by John Ruch
It took him a while to realize he was awake because the blackness remained before his eyes. A weak, agonizing sweep of his leg on the gritty floor quickly found walls and informed him he was in a small, lightless cell. The pungent odor of vomit, presumably his own, had jabbed him back to consciousness. Someone had thoughtfully draped him over a stool so that he hadn’t choked to death on puke. That was a good sign. Even after he killed one of them, they were intent on keeping him alive—for now.
Likewise, a little stretching and flexing found that his ribs, fingers, testicles, and, thank Fortune, his face, seemed to be in working order. It had been a supremely disciplined beatdown. Still hurt like ten Furies mud-wrestling under his skin, though. He half-hallucinated visions of the winged demons at work inside him and vowed to go two whole days in Cor Cordum without getting into a gang fight. He was never good at making promises, and sleep took him again before he finished that one.
Light and a different scent awoke him the next time. A sickly sweet mix of cotton candy and rosewater. Perfume. Ashton cracked his lids to see a tall figure silhouetted in the doorway.
“Can you please come closer so I can puke on your boots?” he croaked.
The figure raised a lantern and loomed over him as it approached. He had an absurd hallucination of spectacular cleavage floating toward him, its delights turning horrific when he realized the deliciously dark skin was in fact gleaming with a sheen of blood. Ragged flesh like pallid lips on a grotesque mouth marked a brutal wound through the sternum. With effort, he turned his gaze up to the beautifully grim face with wolf-blue eyes.
“Arrowmask. Are you alright?” Rinka asked.
“You should see the other guy.” Ashton dragged himself into a sitting position. “Shit. You’re hurt bad.”
“It’s their blood, not mine.” A cloak, fresh and stainless, hung over her shoulders, and she drew it tighter. She stuck out a hand stiffly. He figured she was more practiced in knocking people down than helping them up.
“Just give me a second,” he said, waving her off and using the cracks between stones in the wall as a ladder to pull himself up. He had to do some piece of this on his own. He didn’t want to owe her even more.
“Don’t take too long. I’m burning this place down,” replied Rinka, once again proving herself mistress of getting the last word. She rested a long dark object against the doorjamb—his sword.
He heard the clanking of keys and chattering voices as he shuffled out of the cell into a basement room lined with more iron doors. Another of them was open and Alfie and Mieux were standing before it. He was half-surprised to see them, half not. In his dazed state, he found himself staring at their clothes and abstractly noting how both were clad in purple, Alfie’s robe darker and Mieux’s shirt and trousers lighter.
Eventually he noticed that they were staring, too—at Rinka. At that moment, their attention was about her makeshift cape and crimson-sprayed face and the rapeseed oil she was spilling from the lantern onto the bodies on the floor. Then their gaze switched to the carnage—the dismembered corpses and the arcs of blood on walls and ceiling, the severed heads in the dirt with faces twisted in shock and fear, the amputated forearm with severed fingers laying beside an ineffectually drawn sword. All Rinka’s work. And I’ll bet we haven’t seen how busy she can be. Someone had to be guarding the main entrance upstairs.
Ashton’s stomach twitched as he led a silent parade of the equilibrique and the magister up the cellar stairs, past Rinka’s shooing and oil-splashing, through the commingled stench of vegetable fumes and coppery blood.
At the top of the stairs, they stopped one by one and side-by-side, standing like ringside spectators at a blood sport. The dingy front room had been turned into what looked like a morgue during a janitor’s guild strike. Gore dripped from every surface and corpses were tossed here, stacked there—at least a dozen of them. A couple had been struck down mid-defense, poleaxes on the floor and their limbs splayed awkwardly—the ones that were still intact. Most had been chopped down in a surprise assault while sitting on chairs or couches. Some were missing heads, others slashed so deeply through the chest they were near split in half, and the backs of their chairs as well. Still others had been dragged down the stairs from the second floor, their clothes and hair acting as a giant paintbrush for a stroke of lifeblood. All were clad in Thousand Leagues livery.
In the sooty fireplace, an overcooked ham on a spit bubbled and hissed nastily like the face of a prisoner being branded. Before it, in the room’s best chair, sat a balding, pock-marked merc with his chin on his chest and his hands red from fingertips to wrists. At first Ashton thought the man’s hands were covered in blood from trying to fend off sword blows. Then he noticed the little piles of glistening flesh on the floor and realized that the hands had been expertly skinned.
“Fuck me,” Ashton muttered, his belly churning at the scene combined with the grotesquely mingling stench of meat and blood. He bent and briefly vomited out the remaining contents of his stomach. He’d seen his share of bodies—he had, after all, just thrown another Leaguer off a bridge—but nothing like this outside of old paintings of the Weàlae wars. This expressive artistry was the contemporary work of Rinka Svetkov. An Old Master. Or Mistress, as the case may be.
The countess clacked up the stairs in her absurdly sparkling boots, shooting them a “What do you want?” look as she methodically gathered up all available lanterns and spilled their oil. Like Ashton, Alfie issued a quiet oath, while Mieux simply stared with wide eyes but a mask-like expression, her chin firm and her mouth clamped in a tight line.
Alfie cleared his throat. “Perhaps you’ll want to put some of the bodies in the cells so the cartel will think us dead as well.”
“She’s not trying to fool them,” Ashton answered for Rinka, straightening and wiping the corners of his mouth, looking at her rather than Alfie. “She’s giving them a way to save face. They can tell their clients it was an accidental fire that wiped out their soldiers, not a one-woman army. She’s saying she won, but it can all end here.”
Rinka’s eyes flashed at him in a fresh appraisal.
“It might even work—for a while,” Ashton added.
Her eyes flashed again with a different sort of fire as she continued splashing oil as if she were seasoning some grotesque meal for Fury. The rest of them shuffled out the front door onto the cobblestone sidewalk and hung out like the city’s oldest teenage gang. The twilit street was soon painted orange, the evening air tainted by oily smoke.
Rinka emerged, dragging the man whose hands she had skinned. She dropped him on the stoop, where he lolled, his eyes unfocused, his breathing shallow. She bent at the waist and gripped him by the jaw.
“Tell your bosses that when someone takes something from Rinka Svetkov—her sword, her friends, her freedom—she takes them back.” She flicked her tongue across her upper lip and leaned in closer, almost intimately. “And then she takes everything else.”
She stood over him a moment like some kind of fucking war goddess, then turned and began stalking home. Queen of the last word, Ashton thought again. The whole scene had gone weird, and his head was pounding. But they were alive and out of a cage, and for once, he didn’t mind following her.
CHAPTER TEN
Mieux sat crosslegged on Rinka’s bed and stared at its owner. At the same time, she sucked on the thread to wet it before inserting into the needle and setting to work on the damaged slipper in her lap. Rinka sat at her desk, her knife scraping the plate chillingly as she ate a lunch of quail, and stared back.
Staring was one of Mieux’s favorite things. You can see so much more that way! She had tried to explain this many times to people who were offended or wanted to start a fight with her, but they never understood. She had come to accept that Corcorid people sadly were born with a mental disorder that made them not very curious and also very shy.
Rinka, though, was different. Rinka never complained at all. Maybe it was because she was totally super
beautiful and was used to being stared at, like the actresses at the Morpheum. Also, even if she was like everyone else and staring made her want to fight, that was no problem. Rinka was more comfortable with conflict and violence than anyone she had ever met. Maybe too comfortable.
But even better, Rinka stared back. They were like sisters in staring! And it felt friendly, like chatting without having to say words at all!
Mieux’s fingers went to work stitching the slipper and Rinka slowly chewed as they gazed into each other’s eyes. Rinka’s shaded eyelids were like pieces of dark velvet and her eyes like jewels laid out on them in a shop window. Her gaze was always active, her eyes always moving, her pupils shrinking and swelling.
But not everything about Rinka was so friendly. Her aura was totally messed up, such a tangle of jagged dark lines that she looked like a black sheep that missed shearing season. Even worse was the mystery of what happened in that prison.
Rinka said there was no mystery at all because she pretended to get killed by the guards, then had “saved your ungrateful asses from being murdered.” But Alfie and Ashton Arrowmask did not believe she could have pretended so well. Alfie said there was some kind of magica around Rinka, and Ashton Arrowmask remembered that she had had a horrible wound in her chest that seemed to have disappeared, though he admitted his head had been all messed up at the time.
The two men had quiet conversations about this; Mieux had just left them in the midst of another one in Rinka’s rooftop garden. Mieux had listened carefully, tending to her own wound from the Blade & Ladle fight, and kept her thoughts to herself. She was so grateful that Rinka had stopped the murder of their asses. But she wanted Rinka to be honest with her also. Not even the others, just her. She wanted Rinka to be her best friend ever and she did not understand why this had to be in the way. For now, she channeled her discomfort into repairing the slipper she had torn while kicking the horrible Thousand Leagues men.
Rinka held up her fork thoughtfully. “You know, a lot of women would kill to get into my bed,” she said with a smirk.
Rinka said things like this all the time, about going to bed with her, or something falling between her breasts and would someone like to reach for it, or people being hit on the bare bottom with a bunch of different things. They made Alfie blush and Ashton Arrowmask stammer. Mieux just blinked.
“Why are you lying about what happened in the basement!” she blurted.
Rinka rolled her eyes. “This again. What’s there to lie about?”
“That is exactly what I mean! There is no reason to lie!”
“I had a good plan and I saved you. If Arrowmask is upset about it because he feels like I cut his balls off, too bad.”
“I know nothing about the balls of Ashton Arrowmask, but it’s not just him! It doesn’t make sense that the guards thought they stabbed you but did not! We are going to be inside a wagon for a long time together and we must trust each other!”
Rinka scoffed and tossed her fork down with a sharp ceramic clang. “Trust? I can’t trust that Arrowmask won’t show up drunk with half his teeth knocked out, or that you won’t ask the wrong person about the color of their underwear, or that Alfie won’t keel over from a heart attack. So what? We’re safer together than alone. We play the hand we’re dealt.”
“That’s not the same! That’s like comparing a round thing and a square thing!” Mieux cried, reaching into her tunic and producing her juggling blocks to illustrate the point. “If you told me I would not tell the others. I’m just frightened,” she added quietly.
“Why would I trust you?” Rinka snapped.
When Rinka said things like that, it gave Mieux a pain inside her chest. She looked down at her slipper and felt hot tears springing across her eyes.
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
In the quiet that followed, she could hear the needle scraping through the slipper’s fabric and her own blinks as she cleared away the tears. She could feel Rinka still looking at her, but she did want to look back anymore. It was no fun now.
Rinka sat stiffly for a few minutes. Then she loosened. She put her plate on her lap and scooted her chair closer to the bed.
“Hey. You hungry?” Rinka asked.
Mieux looked up, blinking away her tears, and nodded.
Rinka cut a piece of the poultry and raised the fork to Mieux’s lips. The Corcorids ate with such horrifying barbarian toy weapons regularly, so Mieux knew it was not meant to be threatening. In fact, Rinka guided the morsel into her mouth with a gentleness she had never displayed before. Mieux parted her lips passively, then pursed them on the fork to snatch the quail. She chewed silently with her lips screwed together as Rinka cut her another piece.
They returned to looking into each other’s eyes as Rinka fed her tenderly and carefully, bites of quail mixed with spoonfuls of buttered corn. There was a new softness in Rinka’s eyes—not total softness, but it was there as a new facet on the jewels. No one had ever fed Mieux like this before and she was surprised at the depth of satisfaction she felt. She chewed wordlessly.
When the food was gone, Rinka folded a cloth napkin of royal blue and dabbed the deep corners of Mieux’s mouth. Mieux licked her lips and rubbed them together.
“Does that feel better?” Rinka asked quietly.
Mieux nodded. “Thank you.”
“I’m not going to do that all the time, by the way.”
“Just sometimes,” Mieux said firmly.
Rinka chuckled lightly. “Sometimes,” she agreed. She rose with the plate and headed to the door.
“I will not ask anymore,” Mieux said.
Rinka stood still a moment. Her head half-turned, enough that one of her giant hoop earrings flashed. Then she left. The door closed behind her with a pat.
Mieux looked at the door a moment and then returned to her slipper work. Her eyes burned with tears again. “Oh, my Rin-chatte,” she whispered to herself.
She had forgotten the moral of one of the great One-Thousand-And-Three Fables: “Don’t allow concern for a companion to transform into pride.” She had selfishly demanded trust rather than expressing her fears. The others were a bit frightened of Rinka, but Mieux was so very frightened for her.
It was not just because Rinka’s aura was totally messed up. It was because when Rinka was lying on that basement floor in a pool of blood, she had no aura at all, and there was only one kind of person with no aura.
A dead person.
Alfie and Arrowmask broke their muttered conversation and turned at the clinking sound as Rinka strode into the rooftop garden. The plates of her ceramic armor chimed like a pirate’s bones in a storm-tossed gibbet. She never went outside without wearing it now, not after what happened with the Thousand Leagues.
Glazed the same chill blue as her eyes, the armor consisted of plate molded to the curves of her chest and hips, extending over her arms and legs as overlapping, flexible scales, and ending in gauntlets and boots with punching spikes built into the former and spurs into the latter. The trunk section was exquisitely decorated with anatomically correct detail. Her boobs were protected by their perfect ceramic twins. Baby drakes clung to the armor breasts, beaked mouths open to suckle and tongues winding around the erect nipples. On the section protecting her pelvis, a neat fold cut through a finely detailed flame of lush pubic hair. The back included ample curves to house her rump.
An emerald blinked in her ceramic navel, and a faux necklace of gold, the wolf’s head insignia of Tashlin, was inlaid about the collarbone. In grudging concessions to practicality, the armor included a slot for her sword built into the back and loops for a belt or pouches on the hips.
Under her arm she carried the helm, its top stylized to suggest her locks swept back to meet two openings from which her real hair could fly free in pigtails. Arcing across the armored forehead was a simulated crown of inlaid silver and purple rubies plucked from the Atelrush’s headwaters. The snout had an opening through which she could inhale the scent of enemy blood
and exhale commands to spill more, her nose and mouth shielded by a net of fine ceramic chainmail.
The armor weighed next to nothing and was utterly unbreakable. The same could not be said for its makeup and jewelry. The glaze was chipped in scores of places, the navel emerald cracked by a hammerblow, the necklace missing links like lost teeth, a ruby gone from the crown. So they would always be, because the secret of repairing, let alone of creating, such armor was lost forever when the moronic Corcorids slew her master armorers—Ihor, Ruslin, Juri, all wasted—and set their workshop to the torch. The product was indestructible, the idea fragile. It was a lesson she remembered as she severed head after Corcorid procounsel head until there were too many to chop and only she and the armor remained.
The armor of Voidiva Svetkov roused soldiers and stupefied enemies on the Vollach battlefields, but on the streets of this dry-cunted Corcorid “Heart of the World” it made parents shout at her for “obscenity” and boys of all ages whistle at her until she gave them the look or left them trying to hold their guts in while crying for their mommies. It all amounted to the same prudish phobia of anything feminine they couldn’t control, cover up, consume.
Rinka was proud of her gender, her sexuality, her fertility, her maternity. She had no biological children—she had zero interest in such a petty, fraudulent form of immortality. She had borne greater fruit. She was the nursemaid of ten thousand warriors, the mother of a quarter-million enemy dead.
Admittedly, these days she was only mothering naughty girls at the Incendium and nursing only the occasional hangovers. She sighed at herself, but made it sound like it was directed at the two men as they briefly gawked and then glanced away.
Alfie the “Stone Master” had a limp-pricked interest in the material of her armor until he remembered to be embarrassed about its explicitness. Arrowmask, of course, was just crudely turned on by it, but too much of a little bitch to do anything about it except surely beat off quietly in the privy later.