Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Leaving town was one of Ashton’s great pleasures in life. Anyplace he stood still for a while, shame and bad memories accumulated on him with amazing speed and weight, like volcanic ash burying a trapped victim. Heading for the hills always knocked the dirt off, and adventuring always surrounded him with people who didn’t ask about his history because they didn’t want to talk about their own. Pretending nothing ever happened was the best revenge—on people, on the past, on yourself.

  Still, he’d never headed out in this kind of luxurious elation. Instead of bobbing in a leaky old rum-runner, rushing to call dibs on the least moth-eaten hammock, he was swaying gently atop the roof of the last wagon in the train, grinning stupidly at Alfie, Mieux and the joker guardsman Trelleck. Instead of the fishy winds of the misty harbor, it was a crystalline spring morning scented with fruit-tree blossoms as the caravan rolled through the city gate into the orchards of Hortium Viridias. Mieux plucked limes from a passing tree and juggled them merrily. The bustle of traffic from rickety fruit wagons, bright-white Imperial mail coaches and dozens of traders on foot added to the energy. An early morning rain had left the air fresh and kept the dust down. He felt like it had also washed away the latest Nalia-affair grime from his vision and healed the lingering bruises from yet another round of street fights.

  Even the final preparations, with all their complexities and mini-crises, had been fun. They’d each chosen a logo to paint on the caravan hubcaps, with Gallatine obliging with professional art. Ashton put dice—four-, six-, eight- and twenty-sided—on the lead caravan. Rinka’s sword-swallowing wolf went on the second wagon, which served as the common kitchen and dining room. Alfie chose a circular blue-and-white gem with projecting crystals spiking its edge for the third wagon, the one he shared with Ashton. Then there was the duck head, its bill wide open and pointed tongue flailing, that Mieux had insisted, loudly and without hesitation, must go on the final wagon she shared with Rinka. The only explanation they could get out of her, delivered with a rolling of those huge liquid eyes, was that “it’s the Laughing Duck!” Well, why not? Ashton had done plenty of laughing and ducking. For that matter, he’d also been stoned and wolfed down things he shouldn’t have.

  Laughter certainly was the order of the day when Alfie and Rinka had faced off over the last storage-crate spot atop the wagons. Alfie had his “exquisite and crucial” collection of metamorphic rock samples. Rinka had a ten-gross crate of tampons. He had to give Alfie credit for holding his own in a staredown with Rinka. But the professor had no chance after every woman on the team lined up behind her, including the blond one who made you need a neck massage after craning your head back to look her in the steely eye. After losing the spot, Alfie did penance by serving as an audience to the gals’ erudite debate on the merits of tampons versus something called an “Atel’s Cup,” which, apparently, one could also use in juggling.

  Rinka was lurking down below, brooding over a map of the Old Ways, but for once it wasn’t because she was pissed off about something. She was a nocturnal animal whose instinct was running to lair. Her smackdown of Counsel Regulus hadn’t caused any real friction, either. In fact, Ashton had seen it coming and was feeling pretty smug about how he’d managed it. The rest of them had agreed, more or less, that the counsel deserved a little payback for his snooping and conniving. If Rinka just released a little tension in her bowstring, Mieux would lead her horse away with a treat. If it got more violent, they’d all pitch in to stop her from going too far. He had out-planned and disarmed Rinka for once, and she didn’t even get the last word as Mieux, still upset by offending the counsel despite the set-up, let her have it.

  “‘Toady’ is an insult and the paladins aren’t kings,” Rinka had snapped.

  “I am sorry you have been too busy spanking bottoms to see important plays about macropartisan politics,” Mieux replied impenetrably, shaking her head, her eyes half-closed.

  They were over it now, it seemed. Truth is, he had no idea what was going on between the mystifying equilibrique and the mysterious dominatrix, or between any of the gang. He had no idea what was going on in his own head half the time, so it wasn’t a big deal. As long as they were getting along. He watched Alfie produce a pocket knife and slice into one of Mieux’s limes, lecturing to her about how its lack of seeds revealed that it came from a clone of an original tree that lived five centuries ago, a kind of fruit-salad immortality. Mieux pinched the halves in her delighted, wide-eyed glee, spritzing the professor and the guardsman with juice. Trelleth wiped his face and laughed as he was wont to do.

  Ashton liked Trelleth, even if his sense of humor sometimes had a nasty undercurrent. Nastiness was the shared trait of the lot of them, the guards, in varying degrees. Lower in Trelleth and Ninebarrow, the pensive huntress. Higher in Anceps, a horse-faced, fish-eyed farmer who probably cropped ears and tails for fun growing up on her Scutum farm. Off the charts in Lain Clyst, the centurion who led them all into a war crimes spree. That guy had the breezy, doubled-edged joviality of someone who would do really well in prison. Rugged, thick-necked, with long, effeminate eyelashes—the kind of brute women inexplicably, fatally fell for. He leered constantly at the women—in his own squad and in Ashton’s—with the entitled air of the practiced rapist, one skilled in convincing his victims to blame themselves. He’d met the type before in the dank bellies of ships riding low with stolen loot. They never stuck around long—arrested or deserted or shivved—but they always left some damage behind. Rinka was keeping the gang terrorized into submission by some secret trick, and the promise of Tetragate pardons remained as leverage, but Ashton knew Clyst, at least, would be looking for the first loophole to stab them through.

  Trelleck would probably join in on that dark night, but for now, Ashton found him a charming companion. He had that lilting Greenarch accent that reminded Ashton of growing up in Millennium, when he and Nalia would sometimes go to the docks and listen to the concert of cants and dialects. He called everybody “captain,” pronounced “cahp-ee-tahn,” so every conversation started as a kind of lightly disrespectful joke. Like many jokers, he was also a worrier. Before they headed out, he had given them an end-to-end tour of the caravan train, with an obsessive’s focus on safety features. He had stood inside Rinka and Mieux’s wagon and slapped the walls.

  “A fortress, right? All your enemies locked outside. But you forget the enemy in here.” He had kicked the little wood-burning stove. “The wagon hits a big bump, maybe you fall against it, it gives you a permanent reminder. So you always keep the screen up around it.”

  The beds were deathtraps in a rollover if you didn’t secure the “bed-net,” ship ropes woven around each bunk. The narrow, flexible footbridges connecting each wagon to the next, covered in culex and oilcloth, could squish you like a garlic press in an accident. No lanterns aboard except hurricane-rated ship lamps bolted on swivels that self-extinguished the wick if they tilted beyond 25 degrees. Remembering that each wagon had two exits was crucial, he said, demonstrating the slim door in the lead wagon that led up to the driver’s seat.

  “He had a sister who guarded the mail,” Anceps had said flatly, looking at them with her dishwater eyes, when Trelleth had finished and gone on watch. “She fell out the window when bandits tipped the coach over. They had to pick her pieces up with a shovel.”

  On land or sea, Ashton was happy to let someone else be the professional worrier about vehicular safety. It freed him up to be anxious about everything else, as usual. Soon enough, the nerves and self-loathings of leadership would hit him like a bag of broken bottles. For now, he was enjoying the rolling hills, the cute-faced brown cows, the way his new friends laughed as the sun seemingly hit them for the first time since they left their caves and prisons and junk rooms.

  They spent the first evening at the ninth post-inn, exactly ninety miles west of Cor Cordum, as ten miles lay between between each sister inn. Albina, it was called, and it sat on a bluff overlooking the Atelrush a hundred yards below and
a mile away. Peddlers in the courtyard dealt in mussel-shell amulets and jackknives, polishing and riveting the material fresh from the river. The caravan train nestled along one of the whitewashed yard walls, nearly taking up its entire length. You could have charged admission for the stir the testabestia made among guards and mail-riders; so Ashton did, until Elsbeth warned him in no-nonsense terms about scaring them into a stampede that even Tetragate insurance probably wouldn’t cover.

  The band of war criminals they called a bodyguard remained on the caravans, sticking to Rinka’s strict three-watch duty roster, while the rest of them went into the tavern to carouse and bond. He could have charged admission to see this motley crew, too. Especially Rinka, who finally gave up her armor for a slinky leather dress that barely covered her rump and held her breasts in cobweb-like baskets. But the crowd was thin enough to intimidate with a few glances, giving them freedom to occupy the circular table at the center of the circular room that took up the tower’s entire first floor.

  Being the leader and all, Ashton figured it was his responsibility to stay sober in front of his crew. That determination disappeared after the first, theoretically polite drink. He was no match for himself, let alone the aggressive egging of Elsbeth, who drank like her muscle bulges were wineskins employed in a clever scam to stay sober while getting marks drunk. Mieux was no help, either, downing ale after ale, albeit for the sole motivation that it was “fun to eat the foam.”

  Mieux launched into a critical opinion of which Tetragate paladin was the subject of the greatest plays. It seemed that Sir Ulther was in the most, but Dame Maud was in the best. Ashton was more interested in the paladin’s script for the real-life drama they were all living out in the New Empire. His parents back in Millennium hadn’t been so sure the Old Empire, decaying though it might be, was so bad, or that the paladins’ new order was such an improvement. One thing he knew for sure: this was no time or place to figure it out.

  He tried to catch the eye of a tavern whore with his own already blurry one, but she was gazing at Rinka, and they soon slipped away into the pantry together. After tipping a half-dozen freshwater clams down his gullet, Alfie traipsed off as well to study the Old Way’s pavement, a marvel of masonic arts, etcetera. It was safe to do that here, within sight of the tower and the guardbox, and the road patrolled by the Five—so-called because a traveler along the Imperial Mail route was never more than five miles from armed back-up. He later returned with a lengthy report on crowns and gutters and the way the stones were laid out to resemble apple trees.

  Meanwhile, it dawned on Ashton that they had finally met Arnbold. The boy likely stood six feet, but he crumpled shyly at the table with a sickly hunch, staring at a magazine that Ashton fervently hoped was not another copy of Merrykin’s Digest of Irritating Catchphrases. He said nothing after “hello,” and Ashton was happy to leave it at that; Mieux was not, naturally, and disappeared under the table briefly before popping up beside Arnbold and stuffing her face into the magazine as well.

  Ashton leaned back in his chair and tried to focus on Elsbeth. She’s kind of hot, I guess, he thought, half-convincing himself, searching her features for something that turned him on. The eyes. Or the one without the scar. Women like to have their eyes praised, anyhow.

  He threw on a grin and asked her to teach him some Skógr. He learned that the strong stuff she was drinking was called bjórr, and the wimpy, weak-as-water ale he and Mieux were swilling was called mungát. He immediately ordered a bjórr and gave her shoulder a little drunken tap.

  “How do you say, ‘You have beautiful eyes’?”

  “This, you will have no cause to say in the grim-haunted forests,” Elsbeth replied gravely.

  It was hard to focus on his game, between being drunk and the constant distractions from the other patrons. It seemed like everyone had a hopping, screeching pet. A farming couple and their little girl hand-fed a baby goose, the sole survivor of a weasel-wracked nest, he gathered. A brawny logger had a monkey, its tail curled around his arm, that must have escaped from some passing wagon. Cute stuff and hard not to ooh over for too long.

  As their conversation wandered like one of the grims in Elsbeth’s forest, the wagon-driver guided it to boasting. Elsbeth, it transpired, had once slain two wild boars—a spear in each hand—while three months pregnant. Ashton hauled out the Star of Monksbane Glen yarn and served it up with a thick sauce of his ephemeral connections to the Godkillers, along with a garnish of praise for the stunning condition of Elsbeth’s post-natal abs. The name “Godkillers” made Elsbeth sit bolt upright. Suddenly, she was the one touching him, grabbing his shoulder and dragging him closer like an old chair she intended to stand on to reach a cask of mead. She knew the legend of the Godkillers—the Ásdráp, she called them—and she was of the quite unshakable opinion that a modern-day version needed to form.

  Her arguably stunning eyes blazing and her grip fit to rearrange his collarbone, she told him again about the “death-cult” and its “bone-god” that ravaged her hometown. It had begun quietly, with some villagers collecting strange new animals as pets. It ended in a nightmare bloodbath of body parts being fed to the same little beasts.

  “You do not look at all like one who might pull a god from its sky-throne and make it sleep forever in an earth-bed,” Elsbeth mused. “Yet blood is strong, and it may be that this Harfells god is merely a beast, or a man who acts as one. Either way, vengeance must visit its door.”

  Ashton was pretty sure there was an insult in there somewhere, but a sheen of serious passion clung to Elsbeth’s fairly pretty eyes. That boast—three months pregnant… Oh. He drew himself up and dug into his reserve of macho speechifying.

  “Maybe this is exactly the mystery we’re looking for. Besides, I hate death-cults. I pit myself against them whenever possible. Unless and until something worse crawls across our path, we’ll make it a priority. I promise.”

  That personal touch was sincere enough, but there was no harm in making it literal as well. He tried to make his eyes twinkle and lightly stroked Elsbeth’s massive forearm. It felt the way a table leg did when he was trying to haul his drunken ass off a tavern floor. She gave him a moment’s solemn look, then took her arm back and announced she was off to have a piss.

  It took him a while to figure out that she’d gone to have that piss in the caravan and wasn’t coming back. Another flirtation cut down in the prime of youth. The others drifted away as well on the tides of exhaustion and drink. Ashton watched the pantry door open and Rinka exit, tugging the hem of her dress, followed by the whore, her face and chest flushed, biting her bottom lip as she gave the dominatrix a farewell gaze.

  Un-fucking-believable, Ashton fumed idly, half-bored with the familiarity of sexual humiliation, like a kid playing with a broken toy. Not only was he not going to get laid by Rinka, but the sex-sponge also was going to slurp up any other action that might come his way.

  “You didn’t strike me as the type who had to pay for it,” he cracked as Rinka strolled up.

  “She paid me,” Rinka smirked, plucking a coin from her cleavage and tossing it onto the table next to the server’s chit.

  He bought a cask of the tavern’s most expensive beer solely so he could give it to Trelleck and feel like a hero to somebody that night.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  So passed the first few nights at post-inns that looked the same, just with a changing, and less populated, cast of characters with increasingly rural pets—piglets, baby raccoons, rescued squirrels. Ashton and crew drank the same drinks and told the same lies about working for a cartel or running a special mail delivery. The main difference was the tavern gossip, at first ripe with light chat of fruit harvests, then going rotten with omens of disease. Plague had burned with invisible flames through the great crossroads city of Calisia, driving refugees before it like wind-scattered ash, including the teenage tatterdemalion shivering by the hearth despite the evening’s warmth as he recounted the tale. Which disease, no one knew; they
simply called it the Leveling for its eradication of human and animal, rich and poor, guard and civilian, alike—a heedlessness of boundaries that this urchin seemed to find surprising and perhaps just a bit satisfying.

  Bad news, as their route to the Vast went right over Calisia’s fortified bridge. Of the five Old Ways that converged in Cor Cordum, they could have taken one due north, right into the Vast. But the border there was the salt-poisoned Stjarnafall Sea, and the road was forced to ricochet off its shore and track northeast. Leagues of that route paralleled the eastward Old Way running to Duxum, the roads separated by only around a hundred-and-fifty miles. Ashton and Regulus agreed they could waste valuable time nearly duplicating any discoveries of the east-heading caravan. The alternative route was longer, but more certain to plunge them neck-deep in the unknown: northwest along the Atelrush to the city of Calisia, then threading northward between the Stjarnafall and the lake Frostmyrr into the shrouded heart of the Vast. It looked easy enough—on paper.

  The tavern nights were soon at an end. The post-inns still appeared, as white and orderly and predictable as Atel’s Trail. It was Clyst who pointed out the cold black pyramids of cinder where tower-top signal fires should have burned. Small wonder no word from the borderlands was reaching Cor Cordum. They found the next inn occupied only by a grizzled shepherd using the yard as his pasture. He couldn’t remember when the Five shut it down or why; but then, he seemed confused as to the reasons for having a post-inn to begin with. The villages hereabouts had no need of mail, he explained, stroking a lamb between the ears absently. Traveling to Cor Cordum? Never occurred to him. Greener pastures here.

  Each post-inn was in worse shape than the last until they blended into a ruin-dotted landscape that served as reminder of why the roads were called Old Ways. Rotten hilltop palings marked ancient forts. Circles of trees around crumbling wells alluded to lost villages. Twenty-foot monoliths standing in rings spoke inscrutable messages from the time of Atel; soft divots marring their secretive gray smiles convicted parties unknown in absentia for theft of smaller stones, the booty now stuck in some other ruin’s wall, or perhaps in the road beneath the caravan’s wheels. Built to keep criminals out, the post-inns now looked like perfect bandit roosts. And indeed, a trio of mangy outlaws scampered to the windows of one tower, its whitewash thin as the skin on a dead gull’s legbone. Ashton squinted at their faces through the sight on Anceps’ crossbow, noting their dark insomniac eyes and hunger-tight cheeks. Traffic on the road had dwindled to nothing. They were too starved for daily meals to tuck into this huge rolling feast. Ashton was no stranger to the feeling—just to being on the safe side of it for once.