Interlude 1e

::: subchapter I. Since she embarked on this mission, Marka had been ready for violence and danger. The longer it goes on --- wearing away at her with its endless walking and hard choices --- the more she accepts she'll come out the end of it exhausted to the point of dreamless sleep. And when Wik proposed to sneak through the sewers, she did expect it to be gross. But in all of her anticipation, it's none of these that really tempt her to call it all off. The sewers beneath Wentalel are dark, muggy and tight. Predictable, unsurprising facts? Sure. But inescapable ones, that seep into the very atmosphere of being in the sewers. They had a lantern, but Wik still has it covered. And while it had assured her the Wentalel sewers were more spacious than usual, when an hour passes surrounded on all sides by old stone, not being outright constricted is a small solace. The big, open room where they met and fought Angwi did reprieve, but now she follows Wik away into another sewer main. Now far from the gangsters' hearshot, Wik speaks. "I worry we're losing track of what we're here for." A wide sweep of its foreleg encompasses the distant platform, still dimly visible. "Angwi, Essi, the boss -- take a step back from circumstance, and realize this is not our fight. We came here to acquire the gang's assets and avoid undue violence. Not more than that is necessary, and no less is desirable." Marka lifts her palps. "But the circumstance is pretty important. Angwi just tried to kill us --" "Tried may be putting it a bit strongly." "She played with us, yeah. Still, her ultimate goal was clearly to eat us. Or me. That's what she said. So, the circumstance means we'll have to go down there and deal with the threat she poses." And they should see what's down there, full stop. Why does the arch-fiend want no one in these sewers? Could he be here himself? And what is the gang seeking down below? A termite arcology? They're excavating something, and no matter what, it's something of interest. "To put it simply, if we fight Angwi again, especially if it's on her own terms, I fear we lose." Its cotton antennae curl up. "Us exploiting surprise and lack of knowledge, and her not acting to her full ability were undeniably factors in us surviving that fight. We can expect neither in a rematch. And she isn't the only one down there." Marka clenches her raptorials, pausing a moment before she moves her palps. "What do you want to do about her, then?" "That's a long conversation, one we need not have while the gangsters are back there chewing palps in impatience." Wik reaches out and taps Marka on the head. "Stay focused on the goal. You're a warden, Marka. Have you heard the phrase mission creep?" Wik had changed the topic. Marka wants to change it back, nail the tallowbane to its positions and win. She bites back the impulse. Is Wik even wrong? Their best effort weakened Angwi by a margin. And her being a bloodbane --- how soon will that injury be healed entirely? "Fine. Let's say I swallowed all my objections and followed your lead. What do you propose we do?" Wik pauses at that, lifting a pale tarsus to tap slowly, thoughtfully on their labrum. The waxen digit fused to their face when it rested there, and when it lifted, strings of wet wax stretch between it and the mouthpart. "Being seen entering the sewer," Wik pauses there deliberately --- it seemed above explicitly casting blame, but the emphasis fell there for a reason: it was Marka's idea --- "has damaged our chances of slipping through their base with stealth, but we can't know by how much." Wik drops their foreleg, and the tarsus with it. "Put simply, we don't know what the situation at the base looks like, and whether they're on guard or unawares." "But we know who would," Marka says. "Whatever's going on at the base, it's going to be easier to get in with one of their own vouching for us." Wik peers at Marka, but it knows she's right. It says, "Just remember what we are here for." Little more to discuss, they start back toward the gangsters. With the conversation gone, this new quiet underscores the high-pitched drips and dull, obscure reverberations which the sewers have for ambience. After a short walk, Marka is looking over the gangsters who'd attack them long moments ago. There are six. The one who'd thrown rocks kneels by a prone, stinking mantis --- the one Angwi had ran through with her wretched raptorials. "Is she--" Marka starts, quietly. Wik interrupts, "Yes. Dead. There wasn't much I could do by the time I'd gotten to them." "There's still something," the rock-thrower says. She rises and big green eyes stare at the tallowbane. "You can get her back for this." Her antennae are curled tight. Wik only nods and says nothing. Marka looks over the six --- five --- gangsters on the platform, all but one restrained by Wik's wax. She can see where she'd earlier drawn blood, the injuries are now bandaged up, or covered in red wax -- ichortallow. Was that safe for civilians? "Names?" Marka asks, as was polite. "Silenal," the rock-thrower says. She had tried to convince the vesperbanes to back off, and then, failing that, to work together with the gang. "Tlik," says the mantis who had earlier argued with Silenal. On closer look --- she wore the same warriorly rope garb --- Marka recognizes this as the first gangster she fought. Tlik looks at the warden with a deferential bow of the antennae. "Nal," says a mantis wriggling against bonds to sit up. "Memata," grinds out a mantis not looking at anyone. Ruddy cloak --- the mantis Wik had impersonated when it first joined the fight? The last three had been spoken bymantids bound by Wik's wax, some still struggling to be free. There was a fifth and final mantis, who seemed too out of it to respond --- succumbed to injuries? Or had Wik sedated them? "Alright. And which one of those need we actually remember?" Wik asks. "Mine," the rock-thrower, Silenal, says. "Everyone around here knows my face. If I'm the one speaking for you, they'll listen. Just stick with me." Seeming the most important among them, Marka gives this Silenal another look. The darkgreen mantis stands shorter than the blackbane, with large, light eyes and thick palps. Clearly she's female, so one concludes she's an instar or two away from teneral. Unlike the others, Silenal wears no cloak, only three shirts --- one for each thoractic segment. All are the dull colors of cheap, low-class dye. And had no sleeves: instead, the legholes yield ropes or ribbons that run the length of the leg, attaching to what are leg warmers or guards. It takes a moment of careful peering in the torchlight to notice each one has a concealed blade. Silenal turns, taking a step forward. The vesperbanes don't move until the gangster says, "C'mon," with a wave of a foreleg. Marka starts after her, while Wik attends to the other gangsters, freeing them. "Catacombs are down there, ain't they?" It's one of the gangsters. Silenal holds up two digits. "We're heading back for two reasons. One, the more bodies we got the better our chances are, so we'll talk a few of the others to our side. Two, we'll need a crank to force open one of the old doors down there." The walkway Silenal leads them down is not narrow; three mantids can walk side by side, and comfortably. Planks extend the walkways, looking similar to those shoddy bridges in the previous room. At intervals come torches the gang had placed, creating in a rhythm of meager light followed by long stretches of darkness. (Sometimes very long; torches only last while they have fuel, and whoever kept this passage lit didn't try very hard.) Maybe if Marka wasn't wearied after a long fight, she would have seen it coming. A figure crouches low behind her. Marka dimly wonders, at first, if the they have dropped something. There's only a few heartbeats of time when she could've reacted differently. A gangster flies at her with all the speed of a mantid's lunge. On her back now. A triumphant snarl. A raptorial closing round her thorax, restraining her foreleg --- but finding no purchase on armor. But a real threat is in the other leg. A knife, swinging inward, at neck level. The best that can be said for what Marka does next is that it was self-defense. The modifications to her dorsal thorax and armor's backplate are for propulsion. But what they do is eject high velocity, high energy enervate. Pain jerks the foreleg upward, midswing. This lacerates the periphery of Marka's eye instead of her neck. She sees pain. But the attacker falls back off her with an agonized cry. As per the third law of motion, Marka is pushed forward. (There were strictures against envespered assault with endowed ability: a crime in all nine provinces. Marka hadn't heard of anyone convicted of it --- but the punishment was a strenuous dock in pay.) In the dark between torches, Marka cannot see the damage done. She has no sense of just how much enervate was fired in that panicked discharge. Umbral damage is ranked in degrees, and some of them are merely crippling. "Are you alright?" she asks. By now, the other mantids on the walkway are reacting. Except for Wik, these were vesperless mantids, civilians, and the release of enervate will have set them on a primal edge. Marka's spoken question further confused things --- it seemed an appropriate reaction to them tumbling into one other by accident, rather than the assault or counterattack the other mantis's cries suggest. Before any response manifested, the attacker's on their feet. They're striking forward with a raptorial. Marka can only shift to catch it -- wherever it's aimed --- and hope it lands on her armor. Another strike comes, and then another. The darkness gives every attack stealth. "Fuck's going on?" Marka gets a few blows of her own in --- cracking them on the head with the weight of her foreleg guard, grabbing a raptorial limb, swinging out her midlegs to knock out