Four of the intolerable wretches were lined up against the wall, hands cuffed behind their necks and legs forced apart by bars so as to prevent them fleeing. The fate of these barbaric and insolent bastards lay in my hands, and most furiously my wrath would fall upon them.
My hand buried itself into my officers issue trench coat, a pure white leather with edging of the purest yellow gold around the edges. The guardsmen and police around me knew this only meant one thing, and from it my air of authority drove them into subservient sycophancy. I was a Lord Justicar of the Cities Secret Branch, an unofficial, unacknowledged branch of the Government Security Sect, but it was no secret to the people we existed, and in many cases our unofficial status left us as a rumor and legend in the peoples mind, inspiring the fear and infamy we needed and deserved to suppress the worst of disorder.
From the coat, I withdrew my pistol, an ancient device handed down through my family and routinely maintained. So old was this device that I had to employ people solely to manufacture ammo for it. In this day and age it was an outdated relic of a mundane age centuries ago, a time long forgot to the most of society, but it was symbol of my long and powerful Germanic heritage. The gun had first been carried in the greatest war of the time and in my eyes held an elegant simplicity of an age of great learning. Such an outdated arm was useless in open combat, however I rarely engaged into battle armed with it, preferring my sidearm of a much more powerful modern gravpistol. However, when I in the name of order committed a soul to death by execution, this was the tool I used. It was my beautiful semi-automatic, recoil-operated work of mechanical art superior to all of this modern and ugly age, a weapon of the great order of the universe, the bringer of death upon the chaotic and the unclean.
I walked down the line, and true of most gangers, they for the most part faced their death valiantly. I asked each down the line and I walked behind them if they repented for their disruption of the natural order of existence, and the first three answered with only one reply:
“It is in chaos we will return true order from your dogmatic heresy”
Each of them received a just and fair answer, the mocking blast of the pistol before their skull was penetrated and their lives reaped by my glorious righteousness.
It was only with the last one I received any sign of weakness. She was a wonderful figure and the most gorgeous shade of red hair under all the grease and dirt that caked it, and would not have been far mistaken from a handmaiden of the Justicar’s temple had she not been smeared in the grime of the streets and wore the whorish garbs of a city wretch. When I stepped behind her, my heavy boots kicking up grime and soot leaving faint footprints on the ground, she fell to her knees. For such a despicable bitch, who lived in such an unorderly and despised way, facing death should not have broken her.
I paused for a second, looking back at her friends and wondering why she was so unlike the others, and wondered why she must shame her final moments by betraying the honour of her hideous faction, but like the others I asked her to repent, for once seriously wondering if she would. Her reply was not a repeat of her companions sacrilegious promise, and but she did not beg for mercy. She only made one promise “My master will avenge us, and on that day you will feel the full wrath of all those you kill Justicar. And then you will know the truth of your own impure chaos, and that we are the agents of the ordered.”
I looked her deep in her eyes, as she turned to look at me, and in those eyes I saw a vengeful and passionate flame of pure hatred. She truly held the conviction that I was not the blessed of order, and that she was its true agent. I choked out a dry laugh at her claim, and only for the vaguest of curiosities replied to her “Then lass, tell me, who is this master of yours, whose might is such that he can with force take us into the fires of damnation and destruction?”
She looked down at her dead compatriots, then back at me, and with a fiery last insult spoke only one quick phrase. “Araj The Spider, King of the streets and the webs of fate!”
I froze, stiff as a corpse laid on the frozen plains created in the nuclear winter zone far north. I searched all my memory implants, scanned every note I had stored, searched deep for that one name. The name was eerily familiar and for unknown reasons chillingly haunting to my mind, so much so it froze me in my space as I went to raise my gun to her brow.
Noticing my hesitance, she laughed, weakly at first but it rose into a cacophony of maniacal humor that rang in my already stunned ears like a maelstrom of diabolical delight and insanity. As the storm of thundering loud laughter ended, she tilted her head back forward and let it droop, chin almost resting on bottom of her slender neck, and looked me straight in the eyes, no longer showing fear.
And then in a second sign of resistance she spat at my feet, and turned around, awaiting her end. I stood, bemused. How had this girl gone from the fearing and cowering maggot into a passionate and cursing harlot with the tongue of a serpent that licked with the burning flames of hatred that burned with such passion and intensity that in my mind not could find no equal since the times of long ago, when men fought dragons on horseback.
Inside of my, awakened by such disregard for the natural order, my own blazing furnace awoke in an all consuming flash of flame. How dare this wench speak to me, and throw such names that for unknowable reasons struck my heart with an icy touch. How dare she. How dare the malformed brat of chaos do such a thing. I signaled the nearest guard, who raised his gun, but I shook my head, and returned his questioning glare with a smile that let him suddenly realise my intentions.
While the names meaning might have escaped me, it would not escape the ears of our finest blades who specialized in extracting information. For unsettling my personal balance so much as she had, she would receive worse than the quick and clean death I would of have given her. If she wept before her resisting passion grasped her whoreish heart, it could only bring me pleasure to see how she cried when she was left torn and ragged by hands finer and more deadly than my own.
I gave her only one last question as the policeman bundled her up and pushed her into the van with little resistance. "Lass, what name does one give to one with such a fiery tongue as you hold?"
She laughed, turned her head back to me and glared, responding simply with "Iola, m'lord. Good day to you" before the door to the hover cruiser was closed and I lost sight of her.
I returned my pistol into the holster in my coat, and then wiped the blood from my hands and face. I motioned to the remaining guards to follow me, and see if we could deal any more damage to these bastardly street rats. I had much rage to resolve at this moment in time.
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