Bloody Rose

by Nicholas Eames

  “Too loud? It’s a spell, you halfwit, not a fucking lullaby! And you call yourself a wizard? You couldn’t turn ice into water on a hot day!” He stooped to examine a pair of ghastly puncture wounds on his leg. “Does anyone know if slirks are poisonous?”

  “Only to assholes,” said a woman stringing her bow nearby. “I’d start beggin’ the Maiden’s Mercy if I were you, Daryn.”

  The wizard chuckled at that, drawing a scowl from his injured frontman.

  The woman slipped her bow over one shoulder and pulled on a pair of mismatched silk gloves. The fingers of each were cut off at the knuckle. She wore a luxurious, ermine-trimmed cloak over a rich-looking cotton tabard, a polished steel breastplate over a padded leather cuirass, and a blue silk surcoat under all of that, which seemed to Tam like too many things to be wearing at once.

  When she caught sight of Fable she grinned toothily. “Well, bugger me with a manticore’s tail, if it ain’t little Rosie!”

  Rose dragged a hand through her cropped red hair. “You do know I kill most people who call me that.”

  “Ah, but I ain’t most people!” The woman, whose bowlegged saunter and backwater drawl were almost comically Cartean, slung an arm around Rose’s neck. “Why, you and I are practically sisters, ’cept your daddy’s a good deal prettier than mine. Freezing hell, girl, I crossed half the world to rescue you and this handsome devil from the Heartwyld Horde!” She beamed up at the druin. “Hiya, Cloud.”

  “Hi, Jain.”

  “All you did was step through a portal,” Rose said dryly. “Like every other merc in Grandual.”

  “Fair point. But I did help ol’ Gabe on his quest to reach you.”

  “My father said you robbed him. Twice.”

  Jain shrugged. “Builds character, getting robbed. Heck, if I hadn’t—”

  “Boss,” said a woman nearby, who was also wearing armour on top of armour, and two helmets at once. “We’re up next.”

  “Are we?” Jain spun on her heel. “Then let’s show these northern louts how we do things down south, shall we?” She stomped toward the ramp, forcing Daryn to limp hastily out of her way. A dozen similarly overclothed women funnelled out after her.

  Tam shot Cura a questioning look. “Jain?”

  The Inkwitch scowled. “What about her?”

  “As in Lady Jain? Leader of the Silk Arrows? First through the Threshold at Kaladar?”

  Cura barked a bitter laugh. “Girl, there ain’t a merc in Grandual doesn’t claim they were the first to follow Golden Gabe through that portal. But yeah, that was Lady Jain.” She narrowed her eyes and bit her bottom lip. “She’s on the list, for sure.”

  “What list?”

  The summoner arched a bone-pierced brow. “The list of people I’d like to fu—”

  “Tam!” Uncle Bran nearly bowled her over with a slap on the back. His leathers were caked in mud, and there was an open gash below his left eye, so she guessed he and Ironclad (or rather, the ragtag miscreants who called themselves Ironclad these days) had performed already. “I can’t believe it! What are you doing here? I mean, I know what you’re doing here, but how did you convince Tuck to let you go?”

  She glanced over at Cura, hesitant to mention how much yelling, crying, and, eventually, hugging, had been involved. “Long story,” she said.

  “Right. Well, you’re here now, so it’s …” He trailed off when he saw the sealskin lute case on Tam’s back. “Is that your mother’s lute? I figured Tuck burned the thing!”

  “I guess not,” Tam said.

  Her uncle took a step back, and a wistful look stole over his face. “Gods, you’re the spitting image of Lily at your age. Except you’ve got your dad’s height, obviously. And that go-fuck-yourself jaw of his. And his dirt-brown hair. Heck, I suppose you’ve got a fair bit of both of ’em in you.”

  Cura snorted. “That’s the general idea.”

  Bran scratched the grey stubble on his jowls as he examined the ink on the summoner’s arms. “I suppose it is. Say, is Roderick around?”

  “Try the bar,” Cura suggested.

  “I always do. I’ll see you later.”

  Bran staggered away, and Cura broke off to speak with a man in spiked armour who’d painted his face like a cat’s, so Tam was left on her own. She wandered toward the window up front. She had it all to herself, since most folks in the armoury were too busy plying themselves with liquor to take note of what was happening down in the arena.

  She watched Jain and the Silk Arrows swarm a bandersnatch, which looked like a huge fluffy dog with bone-white fur and bloodred eyes. Its tongue lolled between fangs as long as Tam’s arm, and whatever it touched sizzled as though the creature’s saliva was highly corrosive. The beast’s stubby, spiked tail wagged excitedly whenever it was about to attack, which made the bandersnatch a fairly predictable adversary.

  A few of Jain’s girls baited it with spears, while the rest put a whole forest’s worth of arrows into its hide. By the time they were finished the thing looked like a spinster’s pincushion. The Silk Arrows trotted back up the ramp to thunderous applause.

  Up next were the Dustgalls, who made short work of a minotaur who tripped while charging them and broke its neck in the fall. The beast twitched and howled until one of the mercs put it out of its misery, then a pair of wranglers came and dragged it off by the ankles.

  Giantsbane, who Tam had seen arrive alongside Fable the day before, had a bit of sport before their match. The arena gate opened and the so-called cockatrice Tam had seen in the Monster Market came squawking out. The mercenaries, whose pockets were no doubt stuffed with seed, pretended to run in fear while the chicken flapped in hot pursuit. Laughter cascaded down the canyon walls, though it ended abruptly when Alkain Tor dared to pick the bird up and got pecked in the eye. The Giantsbane frontman hurled the chicken down and stomped it to death while the crowd cried foul.

  Afterward, they faced off against a quartet of scrawny trolls. Branigan had told her once that trolls, which could regenerate lost limbs, were prized among arena wranglers, but Giantsbane dismantled them so thoroughly that Tam suspected the poor bastards might not remember what parts went where when it came time to grow them back.

  While the Renegades took on something that looked like a giant, pissed-off cactus, Fable began preparing for the main event. Preparing, of course, being a relatively loose term in this case. Brune paced in circles, slugging a bottle of Aldean rum and whispering what sounded like self-assurances under his breath. Cura disappeared into an alcove with one of Jain’s girls and returned a few minutes later with a pipe in her teeth and a languid smile on her lips.

  Freecloud came to stand beside Tam at the window. He produced the moonstone coin he’d been toying with in the Cornerstone the previous night and thumbed it idly as he watched the current battle unfold on the arena floor.

  Glancing past the druin’s shoulder, Tam saw Rose sitting by herself on a low sofa. She was wearing her scuffed black armour, and her scimitars, Thistle and Thorn, were in scabbards on either hip. There was an open satchel on the mercenary’s lap, and for long seconds she stared down at it, flexing her fingers like a thief about to test a lock. Eventually, she withdrew a glossy black leaf and, with the grim resolve of someone determined to swallow poison, placed it on her tongue.

  Tam was about to ask Freecloud what Rose was doing, but the druin spoke up before she could.

  “We all have our rituals,” he said, without taking his eyes off the action below. “Necessary vices that enable us to conquer our fear. Or, if not conquer it, then to at least pile furniture against the door while we duck out the back. It’s not enough to survive what we do, Tam. We must also endure it.”

  “What’s the difference?” she asked.

  “One concerns the body, the other the mind. Every battle has a cost,” he said quietly. “Even the ones we win.”

  Tam didn’t fully understand what he meant, but decided to pretend she did, and nodded sagely. “So what’s your vice?”
she wondered.

  “Love,” said Freecloud, flashing his jaguar smile. “And I suspect one day it will kill me.”

  The sun was sinking in the west as Rose led Fable into the Ravine. Freecloud was a few steps behind her, and Brune jogged after them both. The shaman was shirtless despite the cold, waving his arms and goading the crowd into a frenzy. His weapon, a double-bladed twinglaive he called Ktulu, was leashed by a leather thong to his broad back. Tam had examined the polearm earlier: The two halves of the weapon were attached in the middle by a metal screw, which allowed the shaman to wield each separately if he wanted to.

  Cura brought up the rear at a walk. She wore a heavy black shawl and was unarmed but for a trio of sheathed knives she claimed were merely part of her outfit. The Inkwitch didn’t seem to care that fifty thousand people were watching her every move.

  “Thrill ’em and kill ’em!” Roderick shouted after his charges, then bullied his way to join Tam at the window. The ledge was getting crowded now that Fable was taking the floor.

  “Is it true you don’t know what they’re fighting?” she asked the booker.

  Roderick was half a foot shorter than Tam, and was forced to nudge his hat from his eyes so that he could peer up at her. “I don’t, no,” he admitted. “And I don’t like it, either. My contact here said he had something special in mind. ‘Rose is gonna love it,’ he said, and of course she went ahead and agreed to it!” He pulled a long-stemmed pipe from the sash at his waist and began stuffing its bowl. “Sometimes I think that woman wants to die young,” he muttered, and then fixed Tam with a sidelong glare. “Don’t tell her I said so.”

  Her uncle Bran sidled up on her left with two tankards of beer.

  “Thanks,” she said, wresting one from his grip.

  “What? Oh, yeah, sure,” he grumbled.

  Somewhere, a bell was tolling. Tam saw the portcullis in the opposite wall begin to grind open. As it did, those watching from window, bridge, and balcony went as quiet as so many people possibly could. Whatever emerged from that gate would be the best Ardburg’s huntsmen could manage, a monster they hoped was capable of challenging one of Grandual’s greatest mercenary bands.

  Except it wasn’t a monster at all. It was a man, one of the wranglers Tam had seen earlier, but now he was screaming and flailing the stump of what had until recently been his right arm. He stumbled and fell, splashing helplessly in a pool of his own blood.

  Within seconds the window was packed with mercs desperate to get a view of the arena floor. Roderick’s hands froze in the act of striking a match. The flame sputtered out; his pipe fell clattering to the ledge before him.

  Something enormous ducked under the black iron portcullis. Its flesh was the sickly blue of mouldy bread. Its gangly limbs were corded with muscle, marred by welts and festering sores. It scooped up the thrashing groom and lobbed him against the wall. His body burst like a rotten orange, showering the balcony below with gore.

  The creature straightened, but its shoulders remained hunched, as though it had lived for years in cramped captivity. In darkness, too, Tam concluded, since a swollen black pupil filled the entirety of its single vast eye.

  “Fuck me with a Phantran’s salty dick,” muttered Roderick. “It’s a cyclops.”

  Chapter Six

  Wood and String

  It was said that Bloody Rose had killed a cyclops when she was just seventeen years old. She hadn’t been a mercenary at the time, just a scrappy young girl eager to escape the long reach of her father’s shadow. There’d been no band to back her up, no bard to watch what transpired and record it in song. But grand deeds have a way of getting around, and so the daughter of Golden Gabe became a celebrity overnight, having earned the name by which she’d be known forever after.

  Bloody Rose.

  There were some who didn’t believe it. They figured she’d found it dead, or used her daddy’s gold and hired mercs to slay the beast on her behalf. But Tam had never once doubted the story was true.

  She did now. The cylops was enormous—the size of a lord’s keep, at least. How could a seventeen-year-old girl—how could anyone, for that matter—overcome something so monstrous as this? How did you even begin?

  By running straight at it, evidently.

  Rose took off at a sprint, charging unflinchingly into the creature’s colossal shadow. She gripped the pommels at her waist, tore the blades from their scabbards, and hurled them into the empty sky. Before Tam could ask Bran or Roderick why, runes on Rose’s gauntlets blazed to life—one blue, the other green. Matching glyphs flared along the edges of her scimitars as they came spinning back to her open hands.

  “That’s … incredible,” Tam breathed. She glanced over at Roderick, who’d recovered his pipe and spared her a confident wink.

  “Very,” the booker agreed.

  Freecloud was racing after Rose. He clenched Madrigal’s narrow scabbard in one hand and leaned as though he were running into a gale.

  Cura tore her shawl from her shoulders, tossed it away, and shouted, “AGANI!” Tam marvelled that she could hear the summoner’s cry over the noise bouncing off the canyon walls. The Inkwitch fell to her knees, face to the ground, hands raking furrows in the earth before her. Her back bent like a crone’s, and something began climbing out of her.

  What the …? Tam set her mug on the window ledge, since her hand was shaking, sloshing beer over her white-knuckled fingers.

  Segmented legs clawed the ground as a charred-black tree hauled itself from the summoner’s flesh. In seconds it was the size of a bull, then a Brumal mammoth, until finally it towered over Cura, half the height of the cyclops itself.

  Brune hadn’t yet moved. His head was lowered, and it looked as though the shaman was speaking to himself, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He pulled the twinglaive off his back and planted one end in the ground. At last he set off after Freecloud and Rose. He tipped forward—not falling, but running on all fours like a beast.

  “C’mon …” pleaded Roderick around the stem of his pipe.

  The shaman was changing. His thighs tore through his trousers. The hair on his arms thickened into a shaggy brown coat that swept over his shoulders and across his back. His nose broadened into a wide black snout. His hands and feet sprouted curling yellow claws.

  Tam was suddenly on the tips of her toes. “He’s a bear!” she cried.

  Brune roared, an earsplitting snarl that began like thunder booming through a mountain pass, but then dwindled to something like a newborn hatchling pleading to be fed. All at once his entire body shrank to the size of a dog.

  A very small dog.

  An overfed cat, even.

  Tam frowned, perplexed. “He’s a bear …cub?”

  Dismay and laughter rippled up the canyon walls. Brune halted, obviously mortified, and buried his face behind tiny paws. A few mercs behind Tam were chuckling among themselves. Even Branigan snorted bubbles into his beer.

  Roderick cursed under his breath as he hurriedly struck a match. “He gets anxious, sometimes,” the booker explained, waving a hand to clear the smoke he exhaled. “The bigger the crowd, the smaller the bear.”

  “Here we go,” said Tam’s uncle, drawing her attention back to the arena floor.

  The cyclops aimed a clumsy kick at Rose as she approached. She danced around it, sprang into the air, and stabbed one of her curved swords into the monster’s calf. She used the weapon’s leverage to haul herself up before planting her other blade an arm’s length higher. Tam supposed that years of harsh captivity had inured the cyclops to pain, or else the monster was simply impervious to it, since it pivoted on its other foot, befuddled by Rose’s disappearance, while she gouged her way up the back of its leg.

  Cura remained prone as the creature she’d summoned stretched its skeletal boughs toward the sky. A face emerged from the mottled folds of its trunk and began shrieking—in anger or in agony, it was impossible to tell. There was a sucking whoosh—the gasp of fifty thousand stolen breaths—and i
ts leafy crown bloomed into a storm of cerulean flame. It moved away from Cura, scuttling on roots that reminded Tam of a beetle’s legs. Every plodding step shivered loose a hundred blazing leaves.

  Tam turned to Roderick. “What is that thing?”

  The booker puffed his pipe and regarded her frankly. “What are you, blind? It’s a tree with its head on fire.”

  As Rose climbed the cyclops’s leg, Freecloud positioned himself directly in front of it—an obvious target. The creature tried stomping him flat, but Freecloud—who still hadn’t drawn his weapon—stepped clear with the unhurried ease of a pilgrim conceding the road to a farmer’s cart. When the beast tried again with the other foot, Freecloud ducked casually aside.

  At last, he drew Madrigal from its scabbard. The slender blade sang in the druin’s hands, slashing across three of the monster’s toes and severing them completely.

  Tam leaned into her uncle, shouting to be heard above the baying crowd. “He’s so fast!”

  Bran was clapping, and paused to whistle between his fingers. Then he tapped the side of his head. “That’s the prescience for you.”

  “The prescience?”

  “Rabbits can see the future,” he said, using a slang term for druin she doubted Freecloud would approve of. “They know what’ll happen—or what will very probably happen—right before it does.”

  Since Branigan was obviously drunk and not making sense, she turned to Roderick instead. “Is that true?”

  The booker shrugged. “More or less.”

  Freecloud was making a slow circle around his opponent. Madrigal hovered above his head, poised to strike. The cyclops tracked him warily. Strands of gore drooled from its jaw, slopping over the swell of its belly and into the matted loincloth below.

  Rose must have hit a nerve in its buttocks, because the thing yelped and slapped her with a meaty hand. She weathered the blow, gripping her hilts like a climber dangling above a yawning abyss. She was twenty feet from the ground now; a fall wouldn’t kill her, but it would leave her dazed and in danger of being stomped to death in the meantime.