Sloshing swirling mist: it bellowed out from the dukes cape sublimating imperceptibly as his steel capped boots clinked again cobbles at odd angles. Body languid like a spindled spider; shoulders hunched high, supporting a crooked head and narrow eyes. He watched the fly lanterns, lining the street, with a hungry stare. Cats kept their distance in alleyways and rats stuck to their sewer hovels. Each knew instinctively the food chain they’d been pressed into and so sought to preserve the presence of warm ferrolymph in their necks.
The duke was watched from up above, the gentle hiss of his cape a percussion accompaniment that dispelled, along with it’s haunting swirls, any notion that the duke might wish to not been seen on the prowl. Three stories up were a pair of ragged, half pints, pocket pickers doing the watching. Their fingertips quivering as the dukes stare rolled over them as indiscriminately as a farmer surveying the crop. Through the pale sickly green bug light, and the mists rolling in they ought to be adequately concealed, yet were not at all surprised when the duke’s eyes hooked theirs, snagging the corner of his lip.
The duke was hunting or what amounted to one of it’s subsets: fishing. His body was an offer of engagement, an invitation to dine. The winner of whatever bout set out, seller's choice, would have their meal for the evening. In the depth of sweaty four story tenements, that barely rose height enough to touch the sun before ten in the morning, the best strategy was to be the proverbial angler fish.
The rooftop orphans shrank back as a set of talons dug into the slate roof, cracking the tiles as they clutched at their purchase. Beating broad wings signaled their arrival in a more official capacity, though the duke ignored this. His attention was pressed ahead at the spectre’s lurking in the gnawed shadows of the upcoming allway. His shoulders hunched up as a streak of black darted through the mists behind him. Scurrying little footsteps circled around him. Closing like a hand to the throat.
The silence came crawling in. A moment of stillness where all parties interested in their own well being could flee. The air seemed to thin around them as the pace of the dukes heart pick up. Badum badum badum. His pores opened to ooze out a fine sheen, as his mind sharped to a needle fine focus. Vision pulsing as the weight of his limbs fell away like loosened shackles.
They burst forth like a puss from a squeezed spot, a swarming mass that resembled giant cockroaches, cutting across the street ahead to sever his chance of flight. The duke leapt back into the mist and felt a roach brush past his feet. It’s carapace a piece of metallic plunder. They each wore one, aluminum plates, stainless steel pans. Molded into their backs as a echo of some former affiliation. The limbs that stretched out from underneath now only bore a vague resemblance to their once human shape. Hands and feet with the rusty insect limbs forced through like an impaled work of taxidermy.
The hunt had truly begun, the dukes narrow eyes came alive pushing up to poke out; they were bug eyed and manic as they swirled just out their sockets. He pressed the first into the cobbled with a swift stomp. His eyes still fixed on the horde rushing forward like a wave of driver ants, carrying with them the sound of a drunk set loose in a kitchen after dark, pots and pans smashed together in a deafening symphony of tuneless thrashing.
A ripple went through the group as the sudden descent of the dukes foot sliced off several limbs of the roach it struck, pushed up against the guillotine of it’s own shell. The smell was putrid gravy as thick ropes of old ferrolymph spluttered out. Coughed up from the wound as the irregular heart beat of its host doubled it’s pace.
The duke found another and another, crushing each through the fog while he backed up at an increasingly hurried pace, dropping little golf ball sized pots as he went. The swarm was gaining on him crushing the pots as they went, carpeting the road ahead and still pushing him back towards the river. The street’s tributired were accessible until he took one step towards them, the roaches scurrying about the mist leaping in between him and his exit proving just enough of a nuisance to prevent his exit before the main swarm arrived, were the duke to engage. The angler fish herded like a sheep was pushed back closer the riverside with each passing second.
The duke made them pay for every inch, thinning the numbers with his pinpoint blind stikes. Continuing his ritual of marking every backward steps with another pot. Pulling yet more from a corner of his cloak, as the space close in around him a wicked smile began to blossom. The duke kept rhythm as he went, each injury to a roach was felt by the whole, momentarily taking the brunt of their focus.
With no more than ten meters to spare, the duke’s cloak erupted a cloud of thin greasy fog, creating on opaque walls between the roaches and the sloped rampart leading into the sludge rimmed river. The duke turned and stepped inside beckoning the swarm to follow. The swarm elected to stay put having already trapped their prey, only venturing forward a scant few to prob to fog for their quarry. A loud creek came from ahead as the depths of the river stirred near the broken locks, things unseen waking at their approach.
The sound just loud enough to cover the click of a flintlock hammer being pulled back. The shot echoed up the long street. A flash in the fog and a sudden rising heat as one of the pots spilled it’s contents out, a flame film of oil less viscous than water swept out in all direction. Coming just close enough for a spec of ember to kiss the side of one of the more unfortunate roaches; lathered in the oil it shone bright like the eye of a lighthouse as it kindled the flame of its neighbours.
Laughter, shrill and queasy, echoed like the gunshot off the walls and the duke began the slaughter. Crushing the roaches one after the other while their senses were fried amidst a cacophony of reverberating pain. The flames licked the dukes legs yet he paid them no mind. Rapture was cradling his his thoughts as his gritted teeth chattered against the surges of violent motion emanating from his legs. Some of the roached rushed forward to waters edge in a futile attempt to dull the flames. There the watching creatures began their feast, a branching proboscis shattered the water's surface sweeping the roached beneath the waves, those that ran back were kicked in by the duke’s spindle matchstick legs in elegant sweeps that saw him pivoting round with the moves of a ballerina. A leaf blowing in the wind, he felt his hunched back pulled back; losing himself in the flow of his motion, twirling the mists around him as he moved. An unbuttoned waistcoat gripping him like a lover as he cracked the last of the roaches number, this one shattering with an ear piercing shriek.
A moment passed the mangled remains were dissolving. The mists receded; the duke stood admiring his handy work. Their will had been broken and with it the bonds that kept the ferrolymph bound to them began to wane in it’s affiliation, leaking from the pulpy remains that left only ash. The duke plucked a thin steel flash and set it down amought the pooling fluid. He knelt beside it and began to whisper promises, strange proclamations that moved the moved the fluid to act. It ran up the side pouring itself inward as strings around them began to move. Scavengers lining the rooftops, wiry crooked things that’d never be so bold as to stick their necks out and, and so had lost them entirely.
The dukes pointed fingertips screwed a cap on the flask before he raised it up in the green glow of bug light. The metal twinkled faintly, as he held it for all onlookers to see. The hunter wasn’t over; This pot would only grow larger, winner takes all. He buttoned his waistcoat in a motion that made it look as though it was being tease by knitting needles. The fingers then draped them themselves through his greasy slicked back hair. The rushed of the movement faded, as did his cheery demeanor, his shoulders hunched as he set off down the street, prowling along on what would be a very long night.
The creature up above took flight once more, sending a rumbling gust down into the screen below that picked up litter and detritus. It soared away, a spec in the night light.
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