Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

  Mieux had an open-mouthed stare in response to finally getting her demonstration of stone magica. Rinka not only was less impressed, but appeared to be a veteran of prison breaks. She spit on her fingers and rubbed the saliva onto the door’s long single hinge to lubricate it. It still gave a small squeak when she eased it open, but not enough to draw guard notice.

  “The guards may notice the sand when I work on the outer door,” Alfie warned her quietly. “You must act quickly.”

  They moved into the short passage between the inner and outer doors. She spat and rubbed the hinge while he knelt out of the window’s view and repeated his incantations. As the sand was still spilling in a dry fountain, he backed into the cell and Rinka reached into the hole to snap open the lock.

  She was silhouetted in the doorway as she stepped through brazenly, announcing, “Hey, you pigfuckers! I’m here for my sword!”

  “That sounds like no plan at all,” Alfie thought, and the cursing, steel-baring and violent struggling that immediately ensued as Rinka was tugged out of their view only confirmed the impression. Mieux sprang to her feet, but Alfie raised his arm to bar her. “The lass either knows what she’s doing, or she’s beyond helping.”

  It ended quickly, with a horrid shuddering gasp that made his hair prickle. More cursing—none of it Rinka’s—followed, and suddenly two spearmen were prodding him and Mieux to remain in the cell.

  “The bitch is down!” one ruffian announced in the room beyond, while another cried for the lieutenant to be called, and it was a short time later that Titus stood there in the passage between the unlocked doors, looking over the spearmen’s shoulders and tut-tutting.

  “Bloody idiots,” he remarked to Alfie and Mieux with a note of sadness. “I want them bound and gagged and put in another cell.”

  The rigors of stonespelling had left Alfie too tired to struggle as he was trussed up with hempen ship rope. Mieux felled two guards before others threw a piece of sailcloth over her and wrestled her down like a rabid dog, threatening to knife Alfie if she kept kicking. They were dragged out amid the splintered remains of an old card table and non-matching chairs. A candle in a wine bottle lay on the dirty floor, still burning, but guttering in its own spilled wax. And in much the same position lay Rinka, face-down and motionless, in a spreading pool of blood.

  The poor, foolish, angry girl, Alfie thought as the thugs tossed them into the back of a fresh cell. This one had no windows, and when the door banged shut, the darkness was complete.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Ashton relaxed against a wall at the broken edge of the Terminus and surveyed the city he was about to abandon yet again.

  Once upon a time, the Terminus had been called the Pons Caeruleus—the Blue Bridge—a massive span uniting the old city with its newer quarters. It arched high and strong over the Murmur, a waterfall-ridden river connecting the Atelrush and the Godsblood, its sides stacked with stone houses and its deck ornamented with colored mosaics depicting the various monthly phases of Atel’s Trail, from bright to black to haunting blue. These centuries later, the mosaics were long pried up for scrap, the Murmur had fallen silent after an earthquake dammed its source, and the main span had been undermined in the wars. Its jagged stubs gestured at each other across the chasm like former lovers exchanging obligatory grudging salutes during a chance meeting. Now the New Empire end was the Terminus, and it grew a little shorter, the canyon a little wider, every year as another block of stone tumbled to the tangled wild forest below.

  The only traffic now was customers for the master leatherwork and silversmithing of the Green Weàlae and Traline families who had long made a small community in the houses built on the bridge’s sides, the occasional criminal tossing a knife or body over the precipice, and artists looking for a view to improve upon. One of them was down there now, sitting on a stool before an easel, painting an intact bridge. Young lovers used to favor the spot at well, following an old tradition that rubbing a stone near the edge brought them wedded bliss; but the Temple of Love had it removed and trucked to its official gardens where it could be accessed in safe surroundings and at a considerable fee. Thus, the Terminus was Ashton’s favorite place to perch and relax, much as he took to the crow’s nest at sea to put the fleas, barnacle-scrapings, and shouted orders far beneath him.

  He had clambered atop a low addition tacked onto the last house on the right and now sat there, his back against the main exterior wall, his knees bent, and his soles braced against a low, smokeless chimney of brick. The Old Empire ruins sprawled before him, all toppled columns and massive cracks like black lightning, with the usual circling vultures and smudges of campfire smoke joined by intermittent flashes of weird purple and green lights. To his left, green hills and a line of leaf-sprouting trees marking and masking the Atelrush. On his right, Cor Cordum stretching out to the harbor, livid in the afternoon sun, the “New” Empire buildings looking old and ramshackle.

  “If this is the Heart of the World, the divine’s doctor must be fretting about heart failure,” he mused. A breeze swirled around him carrying smoke, salt and flowers.

  He brushed away a puffy seed pod gliding on the air and made out the line of the street on which stood Nalia’s house. He wondered if she would let him back in after another three months or a year or however long it took. He wondered if he would make it back at all.

  He thought about his new companions lurking somewhere under those sagging dormers and screaming gulls. So far, it had been a relief to be around people at least as crazy as himself, he realized. But it was also disconcerting and vaguely annoying. After all, acting crazy was his favorite trump card—but could he beat Mieux’s game? Rinka’s? He didn’t trust the outrageous dominatrix, and worse still, he didn’t like her. Such concerns factored little in the decision-making of someone used to sharing hammocks with the motley crew of smuggling ships, but damn, did they niggle.

  Ashton felt a little unmanned by how Rinka outdid him in mistrust, too. Was she right about some Tetragate scheme? He was the only one who had met with Counsel Regulus—twice now—and still didn’t have answers.

  The second meeting had been just an hour past. Ashton decided to deliver confirmation of the team’s formation in person. To avoid any conspirators, he took a circuitous route and knocked at the Curia Regis’s service entrance. No Check and brandy this time. Regulus had received him in a ground-floor working office half-filled with construction supplies and harried clerks. Clearly, the seduction was over and the drab morning-after was here.

  The counsel had expressed some polite enthusiasm for Ashton’s prompt choice of teammates, flashing a quick smile above that goatee, and had no quibbles with the line-up. But when Ashton, upon handing over the portfolio of ne’er-do-well profiles, asked whether it would be alright to look up one or two of them if his current crew didn’t work out, Regulus merely issued a distracted, “Of course. Anyone you like,” while scribbling his signature on a form thrust before him. No apparent interest in the question. No dark intimation that there would be no one left alive to staff his Plan B. Maybe he really was distracted; maybe not.

  In their first meeting, Ashton hadn’t cared who was leading the caravans to the other compass points, but this time he had asked. Regulus remained distracted, tapping a walking stick as he counted barrels of nails.

  “Oh, several freelancers such as yourself. Butterby, Ransoom, Magdeira.”

  Ashton recognized Butterby as a somewhat capable low-level gang leader who switched freely from shore to sea and back, wherever adventure took him. He didn’t know the others, but noted they weren’t classical Corcorid names. Regulus didn’t hesitate to name them, and names were what they sounded like, not a hit list of enemies of the state. Then again, enemies changed quickly, and names changed quicker.

  “Apologies, Arrowmask, but I’m terribly busy with some tower construction today,” Regulus had said, clapping a pretend-friendly hand on his shoulder and ushering him back to the service entrance. “I will try to see yo
u again before you leave, meet each member of your team. Much appreciated and….”

  Ashton’s memory drifted away like the seeds floating on the breeze, which now had picked up a swampy tang from down in the chasm. All he could remember right now was his own overwrought, underthought cleverness that utterly failed to burn away any fog around the counsel’s caravan scheme. Mieux would have asked Regulus directly. Rinka would have yanked his goatee or something.

  “They’d make a great interrogation team,” he thought, allowing himself a smile at recalling Mieux’s painfully bold questions about Rinka’s business. But he just plain sucked at it, and soon he’d have to go tell everyone that. It wouldn’t make them more or less paranoid, but it would make him look still less leader-like next to the six-foot whipcracker from Castle Sexpot.

  He wiggled his toes inside his boots, wondering idly whether he could get away with a quick wank up here, and glanced down at the street. The painter was gone, though his painting was still there, a bright blue smear across the canvas. Ashton frowned. Not good.

  Peering over the shingled edge, he saw a half-dozen armed men and women, two with poleaxes and another pair with crossbows. They were decently dressed in civilian clothes—definitely not army. Personal hygiene good enough that he could immediately rule out ninety percent of Cor Cordum’s gangs, cartels, and guilds, as well as such common street-beating phenomena as ad hoc vigilante committees or fanatical religious pilgrims. The lack of uniforms meant they were hiding in plain sight—probably to follow him from the Curia, which meant they were better at following than he was at hiding.

  Competent thuggery left very few candidates indeed. They had to be Thousand Leagues.

  Ashton had tangled with Thousand Leaguers before—even boarded one of their treasure ships on an ill-fated night—and found them utterly ruthless but pragmatic to the end. Rather than lose the entire vessel, they had allowed the treasure to be removed by Ashton’s captain, Almun. Within the week, they found the pirate ship’s true registry, determined which warehouse it had rented, bought the entire building before the pirate crew even returned to port, then stole their treasure back from its secure place in a warehouse vault they owned. A few weeks later, the League kidnapped Captain Almun’s family and convinced him to work for them. Today, he employed his criminal genius outwitting pirates as a captain of Thousand League treasure ships.

  It was a charming, almost gentlemanly tale, if you didn’t know the epilogue. Two weeks later, League mercenaries slaughtered all the defenseless deckhands of Almun’s former pirate ship at its dock, purely as a message that fucking with the cartel is a game where the big players shake hands and the small pieces get wiped off the board.

  Despite such ugliness, Ashton had never had a personal beef with the League, or vice versa. So if he had come under their telescope and gotten tailed from the Curia Regis, it was for a serious reason indeed. His instinct was to swing off the far side of the roof and try to climb along the wall, a hundred-fifty feet above the city, and crawl his way to an open window to sneak away. But these were pros. They would have the Terminus entrance sealed off already and they would have the patience to wait and search anyone coming and going from the homes. And they would be erecting ladders to the rooftops soon enough. He fingered the die in his pocket and stood up.

  The crossbows swung up and the troops murmured. One of them, a fleshy man in his thirties with a bald head, a trim blond beard, and a fancily embroidered short cape, spun to face him, tilting his head back with a broad smile and open arms.

  “Ashton Arrowmask!” he bellowed jovially as if reuniting with an old school chum. Rings flashed on his thick fingers. He waved the crossbows down with a symphony conductor’s gesture. “Sergeant Burnston of the Thousand Leagues Trading Cartel. Call me Gregory. Why don’t you come down and join us?”

  Ashton shrugged and stretched his arms. “I like it up here. Away from all the rats and trash in the street.”

  Gregory laughed with what appeared to be genuine unflappable joviality. “Come now. As I’m sure you know, we are just businessmen, and we’re here to talk business, that’s all.”

  Of the innumerable things that made Ashton’s emotions churn to the point of ceasing to care whether he lived or died, the word “business” was near the top.

  “Actually, your bosses are the businessmen,” Ashton pointed out with an ingratiating grin. “You’re just whores who kill instead of fuck.”

  The sergeant continued his chortling and looked around at his companions, who did not seem quite so amused.

  “Very sharp,” Burnston allowed, wagging a finger upward. “Very sharp, indeed. Be that as it may, I do have a tidy sum of gold on my person as an advance on a tentative deal we can cut right here and now. The options are very negotiable and all of them will make you a wealthy man.” The sergeant paused to rub his nose thoughtfully. “And you do know we are going to negotiate. Down here or up there. So why not down here, where I can have a seat on this warm day?” He plunked his bulky butt down on the artist’s empty stool.

  Ashton shrugged again and moved toward the edge of the roof. Burnston held up a hand. “The sword.” Ashton unbuckled the scabbard and let it drop on the roof before making a lithe hop to the pavement. He walked slowly and kept several paces between himself and the semicircle of mercs as it closed in around him, penning him at the dead bridge’s end. Down the street at its entrance he saw the additional Leaguers he expected, their poleaxes catching the afternoon light.

  He stopped, facing Burnston, and gave him a stare. He noticed a moth had become stuck in the paint on the canvas, wings beating slowly as it sank and suffocated. Burnston noticed, too, and prodded it deeper with his thumb.

  The brief stroll had been time enough for Ashton to figure it out. “You’ve already taken over the other caravans.”

  Burnston beamed. “You see, that wasn’t so difficult! Right down to business, and spot on as well.”

  “How did you find out?” Ashton asked, already knowing the answer was bribes to the underpaid slob who washed brandy glasses or delivered barrels of nails at the Curia Regis.

  “Well, the important thing is that we do know. And we’re the only cartel that does. It is a tremendous economic opportunity and we intend to make the most of it.”

  “By controlling it and getting first dibs on whatever may be found.”

  “Naturally. But it is still an opportunity for you as well, Ashton—may I call you ‘Ashton?’” He continued obliviously as Ashton shook his head. “We’re not here to steal. We’re here to buy. Just walk away, allow us to operate the caravan, and we’ll equal the Tetragate’s pay and add a bonus for your troubles. All of the rewards, none of the dangers and efforts.”

  Ashton grinned and swung his arm at the rotting Old Empire vista. “Nah. As much as I like sitting here watching the world go by, I like a little adventure.”

  Burnston grinned in return, and actually winked. “Of course. I feel the same way myself. Let’s say we replace your own hirelings with some of my soldiers—your choice, open access to their service records. We match your Tetragate pay.” He held up a pudgy hand. “Alternatively, maybe you like your new companions and don’t want to replace them. Instead, you let us replace the Imperial guards in your caravan with our own men at a convenient spot along the road. It may be a little violent, but no blood on your hands, and the pay would be the same. Or again, perhaps you like everyone in your employ. Add a wagon of my men. More risk and less exclusivity for us, less reward for you—say, twenty-five hundred aurei.”

  Ashton leaned against the easel, as if in thought, and knocked the wet painting down onto the toe of Burnston’s boot.

  “Oops.”

  Anger bled through the jowly face for the first time as the sergeant kicked the painting away, the brown leather smeared with gleaming blue. But he maintained his composure as he rose, paced and speechified like an actor with the rotten Old Empire as his backdrop. Quite a talker for a cartel merc, Ashton thought. Probably has a
mbitions of joining management, becoming a real salesman.

  “Ashton, you know you have to leave this bridge today, by one end or the other. Why not walk away a rich man? I have five hundred aurei right here, right now, as a downpayment. Your choice of options. You merely sign a basic contract here, with a gentleman’s agreement to formalize it later. I can even offer you the comfort of knowing that your sister Nalia will be safe under the protection of the Thousand Leagues while you’re away. Perhaps you’d like a cartel captaincy as well for when you retire from adventuring? It’s all about options. We’re reasonable men. But I do need an answer.”

  Leaning against the easel, Ashton didn’t just pretend to think. He considered the dozen smart ways to play this. Take any of those deals and make a break for it, figure out a loophole later after telling the others. Or really cut the deal. Retire rich without dying in some Vast forest. Or use a Leaguer crew as insurance against any Tetragate plot of the kind Rinka suspected. Double- or triple-cross them later as necessary.

  But he also thought about the cheap threat against Nalia. He thought about the deckhands and he thought about the moth.

  “You know, Gregory, the problem with bullies like you is, they never think somebody will remember this option.”

  As he voiced the final word, Ashton slammed his foot down on the outside of the sergeant’s right knee, collapsing it with a crack, and then drove himself shoulder-first into the bigger man’s stomach. Ashton went sprawling face-first, skinning his hands in a long slide, as the yelping Burnston stumbled backward in an awkward limping hop, and then disappeared silently over the Terminus’s fatal edge.

  In the brief shocked pause that followed, Ashton curled into a protective ball and laughed. He was filled with the warm euphoria a haggler feels when he skips the bargains and splurges on the most expensive version money can buy. He barely felt the savage kicks and shaft-pummelings before everything went black.