by Will Madden
Unfair! The next time a sphere passed, she double-stabbed it purely in protest. Both blades stuck inside, but the sphere didn’t deflate. Like a flat-resistant tire!
Just to be spiteful, the next time the Onion parried Quarterstaff, the jorlyghul struck Poniards across the mouth with the handle of her own weapon. It knocked a tooth loose, which she couldn’t spit out, on account of her mouth being sewn shut. She wedged the bloody thing under her gums like a wad of tobacco and hoped she wouldn’t choke as she carried on.
Without her poniards, Poniards became Kung Fu. Which was fine with her. The little daggers had no business in a melee, she thought. Besides, she should have been fucking Mace.
Pike, who was actually fucking Mace, had climbed out of the factory pit and recovered her weapon. She leaped from rail to rail, trying to sneak up on the Onion’s flank and make the jorlyghul knot around her polearm so her lover could attack from his flank.
Perhaps hunting in the mountains sounds like it promises a lot of personal freedom, but the Church of the Knight Errant, like many cults, exerted stifling sexual control over its members. A maiden had a curfew, and a chaperon checked her bed for occupancy (single) every evening and every morning. The chaperons were ill-tempered men carrying rather un-medieval sidearms. Ostensibly, they were also the maidens’ trainers, despite never doing any of that cliff-leaping bullshit themselves, no way. Eating food the shieldmaiden hunted helped ensure she kept busy with her virtue-building mountaineering. Which was a kind of training, if you thought about it.
Amorous rendezvous were hard to arrange for Pike and Mace since they starved if they didn’t hunt, but if they hunted together and split the spoils, some shooty bastard was gonna be like, Where’s the other half of this hawk?
Anyways, now that the Onion had a good bobbing rhythm, the jorlyghul were everywhere inconvenient, pushing Pike back as if they had a mind of their own. Nevertheless, Ariadne noticed Pike was really good at leaping on handrails, which was a nice trick in armor.
Nobody leaped rope-to-rope as strongly as Mace, but from the way she held her weapon, anyone could tell she was no more dangerous in a fight with it than an ornery drunk. The rumor going ‘round a the CKE’s monthly potluck was she was getting by on her looks. The truth was, Mace had been trying to fail out of the program for years now, but it’s difficult to leave the shieldmaidens alive. Besides, her guardian had taken a shine to her and resented the idea of letting her go. She was hoping years of exposure in the harsh mountain climate would erode her value for him, but what retirement might entail frightened her as much as anything. In the meantime, she was just trying to get by.
Falcon eggs were delicious though.
While down among the factory machinery, Sword had grabbed a dangerous-looking metal spindle off one of the looms. To create an opportunity to reclaim her weapon, she threw it at the Onion. He screamed as it jabbed him in the ribs, but the sharp edge failed to pierce the silk armor. The projectile had nearly taken off the nose of Hand-Axe, however, who tried to make an “eat me” gesture at Sword, but again, her mouth was stitched shut.
Never let a cult sew up your orifices! thought Ariadne. The government should put that on every lunchbox.
The Onion recovered fast enough to land a solid blow to Hand-axe’s hip, but expecting it to taze her as his quarterstaff did, he was lazy with the follow-up. Hand-axe countered with a solid punch to the ribs—right where the spindle hit him. Ow! Instinctively, she then tried to tear out his cheek with her teeth, but naturally, this too accomplished nothing.
Habits are hard to break, especially if you rely on instinct.
Pike always kept a few throwing stars on her belt for when she’d been having a particularly long day and those mountain birds just kept circling up in the sky like she had nothing better to do. When the Onion had knocked Hand-axe to the ground, Pike saw a chance to hurl one at his face. It deflected off his mask and impaled itself in an extremely old orb weaver. She had been a mother or big sister for generations of spiders who manufactured bullet-proof lace underwear for the sexy and sexually-daring members of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Panties and brassieres are among the more difficult attire to make because the articles had to guarantee protection from a 55mm projectile while still serving up espionage couture and Bond girl realness.
Anyways, the Euphorium’s entire lingerie department gathered round to pay the respects due to their fallen matriarch and mentor. Which may or may not have involved eating her. Who are you to judge?
While Mace’s sisters tried to find some ingress against the Onion’s now fully-functional weapon, she swung around the perimeter, doing God only knew what. To Ariadne, it looked like she was striking poses with her mace and performing unnecessary acrobatics on her silks, which nobody at all was watching.
Every chain has a weakest link, Ariadne thought, as she cut loose one of the sandbags near the ceiling. It knocked Mace square between the shoulders, hurling her face-first into a support beam, which split open the skin above her eye. As Mace came crashing down onto a pile of silk bolts, Ariadne saw her body assume an elegant free-fall pose, the kind that might be used as a silhouette in an art print or something.
Truly, all show and no substance.
A black weaver crawled over and sewed closed the wound on Mace’s brow. Even though spiders are cold-blooded invertebrates, that’s no reason they shouldn’t be charitable.
Quarterstaff, Poniards, and Morning Star saw a new opportunity and attacked together. The Onion swung and held off Quarterstaff. He then hopped twice and reached back to parry Sword. The air sacks inflated behind him and caught Poniards (a.k.a. Kung Fu) like a lead balloon on the backswing. She reeled sharply and butted heads with Morning Star, who executed a little pirouette as she collapsed in a heap.
Morning Star lay on the catwalk, her legs dangling over the side. She was in a good position to swing her spiky ball up over her head and smash the Onion in the groin, something he seemed more aware of than her. More out of panic than malice, he thrust sharply downward with the taqarhiza. Its spearhead might have pierced her throat, if not for a company of weavers who had tied her ankles to a winch in the loom machinery. A harness of webbing tugged her sharply and winded her out of harm’s way.
Seeing Morning Star laid out flat, a team of packaging spiders mistook her for product. Once they had bound her tightly, a crane loaded her on the forklift, which stacked her upright with the bolts of the silk in the corner.
The Old Tongue of the Horselords in which Bubo barked orders to the maidens was actually modern Danish. The Dodovillean immigrant who taught it to the CKE claimed it was their ancient language in hopes of getting them to purchase his hand-cooped bespoke barrels for their monthly keggers. But Bubo spoke it so badly, you might call it its own dialect.
Beaten to the ground and run over by Bullwhip, Hand-axe pulled herself to her feet, lowered her head and charged back into the fray. Since finesse was proving useless in this fight, she was gonna try some old-fashioned get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way.
Kung Fu had finally worked back up to her hands and knees after her head collision with Morning Star. Her movement was wonky and she looked like she was trying to retch. Gods help her if she has a concussion! thought Ariadne. Her mouth is too sewn shut to vomit! She signaled her teamster spiders to swarm and haul her out of there immediately.
The Onion realized the air sacks at the end of the jarlyghul deflated automatically if he swung the taqarhiza in a wide arc, allowing him to fight freely. Operation of the weapon was proving fairly intuitive. Even up to his eyeballs in shieldmaidens, he spared a thought to marvel at Mori’s design.
That small distraction cost him getting rammed in the ass with a pair of heifer horns.
Pike had a husband plus two children from a previous marriage. She found the term “shieldmaiden” condescending, but you just have to put up with shit like that if you want to be part of a cult, she felt.
A large gray ebo, which is a kind of crab spider, ventured into Wea
ver Hall. As her species did not build webs, she was not a loom worker. She had only come to visit a friend when she saw all the fracas. It was too much sensory input, especially for someone with so many eyes! Feeling overwhelmed, she crawled out on Bubo’s shoulder and bit his left ear. The knight smashed at her with a fist, which was a bad idea, because many spiders move faster than you’d think, and Bubo gave himself a pretty good whack where he’d just been injured.
The taqarhiza was basically a big titanium rod with a pair of balls attached. Mortal combat doesn’t leave a lot of time for dick jokes, but damn! Damn is all I can say.
Quarterstaff stepped away from a blow to tease the Onion off balance. On the backpedal, she collided with the maiden behind her. The hand-axe flew from Hand Axe’s hand and fell into the looms below. As the sharp edge struck a piece of cloth being woven on the woof, the blade merely bounced off the stretched fibers. Now that’s strong!
Ker-rack!
Devastating blow! Maybe Onion hadn’t mastered control the jorlyghul as well as he thought. The pommel of a poniard, still embedded in the leather sphere, cracked brutally against Bullwhip’s shin and she collapsed on the catwalk. Pike dragged her out of the fight and examined the injury. Definitely a break. She snapped her pike in two and fashioned a splint for her warrior-sister.
Hand-axe swung down to the factory floor to recover her weapon. When she picked it up, the handle was covered in goo. Some asshole spiders had shit their silk all over it! Well, no matter. Now she could cut his face off without losing her weapon again. Only . . . They had webbed the goddamn thing to the loom as well! She yanked and stretched, but no luck. She got a running start and jumped, but the silk bonds held. Frustrated, she tried to hack the web with the axe blade, but of course it wouldn’t cut. All she accomplished was getting her arm enmeshed in the web too. Fuck!
Well, just because she was tied up didn’t mean she couldn’t smash at the loom with the axe head until she collapsed from exhaustion.
With most of the shieldmaidens neutralized, Quarterstaff was coming into her own. She was the tallest and leanest, also the oldest and the coolest under pressure. No longer facing overwhelming odds, the taqarhiza was proving less an advantage, the jorlyghul mostly just demanding extra precision from the Onion’s movement. If she held his attention, hopefully, an opportunity would open for Sword. Or bare-handed Pike could hit him with a flying tackle. The leadership at the CKE had been giving those two hell lately, so it would lift her spirits to help one of them score this victory.
As the battle’s momentum shifted, Bubo’s instructions became louder, more forceful, and almost exclusively directed at the one he called Jorza, which was not Danish but actual Old Horsefolk for darling or sweetheart, as every Dodovillean child knew from the school rhyme:
H’besh valekh, jorza nvru
zoldri na atba korbharul
Come swift, my jorza
Father’s mare’s about to foal
Even someone who had never attended a Dodoville school could see that Jorza was Quarterstaff, the only one to whom Bubo was paying attention.
Although no equal with that weapon to the Onion (who was approaching transcendence), she was holding her own. His M.O. was rarely to overpower but to make his opponent aware, volley by volley, that she faced a superior opponent. But Quarterstaff, incapable of discouragement, continued to try to draw him off and leave an opening for her comrades.
In response, the Onion seemed to be trying to test her, push her past her limits as a warrior.
Or maybe it was just hard to find a good sparring partner in the long stick these days.
Sword, a woman born Jordan Bosch, found it irritating that Bubo was speech-fucking Quarterstaff with a name that was practically hers. Out of the half dozen romantic poems about pregnant mares bleeding to death, Bubo had to borrow that name to sleaze on that ten-foot ninja lemur. Because of course, the knight had to drive it home how it was precisely not her he was cooing his martial nothings to.
When she was a girl, Sword’s mother told her when she joined a cult, the first thing was to learn how to take pleasure in the emotional abuse, because otherwise, she’d never find happiness. Her mother, the trophy wife of an odious businessman, had pushed her daughter toward cultism since it was practically identical to her own life except without having to host elaborate dinner parties, which she considered the bane of her existence.
But what really ground her gears was that Quarterstaff, this so-called Jorza, would almost certainly lose a fight between the two of them, sword versus quarterstaff. Too bad Sword was only a deadly efficient and intuitive fighter, not some sky-high freak of nature with improbable, hypnotic-to-watch movements. Because if anyone here deserved a battle clinic on obsolete melee tactics from a grandmaster in spandex, it was Sword.
All of sudden, Sword realized that she hated horses and self-mutilating, and she hated charismatic cult leaders with wretched tasted in dance music. As for half-starving to death on a mountaintop while she trained in medieval weaponry—well, that was sorta cool, but what she really wanted was to run a little dry cleaners in town. For some reason she liked the chemical smells, and she could spend all day replacing coat zippers by hand. Not that she knew much about sewing (except the whip stitch she used on her mouth), but it had to be fucking easier than stabbing birds out of the goddamn sky for lunch.
So that’s what she was going to do.
Her first step in opening a small business:
Striking a Poseidon pose, she crow-hopped and hurled her sword at Sir Bubo’s heart.
The blade didn’t cover even half the distance, since not even in a story this insane did the scimitar make a good javelin. The knight was too confused to even flinch.
Whether this had been a real assassination attempt or just a gesture of defiance, Sword-less stormed out of Weaver Hall in tears.
Pike, now Pike-less, foresaw no future where she defeated the Onion with her fingernails then hauled off a half ton of silk on her shoulders. She ran after her warrior-sister into the hallway to comfort her.
Ariadne closed her eyes and imagined a crying jag between two armored women with their mouths sewed shut.
Her eyes instantly reopened. Not today, Satan, no way.
She instructed her servants to go check on the maidens and make sure they didn’t steal more than one plush toy each from the gift shop.
Klop klop klop. Down on the floor, Hand-axe continued banging at the loom supports. Like trying to chop through an oak trunk with a really sharp spoon.
Only the Purple Onion and Quarterstaff remained. They exchanged blows, advancing and retreating, jumping ducking and rolling. The weapons crashed together, an elegant kiss of titanium on strong ash. Considering the duration of the battle, the spins and flourishes seemed extraneous and wasteful. No longer a struggle but a dance, the display of technique and stamina was pushing toward no resolution.
Bubo hopped up and down on the ladder, shouting with more bluster than sense, smashing the rails with a gauntlet to make as much noise as possible.
Ariadne sighed. This was entertaining, but she had a production schedule to keep. Time to choose: one to bind, one to set free.
The quality of the Onion’s training was superior, but maiden had fiercer determination and nothing left to lose. Each could prove an asset in their own way.
On the other hand, the Onion was a paying customer, the maiden was trying to steal a couple years’ worth of product.
Ariadne had made her decision.
The banging on the factory floor continued.
“Enough!” cried a feminine voice cried.
Victor stopped fighting. Together with Bubo and ‘Jorza,’ he looked toward the rafters. No one was there.
Slowly, a purple and turquoise spider the size of a basketball descended on an invisible cable. The spines on her body looked meticulously brushed, and the eight orbs of her eyes blinked in a wave, from left-to-right then right-to-left.
Could this be who had spoken?
“I am Lady Ariadne,” said the spider, “First of the Arachnids. And you are trespassing in my domain! No work of the loom shall be removed from these premises without my permission, not on this day or any other! Shieldmaiden, submit!”
Jorza glanced over her shoulder to Bubo, who gestured: cut that hideous thing’s head off.
She pulled a dagger from her boot and marched toward Ariadne. As she shouldered past Victor on the catwalk, she cast him a dead look with her one good eye. The hatred in the glance startled him so much, it didn’t even occur to him to bar her way.
Suspended from the ceiling, the spider met Jorza face-to-face. The two exchanged a look that seemed to span oceans and centuries. The maiden held the flat of the dagger against her thigh.
Without further advisement, she knelt on the catwalk, bowed her head, and held out the dagger handle first toward Ariadne.
“Get up!” shouted Bubo, switching to passable English.
“Maiden,” spoke Ariadne, “in lieu of punishment for your crimes today, you may pledge yourself in lifelong service to the Order of Araneae. In exchange, I will null and void your prior obligations and allegiances, severing all ties, by law or blood, vow or honor. Do you consent?”
“You have no authority to do so!” screamed Bubo as he descended his ladder. “The oath she swore is to the Lord God J Harthur Christos himself!”
The room shook with the arachnid’s voice.
“To whom do you speak, man-thing? For three millennia, I have stood before gods and bent them to my will! I hold the Vulkan of this realm I hold in fief! Even the Mistress of Battles herself pays tithe to me. And you? Do you dare to charlatan fear in my house with your puny church? Favor your tongue and be silent!”