Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

  Regulus offered his own half-grin. “Do you need it?”

  The rogue laughed again. “Nah. I’ll explore your damn woods for you. You better start dusting out that villa. I’m feeling lucky.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ashton hunched over the bar at the Jury Lane, with his first chicken pot pie and his third ale before him, and silently vowed to drink just enough to forget how he had once again fucked things up with Violet.

  In his more sober moments, he was aware that his thirties were fast approaching, and with them the inability to use his youth as an excuse for his foibles. Leaving the Curia Regis, he had a fleeting determination to seize this great responsibility. It began well enough; he went straight to the room Elcook let him use in the tavern basement and slept past highsun, awakening rested and sharp-minded, in part thanks to the stabbing soreness of various joints and muscles. He had lain in bed for an hour, taking the time to consider that he was being played somehow by Counsel Regulus. He weighed those abstract possibilities against the hefty certainties that were tucked into his doublet: an Imperial letter of credit, the Shadow-wield potion that was faithfully restored to his possession, and written profiles of several potential mercenaries, academic hirelings, or the odd hybrid of both.

  But, as it always did eventually, Ashton’s mind wandered. He considered surprising Regulus with a formal invitation to join the expedition, just to irritate the counsel with the implication he was a coward who liked the fake dangers of Check more than real combat. He thought of inviting his twin sister Nalia, fired by the thought of how the idea would simultaneous attract and repulse her, as everything about him did. Inevitably, lying abed aroused a strong erection and his mind turned to Violet, the tavern bard, with her athletic little body and her alluringly drab features.

  Of all the important preparations that lay before Ashton, the clear priority was impressing Violet.

  He found her, as he had so many times before, tuning her harp in the pantry that doubled as her dressing room. She was clad in a plain blue dress that clung to her boyish frame, giving her an androgynous look. She sat on an overturned cabbage crate and lifted her head as he entered, looking at him blankly.

  “What is it now, Ashton?” Her voice was musical even when she was being plainspoken.

  “I’m on an important mission for the Tetragate! Plus I almost died last night!” he blurted. He winced immediately. It sounded different when he was rehearsing that in bed with his hard-on.

  Violet rolled those lovely purple eyes that had inspired her stage name.

  “No, seriously, that’s why I wasn’t here to see you play last night. The Imperial counsel himself sent me into the Old Empire ruins to battle some Mix-Fiends. They forced me to jump nearly a hundred feet down into the ruins, and only pouncing on a Mix-Fiend saved me.”

  He hung his head and spoke softly. “I really thought I might die.” He looked up, straining his eyes so they gleamed. “Right before I fell, when I believed I was having my last thoughts—I thought of you.”

  Violet laid her ear against the top of the harp as she turned a key and plucked a string with her strong nails. Her face relaxed just a bit.

  “Is it true what they say about the ruins—that the biggest danger is the hordes of rabid stray cats?”

  “Yes! Excellent point!” Ashton said, stepping forward and jabbing a finger as he tried to squeeze into the verbal opening. He knocked a candlestick off a shelf beside him and caught it with uncanny agility, quickly replacing it.

  “The cats are indeed a terror! They have been breeding in there for centuries with no hygiene whatsoever!” he chattered, nearly oblivious to Violet pulling a face that indicated she thought something similar might be said of him.

  “They are a snarling, snapping danger to man and fellow beast!” he continued, louder.

  “A swarm of cats could be more daunting than an armored warrior,” she prompted.

  “Oh, yes! Luckily, I had thought to bring sliced meat with me to distract them!” he lied. “Even then, half a dozen followed me straight up a ruined wall, pursuing until I leapt onto the old aqueduct.”

  Somewhere in the back of his mind dozed the true memory: His distress at forgetting entirely about the cats, his desperate swinging of an old board and tossing of broken bottles from the gutter, his hiding under a rotting overturned wagon.

  He told the truth about the daring climb to the Mix-Fiend hideout and his detection, and elaborated his fall into a pounce.

  “He was injured, but still fighting, he came at me with a sword of black bronze! I scrambled up, keeping him away by kicking sand in his face, until I found my dagger. I got a foot under it and kicked it up into my hand, parrying and thrusting until… Well, I will spare you the unpleasant details. Suffice it to say, I was the victor.” He casually made a quarter-turn to show off his new purple-bladed sword.

  “You were uninjured?”

  “Not entirely, but nothing worth worrying about,” he said with nonchalance, leaning against the pantry wall and bumping his cheek against a sprig of dried lavender dangling from the ceiling. He puffed at it out of the corner of his mouth.

  “And what is this secret mission you’re going on for the Tetragate?”

  “Well, it’s secret, after all, so…”

  Violet sighed and rose, slinging the harp’s strap across her shoulder.

  “…But I can say it involves exotic travel in comfortable circumstances! Close quarters, but with a number of people I’m sure would appreciate the stirring songs of a bard.”

  “What people?”

  Ashton cocked his head and held his palms up as if calming a potential rioter. “I’m still figuring that part out a little bit.”

  Violet sighed again.

  “Ashton. Let me ask you one question about this amazing secret mission.”

  “Of course. Anything. Ask away. Nothing to hide.”

  “How would you feel if I went on this adventure with you and never, ever once slept with you?”

  Ashton hesitated, fatally.

  She played a brief rill on the harp as she brushed past him, looking ahead solemnly.

  He mouthed a curse and smacked the lavender from its hook. The burbling of the dinner crowd, like the babbling of a river composed entirely of beer, rose as she opened the door to the dining room.

  He slipped among the long communal tables as Violet took to the low stage and perched on her stool. She hitched up the hem of her dress a few inches in her practiced way, showing the boys enough leg to get their attention and not enough for the ladies to slap their arms for looking. Her fingers danced over the strings as she launched into The Godkillers, her voice strong and clear through the smoke-hazy tavern air.

  Vast was the country and vast was the threat,

  Vast was the danger the Godkillers met.

  Shrouded in darkness, the great forest’s gloom,

  Where foes joined as friends to spell a god’s doom.

  Whether the selection was meant to appease him or mock him, Ashton decided it made him feel terrible either way. He scurried through the stuffy, scruffy tavern, under its elkhorn lamps and across its wine-stained floorboards, to his favorite spot at the crook-end of the bar. And here he remained, hunched, with Violet so near, yet so far.

  Elcook, on the other hand, was as close as ever. Bald and beefy as one of his own meat pies, he stirred an unseasonal crock of mulled wine, looking down into its depths with his imperturbable face. He loomed over the bar in a way that seemed anchoring rather than disconcerting.

  As Ashton rambled about his bard problems, Elcook displayed the gift that made him a great barman—a knack for saying absolutely nothing. The only thing capable of drawing a reaction seemed to be the pet monkey he’d picked up on some island or other, now burbling away cutely on a nearby perch, when it would uncurl its tail to tickle his ear with the tip—and even then, Elcook offered only a stiff but gentle pet.

  Ashton had known Elcook for years, back when he was a fortuitously-named
cook in the galley of a privateer called the Crepusculum. Ashton had jumped from crew to crew as was his wont, sometimes pursued by the privateer, sometimes fighting alongside its crew, sometimes drinking with them ashore. Elcook wasn’t half-bad at whipping up the grub, but Ashton suspected he was valued by stewards and captains as much for his unflappable nature. He never got seasick, he never complained about being short-handed, and he didn’t blink at putting down a mutiny with a truncheon-swing when the men got miffed at a little rationing. He was a man you could trust with a secret.

  Elcook had kept a secret of his own, quietly saving up enough plunder to get out of the galleys. Ashton had lost track of him, unaware that he had bought the Jury Lane until stumbling in one night, already drunk and a wee bit desperate for a hiding spot from a perturbed moneylender. Elcook had let him hide in the basement and he’d never really left. Or at least his stuff hadn’t. He’d left a lot, actually. But it was the spirit of the thing.

  There was no rent, no barrels of smoked herring rolled in to fill the room while he was out pirating. He didn’t know why Elcook was so tolerant of him, and wasn’t prone to thinking about it. Ashton had a theory that if he never thought about something, nobody else would, either. And who wants their landlord thinking about whether to keep them around?

  But now Ashton was thinking about it and it was too late to stop. Maybe Elcook saw him as a fellow outsider, and not just because of their piratical past (or present or future, in Ashton’s case); they were both ethnic Weàlae. Ashton was as Corcorid as the next felon, but he hailed from a semi-isolated island of Weàlae aristocrats in Millennium. Elcook was straight from the Riparia outback, still talking—on the rare occasions he did so—in that old tongue that sounded like a badly muffed hanging and bowing to quaint gods who had names and faces and favorite uniforms. Ashton’s notion of heritage was wherever he slept last night, but maybe this was a card he could play someday.

  Ashton pushed the pot pie aside and slapped the hefty portfolio of paperwork Regulus had given him down on the nicked wood.

  “How are the old gods treating you, Elcook? What’s the one with the twin hounds? Rithuen?”

  Elcook’s boar-like shoulders expanded a moment in some form of shrug as he silently dropped a clove-spiked lemon into the crock of wine.

  “You should fire Violet,” Ashton offered.

  The tavernkeep only grunted and sloshed the wine.

  Ashton had sworn he was only going to have two drinks and thus inevitably began pulling on his third as he looked over the astonishing documents at his disposal. The letter of credit alone weighed about a pound with all of its seals and ribbons. It applied exclusively at one provisioner and one wainwright, but it was an unlimited account. Whatever invisible strings attached to being handed the Imperial purse, and whatever hazy kickback scheme it probably involved, Ashton felt near-dizzy with the possibilities. He’d have to order some things so weird that the Empire would never want them back, yet so valuable that he could make some extra profit on it. Gilded chamberpots? Naked portraits of famous erotic dancers in bejeweled frames?

  The provisioner was Lampley’s, one of the biggest traders in Cor Cordum and thus in the entire Empire, so no complaint there. The wainwright was the Gallatine family, a name Ashton recognized as the makers of the Imperial mail coaches, and probably the fancy rides of the four Pompous Paladins and their retinue, for all he knew. Ashton let out a low whistle. He’d be able to commission a wagon bigger than the basement room he lived in, and probably five times more luxurious than any house he’d ever occupied without committing burglary. Generosity suddenly came upon him like a sexually transmitted tropical fever.

  “Elcook, old chum, I’ve got title to an Imperial coach and an open purse for a particular mission,” he said, waving the gaudy document, its seals rattling like a tambourine. “Why don’t you come ride with me? Like sailing, only across the billows of the Empire’s provinces.” He wiggled his hand up and down in imitation waves.

  “Pah,” was Elcook’s full reply as he shuffled down the bar to serve other customers.

  It was Ashton’s turn to shrug. Elcook probably didn’t believe him, but if he did, Ashton labored to remember, most other people actually liked being stuck in their mundane lives, doing the same thing every day, paying taxes and calculating change. They thought it was irrational to cut and run for the unknown. To Ashton, it was something akin to a survival instinct.

  Ashton turned to the remaining paperwork. He expected a list of retired soldiers or perhaps a professor or two at whatever was left of the Imperial University. What Regulus provided was weirder, downright sinister—and thus much more useful.

  It was a series of fragmentary profiles—probably censored from official records—of oddballs and vagabonds. Clearly the work of a widespread and nitpicking spy network, the profiles snooped everywhere from seedy taverns to inner temples and quite possibly a bedroom or two. Ashton resettled himself uncomfortably on his stool as he reconsidered what Regulus might have on him.

  A couple of those named in the papers had already occurred to him. There was the little slip of a Shardaian entertainer—a fugitive from some kind of bizarre circus-themed cult, or cult-themed circus, operating in the Vyrkanian mountains—rumored to be working improbably as a bouncer at the notorious Blade & Ladle tavern. She was mopping the floors, figuratively and literally, it seemed.

  The Tetragate had also heard about Aloisius “Alfie” Finstickle, the eccentric priest and sometime University lecturer who was one of the foremost experts on magica—well, the only one Ashton knew personally, anyhow. He’d crossed paths with the portly old scholar during a mission to smuggle some exotic Jadal goods on behalf of a trading cartel. Alfie, who had lived among the Green Weàlae locals, had been styling himself “Aloisius the Plant Lord, King of Vegetative Magica,” and said he needed some of the goods for his arcane rites. He paid better than the trading cartel, which had an unfortunate tendency to count its goods carefully and retained several assassins to punish skimmers. Still, all the right people were still alive today, including, it seemed, good old Alfie, who now was now a priest of Night and going by “Aloisius the Stone Master,” whatever that meant.

  The rest were figures of mystery—or comedy, depending on whether one was drinking their third ale of the evening. Telvyr, a former paladin—former because of a sticky situation with a sexy priestess and a lost holy sword; perhaps an amiable partying companion for the road. And lurking in a tomb-like mansion by day and working at the Temple of Pain by night, one Countess Svetkov of Volania, some vice-province in Duxum; a curiosity considering that Duxum hadn’t been ruled royalty for a couple of centuries.

  He flipped through the remaining profiles. Felicia Gratia, an animal-trainer who had been forced out of work after an unfortunate dracolupus escape. Finally, Cupio Argento, an actor known for his portrayals of doomed lovers and, in very different circles, for his skills at faking gemstones.

  Ashton raised his head and stretched his arms. So this was the company the Tetragate thought compatible with him. A holy warrior who couldn’t keep either of his swords in their proper scabbards; a fraudulent royal and priestess of torture; a circus act who didn’t know how to walk a giant dog on a leash; and a foppish practitioner of two equally phony careers. It would be insulting if it wasn’t so damn fitting.

  Well, he was already set on reconnecting with Alfie and inquiring about this mini-bouncer. If they worked out, that left an open slot for one of the mystery people. But which one would be most suitable for a long trip into terra incognita? He could weigh the variables for months and do no better than trusting Fortune.

  He fished into his doublet and produced a small crystal pyramid that could be mistaken for a caltrop—or not so mistakenly, as he had used it as such once or twice. In fact, it was a die with a distinct glyph carved on each of its four faces, and he trusted it more than any person in the world. He tossed it onto the bartop, where its clacking was lost amid Violet’s harping.

  G
lyph two. Ashton selected the proper document and tapped a finger down on the second profile.

  “Hello, Countess Rinka Svetkov.”

  He stood a bit unsteadily, snatched up the die and replaced it with a generous tip. With a nod to Elcook, a chuck under the monkey’s furry chin, and an avoidant sideglance away from Violet, he slipped out into the night.

  Ashton inhaled the seasalt-and-sewage aroma of Cor Cordum and looked up at the square of sky visible between the ramshackle townhouses. The old Imperial palace, with the four new towers of the Tetragate pasted on with fresher, whiter mortar, towered above the city. Dwarfing it was the shadowy ruins of the Old Empire, its grand old structures a broken line punctuated with smears of dark smoke from bandit campfires. To hear Regulus tell it, Ashton and his crew would help raise it all once more. Ashton had his doubts about having a hand in empire-rebuilding. Shabby and stinking though it was, this city had a place for people like him. A shiny new Imperial capital might well not.

  But, as was so common a thread in the fabric of his life, he had little choice. Except for who he’d take with him, of course. It was still First Watch. He could probably find Alfie at his creepy Night temple, or the bouncer at the dive. He shouldn’t procrastinate further. And yet, wouldn’t it be wrong not to say hello to family before he left? And reunite with a possible alternative companion at that?

  He walked briskly, missing his cape as proof against the sea breeze, as he headed for the manse of his sister Nalia. Not to mention of her husband Vito, but Ashton made a point of trying never to mention that milquetoast.

  Something stirred inside him as he arrived and saw a light on. He circled carefully, noting with satisfaction that there was no sign of Vito’s horse. Either out rabbit-hunting or olive-oil-trading, his only known interests and vices, the sod. Ashton’s beloved, and sometimes be-hated, twin sister was home, then. He stumbled over a cobblestone , caught himself, and headed for the front door. How long had it been? Three months? A year?