crystalline click announced the cleaving of it into halves. It had broken.
Slick's snarl faded to a disappointed pout, and he cradled the halves of the gem in his blunt-fingered hand. Hissing and shedding vapors, a black liquid drained from the gem's core. Like a living thing, it plastered itself to the hapless bandit's skin. In less than a heartbeat, Slick's hand turned a dull, boiling black.
He screamed. Unlike Tash's intentional scream of desperate summons, this scream was an involuntary outpouring of agony and terror.
Her spine stiffened as if electrified, and she pulled ineffectively at her ropes.
