Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

  That did it. The tears finally came. Rinka felt a delicious tickle within her, deep behind her bejeweled navel. “They would be disgusted,” Brenda sobbed. “They would hate me.” Her sobs bent her at the waist, with only the tension of Rinka hands on her breasts preventing her from doubling over.

  “They should be disgusted. You are fucked-up for wanting this,” Rinka said cuttingly. She rested her palm on the shaking woman’s cheek once more, then slapped hard. “Fucked-up,” she repeated with another slap.

  Brenda’s head snapped back, and the remains of her new dress slipped off her shoulders, exposing her. The words and the slap, over and over. Brenda’s eyes lost focus. On the eighth slap, she finally broke. She screamed in shame and pain, a long shriek that dissolved into racking sobs. Rinka let her bend over this time, watched her swinging teats and beet-red face and running nose. She grinned wickedly. This right here is the religious experience, she thought.

  Rinka grabbed a fistful of the woman’s mousy hair. Brenda looked up, her face a mess of tears and snot. “Fucked-up,” she wimpered agreeably, obviously hoping to avoid another slap. Rinka merely chuckled and spun her around, then forcing her down onto the table with the built-in cuffs. Brenda knew it well already and bent over its edge compliantly, her feet on the floor and her torso and arms stretched across the surface as if paying obeisance to Pain Herself. Wrist cuffs kept her in place on that end, and ankle cuffs attached to a bar kept her legs just far enough apart to allow her no secrets. Brenda also had learned to lift her hips at Rinka’s guiding tap so a small, firm pillow of cord could slip under her hips. The only release she was allowed each week was from rubbing that pillow during what came next.

  Rinka began the spanking without warning, landing precise little palm-smacks unpredictably out of time with the little bard’s tune. Brenda mixed hisses with grunts as she began humping the pillow.

  “You like Pesh seeing you this way, don’t you, you nasty old sow?” Rinka said.

  “Yes, Miss Rinka,” Brenda mumbled yet again.

  “You know,” Rinka mused between butt-reddening smacks, “Pesh doesn’t wear that gag all the time. She goes home and tells her skanky friends about you. It could be just a matter of time before word spreads.”

  It was a lie, but it made Brenda pause a moment before repeating her “Yes, Miss Rinka” and then crying quietly again.

  Once her jiggly buns were an even crimson, Rinka fetched from the cupboard a square rosewood paddle with inlaid silver knotwork. She made Brenda kiss it before applying it full-force. Brenda tensed and screamed after each resounding crack, then returned to grinding her hips while she had the chance. Rinka gripped her by the throat and paddled her through her release while commanding, “Let it go for me. It’s mine.”

  She surveyed the damp, bruised curves of Brenda’s spent body like a victor claiming freshly conquered landscape. She yanked open the laces on her trousers, braced a boot on the edge of the table, and thrust herself against Brenda’s mouth. She laughed triumphantly.

  Rinka hated the next part—all the comforting and reassuring. Freed from the table, Brenda knelt before her and cried herself dry into Rinka’s cleavage. Rinka rubbed Brenda’s shoulder blades stiffly and planted unpuckered kisses on the top of her head as if she was playing with someone else’s dog.

  “Feel better now?” she asked in a monotone. Brenda nodded and whimpered and looked at her with misty-eyed devotion.

  Rinka got rid of Brenda as quickly as possible, dismissing her with the instruction to ask Asvelt for some clothes from the lost-and-found box behind the counter. Then she called Pesh to sit within petting reach while she leaned back in the chair and lit up a long lime-green cubeb. She was ready for a big dinner and bed with Asvelt. A craving for all the comforts of home—just like any warrior after a good day of meting out pain on the battlefield.

  Mieux peered over the rim of the gigantic drink served in a coconut shell that she had insisted on purchasing and now held in both hands, her lips pursed around the straw, and took in the obscene sights of the Carnis Incendium.

  To ease his anxiety about the scene, Ashton distracted himself by pretending to be paternally concerned about Mieux’s incredible ability to overeat. It had been two pork chops, an entire grapefruit and several glasses of tomato juice at breakfast, while he was still slumped in his chair, too sore from the previous night’s fighting to even shave himself, let alone down his oatmeal and a coffee with a shot of Elcook’s cheapest whisky in it. Lunch was two huge bowls of stew, a half-dozen rolls, a sausage she ate merely because she thought its shape was amusing, and several pints of ale, all while she fended off his timid advances and made him tell her about nautical rope knots and the sorts of animals they have in Millennium. Dinner, which sadly transpired on Violet’s night off and thus lacked in any jealousy-provoking seen-with-another-girl value, consisted of an entire pheasant, salad, sautéed squash, bread and cheese, a quart of red wine, and a strawberry tart of dubious freshness that left whipped cream on both her plump cheeks as she chatted endlessly between rapid chomps. It was like watching trash between shoveled into an incinerator.

  Commenting on a lady’s consumption was in the “no” chapter of the gentleman’s textbook, but Ashton, as so often was the case in his life, couldn’t help himself.

  “Your eyes are probably literally bigger than your stomach,” he had observed. “How can you eat like that and stay so skinny?”

  “I have the metabolism of a hummingbird,” she had replied matter-of-factly, deigning to add that this scientific determination had been made in Vyrkania by the something-something of the such-and-such on top of Mount Whatever.

  She looked like a hummingbird now, a pretty little thing sticking her shiny snout into the giant flower of the coconut. She slurped noisily.

  “We’re going to need an extra wagon just for your rations,” he jibed as she placidly ignored him.

  The joking didn’t dull his edginess. Ashton liked a kinky club more than the next guy—and that’s what the Incendium was, “temple” or no—but they also made him nervous that he wouldn’t fit in to their rules and expectations and protocols. He felt vaguely embarrassed about bringing Mieux here, and he felt unfairly irritated with her as well. He had visited once or twice before, and wanted to impress her by talking his way past the Sally Anns out front. But they recognized Mieux immediately from the Blade & Ladle and waved them through.

  Ashton also didn’t like having to pay the blonde at the door that fat a bribe to find out where Rinka lurked. And now he wasn’t so sure after all that he wanted to go on an expenses-paid holiday with someone who kept a private room in a place where guys hang nude from fishhooks for fun. Such forms of fleshy mortification were so abundant that neither of them paid any attention to the naked woman dashing past with hands over her privates. Ashton had just about decided to wait for Mieux to gulp down her “Nutknocker” and go find that gemstone-faking actor instead, when she barged her way through the crowd toward a back doorway.

  He realized she had been saying something about his aura being all zigzagged and that he should calm down and breathe only once every seven seconds. “More is bad for you!” Then she had impatiently darted off, still holding her drink carefully in both palms as if it were mouse she had captured and mercifully decided to go release in the alley.

  Someone goosed his ass as he followed her to a door with a cheesy, gleaming “R” on it. He reached over Mieux’s head and knocked hesitantly, then admitted himself upon hearing a thin, plaintive voice bidding him enter.

  He was about to make a crack about the décor and its lawsuit-worthy consequences for his eyesight when he came into her presence and found himself stock-still and gulping as if he’d taken a knee to the chest. This unquestionably was Rinka Svetkov, as no one could possibly look more like a priestess of Pain, or like a countess of some nightmare court, for that matter.

  She sprawled in a chair as if it were her battle-won throne, one leg braced confidently on a footrest. A b
ound minion with a loose gag dangling from her neck knelt beside the seat and strummed that horrible new Cap’n Trent song, of all things, on a lute. Before her was a grim table with built-in shackles.

  He had met his share of statuesque brunettes, gazed into thickly shadowed eyes, and even once or twice seen cleavage this unfathomable. But there was something otherworldly to Rinka’s beauty, a perfection and radiating aggression that made his skin prickle. It felt like being in a boat drawn by a mysterious current only to find it was the edge of a whirlpool at the base of a tornado writhing at sea. When she looked up at him, her attitude felt like the heat of an oven door opening. Or maybe he was just blushing ridiculously.

  Svetkov glanced over him, as if instantly diagnosing his myriad inadequacies, and then Mieux as well.

  “What the fuck. No kids,” she spat. “Get out.”

  “She’s not a child. I made the same mistake myself,” Ashton confided inanely, immediately regretting the attempt to join the countess of Pain in sympathy. “I’m Ashton Arrowmask and this is my partner, Mieux Vigouroux,” he stammered as Mieux nodded, her lips still locked around the straw of her drink. “We’re not customers. We have a business proposition. The lady at the door said it would be alright to ask you,” he added childishly.

  Rinka raked her gaze back and forth over them like a scythe kissing wheat, while Mieux spotted the rosewood paddle laying on the table.

  “Do you spank people on the bottom for a living!” Mieux asked. She sucked her straw and blinked slowly as she awaited the answer.

  Ashton winced and felt his heart pound, his hand sneaking habitually for the sword that wasn’t there, left behind the counter at the blonde’s insistence. Everyone else froze for a minute, even the lute-slave. Then Rinka flashed a grin.

  “No, just for fun. Why, you need a little discipline? Daddy not giving it to you?”

  Mieux’s brow wrinkled slightly, then smoothed as she cocked her head and looked up to the ceiling. “Perhaps,” she said thoughtfully.

  Rinka laughed musically with surprising charm. She rose and began stalking with long, slow paces, her arms folded, towering over both of them. She looked Ashton over again dismissively, then regarded Mieux.

  “What was your name again?”

  “Mieux Vigouroux of the Sénche-do!” She repeated her nod and added a hand-flourish.

  Rinka arched an eyebrow and looked down her nose at the little acrobat. “You’re an equilibrique.”

  Mieux’s eyes swelled like pufferfish. “My stars and garters! You have met the equilibrique before!” she cried. “That is totally not normal!”

  “Oh, I’m totally not normal,” Rinka said in a voice as smoky and snakeskin-smooth as her eye shadow. “I fought the equilibrique a long time ago, in a different place.”

  “I am glad to see you have recovered from your loss,” Mieux replied, her eyes half-closed as she slurped her drink.

  Rinka chuckled. “So I have.” She looked down on Mieux with interested amusement. “Get out,” she repeated, but this time to the bondage bard, who nodded and shuffled to the door.

  She motioned for them to take the chairs as she continued pacing like a headmistress teaching a class in remedial badassery. Ashton sank into the leather and hunched in fuming self-pity. Demoralizing, it was, for Rinka to so easily wrest control of the conversation away from him—something she might just do with the entire adventure. He raged inwardly at Mieux’s betrayal of charming Rinka first, and also at Rinka for charming Mieux. He resented his kneejerk attraction to this skanky hooker. He felt around for a pillow to hide any surprises from his lap. If he had to cover himself with Mieux’s Nutknocker, he swore to the Furies he would kill them both in their sleep, or just drink heavily and pass out in the alley behind the Jury Lane. He seethed all the more when he realized that he was sitting there stupidly, waiting for Rinka to do whatever she was going to do.

  “So, an equilibrique and a…” Rinka waved her hand speculatively toward him. “Card sharp? Pimp?”

  He glowered impotently as Mieux emptied the coconut with a disgusting noise and then piped in.

  “He is my friend and he is a pirate! I met him yesterday, the very same day I saw The Pirate Queen of Redwave Reef! How crazy is that!” Mieux cried at a volume that made even the Ice Countess step back on her stilettos. “Plus he has done adventures on land also, like stealing a gem from a panther sitting on a chair on a roof!”

  Untroubled by Mieux’s unique retelling of the familiar yarn, Rinka turned her head to Ashton and looked at him coolly. “That was you?”

  He flicked his palms open and shot her a no-big-deal simper. Her ice-cave eyes didn’t blink.

  “Plus on top of that, he helped me defeat a bunch of killers in a huge fight with burning rum and…!” Mieux continued, but now Rinka was ignoring her instead.

  “You’re related to the Arrowmask?”

  He issued a grudgingly affirmative grunt, but Rinka already had made the slightest of nods, apparently satisfying herself with something she had seen in the line of his jaw or the shape of his eyes, or Pain and Fortune knew what.

  “An equilibrique and an Arrowmask,” Rinka said, and Ashton found himself cheered by the faintest note of humility in her voice. She could play all night at being the all-powerful Mistress of Butthurt Dungeon, but she had completely misread and underestimated them, and she knew it. “What kind of business are you in? Selling trouble door-to-door?”

  Finally, a chance to actually speak. Ashton wanted to get it over with. Infuriating as Rinka was, she was here now, and he needed that third lackey to fill a slot and get on to enjoying unlimited credit and the counsel’s payday. Reining in all his impulses, he decided to be polite.

  “Countess Svetkov…”

  “What did you call me?” she snapped, her eyes flashing as she deftly interposed herself between them and the door. “Do I look like a countess to you?”

  “Yeah, actually, you do,” he grumbled.

  “In the papers of the four kings of the Tetragate it says you are countess!” Mieux cried.

  “What do those back-stabbing pigs have to do with this?” Rinka snapped, her lip curled in sudden ferocity. Ashton couldn’t help flinching, and Mieux’s eyes widened.

  “Everything. Nothing,” Ashton equivocated, finally plunging in to a description of the mission at hand. As he expounded and produced paperwork, Rinka paced, occasionally leaning in uncomfortably close to jab a finger and demand an answer, then leaving behind the scent of cosmetics and perfume like the sting of a slap.

  She said she was indeed Vollach—“fuck ‘Volanian’”—and of royal blood, but there had been no local “countesses” named in centuries, only brutish Weàlae warlords and prissy Corcorid procounsels. Ashton made sympathetic sounds and tossed in a nasty word about his ancestors. She noted that the Tetragate were ruthless fuckholes who ran prison islands and assassin squads. Ashton shushed Mieux and agreed wholeheartedly.

  Finally, story and questions alike were finished.

  “An Arrowmask pirate, an equilibrique, a washed-up magimath, and a Vollach dominatrix,” Rinka mused. “And a secret file full of invites to other criminals, fuck-ups, weirdos.”

  She leaned across the table, spreading her fingertips on its surface and setting her jaw as if pondering a battle map. Beneath the makeup and flash, Ashton saw some atavistic field general emerge.

  “You realize they’re just trying to get rid of us freaks, right?” Rinka looked at them searchingly from under the ominous thunderclouds of eye shadow. “Cleanse their shiny new empire of anybody who’s out of order? And the ones who say no or don’t find a ride out of town”—she tossed aside the counsel’s portfolio—“you do understand they’re going straight into some dungeon or ditch?”

  Mieux’s mouth popped open, but then uncharacteristically closed again as she pondered. Ashton braced a hand on his knee, bit his lip, and considered the talking statue that was Rinka. The plot she was suggesting seemed too complicated and expensive to be true, bu
t then again, it was simplicity itself. Pick the best of the worst, send them afar as disposable scouts, gain if they return with something, gain if they never return at all. Pluck up the rest, whose identities and locations are now confirmed by the efforts of Ashton himself and the captains of the wagon trains to the other points of the compass.

  He flushed for a moment recalling how well Counsel Regulus had played him. Not that he was convinced that Rinka was right, or if she was, that Regulus knew of it directly. But Regulus had worked on his sense of adventure, and Ashton had let him. The general idea of a double-cross or cheat had occurred to him, but not this very plausible possibility.

  “Fuck it. I’m not gonna die alone,” Rinka declared with sudden determination. “I bunk with Mieux, and dibs on the bottom bed.”

  Ashton nodded half-heartedly as he thought distractedly of plays and double-plays. Rinka considered her nails and whatever voices in her head brought her to her resigned resolution. Mieux just chewed her straw and observed Rinka with a half-smile on her lips and seriousness in her giant liquid eyes.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “This Kundhii green tea really hits the spot!” Alfie the Stone Master declared approvingly, setting the empty cup on its saucer and patting his furry upper lip with the thick dark napkin he had tucked into his shirt.

  He beamed at his new companions, the odd couple of Rinka Svetkov and Mieux Vigouroux. Charming lasses, each in their own way. Took getting used to, of course. First handshake with the adorable zealot was like discovering a megaphone with a parakeet lodged in the mouthpiece. He just popped in a couple of the smooth pebbles he would insert in his ears to protect his hearing during visits to quarries and such, and problem solved. Got along famously now. Great discussion about the mountains of Vyrkania and some of the astronomy they performed in her circus there. After that, she had juggled for him. Jolly good stuff, a real talent for it.

  As for Rinka, gorgeous, of course, but then, so was the leopard that ate half the porters in his first camp in the Jadal. Like many of those who mete out discipline for a living, her own personality was unrestrained, if not unhinged. Prickly as a cactus salad and twice as strange to have set before one.