Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

  Five leagues on, the Old Way itself went to ruin. At least a half-mile stretch had vanished when the bluff beneath it washed down into a streambed. A decade ago or more, Alfie determined, before losing himself in the unparalleled opportunity to study the broken Old Way in cross-section. He oohed over cements and gravels while Ashton surveyed the three separate dirt paths that deer or shepherds had worn as detours. The moment called for his first command decision, which he naturally left to Fortune. A roll of a die on the driver’s seat between Elsbeth’s thick thigh and Arnbold’s slim one determined they would take the right-most trail. Or mostly; he fudged it a little bit when Elsbeth showed a clear preference for going downhill where they could water the testabestia.

  And so the fifth night of this grand adventure began with the caravan parked in a trailside clearing redolent of skunk cabbage and surrounded by saplings that delivered a nasty whip if you moved through them too quickly.

  A crossbow was not the only thing Ashton was sharing with Littalia Anceps. There was, notably, his bunk, in which he presently mounted her, boldly carefree about banging his head atop the ceiling, while she whispered orders to fuck harder.

  Ashton had given up flirting with Elsbeth when Alfie discreetly informed him that Skógr mating ritual demands a fistfight as foreplay. Suddenly he realized that the guardswomen were undiscovered gems of womanhood. Fortin coldly told him she was on duty, but Littalia, to his surprise and no small measure of disgust, responded to his grin by rubbing on him like a teenager. Before he knew it, she was gazing up with those fish eyes while she sucked away on him. When she bent over and offered him her rump, he obliging screwed away to consummate the relationship. For Ashton, the most attractive thing a woman could do was show attraction to him. The other details sorted themselves out. Her desperation became delicious, her ugliness a pungent seasoning.

  His groping on their second night together discovered her chastity belt. He clumsily humiliated her by chuckling at Rinka’s typically twisted ingenuity, but made it up to her by deftly picking the crappy little lock. She nearly broke his spine pulling him into her with her strong soldier legs locked around his hips. She swore crudely during sex, which he liked, and kept her eyes open while kissing, which he didn’t. But in Ashton’s considered critical opinion, there was no such thing as a bad fuck—at least, while it was happening. Ten seconds afterward was a different story.

  There’s nothing like close quarters and the first of three orgasms to make two people divulge their life stories within an hour. Littalia’s was the mix of boredom and disconcerting rural savagery he’d expected. Long years of tossing feed and baling hay punctuated with castrations and de-hornings. Perfect training for the violence-punctuated tedium that was a sentence in the Imperial Army. Bloodshed made her want to screw out of some lust for life, she said, failing to make it sound any more romantic than it was.

  “Making love during a hanging—it just makes you feel alive,” she said dreamily.

  “I’ll do my best to arrange one promptly. Possibly my own,” Ashton babbled as his skin crawled.

  He babbled other things too in that beguiling intimacy of the road, including his affair with Nalia. He figured it was no worse than an execution fetish, and besides, he was thinking of his sister during this entire dismal screw.

  Ashton chose to take her nonchalant response—“It happens sometimes on the islands”—as a fervently expressed desire for a threesome, visions of which he meditated upon throughout this road-sex ritual until it was time to discreetly click shut her lock once more.

  If travel goaded affection’s pace to a gallop, or at least hot to trot, just as quickly it could spook a heart to dig in its heels and throw you over the nearest hedgerow. The whole thing had gone sour by the next night. After sex, she laid still in the bed like a fish-market tuna displayed in ice. He just knew she was thinking of her pet ogre and fellow war-crime-ophile Clyst, how she wished Ashton and his lockpicks would free the brute’s foaming-at-the-mouth little soldier for her, and how she could never ask.

  For his part, Ashton was already thoroughly ashamed by this whole romance-of-last-resort, and both dreading and looking forward to the inevitable moment when Clyst would discover it. Already he was mentally sketching a plan to take a fall in a duel with Elsbeth so badly he would earn her pity, marry her at some roadside chapel, denounce Littalia as a lying floozy, and watch his Skógr bride toss Clyst around like a Bitey Kitty doll.

  Naturally, none of that stopped them from sneaking back into bed together tonight, screwing under the lifeless gaze of Alfie’s withered dwarf-drake mummy on the nearby deskstop. Littalia’s gaze was only slightly less blank and more appealing. Her tongue wiggled in his mouth like antennae as he came.

  “I love you,” he said experimentally afterward as he lay beside her, stroking her rubbery breast.

  It was miserable enough to be love, he supposed. Only about five percent of women he ever said this to responded positively. Unrequited love always ended things with a nice clean break. And any reciprocation instantly spurred him out of procrastination and into the familiar business of running away. It sounded deranged when he thought about it that way, but it was all very neat, really.

  Littalia merely lay there, crunching on chyrsomweed.

  “Help me put the chastity belt back on,” she said.

  Ashton fumed as the locked taunted him with its click. Sure, he was looking for a way out. But not by the most devastating, erection-murdering shutdown in Arrowmask history.

  He worked his pants buttons into the wrong buttonholes and tossed his dashing black-silk shirt on inside out as he stalked away in an elegant temper tantrum. He stood on the wagon’s balcony a moment until the scent of skunk and testabestia started to get to him. He stormed across the enclosed footbridge and gave a perfunctory knock on the ladies’ wagon before passing through, coughing in a lingering cloud of grapefruit perfume and green-tea steam before emerging safely on the caravan’s tail-end balcony. Fortin peered through the culex, keeping watch over most of his little gang as they relaxed around a small fire. She lowered the stairs for him as he pondered who take things out on.

  Alfie hopped up from his folding canvas seat, tossing aside a log whose rings he had been counting with the aid of a jack-knife blade.

  “Ashton, old man! I say, might I make use of the wagon a bit if you’re done napping? One does risk the piles spending too many hours in a camp-chair!”

  “Yeah, but you might want to stoke the stove. Something in there’s fucking frigid,” he grumbled.

  Ashton circled behind Rinka and Mieux—side-by-side as usual. The taller woman leaned back in a chair puffing on a cubeb, her long legs laced in thigh-high boots and the rest of her barely covered by black shorts and a halter top. Her eyes flashed at him upside-down, automatically attempting to seduce him like a forgotten rabbit-trap springing in the weeds. Her left hand hung languidly off the armrest. Mieux, sitting cross-legged on a large kerchief, clutched Rinka’s dangling index and middle fingers in her upheld tiny paw, as if she were holding a torch or cracking a whip. She was engrossed in her magazine, studying a crude woodcut illustrating some absurd comedy. It depicted a rotund man spitting crumbs, a bib flapping at his chin, as he poked a pudgy finger across a feast-loaded banquet table at another diner. “Fie on your drumsticks!” was the caption, which Mieux read slowly, whispering the words as she followed them with a finger. On the hand that wasn’t irritatingly clutching Rinka.

  Ashton had to sneak around fucking the help, while Rinka turned everyone in sight into some combination of crouching sex-slave and adopted stray. He considered ruthlessly ratting out Littalia to “Voidiva Rinka” for her chastity escapes, but at the moment, he couldn’t decide which woman he despised more for highlighting his own despicability.

  Ashton threw himself into a seat next to Elsbeth, who sat splay-legged on a stump. The green leather of her pants and vest creaked as she swatted a gnat on her tattooed shoulder. A poorly maintained statue of a gladiator that t
oppled onto a blind, mad barber who cut his own hair, leaving only his sloppy scalp sticking out, he mused savagely.

  The barbarian giantess looked off into the night, but must have somehow read the meaning of his lousy posture. She pulled out a hip flask and nudged his knee with it. The metal was still warm from her ass. He wiped its neck and took a swig of some piney gin that corkscrewed like a hot drill down his digestive tract. Angrily kicking his shame into a corner, he leaned back and prepared to dream up a few more silent insults.

  He studied that ravaged face in profile against the campfire flames with the eye of an butcher measuring his ruthless cuts. The broken nose, the bullish jaw, the weals on the chin. So much monstrosity to choose from.

  The firelight caught and burned within the thin watery curve of her eye like the very last sliver of sunset. Somewhere in that teary fire, and in the slightest crinkling of lines at her eye’s corner, a previously hidden emotion reached out and touched him, like the beam of a lighthouse finally working its way around to him in the night.

  Her expression was a different sort of scar. She looked stricken. He felt something pour out of his heart and flood his stomach, extinguishing the fire burning there.

  “Hey. I don’t like to drink alone.” He stretched out an arm and passed her the flask.

  She seemed to half-awaken and took it with a little smile. She drained a quarter of the thing with a gulp. A flush rose her chiseled cheeks, made her look ten years younger. Those lines around her eyes stayed.

  Night and Fury. She actually does have beautiful eyes, Ashton thought.

  He had nearly convinced himself to take another fortifying swig and challenge Elsbeth to that fistfight when Mieux suddenly hopped to her feet. She cocked her head like a puppy, one of her long face-framing bangs dangling across her lips like a joke moustache.

  “People are in the woods!” she cried. Then her head snapped to attention on one particular twilit copse. “You come out of there right now or you are mean and sneaky!” she shouted at no one he could see.

  At her challenge, a tall young man dashed into the circle of firelight, while other footsteps crashed away through the underbrush.

  “Yes, run! Run away, you cowards, now that I have chanced upon true heroes!” the newcomer proclaimed, turning slowly toward them with a raised arm that he then swept to thank them inclusively. A weathered cowl shaded his features, but not the shock of blond hair protruding from it, or his shiny smile, or the dirt smudges and sapling whip-marks on his cheek.

  “Surely you are true heroes, eh? With such a fine caravan and a strong crew, I am either rescued or fallen into deeper trouble still,” the posh victim mused as he bent over, hands on his knees, gathering his breath.

  His brow folded as he looked up, cast his gaze on each of them in turn. Elsbeth, her lips pursed and her arms folded like old trees twined together as seedlings. Ashton, imagining that he must look fidgety and not a little drunk. Mieux, who blinked in judgmental pulses, her little fists balled on her hips. Rinka, one eyebrow arched, holding her huge sword as casually as she did her cubeb. Fortin, shouldering a crossbow to an arrow slit in the culex as Alfie and the other guards joined her on the balcony, roused by the commotion.

  They’re waiting on me to tell them what to do, Ashton realized with the familiar knots twisting in his stomach. And I’m just waiting to see what this guy does.

  “I, Fidus of Calisia, have escaped that city of lies!” the man continued, straightening and holding up a fist. “Perhaps you have heard of the plague that has closed its gates? Falsehood! It is not foul disease, but rather a foul conspiracy from the Vast, that has seized its heart!”

  Ashton felt himself, and everyone except Mieux, leaning in at the word “Vast.” Or maybe it was the gin.

  “I am the minister of finance, now deposed, and I have barely escaped with my life, as well as with documents proving the conspiracy and showing a secret way through the city’s blockade. I shall share them with you if you agree to but one small favor.” He hung his cowled head. “I escaped, but my beloved Hortensia did not. I beg of you—use this information to rescue her.”

  Ashton’s heart stirred for Hortensia, who he immediately imagined as buxom and grateful in equally huge measures. But his stomach continued to knot, and it wasn’t just the prospect of trying to boss around his bullheaded crew.

  Something felt off. The way those footsteps running away ended too soon. How Fidus didn’t give Elsbeth a second glance, or Rinka a third. Mieux shattered his concentration like a kid tossing a ball through a dining room window.

  “My stars and garters! This is no place to stage a play! You must do it inside a building with a curtain in it!” she lectured inanely at a volume approximating temple bells struck by lightning. “Plus also where you can buy a piece of pear pie!”

  Fidus’s face crumpled in elaborate confusion. “I would give my life for this to be a fiction, my lady,” he moaned.

  Mieux rolled her huge eyes and chose Rinka as the recipient of her answer to their questioning looks. “He’s Knight Vitus from the totally great play Pirate Queen of Redwave Reef! He was poisoned and his hair was set shamefully on fire,” she explained, her hands flailing. “For real, he is Cupio Argento, who I read all about in the excellent Merrykin’s Digest column Heart City Confidential! He likes moonlight walks and fast horses, and he was seen swimming with Impudica ‘Impy’ Maxilla on the Old Spandrel beach! With no clothes on!”

  And who I read all about in the Tetragate’s secret criminal profiles, Ashton thought in instant recognition of the name. But all he said was, “Move! Just move!”

  Most of them did, including Argento, who cursed the tattletale Merrykin as he hit the ground with his hands covering his head. A volley of arrows from the trees thunked into stumps and soil where Ashton’s crew had been standing. Only Rinka kept her feet planted, and now had an arrow protruding nauseatingly through her bare stomach. She slammed a fist against its fletching so it popped out of the small of her back and tumbled to the ground trailed by a spiral streamer of blood.

  “I am unarmed!” Argento babbled as she advanced on him.

  “Oh, you’re about to be,” Rinka purred, then swung her sword through his left shoulder with a sound like firewood splitting. She kicked him into the campfire with a sardonic smirk and bent to retrieve his severed limb. She hurled it into the woods, shouting over his agonized screams: “Is that all you’ve got?!”

  It was not all they’d got. Ashton, Elsbeth and Mieux had nearly reached the caravan when the next volley struck it. Little paper packets roped to the arrows exploded on impact, puffing a weird whitish cloud of gas through the culex, its fumes snaking into the open wagon door. Choking and gasping, the guards dropped the folding stairs and fled the armored balcony. At the same time, hooves thundered and iron wheels sparked as wagons hove into view on the road from both directions, their freshly varnished wood a-twinkle in the waning light of sunset.

  Gallatine’s fastest carriages. The Thousand Leagues didn’t want them to get their shopping trips done quickly, Ashton realized far too late. It was about running us down and setting a trap.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “The first rule of family: join it or be its stranger, its enemy, its threat,” Telvyr reminded Magdeira as he led his new clan in executing a six-wagon pincer movement around Arrowmask’s grubby camp.

  He stood spread-legged in the driver’s seat, one hand braced paternally on Magdeira’s armored shoulder as she nodded grimly, the other wielding the ancient and blood-darkened sword Separatist. The blade had lost its ensorcellment, just as he had lost his paladinship, when the Temple of Family excommunicated him for his affair with Iona. He bore the Temple no grudge; after all, every family is fundamentally a dictatorship. He disagreed with their narrow, single-partner definition of “family,” but respected their right to bind members to arbitrary rules just as he did with his own kin. He quit the form, not the faith.

  Though unmagicked, Separatist remained uncanny sharp
when he finally retrieved it from the haunted delve where Iona had prankishly hidden it. Over the past year, he had lent his blade—or more often, the threat of it—to aiding broken and endangered households for a modest fee or merely a pot of porridge. Wayward and ungrateful adult children were the main of it. New mothers called him to arms as well against the myriad threats to their precious babes: neighbors who protested loud lullabies, merchants who sold swaddles woven from potentially toxic fibers, smut peddlers who advertised the filth of Duram Duram and Merrykin’s Digest within corrupting distance of young eyes and ears. Small tasks, but saving small lives.

  Now he rode on a true crusade with a speed that made the cool evening breeze swirl under his helm and shiver his graying beard. Arrowmask was typical sea scum, abandoning family for a selfish life of crime and drunken oblivion, and slaughtering Thousand Leaguers when they offered him something better. Now, rather than building a clan of his own, the pirate had a ragtag crew he neglected to lead in the manly fashion, instead permitting himself to be bullied by freakish, barren women. Telvyr had embraced the Thousand Leagues and found his greatest family yet, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, cousins—whatever role that best suited each. Magdeira, Ransoom, Butterby, Gratia, the now-fallen Argento—all looked to him as pater. Tonight, at his knee, they would learn to refine mere killing into the carving of a bright, shining circle discriminating Us from Them.