Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

  ARROWMASK

  GODKILLERS OF THE SHROUDED VAST

  BY JOHN RUCH

  “Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast” is Book One of the “Arrowmask” series

  Copyright © 2016 John Ruch. All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Maduranga / mnsartstudionew on Fiverr.com

  Map by Beee / mistybeee on Fiverr.com

  Follow the “Arrowmask” series on Twitter at @arrowmask

  For Riann, Sophie, Wei, Ginger, Nyx, Falcon, and Callie

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ashton Arrowmask dangled from his own cape through the splinter-rimmed hole in the ancient floor. His left foot, bare from a lost boot, took a cool dip into a sea of darkness of unguessable depth below. He listened to the cape’s stitches pop in neat succession and wondered whether he had finally run out of luck.

  He certainly had run short of it before, and had learned there was no rule that everything had to end glamorously. Sometimes Fortune withdrew her favors from heroes at their very moments of triumph in a drake’s lair or a necrocharmer’s tower. And sometimes she just plain stood you up as you fell through the floor of the abandoned sanitation department headquarters while running from a gang of Mix-Fiends.

  “Of all the ruined sanitation departments in the world, at least my accident arrived in that of the Old Empire in Cor Cordum, the Heart of the World, the Imperial city to which all of the Old Ways lead,” he thought romantically. He gazed up through the hole, past the glinting silver studs on his cape and the broken pipe that had speared it, through the crumbling arches, to the deathly pale glow of the thousand moonlets in Atel’s Trail flowing slowly across the ebon sky.

  “How will they remember me?” wondered the lanky rogue plaintively, blowing a hank of shaggy dark hair out of his eyes as he twisted in the darkness. “They,” of course, amounting to his sister Nalia and maybe Elcook and Violet down at the Jury Lane tavern.

  “Ashton Arrowmask was a notorious...” Well, he wasn’t really that famous, of course, likely only claiming more to get you in your cups or in the sack. “He was an unknown underworld lurker who...” Well, that wasn’t exactly true, either; he had blundered into some curious circumstances, strongly remembered locally, in places he judiciously fled. “Perhaps all one can say is that he was the grandson of the famous Nire Arrowmask, the extraordinary member of the Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast—if you believed him, that is.”

  He wrinkled his nose. This was no good at all, this nasty business of picking one story and getting all objective about it. Surely they would have some fond memories of his rakish charms and street wisdom.

  “Consider the dashing attire he wore on his last adventure. A well-fitted cape woven dark for stealth, yet also spangled with silver studs so he would look good enjoying the spoils afterward. Ashton knew that it truly is possible to have it both ways.”

  He smiled and got a grip on the cape to keep it from strangling him under his own weight. He warmed to his subject as he concentrated on the notion of a mourning Violet plucking her harp dolefully for the tavern crowd.

  “Ashton considered becoming a devoted worshiper of Fortune, but, well, it’s just so hard to stick with something like that. Who can blame him? And, whatever the harbor guard might say, Ashton wasn’t a troublemaker; he just had a knack for having the wrong impulse at the right time. That is what gave him his bewitching air of mystery. Exactly how and why did he manage to break into that prison island? What of the incident involving a panther, a chair and a hidden jewel on the roof of the Citadel’s highest tower? And how was he to know, when stealing a kiss, that woman was betrothed to the archduke?”

  “And oh! oh! Whyever did I deny him my cupcake breasts and warm mound!”

  Ashton allowed himself to bask a brief moment in the possibility of Violet’s regret. The moment was all too brief.

  It was more probable, he thought with a pursing of his lips, that they would never find his body at all. In fact, their musing on his absence was more likely to run along the lines, “What was it this time? Drunkenly enlisting in the Shardaian navy, or stowing away in a shipping crate to follow another junkie girl to Kundh?”

  A sharp shearing of the fabric dropped him another half-foot with a jolt. “No, this won’t do at all,” he thought. He looked up again, this time not longingly at the moonlets, but pragmatically at the cape, quickly judging it would rip apart if he attempted to climb it.

  Ashton suddenly grinned recklessly. He was certain he had not run out of luck, because Fortune had left him one last roll of the dice.

  “When in doubt,” he thought, “stop doubting.” He drew his dagger, sliced through the cape’s tangled claspwork, and plunged into the waiting dark.

  He braced himself to land after ten feet, or twenty. Twenty-five might be alright.

  The shock did not come, and his stomach lurched as he kept falling. Out of some unusual impulse toward dignity, he willed himself not to scream. This is what they call “time to think about it.” Another old saying appeared unbidden: “Don’t look down.” But that’s only when you’re trying not to fall, not already well on your way. He looked down.

  He may as well have been falling upward into a moonless polar sky in all its disorienting blackness. Then, like a smoke-muffled sunrise, a pale orange oval appeared and tracked across the barren space. It paused beneath him, that lambent ring. A shadowy figure within bent and gave an interrogative grunt as it hefted something floppy and shiny—a boot.

  Ashton laughed aloud for the split second before he curled into a ball and slammed into the Mix-Fiend with the force of a harbor cannon.

  The pain was maliciously thorough, like an accountant paid to audit the capacity of every single nerve. Still, after he had lain sprawled in the damp, moldy sand awhile, panting in the dank stench, everything seemed to work properly. The same could not be said for the Mix-Fiend. The details, thankfully, could not be seen due to the shade that clung to him, even in the light, as a skin-tight black mist. But his shape was terribly wrong, and the spatters of blood and marrow on the sandy floor were undisguised.

  Ashton sat up and bowed between his spread knees until his head stopped spinning. He looked again at the dark blob and gave it a sympathetic wince. He was hardly sorry for the way his luck—and his foe’s neck—had broken, but after all, he’d been on the receiving end of a surprise blow himself once or thrice.

  He extended a foot and slipped it back into his lost boot, then prodded it against the horrid, mushy lump of flesh, feeling it give way to a degree improper for a healthy human body. Tapping here and there, his toes sought to elicit a cold metallic clunk.

  Mix-Fiends were high-class addicts, devotees of the rarest of drugs: magical elixirs. Magica was almost gone from the world, and the art of ensorcelling liquid for potions was lost with the Old Empire’s fall a century past. Quaffing an ancient elixir for kicks was luxury enough. But Mix-Fiends drank two, or more, at a time. Not for the raw punch of the typically high alcohol or herbal stimulant content, or any practical benefit of arcane powers twinned and doubled. It was the sheer mind-twisting sensation of intense magicks competing for space and attention deep in one’s body and brain. Magica was never without consequences, inside or out, and the Mix-Fiends lived, and sometimes died, for that thrill.

  Their minds were not all that was twisted by the sorcery. Noble cloaks and foppish blouses hid digits extended into fins and skin turned tree-bark. Small wonder so many retreated to the ruins to skulk among the bandits and beasts. And in this lovely atmosphere of broken floors and tumbling intruders, naturally they stored their priceless fixes in unbreakable vials of copper or bronze or even steel.

  “Aha,” A
shton said flatly, his voice a hollowed-out echo in the vast chamber, as his boot hit something hard.

  His toe found a flap. He kicked it open, relieved to see it was the hem of a jacket and not a ribbon of torn flesh. Then he was overjoyed to discover what lay within the interior uncloaked by the eldritch dark mist: a cleverly sewn-in holster of five slots, each containing a square copper vial that glowed warm in the light of the fallen torch.

  From spying on the Mix-Fiends, he knew that the juice in these was something called “Shadow-wield.” What they had been mixing it with he would never know, but the combination must have done something to heighten their senses enough to hear the scrape of his boot on the rafters as he crouched above them. After that, it took no magical skill to notice the glinting on his quite spectacular cape. Black-bladed swords were drawn, and he was running from shadows. No matter; it had ended well enough, with these shiny little prizes his for the taking.

  He plucked the copper vials from the holster, running his thumb around the waxed lip of each to check the seal before tucking them into his doublet. All intact. That would be pleasing to Counsel Regulus of the Tetragate Palatinate, who had hired Ashton, on the basis of a somewhat exaggerated curriculum vitae, to acquire them. Four vials would garner him a handsome bounty. As for the fifth… coin was nice, but the ability to disappear into the shadows could well be its own reward. He’d hide it in one of the flowerpots outside the Curia Regis before going in to meet Regulus and friends, just in case they thought to search him. Afterward, it would be his little bonus.

  Any urge Ashton had to experience an elixir-mixing high himself—which is to say, a hundred definite urges merging into an all-consuming pang toward ill-advised corruption—was counterbalanced by the certainty of a potion payday and the distinctly unappealing Mix-Fiend corpse at his feet. He gave it an aimless kick and hit hardness again. He squinted his dark eyes as he traced the length of the shaded but solid object with his foot. “Of course. The sword the unlucky git was shaking at me just minutes ago.”

  Ashton hesitated a moment to touch the hilt, considering the chance that the magical darkness surrounding it would taint him somehow. He realized he had no basis whatsoever for rationally calculating those odds. So obviously the best thing to do was just go right ahead, grab it, and see what happened.

  He unhooked the sword from the dead man’s belt and unsheathed it. For a moment, he thought the blade had remained blackened by the Shadow-wield magica. Tilting it in the firelight, he realized it was crafted of so-called black bronze, a rare metal of purple hue. Just the sort of weapon someone who could afford to use museum-quality drugs might be expected to carry. “Another bonus,” Ashton thought, looping its scabbard to his belt. He paused to give his own backside an experimental pat. “And no sign I’m growing a magica-induced tail, to boot.”

  The other Mix-Fiends were likely to arrive sooner rather than later, swimming anywhere in the pool of shadows about him. Ashton picked up the torch, then located his dagger in the sand. He slid the toe of his boot under it, intending to flip it up and into his waiting palm, but accidentally kicked it a yard away. He’d rewrite that bit in the retelling back at the Jury Lane.

  He retrieved the dagger, rejoined it with its scabbard, and cast his gaze about the floor. Locating the footprints of his late would-be assassin, he followed them out of the ruins and back into a world that was about to become a little more magical.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Counsel Marcus Regulus had the disconcerting feeling that he was about to be humiliated by the brilliant strategic mind of Ashton Arrowmask.

  Judging by the tavern tales about the cat-burglar, he would hardly be the first. But, unlike the police authorities and piratical villains with whom Arrowmask had tangled, the counsel was risking nothing worse than an exceptionally fine opening move in their game of Check.

  Regulus clutched his goateed chin, his other hand swirling the brandy in his goblet, and looked across the chequered game board at his dodgy young adversary.

  Arrowmask was a gangly creature with a tendency to hunch, as he did now with his ivory senator-piece dangling from his long, delicate fingers. His eyes were dark and a set a bit too close together, adding to his air of intensity, if not focus. Neither handsome nor homely, the rogue seemed open to others’ interpretations—a trait that undoubtedly served him well in his line of work, such as it was.

  Regulus was under no illusions about the embellishments Arrowmask had added to his qualifications in entering the employ of the Tetragate, the quartet of paladins who ruled the Empire from Cor Cordum. He expected as much, and would hardly trust a hireling who wasn’t desperate enough to toss in a lie or two. But Arrowmask was demonstrably accomplished in certain remarkable feats—most notably, the affair involving the Star of Monksbane Glen and the panther atop the Citadel. And there was the plain fact that here he was, back from the Old Empire ruins with a satchel of Mix-Fiend potions and barely a scratch to show for it. That’s why he invited Arrowmask into the Curia Regis, the Imperial court, to play Check, the Imperial game. It was a way to take the full measure of a man.

  Also for a man to take the measure of himself, Regulus considered silently, as Arrowmask continued his confoundingly unorthodox offensive. The counsel realized he was being pushed to play a conservative, defensive game that had little hope in the long run. He recalled Arrowmask’s comfortable upbringing in the Millennium islands, where tutoring surely included the great games of royal strategy. Now he watched Arrowmask preparing to sacrifice his senator and attempted to puzzle out the trap being laid.

  “Senator to g3,” Arrowmask said, flourishing his “cubeb,” that nasty little foreign vice he was smoking. The rogue leaned back, taking in the sight of the oak-paneled, book-lined room and its cheery fire, required despite the spring weather in the chill stone confines of the Tetragate complex. He unsuccessfully tried to lure Villi, the bulgy-eyed dwarf cat beloved of the servants, from her favorite spot on the hearth. He seems more comfortable here than I do, Regulus observed.

  “You were talking about mysteries,” Arrowmask continued politely.

  “As men who have solved our share of them, I thought perhaps we might find common ground there,” Regulus said.

  “All the common ground I’m likely to have with an Imperial counsel and his secret guard who drag enemies off into the night,” Arrowmask remarked with casual impertinence and a charming grin.

  “And I with a supposedly lapsed pirate who is wanted on open warrants in a half-dozen provinces under as many names.”

  Arrowmask sucked the corner of his mouth for the briefest instant. He wasn’t expecting me to know about those—or not that many of them, Regulus thought.

  “Mistaken identity. Bureaucratic problems, shuffled paperwork—it happens a lot in these New Empire days,” Arrowmask offered.

  “To be sure. A mystery unto itself,” Regulus sympathized. With deliberation, he avoided taking Arrowmask’s senator and instead brought his legionnaire out to a6.

  “Mysteries aren’t very interesting,” Arrowmask replied. “They’re only truly mysterious at the very beginning, and only truly satisfying at the very end. The rest is a muddle, I’m afraid.”

  “You speak of actual mysteries, or the stuff of playwrights and novels?”

  “It’s all the same,” Arrowmask said, inching his castellum forward a square. “Authors could make it a lot easier on themselves. Give your readers what they want—a mystery that is only the last page. A short poem of set-up and spoiler all in one. The rest of the book could be illustrations, if the case is bloody enough.”

  Regulus chuckled, half from the man’s breezy gall and half from the amusement of a pleb mocking the plebs. He picked up his senator and placed it to flank his own castellum, hoping to stave off whatever attack was to come.

  “Come now, both the courts and the public wish to know more than that,” he said, leaning back and giving his silver-filigree waistcoat a tug. “They wished to know, for example, how I determined that
an esteemed elderly lady in Etonia was poisoned, not by her husband, but rather by fumes from the glaze of her pottery collection. The details mattered much in sparing him from the gallows.”

  Arrowmask, whose eyes brightened markedly at the concept of escaping an execution, took a drag from his cubeb and tilted his hand in a gesture of acceding the point.

  “As for fictional mysteries,” the counsel continued, “well, the satisfaction is more than just the sense of completion, the inevitable victory of Order. The true mystery of the mystery is how the hero was able to see what no one else did.”

  With an air of relaxation bordering on distraction, the rogue deviously placed his legionnaire at a7, forking Regulus’s senator and legionnaire. The counsel set his jaw silently. How had he missed that coming?

  “True, I don’t understand mysteries,” Arrowmask admitted. “I have no patience for them. That’s probably why I solve them. I just plow straight through.”

  “You’re quite good at spinning mysteries as well,” Regulus replied. “Such as poking about in the flowerbeds outside. Hiding some coin you found on the body? Or an extra elixir, eh?”

  Arrowmask shrugged. He clearly saw no point in denying it now. He was smart enough to surmise that the counsel had exhumed it already anyway and was having a bit of fun with him.

  “Not to worry,” the counsel said. “Perhaps we’ll let you have it back. In exchange for owing us a favor.”

  Regulus returned his focus to the board and did not like what he saw. The rogue’s scheme was masterfully bewildering. The counsel couldn’t see more than four moves ahead. Which surely meant he didn’t have many more than that.

  “I resign,” he said with as much self-possession as he could muster, surprising himself more than his laconic guest. Arrowmask waved a hand over the board with an air of kingly permission.