…Poison the barrel. Kill them all.

You open your eyes and look at the gods, what do they think of all this? Of the lusts and savagery of men? They twinkle coldly back at you. The gods favour those who live their lives honourably, those who act. The priests that minister to you and your fellow agents also say that the god of justice has as little love for rash action as he does for no action. They also say that turning a blind eye to the actions of the unjust is-

A scream tears the air and cuts through the sobbing and cheering below. Your head is back in the hole, looking down at the room, hands griping the frame before the scream ends. One of your hands holds the vial of poison, gripping it with your three lower fingers. You don’t remember getting that out from the strap around your leg. Regardless of how it got there, you uncork it.

You try and look for the source of the scream, but it’s impossible to tell. All the participants, unwilling or otherwise, are in roughly the same position as before. Only the girl who was previously being ‘walked’ had moved, now slumped over what could be a bar, and the man inside her was different. You swallow. Perhaps she had screamed when he chose to use a ... baser hole than his predecessor. You look away, to the barrel of ale in the middle of the room. It will be quite a stretch. You sigh, realising you’ve already decided to do it. The girl in your heart, who made her bitter oath so long ago, grunts with grim satisfaction at the prospect of keeping it.

You grip the ragged frame with one hand and lean your body through until only your spread legs rest on the roofs tiles. You wobble, your outstretched hand just about above the barrel, your torso held over the great drop. Heat and noise and smoke and height and vile debauchery all make you feel dizzy; if you fall then you’re dead, or broken enough to wish you were. You shake your head clear, trying to focus. The poison in your hand is strong stuff but you don’t have much of it. A few drops are all it will take. Your shaking hand tips it, loosing half the small containers contents in a thin stream. You watch it fall, tracking it with your eyes and careful not to lose more, watching as it glides down, a clear odourless liquid making a sparkling ribbon as it falls all the way down. Half of it makes it into the barrel. More than enough. No one notices.

You shuffle backwards and **** the cork stopper back into the neck of the half empty glass, watching the crowd as it moves and flows like seaweed caught in the tide. You wish you didn’t. The young man is being **** onto the table with his mother. Evidently, she had rebuffed the man trying for her mouth as he was now sucking one of her breasts like a babe. He’s pulled away ungently, along with the man between her legs, but it is not a rescue; it to see her son stooped over her, torturing her with the sight of their actions.

You’re about to look away when you see a new development; one of the woman in red and white arguing with one of the men, keeping him away. She’s missing an eye; the empty socket long since healed and displayed openly. She goes to talk to the red haired woman, who was slowly righting herself after regaining her freedom, and you almost shout a warning when the big man grabs the younger man anyway, pulling him down from his stoop and forcing him to lie flat against the table. You can’t hear the one eyed woman’s words, but from the expression on the red heads face, they bring no comfort, if anything her anguish increases. The one eyed woman smiles. It’s a hateful thing; a smile that derives all its joy from suffering. She wasn’t helping, just...repositioning.

You look away. More men had gathered around the girl nearest the front door as the men at her front and behind pick up the pace. You look away. The man at the counter was in his own world as he destroyed another’s. You look away. The crowd around the girl at the back had increased too. You look away. One of the men in red and white sitting against the back wall was talking to his friend while a head bobs up and down in his lap. You can’t tell if its attached to a man or a woman. You look away, to the ale barrel, your own sanctuary of control in the debauched chaos. Men walk away from it and others take their place. The poison is strong but it’ll be diluted, and it was made to cover a blade rather than be ingested. It takes a few more moments to work before it can burn in the stomach. The man who sold it to you assured you that blood brings peace but the belly brings agony. Both bring **** in the end.

A man spins and falls, missing the chair he was aiming for. No-one notices, except his friends who mock his week stomach. More drink the ale. The man lies face down and struggles to get up, his arms too weak to help. Only one of his friends stops laughing. Another metal mug dunks into the barrel and provides its owner with a sure ****. The collapsed man’s only sincere friend rounds the table and shakes his head, first in disappointment, then confusion. The man on the floor shakes with small coughs, his arms sliding up to his throat. Three more men approach the barrel, dunking and drinking deep. A man across the room pushes a table as he falls. Your eyes flick back to the first that fell. His friend turns him to lie on his back and you see the blood on his lips. His face is red, but not too much. It looks like he died before the suffocation got to him. His friend jumps back and says something, yells it to the room. It takes a few moments for the buzz of the crowd to lower enough to understand it.

“Poison! Poison! Don’t! It’s Poison!” His words are punctuated by the far more dramatic collapse of another man, gripping his throat as he slumps on his knees, coughing and spluttering as his eyes swivel wildly before disappearing upwards.

The room hushes, cheer turning to quiet confusion, then panic as another man falls. The men around the barrel spit out their ale in a hiss before looking down into their half empted tankards. Others follow, spitting or throwing their ale. More men fall, some together and some alone, but the message was clear; no one was safe.

“Wa ya done! WA YA DONE YA BASTARDS!” The man was holding another in his arms, trying to keep his swaying friend on his feet. As if a damn broke, shouts flooded into the room. Not the cheery cries of conversation or the frenzied barks of debauchery but harsh cracks of accusation.

“You killed him!”

“What!?”

“Bastards!”

“How?”

“...Wendigo...”

“... Roland’s lot...” (Roland’s lot?)

“Why?”

“I’ll kill you!”

Tthey all jumble on top of each other as the room quickly splits into two groups, one wearing red and white and the other red and yellow. The room is still packed with people, save for a widening chasm of emptiness that runs through the middle of the crowd: battle lines forming. You do a quick count; over a dozen dead at least. Most of them look to be from the red and yellow side.

Too few. Far too few.

A man in red and white jumps up onto a table in the middle of the room, in the space forming between the two groups, his hands outstretched in a placating gesture.

“Guy’s, guy’s, everybody SHUT UP!” It’s the same large table that the poor red haired woman and her son were on. You see them both covertly crawling towards the girl at the back, who was previously lost in the crowd but now sits unattended and traumatised. The man on the table repeats himself until the room slowly complies. The cracking and splintering of wood sounds over the last few mutters, and from your vantage point, you can see a few makeshift clubs torn from table and chair being passed around the red and yellow crew.

“Ok. All right. Listen. We got a poisoner in here.” There was a general mutter at this, much of it insults. The poison is still in your hand. You tuck it back in the strap around your thigh. “N-Now looking at it, it’s got to be the barrel.” Again, there was a mutter in the room. The man licks his lips, clearly making this up as he tries to keep the peace. He’s got a club, not some crude chair leg but clearly a thing of war, resting in a loop of cloth at his side. He’s only the second person you have seen with a proper weapon since coming here. “And, er, we all saw Kirk when we was walkin that bitch right? Well, see, he’s alive and er, he drank from the barrel. So it’s got to be someone who was by the barrel after that right?” Good luck. There are around seventeen people dead and not everyone who walked by the barrel drank. In the scrum of the room it was impossible to keep track, even from your bird’s eye view.

“Now, er, Jack”, he points to a man in the red and white side of the room who, from his body language, really doesn’t want to be the centre of attention right now. “You were near the barrel then right? Did you see anyth-“

“Lot o Wendigo’s folk round the barrel come poisonin time ey? You. Im. Who else!? Which o you did it!” You can’t tell who shouted it, but you know it was from the red and yellow side.

“None of-“

“It was im! I saw im by the barrel but e ain’t dead!”

“Fish shit! I an’t done nuffin!”

“Prove it!”

A chair fly’s through the air, crashing into the red and white crowd. They’re all on the breaking edge now, clearly split into two lines that run the length of the room. You look for something you can do to push them over that edge; maybe pull one of the tiles off and throw it? No, nothing that can make them look up.

“I said SHUT UP!”

“YOU shut up! I an’t being talked at by one o Wendigo’s pretty boys!” The man on the table draws his mace and climbs down, facing the man who shouted at him.

“Look-“

You see it from above; a scuffle, not with the man who shouted but someone else from the crowd, roughly hugging the would-be peace maker with one arm, the other unseen. Shirts and men are pulled in the jostle. It lasts a second, maybe two, before the mace wielding man steps back, clutching his stomach with red hands. He bumps into the table he climbed down from, and you hear it scrape, the silence absolute and all eyes on him.

He sinks to the floor.

With a deafening roar, the tides crash together. Absolute chaos forms down the pressing middle of the room; a battle, a scrimmage, a wall of flesh and anger that quickly turns to red and screaming. Men fall. The line breaks, splintering as the chaos spreads into separate fights and skirmishes. Sides and colours become indecipherable, even from above, as chairs and tables split heads and concealed weapons catch candle light as they reveal themselves. You watch some dash for the exits; hear them running down the street, raising the alarm. The rest of them fight; growing numbers joining those left crawling away blooded or writhing on the ground or best of all, staring sightlessly in ****. A lot more than seventeen, and growing, with no roof tile necessary.

You couldn’t have hoped for a better result.

You look for the red heads -the natural verity as opposed to the bleeding pirate kind- and see them heading for the far wall. Unbelievably, the older woman had rounded them up; son and three daughters in tow. You’re too far to see the state they’re in, but the boy is almost dragging one of the girls. They pass under one of the far balconied and out of your view, toward the place the bearded pirate said the other girls were in during his speech. The ‘whore hole’ he called it.

You shake yourself free of the hypnotising effect of the meat grinder below. Reflection can come later. Right now you made the job at hand far more difficult. You look over to the mansion through the far trees; they will soon be on high alert if they aren’t already; the mad house below is making more noise than ever and no one could mistake it for jovial. You need to go to the mansion, need to finish this and get out while you can.

Stopping you though, are thoughts of the family below, broken and abused, but innocent. Victims searching desperately for salvation. You gave them the freedom to escape, but where too? It’s not like they can leave the island. You sigh, haven’t you helped them enough? It’s not like they’re your responsibility now…right? And you can’t take them with you...not to kill Captain Washkin at least. You drum your fingers on the wooden tiles, honour fighting its own battle.

Save the innocent or pursue the guilty? You cringe, an odd sight for anyone stupid enough or dead enough to be looking up right now.