Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

  “Only after you feed him!” Gallatine exclaimed at a volume almost equal to Mieux’s, tossing her a small yellow apple.

  “Eat up, mon petit cheval!” she commanded, barely waiting for the animal to finish before she lightly hopped astride it and hugged its stout neck, rubbing her cheek in its mane.

  “Your daughter?” Gallatine inquired quietly.

  “Yeah, for at least an hour a day,” Ashton replied vaguely.

  Too distracted with his own theatricality to hear, Gallatine clapped his hands and shouted some old Imperial word that brought six laborers pushing a low wagon from a far room. The left front corner was missing a section; a puzzle solved when they pushed it against Gallatine’s chariot and they interlocked with a snap. Eccentric though he might be, the old man clearly had some genius at designing rides.

  Gallatine patted the seat beside him, and Ashton scrunched himself onto its diminutive cushion, while Rinka clambered aboard the back and helped Alfie do the same. Even through the heady paint fumes, he could smell Alfie’s pomade and Rinka’s cheap perfume. As they trotted off down a wide corridor, Ashton half-turned in his seat and regarded the wainwright.

  “I wasn’t expecting to meet the master himself,” Ashton said, his voice rising over the crunch of the wheels on the powdered-stone floor.

  The old man’s eyes glittered as they passed under a skylight. “Marcus told me you were different from the others. That you’d want the best, not merely the fastest. Unveiling the best—that’s a pleasure I reserve to no one but myself!”

  “The other caravans?”

  “They took all of my single-axle cabs and emptied the stables of the best sprint horses from Kundh.” He shrugged. “What a customer does with my wagons is their decision, but I never would have sold them the horses. Speed is for crossing the city when one runs late for dinner. A journey is about pace and wisdom. On the long road, haste kills animals and men alike.”

  “Guess I won’t worry about the competition, at least.”

  The wainwright nodded and made a snickering sound that egged the donkey around a corner. Sucking the corner of his mouth as he pondered speeding mercenaries, Ashton saw a wagon as warm and golden as a loaf of fresh bread slide into view over the dual bobbing heads of Mieux and the donkey.

  The grain of the caravan’s sides gleamed like a blonde child’s hair in a setting sun. It had to be irondrift, a fantastically rare wood that grew Night knows where, turning up only as tidewrack on the Godsblood. Like the name advertised, it was extremely strong and very lightweight. Or so Ashton had heard. The Imperial Navy built a caravel of it to harass smugglers, but he’d never been sloppy enough to get a close look. Now he’d have his own rolling lumberyard of the stuff to review at his leisure. Who says crime doesn’t pay?

  The nature of the wood was not lost on Alfie, the resident ex-“Plant Lord,” who snorted excitedly. Gallatine leaned back with a grin.

  “Must’ve gone through a score of sawblades to cut that stuff,” Alfie said, working his jowls.

  “A gross, in fact,” the old man replied with satisfaction. Even harder to carve the filigrees and faces of Vigilance and lesser-known deities into the trim, apparently. Ashton only half-listened. Luck was god enough for him.

  As their wagon pulled to a stop alongside the caravan, Ashton’s wonder had already transformed into anxiety over wrecking such an expensive piece of property. He distracted himself by taking in the entire package, not just the expensive materials. The caravan seemed to have begun life on the drawing board as a mail coach, but had a growth spurt that extended it to about fifteen feet long, from the high, glass-enclosed driver’s seat to a wrought-iron balcony on the rear. Two windows of leaded glass pierced the visible side—a round porthole near the front and a central bay-front extending a couple feet from the wagon’s wall. Neither afforded a glimpse inside from ground level. Perched on wheels nearly as tall as Ashton, the caravan had a yard-high draft and towered a good ten feet off the floor.

  Alfie made ceremonious noises about helping Gallatine out of the wagon, but the old man scrabbled out and lent him a hand instead.

  “Don’t think I need those wheels, do you? Ride for fun, I say!” Gallatine cackled.

  “This is super-fun already!” Mieux shouted as she patted the startled donkey.

  Gallatine cackled some more in satisfaction as he led the way up the four steep iron steps onto the caravan’s roofed rear balcony. Decorative whorls of metal vines bordered its edges, but the iron served primarily as a defensive cage, an intent Ashton felt all the more clearly as they crowded within it, looking out at the warehouse through its tightly spaced bars. A wooden door gave admittance into the wagon, while opposite it was another portal, like a jail cell door, leading straight off the balcony’s edge, presumably to access other caravans if they were strung together in a train. Rungs were built into the balcony’s wall, leading to a bolted trapdoor in its roof. There was no door to seal off the top of the steps, but Gallatine soon resolved that mystery by heaving a small crank set near the wall that slowly lifted the stairs until they clanged into place, serving as their own barrier.

  “Cozy,” Ashton thought. Enclosed spaces always made him fidgety. Glancing about, he spotted a roll of mesh, bound with leather straps, tucked along the balcony roofline. He gave it an experimental finger-poke that resulted in a sound like coins rubbing together. Reteculicis, also known simply as culex—meaning “gnat-net”—it was an exceedingly fine chainmail crafted from a steel alloy whose manufacture was a national secret. Virtually indestructible and undoubtedly a major pain the ass to make, it was another ridiculously luxurious material, one Ashton had only read about in histories of the wars.

  “Is this really culex?” he asked.

  Gallatine stretched on tiptoes and slapped the roll with a grin. “Pull it down like so”—his back cracked loudly as he mimed the motion—“and tie it to these floor anchors. It’ll stop any arrow or spear-jab.”

  “And actual gnats as well, I’d imagine,” Alfie noted. “Useful, considering disease can lay one low faster than a weapon.”

  The old man nodded rapidly. “We installed it over all of the windows, too. A crank allows you to unroll it from inside.”

  Rinka impatiently tried the latch on the caravan door and, finding it unlocked, strode in with her typical aura of ownership. Even with the five of them inside, there was plenty of room and light. The caravan was eight feet wide, maybe nine, with the bay windows on either side and a shallow cupola on top admitting the factory’s skylight sun through rectangular slits. Bunk beds were pushed against the far wall. On the port side, a cast-iron stove with its smokepipe bending before heading out through the wall, and a small desk pushed into the window bay. On the starboard, a cot, a dresser, and a washbasin stand. And also a narrow wooden door concealing a privy that, Gallatine explained, doubled as a shower thanks to a rain barrel attached to a pipe in the ceiling.

  “Roomy,” Ashton remarked. “But not roomy enough for eight of us—not counting the driver.”

  “Well, of course not. There are three more.” Gallatine nodded as Ashton could only raise his eyebrows inquisitively and point at the floor. “Yes, three more. Each paladin was going to have one, naturally, but we’ll convert them now. Hitch them together in a train so no one gets lost.”

  As Ashton continued staring dumbly, Rinka chimed in. “Haste may kill, but there’s such a thing as too slow. That’ll be, what, ten tons? We’ll need more horses to pull it all than we can feed.”

  “Oh, not horses. Testabestia. Four will do.”

  That shut them all up for a moment. Or almost all of them.

  “What is a test! ah! best! cha!” Mieux cried carefully.

  “Humongous beast of burden from The Twelve,” Alfie lectured, gripping the lapels of his paisley robe, as Mieux looked up at him expectantly. “Name’s a bit of a Corcorid pun. ‘Testa’ meaning both ‘brick’ and ‘jug.’ The ‘bestia’ in this case have aspects of both. ‘Brick’ because of their
tremendous strength and the impenetrability of their hide. ‘Jug’ because of their ability to go without water and food for extended periods due to fat stored in their various humps, knobs, and indeed their capacious jowls.”

  Mieux’s eyes grew to maximal size, then narrowed as she focused appraisingly on Alfie’s own jiggling cheeks. “I see,” she said slowly as she looked the magimath over. “It sounds like a monster!” she suddenly shouted with half wonder and half relish, curling her stubby fingers in excitement as if she could snatch one from the air.

  “It sounds like an expensive monster,” Ashton replied, looking at Gallatine. “Look, there’s no way I’m gonna be on the hook for losing a testabestia in a river fording or whatever.”

  The old man slung a comforting arm over Ashton’s shoulder. “One of those customers anxious about the impossibility of keeping a luxury vehicle in perfect condition. A common malady, my boy.” He produced a jackknife and slashed a notch into the trim around the roof. “There you go. Damaged. Now you can enjoy it.”

  Rinka chuckled annoyingly, but Ashton had to admit to himself that it made him feel better. Not much, though.

  “One more surprise. Come.” Gallatine beckoned them back to the balcony, and they followed up the ladder and through the trapdoor to the roof.

  Lined with a low brass railing and benches that doubled as lockers, the flat roof would be useful for storage. Right now, it contained only a low ebonwood box and a black metal tube, about two feet long and half as wide, mounted on a tripod bolted to the wood next to the bump of the cupola.

  Ashton eyed it skeptically. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Gallatine grinned yet again with his endless self-satisfaction. “You’ll only get one of these.”

  One would be enough. It was a polarity cannon, a miniature version of the ones guarding the Cor Cordum harbor. He wasn’t sure exactly how they worked, but it involved a rare metallic stone called hematite. Pieces of it could be doctored, maybe by magica, to strongly repulse each other. When a hematite ball was placed into a tube with a hematite base, it launched itself with the speed of a dozen catapults. The results were devastating to any target, enough to justify the expense of using a rare projectile that almost never could be recovered. The last major enemy vessel to taste their power was the Rummer’s Run, flagship of the pirate Marabella Tash, hounded into cannon range by the Imperial navy a decade ago. Tavern rumor had it that nothing was left of her above the waterline, and nary a splinter or fingerbone ever washed ashore.

  The “Stone Master” was beside himself with the opportunity to fondle the three polarity spheres that were stored in the box. Gallatine amused himself further by joking to Ashton that the Tetragate definitely would want their cannon back. Finally, the novelty wore off and they began climbing back down, leaving Ashton standing there. He smelled perfume and half-turned to face Rinka. As always, her nasty beauty radiated on him, as if she were an iron fresh out of the fire and about to brand him. He noticed she was frowning skeptically and realized he was, too.

  “I don’t like the feeling that I owe the Tetragate this much. Even if it’s free,” he blurted in a random attack of camaraderie.

  She nodded smoothly. “I don’t like wallowing in the filthy pen of Imperial pigs. Surrounded by all the trinkets they were going to lord over the rest of us.” She gave the cannon a little kick as if to put it in its place. “Still, it is a rolling fortress. Makes my job a lot easier.”

  He couldn’t disagree. He faced forward and tried to imagine the caravan creaking along the fieldstones of an Old Way, dragged by testabestia. It beat other options he could imagine, like a cloud of gnats going up his nose right as he tried to dodge a bandit arrow from horseback.

  “Maybe we could paint our own arms on it. Mark it as our own,” he suggested.

  “Not a bad idea at all,” she said with a grin that somehow restored his swagger.

  “Just nothing with nipples on it, please,” he warned impishly, and was rewarded with a vintage Vollach smirk.

  Back on the ground, they rejoined Gallatine as he finished his lecture: the differential gears that let the wheels make sharp turns, the suspension that turned sharp bumps into gentle sways, the coffin-like bed tucked under the driver’s seat that was illuminated by those porthole windows.

  The prospect of such safe and secure travel left the others a bit giddy. They excitedly joined in dreaming up logos to paint on the caravan wheels, and put new vigor into updating their supply shopping lists. But Ashton felt like it was his job to worry—because of course it was just his nature.

  In Gallatine’s suitably absurd office, a spacious affair with a glass-topped wagon wheel for a desk, Ashton signed credit documents while the old man fed two fat little parakeets he’d recently rescued from a fallen tree on a cold night.

  Ashton made a final scribble and sank into the padded leather chair, his eyes drifting from the document to the birds to the old man.

  “What do you think the Tetragate really wanted those caravans for? Riding isn’t just for fun to them.”

  Gallatine sniffed and tossed a sunflower seed into the cage. “Some rides aren’t any fun at all, for the people along the way or at the end of the road,” he agreed abstractedly. Then he looked at Ashton. “I truly don’t know. It’s my job to build, not to ask.”

  With his eyes and a gesture, Ashton asked permission to pick up some seed and join in feeding the birds.

  “Mr. Gallatine,” he began after the old man nodded, “you’ve built wagons your whole life, talked to thousands of travelers, built coaches to deliver mail, dreamed up new technology for transportation. But riding to the ends of the Old Ways—that never occurred to you? You forgot like everyone else?”

  Gallatine looked at him a moment, his smile fading. “Let me show you something,” he said, and turned to a cabinet beside his desk. He rummaged for several minutes, flourishing papers in false starts and then shoving them back, before finally resting a parchment on the desk and pushing it under Ashton’s nose. His jeweled finger tapped one section of a to-do list for the wainwright’s weekly business.

  “The Old Ways,” it read in a sloppy, scratchy hand. “Why haven’t we built distance caravans and marketed their re-exploration? Why have no customers requested same? Great opportunities. Perhaps donate equipment to Palatinate.”

  “That’s my handwriting,” Gallatine said. “Turn it over.”

  At its heading, the note was dated to a week in Sminos, 4/23—the twenty-third year of the Tetragate Palatinate. Two years ago.

  “I found that a few months ago when I was reviewing design ideas to fill the order for what are now your caravans. I don’t recall writing it,” Gallatine continued, tossing seed to the birds. “I remembered the Old Ways. Then I forgot them. Again.”

  Alfie hogged an entire aisle at Lampley’s with two carts pushed by a grumpy shop-lad and conducted a keen experiment on the angles obtainable by the ornate backscratcher he was thinking of purchasing. He concluded that its operative function consisted not of scratching an itch, but rather in engendering a muscle spasm in the shoulder blade so painful that one no longer cared. Still, two-dozen alternatives to choose from. Incredible place.

  Stocking up at the Empire’s most comprehensive variety store was a prospect that excited them all. The magister was no stranger to a bit of luxury, but he was pleased as punch by the surprising roominess of the caravan’s living quarters. Furthermore, he would bunk with Arrowmask, who needed only space enough to rest a wine bottle and roll one of his cubebs. All of which called for dedicated shopping. Alfie would have storage space for a great deal of spelunking equipment.

  “Might even be able to work on that drake mummy,” he thought. “Better find some wire netting, or at least a large colander.”

  He turned to the lad and gave one of the carts a rattling slap. “Straighten the spine, my boy! You’re the quartermaster of this little mission! Important stuff, shopping! Why, when I was your age, I was hacking through Jadal brambles
with a dull hatchet, nonetheless marching with pep and vim!”

  “I hope you got a good tip after,” the lad replied.

  Alfie made several snorting and humming sounds. Turning on his heel, he waved his personal supply train along. The wheels squeaked beneath the galoshes, the nasal hair trimmer, the set of gem-cutting chisels, and other necessary sundries for life upon the Old Ways. His fellows were well into their own hunting elsewhere in the Lampley’s maze, and they had already selected a livery for their forthcoming caravan guards—green-and-black, upon his suggestion to lean toward camouflage.

  He pushed through a set of battered swinging doors into the winter clothing department. Bigger than most inns and smelled like a trapper’s attic, what with the musty pelts and wool dust. He spotted Rinka and Mieux among the racks some yards away, their cart loaded with pointy weapons and the complete series of Kissyface the Otter novels. He marveled anew at their increasing companionship. When they had entered, he had observed as Mieux constantly grabbed at Rinka’s belt, persevering through repeated swatting-aways until Rinka relented. The little zealot had curled two fingers through a ceramic belt loop, clinging affectionately as she trotted rapidly to keep up with the taller woman’s long strides.

  Now Mieux released her grip long enough to try on a short cape of fur-trimmed white felt. She raised its cowl and pulled it close so that it perfectly framed her face. With a theatrical deliberateness, she slowly turned and lifted her head to face Rinka, hitting her with a veritable sledgehammer of adorableness. Rinka must have murmured some words of approval through her cool expression, as Mieux lit up like a votive with a gentle smile. When the little head turned away again and disappeared in a brief struggle to squirm out of the cowl, Rinka flashed a secret smile of her own—a genuine, unselfconscious expression that Alfie had not thought her capable of, and that further astonished by advertising how even more beautiful she would be if her face was more frequently animated by the humane. Just as quickly, she tamped the smile back into her usual sensual smirk with a pursing of her lips, like a thief yanking the drawstring on a sack as a stolen item nearly slips into view.