Tag: cover


1968 06-126 Succubaean Strike Force
1969 06-126 We’re gonna avenge Tirtzah

1970 06-126 Lord of the Night’s last moment of contentment
1971 06-126 Rivqah prepares to carve monkey-boy like a holiday turkey
1972 06-126 Gimmee 3 steps: Stick-boy’s last stand

Explicit version containing gore, graphic violence, and enhanced interrogation themes at 06-126X Death in Venice at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman

PREVIOUSLY:  Channah and Rivqah are concealed on the stairway, just below the floor line of the interrogation room of the Council of Ten, seeing one of their primary targets—a Capo of Venice—and a Lord of the Night before them, but aware from the noise that someone was being tortured beyond their line of sight to their left.  They have agreed Channah will break right and Rivqah, left on the count of three.  NOW:

Three counts later, Rivqah exploded up and forward, Channah nearly on top of her, so close if either of them had slipped the momentum of the other would have taken them both to the floor.  Other than their boots drumming on the wood, they remained silent until they were noticed.  It was the Capo who, frowning with irritation wondering who would be barging into his domain creating work for him, flicked his eyes towards them first.  Channah, her metabolism and nerves on overdrive, imagined she could actually see his eyes begin to widen as he saw her coming out of the darkness, barreling towards him, the plague-mask magnifying his shock and alarm, forcing him to deal with two different surprises at once.

To further throw him off-balance, Channah let out a blood-curdling scream, echoed a second later by Rivqah.  The Lord of the Night spun around to identify the threat, wide-eyed and empty-handed, just in time to offer his crotch to her.  She accepted his invitation with alacrity, and with a violent kick containing every last bit of adrenaline and seething rage she was feeling.  “Stand and surrender!” she demanded of the Capo, her arrow pointed straight in his eye, and he did, immediately, his hands shooting straight up in the air.  Thus tamed, she looked down and kicked the howling magistrate:  “Take your hands off your cock and spread them where I can see them on the floor!” And when he didn’t immediately do so, she barked:  “Do it now, or I swear I’ll nail your head to the floor with my arrow!” 

With a frightened wail, he extended his arms, not perfectly, but well enough.

While Channah had charged forward, Rivqah had pivoted to the left, immediately spotting more-or-less what she had surmised would be awaiting her:  a big, burly, hirsute man with olive skin dangling from a rope tied tightly around his wrists, behind his back, dangling above a waist-high wooden platform spattered with blood and sweat.  The rope went straight up to the high ceiling at right angles to the horizon, almost two stories high, then through a heavy iron ring embedded in the ceiling, and back down at an angle to where the other end was tied to another iron ring embedded in the wall at about chest height.  His figure was sandwiched between those of two rough, thuggish, laughing Venetian soldiers, their red cuirasses set aside for ease of movement while they worked their prisoner over.  One was hanging like a monkey from the long rope, near where it was tied to the wall, jumping up so that when he fell back down again, the weight of his body jerked the rope hard, making the prisoner cry out.  The other was using a long staff to hit the prisoner whenever he saw a moment of vulnerability, adding a horizontal dimension to the vertical dance called out by his partner on the rope.

The two goons were clearly cannon-fodder, without any knowledge of interest to the succubae; and that near-instantaneous appraisal signed their death-warrants.  With no value, they were only threats.  And she saw no need to tolerate extinguishable threats. 

Stick-boy was armed and standing, on balance, and thus the bigger and more-immediate threat.  But she could hardly reach him without passing and exposing her back to unarmed monkey-boy; nor could stick-boy reach her for 2-3 seconds.  Even if he was capering about idiotically now, monkey-boy would become a threat immediately if he could produce a knife from the back of his belt.

In any event, she moved to the left first, slashing monkey-boy’s neck and watching with momentary interest as his stupid grin collapsed into what Rivqah judged was a far-more-comical look of surprise.  His last act, sitting dejectedly on the floor like a child’s sad, discarded, stuffed monkey, was to try and stop the blood pouring from his neck by clapping his hands over the gash in near-imitation of the Confucian maxim to speak not what was contrary to propriety.  Sadly, it was a finale without an audience, because before he could complete the gesture, Rivqah was already turning and raising her blade defensively to meet the second soldier. 

A bit slow off the mark, he had hesitated a beat or two as his mind tried to make sense of what was happening around him—precisely as the succubae had intended with their speed of attack and shrill battle cries.  Rivqah met him halfway around the back of the dangling prisoner, seeing he had raised his stick over his head intending to bring it down on her head in a killing blow.  Either he badly underestimated her, or the Venetians only used the staff as an implement of torture, for he was clearly not trained as a soldier to do battle with it.

She thrust her blade towards his heart, and he, to his credit, managed to check and reverse his forward momentum, even as he began turning the staff from its slow, clunky, all-or-nothing coup-de-grace position toward a more-convenient and better-balanced position that might actually serve him on both defense and offense.  Alas for him, sound tactics had asserted themselves too late.  Rivqah’s initial thrust having barely scratched his chest, Rivqah, snorting and spitting in frustration like a Tasmanian Devil, whipped her own blade back and, judging the guard’s stick moving fast enough to give him a good chance of protecting his neck or even chest, flicked the blade forward and in a downward arc, slicing open the man’s stomach. 

Rivqah, something of a student of the human face—especially in battle and in sex—observed with interest as his face, too, began to transform in the moment of his mortal injury, from surprise and rage, to agony, fear, and perhaps just a touch of resignation.  As if in slow-motion, his hands loosened and the stick began to drop out of his fingers as he reached to protect his belly, or perhaps to try and repair the damage she had done.  A moment later, Rivqah slashed again, this time opening him up and watching with interest as he suffered the ignominy of slipping to the floor.  Not to put him out of his misery, but to protect their mission and allow them to communicate normally, she stepped forward, sighing with irritation, and cut his neck wide open.

Just like that, the battle had ended as abruptly as it had begun a few moments before.

Literature Section “06-126[X] A Murder of Crows IV”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 126 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1072 words::Explicit 1163 words—Accompanying Images:  1968-1972—Published 2025-05-26—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.

1964 06-125 Death in Venice
1965 06-125 A Haunting in Venice

1966 06-125 Death comes in hot
1967 06-125 We’re off to fuck the wizard up

PREVIOUSLY:  After eliminating the guards in the courtyard of the Doge’s Palace, Channah and Rivqah race along the loggia towards their assigned entry door near the front of the palace.  Chava and her little boy separate from them near the middle of the palace, while Miryam remains behind in disguise, in place of the dead guards.  NOW:

Channah and Rivqah didn’t pause until they reached the double entryway to the Stairway of the Censors.  Checking quickly for any sign of movement or human presence, and detecting none, Channah pulled open one door even as Rivqah tumbled through it, landing on her feet on one side of the door while Channah tumbled to the other, both of them trying to minimize the time they would be framed in silhouette against the lesser darkness of the courtyard.

After a tense moment, scanning the darkness as quickly as possible—ideally, before any Venetian guards spotted them and attacked—they relaxed as soon as they determined they were alone here and undetected.  The palace seemed quiet and deserted, except for muffled cries coming from somewhere up the stairs. 

With a glance, Rivqah transferred her crossbow and bolts to Channah, drew her sidearm in her left hand, a falchion with a short curved blade, and darted up the right side of the stairway.  Like most of Channah’s operatives based in the West, she was most familiar with the curved swords that dominated the wealthier, better-educated, more-civilized Muslim world most of them occupied.  Channah herself was considering relocating from Cairo back to Constantinople; and normally used a shamshir.  But the sight of such a blade would have attracted attention in Venice, so Rivqah carried the ancient Greek falchion, undergoing a revival in Italy and other parts of Europe.  She had been trained in a wide variety of swords.

Channah waited, scanning and listening, until Rivqah reached the tenth step, then began moving up the left side of the stairs after her.  Rivqah peered carefully around the landing at the top of the staircase, waiting tight up against the right-hand wall at the base of the second flight, while Channah reached the landing, sweeping broadly to the wall on the opposite side of the stairs and slipping along it to the far corner, crossbow trained on the top of the stairs, where the low flickering light of candles or torches coming from somewhere further on gave them the advantage, down in the darkness of the stairwell.

Rivqah then began moving again.  As she approached the top of this staircase she moved to the left, motioning Channah to the right as she remained on the top stair watching to the left.  When Channah reached the top of the staircase, she saw what Rivqah had seen:  a third, short and much narrower stairway to their left.  From here, the cries were much louder, and between them lower groans of pain were now audible, overlapping with two other, impatient voices demanding information and cooperation between the screams.

Channah slipped to the right, across the landing in front of them, crossbow aimed at the top of the third staircase.  With another glance, and a slight nod, Channah raised her crossbow to the ceiling while Rivqah crept up the third staircase.  If she fired into the stairway now, the only thing she could reasonably expect to hit would be her own sister.  She moved to the bottom of the stairs, keeping only her eyes trained at the third floor. Rivqah ducked as she approached the top, stopping in a crouched position with her eyes barely above floor level as she scanned what she could. 

With a glance back, she signaled 2 to the right, unknown to the left, suggesting she didn’t have a direct line of sight to the left without exposing her position to the two on the right, but there were voices coming from that direction.  Not the best situation to face; but on the bright side, it wasn’t like they were interrupting a church service.  The occupants of this room were torturing another human being, without any effort to muffle their screams.  In her experience, most humans who hadn’t become completely inured to torture preferred to move out of earshot whenever it occurred, because they found it unpleasant.  And the minority who enjoyed it were drawn to it like flies to manure; they’d be in the room, almost on top of it.  All of that gave the succubae a lot of latitude for making noise.  They could, quite literally, scream and still blend.  Well, more or less.

Missiles?  Channah signaled.

None to the right, unknown to the left, Rivqah responded.

Considering the width of the building, Channah couldn’t imagine there was too much open distance to the left.  Still… She crept up behind Rivqah, pressing up against her back to see nearly what she saw in the crowded space at the top of the stairs.  On the right was a long desk, three chairs wide, closed in front, with a candelabra sitting on it to provide light.  Behind the desk sat a gray-haired man in elaborate robes of expensive fabric, talking to an equally gray but otherwise lesser man—in proportions, in status, and certainly finery—who wore a neat but simple and unexceptional robe, standing with his back to them. 

The seated man, she knew immediately, was the Capo, a member of Venice’s ancient and privileged patrician class, rulers of the Republic for the better part of a millennium.  Knowing from her mission planning, exactly who he was, she felt the faint ache of her horns, claws, and fangs straining to erupt, an instinct she was barely able to restrain in the nick of time. 

The other man would have to be, she thought, the Venetian Lord of the Night for San Marco—night commander, judge, and all-purpose representative of the Venetian state in this district of the city during the hours of darkness.  He had five counterparts in the other districts of the city; and some nights their business brought them together here.  But evidently not tonight; if it had, they would all be gathered around that table, or outside the torture chamber altogether.  If she’d seen this fellow on the street, she would have guessed he was a shopkeeper or clerk, perhaps a merchant on the make but not yet worthy of consideration for marriage into or other admission to the ruling class.  She tended to doubt the Venetians would tolerate giving anyone other than a patrician the title “Lord.”  So perhaps he was of an ancient family that had fallen on hard times.

Both of the men were old, for humans; and would be unlikely to pose a grave threat.  They were both examining a parchment as they talked, so their attention was focused elsewhere.  She doubted the standing man could turn around before she was upon him.

Leaning into Rivqah’s neck and enjoying the smell of her, she whispered “I’ll try to take both of them alive.  You take the left; I doubt any of them will matter.  If you need me, shout at me to turn.”  Rivqah nodded her understanding, managing to tickle Channah’s cheek with her hair.  With a final “on 3,” Channah slipped back to give her room. 

Literature Section “06-125 A Murder of Crows III”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 125 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—Abridged 1150 words—Accompanying Images:  1964-1967—Published 2025-06-25—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.