by John Ruch
Mieux giggled in delight when Elsbeth put the names into south-tongue: Angry, Fast, Biting, and Hungry. She quickly learned to say the Skógr words with the right accent, repeating them carefully. The girl was a stranger to the Imperial tongue and lands, Elsbeth realized, and so had honed her skill at repeating words. She was almost sad to see her go when Rinka waved her off with a promise that a new magazine had been delivered to their house and two Sally Anns were waiting to escort her there.
Elsbeth lapped at the rock candy stick Mieux had thrust upon her before leaving, and watched Rinka watching her. What does this warrior-whore want with me so badly she arranges for us to be alone? Elsbeth made a face at the candy’s overpowering sweetness and tossed it aside.
“You got anything to drink around here?” Rinka asked, gazing at her with her heavily shaded lids half-closed.
Elsbeth fetched her ale-keg, eager to taste something with a bite to it. Having only one tankard to her name, she filled it and passed it to Rinka, while drinking straight from the cask’s bunghole herself. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and watched with approval as her armored companion tossed down her drink heartily.
Elsbeth rose and offered a traditional drink-boast, recounting some of her feats. Rinka stood and did the same. She spoke of battles against the Imperials and the Wealàe alike in her land of Vollach, which bordered the far east of Skógr and put her in touch with its people. From this alliance, Rinka’s strange whore-armor had been forged. Elsbeth could not follow the time-thread of these wars, and she believed the last Imperial wars were a hundred years past or more, but she did not care so much about details after her fifth swig from the cask.
“Were you a queen of your people?” Elsbeth asked.
Rinka chuckled. “Queen of kicking ass and looking great doing it, maybe. Why? You like the idea of looking up at me on a throne?”
Elsbeth fiddled with the stopper on the cask in her lap. “You speak as a war-chief. But I have not seen a ruler rise through battle with her cheeks not steel-kissed. Nor have I known a chieftain to paint her face.”
Rinka half-lowered her darkly shaded eyelids and pursed her lavender-painted lips in disdain. “Why does my makeup bother you so much?” she challenged, deftly ignoring the first part of Elsbeth’s thoughts.
Elsbeth shifted her bulk on the hay bale. “This face-paint is a thing of the city, not of the battlefield. I see that women wear it to draw the eyes of men, like a box in a shop, rather than proving their worth by deeds. Even the Sally Anns go bare-faced in the hour of their combats.” She sucked her lip, quickly regretting her naming of the prostitutes’ guild.
“Are you calling me a whore?” Rinka asked airily, stretching out on two hay bales with her hands behind her head. “Not that I can deny it. I just suspect your ears might get even redder if I start going into details.”
Elsbeth felt her cheeks burn. Rinka spoke in the confusing Imperial way, where words were not axes cutting to the bone of things, but the light swords of fencing matches with the feints and parries of mock combat.
“This is my meaning,” she began. “Your manner and armor speak with two mouths. At the same time, it seems, you want to attract mates and kill foes. As a warrior, you could prove yourself the worthy equal of any mate. And I can tell you are fine-faced without your paint,” she finished awkwardly.
“I’m glad you think I’m so gorgeous,” Rinka said, flicking her tongue across her upper lip and stretching out a foot to run up and down Elsbeth’s calf. “Because I want to fuck you.”
“I do not want a wife,” Elsbeth said, edging cautiously away from the invading foot.
“Do I look like the marrying type?” Rinka said with a musical laugh. “The only ring I’m offering is the one my tongue would make on you while your eyes roll back in your head from the insane pleasure.”
“I do not like women in that way,” Elsbeth said, the anger flickering in her guts at Rinka’s word-puzzles.
“How many times I have heard that line,” Rinka said silkily, “usually followed by, ‘Oh, Miss Rinka, please don’t stop! Yes, Rinka, yes!’”
“Sex among my tribe is not like that,” Elsbeth protested, frowning. “Sex between warriors is a dangerous meeting and a solemn matter. We duel before mating to prove our worth and that we are equal matches. And to let the worst of the anger fly free before the violence of heart-joining.”
Unbidden memories came to her of her first combat with Rogvahtr before they wed, and the dark twin of that battle when she slew him beside their marriage bed. The cask creaked in her palm as she squeezed it.
“Like it rough, do you?” Rinka said with a nose-crinkling grin as she stood and began unbuckling her armor. “Let’s do it.”
Elsbeth grinned as well and set aside her axe and hammer. It had been too long since she hit someone. “I accept your challenge. Not for mating, but for pride. The loser is the one who falls first.”
“Whatever,” Rinka replied and continued stripping down to the city clothes she wore beneath the armor: tight pink shorts and a white blouse tied off to bare her midriff, where a lavender jewel flashed in her navel. She stood barefoot, for she had no footwear besides the armor’s boots. Her toenails glittered with gold paint to match her fingernails. She gave off a scent something like the squirrel-girl Mieux’s rock candy. Her body was strong and supple, though her large breasts would get in the way of cross-punches. She took a practiced fighter’s stance.
Elsbeth kept her left fist raised between them and looked for an opening. As she likes to show off her teats, why not aim for the biggest target? Elsbeth feinted and then hooked a fist into Rinka’s left breast.
The blow doubled the whore-soldier over and nearly ended the fight instantly. But Rinka regained her balance and looked up with a wolfish smile that Elsbeth had seen before. It was the relief a certain kind of warrior felt when she realized she was free to fight dirty.
Rinka’s swings were fast, and if she were wielding a blade, she surely would be deadly. As it was, Elsbeth could deal with her fists, but the ceaseless kicking of those long legs was more of a threat. Rinka brought a knee up hard into Elsbeth’s groin and clasped her a moment. Rinka licked her neck as she winced.
But in the end, Elsbeth had the better strength and reach. Her right fist clipped Rinka’s chin, setting her earrings jangling, then her left cross-punch opened the warrior-woman’s nose. Rinka fell hard on her rear end and sat there, letting her nose bleed unwiped. It might be that her face would not be so battle-free now.
Elsbeth extended a bruised hand and pulled Rinka up. Rinka banged a shoulder into hers.
“You win,” Rinka said casually. “But don’t ever question my life again. Or the next time you’ll be the one on the ground—and you’ll be wishing it was to kiss my puss hello.”
The woman spoke in mysteries, but Elsbeth knew a war-boast when she heard one, and grinned back at her worthy foe-friend. She took Rinka’s hand and shook it. “Fair enough. I honor you as you are.”
Rinka nodded and bent to gather her armor and the navel jewel, which had popped out in the combat. “This’ll still be here when you come crawling back for it,” she tossed over her shoulder as she strode away, her eyes flicking down to her own rump bouncing in her shorts.
Elsbeth crossed her arms and laughed. She sat on the hay bale, took a pull from the cask, and laughed some more. Maybe she was not, after all, the oddest person in this odd place. And maybe this daring warrior Rinka, at least, would not die on the points of the storm-blades and beast-spears that Skógr would wield against them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The coldness of the wooden ledge clawed at Ashton’s knees and the harbor fog liquefied on his cowl to drip onto his hawkish nose. He wiggled his upper lip to stifle a sneeze. He didn’t want to awaken Nalia. Or did he?
He perched here outside her darkened window to make sure no Thousand Leaguer was doing the same, he told himself. Because spying on his sleeping sister was creepy. Unless he was the one doing i
t, of course. He sighed at his own hypocrisy.
But then, it wasn’t just his hypocrisy. If he slipped through that window and gently stroked Nalia awake, she would silently mount him with Vito still sleeping a yard away and shiver with passion, no matter the death threats and eternal curses flashing from her eyes.
The strength of their connection was uniquely irresistible, but he was beginning to think there was a common factor in there, too, that affected anyone crazy or passionate enough. Intimacy addicted Ashton and Nalia, and real intimacy thrived in the loopholes and cracks of social rituals. Just look at what being wed had done to Nalia. Or to their parents. Marriage was commerce, religion, nosy neighbors, and mutual distrust teaming up to imprison intimacy, to turn it into something controlled, predictable, profitable. It turned raging wildfires into fat, drippy candles that rarely burned long. That’s why Nalia was far from the only married woman to lift her nightdress for a quiet, reckless screwing from Ashton. Just the best of them.
He smirked coldly at himself. This profoundly insightful philosophizing had nothing to do with why he was still squatting out here on the ledge, a model of noble chastity. The fact was, he had already wanked himself silly earlier thinking about Rinka and/or Mieux and all the ways he might seduce them on the road. He knew full well that none of them were likely to work, that he would now feel even more awkward around the women for having wanked away, and that his best shot at a sex life on the road would involve drunk caravan factotums and bored post-inn prostitutes. Even more likely, sex was about to become a magnificent puzzle of trying to jerk off without the distinctly unsexy Alfie puttering around their rolling cell.
Ashton frowned, triple-checked the latch on Nalia’s window, and then leapt cat-like across the dark gap from the ledge to the building next door.
He always liked this jump because it looked really cool to anyone passing below, and sometimes he’d hear their “oohs” wafting up on the fishy breeze. His figure would be silhouetted against the dramatic spire of the Temple of Family jutting up at road’s end, and the jump looked farther than it was because he’d land on a small crane platform, built to service an upper-story warehouse, that was tucked above the roofline at night. He flicked his cape to ensure it flared properly as he sprang into the fog.
As he bounced on the wet slates and slid off the roof, it finally occurred to him that perhaps the crane had been removed in the two years since he last pulled this stunt. He grunted as he landed a story below in a flowerbox approximately the size, shape and dirtiness of a grave. The few flowers he hadn’t crushed tickled his face. Violets. Maybe I can salvage a little something. As a lantern sparked on the other side of the glass, Ashton snatched some of the flowers, held them between his teeth, and clambered back to the roof.
In the adventure stories he read as a boy in Millennium, the rooftops of Cor Cordum were desert places to which heroes retreated like hermits of The Twelve. Chimneypots were kin to the columns of cities lost to the dunes, water towers the weird, wind-sculpted spires of sandstone. The adventures tales’ urban wasteland was thinly peopled by cat-burglars, pigeon-keepers sending illicit coded messages, and brooding heroes.
“Tonight I join them in roaming this desolation, in walking alone this invisible higher plane of fog and night,” Ashton thought dramatically, the wind lifting his cape as he clambered cautiously over a reeking barrel of roofing tar.
Of course, in his subsequent experience, rooftops were a lot more populated than expected by irritating little stone-throwing graffiti artists, or even the occasional panther, and all he was brooding about at the moment was how to seduce a tavern bard.
“It’s still a desolate higher plane and everything, and not many people can say they’ve been here,” Ashton comforted himself, then cursed loudly as he narrowly missed sticking his foot in a chimney-sweep’s wastebin.
Cupping the limp bouquet in his hands, he made his way around weathervanes and over stepped gables to Jury Lane. Crouching on a cornice, he peered down through the thinning fog at the buttery glow of the tavern window and checked for signs of Violet as he had so many nights before. She was not performing on the small corner stage, but he glimpsed her, satin-clad back turned, at the bar locked in gossip with one of the servers.
A familiar hop down to an awning, a swing from the potter’s sign, a stylishly soft landing on the sidewalk, and then into the Jury Lane to test Violet’s resolve with his latest brew of fact and fiction. Then she’d reject him; he’d be a little mad at her, but more mad at himself, and spend the rest of the evening overspending on ales and having a one-sided conversation with Elcook. Cozy.
Ashton rocked back on his heels and did the unprecedented: he said no to one of his habits. He remained on the cornice, sucking his bottom lip until his mis-shaven whiskers began to scratch.
“What in Night do I keep coming back for? I can get better quality rejection from at least two women back at Rinka’s place, maybe three, if I ever try my luck with Pesh.
“And what if, by some miracle, this is the time she says yes? I say, ‘Great, I’m leaving for the Shrouded Vast and I can’t bring you with me’—so let’s screw really really fast?” He could almost feel the cupful of wine splashing in his face; he had enough prior experience to imagine down to the vintage.
For that matter, what if Mieux said yes and he was suddenly committed to undergoing Fifty-Two Trials of the Semi-dough or whatever it was called? What if Rinka said yes and commenced assaulting him with trendy vintage sex-torture implements until she beat his soul into a pulp and left him the hollow shell gals like that always tossed into their trash heaps?
Both were still preferable outcomes that, at the moment, he could not stop thinking about.
He looked again through the window and suddenly saw Violet, her shoulders sloped vulture-like over a morsel of gossip, in a new way that his mind automatically discarded, like a trawler crewman tossing an unfamiliar and indigestible fish from the haul in the net.
The scent of violets, trapped and knotted amid strands of fog, lingered unsmelled long after Ashton had drifted over the rooftops and back into the night.
Mieux lay on her belly atop a cloak she had laid out on the chilly marble floor of Rinka’s house, her legs bent at the knees and her ankles crossed. She tilted her head back and forth as she hummed the melody of Silver Moon on the Three-Blossomed Rose while gnawing a stick of Cap’n Trent’s Manticore Jerky, the consumption of which the four kings of the Tetragate decreed once per month.
Truly, Mieux would not be sad when she left the jurisdiction and no longer had to eat manticore jerky, because at least one million things were yummier and Cap’n Trent appeared to know more about shaving his chest than making snacks. She glanced up at the large poster of the musical captain that Rinka had framed in a place of honor. Her eyes narrowed in a brief flash of judgment. His picture had no aura, of course, but for real it was probably totally messed up.
She then returned to her fresh new copy of the wondrous magazine Merrykin’s Digest, which lay open on the floor before her, telling her about the jerky decree and so many other useful things. “Mmm, manticore is music to my mouth!” said the top of the advertisement, and at the bottom: “Make Cap’n Trent’s finest a part of your balanced breakfast every morning this month! (Contains 5% manticore tail and wings.)” But Mieux’s interest was focused on the list of the newest productions.
Some plays kept showing forever and ever, but there were always new ones, probably more than there were feathers on the fat parrots that flapped around Cor Cordum. As she flipped through the pages rapidly, her heart raced and she kicked her feet happily. A sharpened pencil stub lay on the floor perfectly parallel to the magazine, and another one beside it just in case the first one wore down. Sometimes an issue would be extra great and she would need to ask someone for a third pencil.
The very back of Merrykin’s was always full of ads for theaters Mieux had never heard of before and plays that were mostly about people doing dangerous adventures even th
ough they were totally naked. The Fleshopticon, for example, was a theater improbably located under a whale-fat boiling factory on the docks, and it was showing something called The Naughty Nuns of Nomen Convent written by Mrs. Jane Liftskirt. A woodcut illustrating a scene from the drama showed a priestess bent over a chair with her robes pulled up and another nun hitting her backside with a belt, which for some reason made sparks come out of her bottom. “I won’t be able to pray for a week!” said the caption, which Mieux read slowly, following the Corcorid words with her finger.
She screwed up her mouth and pondered. Perhaps the kings of the Tetragate are concerned about religious conflict. Curiosity quickly filled her to bursting like an overloaded wineskin. When you really want to know something, it’s like you have to go to the bathroom, except questions come out! She squirmed atop the cloak.
Rinka would be the perfect person to ask about any bottom-hitting matter, but she was still out with Elsbeth Steeleye, the testabestia driver who told scary stories about tearing off her own arm and ate pieces of pine trees for snacks. Ashton Arrowmask had returned recently with wilted flowers he said were for Mieux and shoved them into a vase, but he now had been in the bathroom a super long time ever since. That left Alfie. Mieux dropped her manticore jerky and looked over her shoulder suspiciously at the magimath.
Alfie was in a puffy armchair whose leopard-spotted upholstery was about half as wild as his own paisley smoking jacket. Atop a small reading stand he had erected a weird metal arm that held a pink crystal. Alfie peered at the crystal through a monocle, positioning a tiny chisel against its top side while hefting a miniature hammer in his other hand. His moustache stuck almost straight out as he pursed his lips in concentration.
Alfie was an extremely silly man and Mieux strongly suspected from close observation that he was way more likely to become a Sausage Master than a Stone Master. Still, his aura was pretty good and also he knew about many things from being old.