by John Ruch
In the lavender light of sunset, he saw his opening tactics unfolding precisely as planned. “The gas is only talcum and pepper—a harmless ruse!” bellowed a Blue Weàlae voice from within Arrowmask’s caravan—probably the magimath—but it was too late. Most of his companions had already fled from behind the impenetrable culex and into the muddy clearing, where Telvyr’s children engaged them hand-to-hand, outnumbering Arrowmask’s guard by three to one. Phase two would prevent an escape, eliminate or seize Arrowmask’s highest-value assets, and force a fatal retreat.
Gratia the beast-mistress darted across his wagon’s path, a slim figure astride one of her monstrosities, an armored hill wolf of immense size. She somersaulted off its back and landed before Arrowmask’s even more massive testabestia, which stamped impatiently in place beneath their culex drapes as the grotesquely mannish wagon-driver Elsbeth bellowed through the window for everyone to reboard.
As the wolf dashed off to harry the guards, Gratia drew a heavy square of cardboard from her back and unfolded it on the ground, laying two torches nearby to illuminate it. Cunningly painted by Argento’s theatrical friends, it realistically depicted a steep slope leading down to an abrupt rocky cliff, a river winding in a canyon far below. Whip them as she might, Elsbeth would never get the testabestia to dash over the illusionary cliff. Suicide, the ultimate rejection of family, was a disease confined solely to the human mind.
Telvyr’s wagon pulled alongside the oversized caravan and he jumped the short gap onto its roof. Only one of Arrowmask’s disorganized thugs had thought to guard the polarity cannon, let alone use it. The sharpness of Separatist surprised the thick-necked brute as Telvyr sliced the blade through the top of his shield and bit its tip through his breastplate. He stumbled off the roof’s edge as Telvyr hunted for the cannonballs and kept an eye on the progress below of the third prong of the current phase of attack.
Magdeira and Ransoom, armed with weighted nets of chain, would neutralize Arrowmask’s two top warriors: the vagrant Shardaian equilibrique who stooped to barfighting, and the morally insane whore who had corrupted the Temple of Pain into a lurid cathouse. Both were taking down Telyvr’s children with unsettling speed.
“Fie on your drumsticks!” screeched the battling priestess somewhere below him—nimble but simple-minded to the point of inanity, as he had been informed.
As for Rinka Svetkov, she’d had an even less reputable career prior to Eyeout Alley, operating as some kind of local warlord in Duxum. Magdeira had tangled with her there on a sortie some years before and was longing to settle the score. Now would be the time, as the dominatrix was proving a real talent at strategy.
“It’s a pincer movement! They’re trying to force us to retreat!” he heard her shout raggedly between slashes. “We have to cut straight through their line!”
The steel net hit her before she finished speaking, and Magdeira was upon her, blond tresses lapping like flame from beneath her helm. Perhaps my daughter’s grievances were more personal than she’d given voice, Telvyr considered idly as he observed her draw and plunge her dagger.
Ransoom was not so lucky with the equilibrique. His practiced throw was true, but she somehow sensed it coming and leaped straight out of her slippers to meet it in the air, gripping the net’s lead weights with her fingers and toes, then spinning herself spread-eagled with its momentum. She cartwheeled along the grass, still clutching the net, until it collapsed harmlessly. Then she plucked it up at its middle, twirled it into a braid with the lethal weights on one end, and commenced thrashing the attacking guards with it.
He caught himself against the cannon as the wagon suddenly jerked. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the bear-like form of the driver Elsbeth huddled with her testabestia beneath their protective shroud of culex, inexplicably coaxing them to cross Gratia’s illusory chasm inch by inch.
Astonishing performances by the largest and smallest of Arrowmask’s freaks, but every battle had its setbacks. The polarity cannon would soon win this one. Telvyr located the ammunition box and kicked away its lock. With the butt of Separatist, he knocked off the regulator that prevented the muzzle from being angled so low as to shoot the wagon itself. As he removed the cap on the black steel tube, the river-valley wind moaned across it. He hefted a silvery-black ball and dropped it inside, then slid the launching plate into place to blast the projectile into the equally monstrous woman and beasts.
As if possessed, the cannon swung sharply skyward in the millisecond before firing. The thooom of air and steam sent his ear ringing, and the heat from the barrel, inches from his chin and glowing like ruby glass in the Temple of Family’s windows on a Stakti night, set his beard aflame. He slapped at his own face, barely keeping his balance as the wagon rocked sharply under the cannon’s recoil.
A wraith loomed before him, a weird figure a shade darker than the falling night, its features replaced by black ripples.
“Telvyr,” it intoned.
The pater continued pawing at his smoldering whiskers and raised Separatist between them. His mind calculated. Aloisius Finstickle, somewhere in the wagon below, was once a necrocharmer. What might he have raised? Some phantom of the Night Temple’s creation—or from Telvyr’s own bloody past?
“What are you?” he challenged the shade.
“Are you gonna keep hitting yourself, or can I join in?” it answered in the punkish manner of a street urchin.
“You jape from the grave? Ghost or demon, you stand outside the family of all humanity! Separatist shall cut you from the night like a cancer—”
As he stepped into his sword-thrust, a projectile emanated from the shade and caught him hard above the eye. At the same time, the cannon swung around on its pivot and hit him behind the knee.
As he landed on his back on the rocky soil, his bones rattling inside his armor, he realized he did not plan for this.
Ashton figured the Shadow-wield magica cloaking him would feel like, oh, a bracingly nippy autumn night. Instead, it felt like he was wrapped in oilcloth, and the shit was 90 percent alcohol, too. Sweat collected in his boots, his gloves stuck to his fingers, and he felt pretty damn mellow for a guy in the middle of a raging ambush. Pure chance to have hit that pompous asshole in the face with a drunken toss of the copper vial.
“‘Separatist’? ‘Cut you from the night’? That’s the dude I thought would be a good drinking buddy?” Ashton marveled at how his luck beat out his judgment yet again. He also wondered idly whether he should name his own sword. Something better than “Separatist,” of course. “Paladin-Poker”?
“Not even heading north yet and already fighting for our lives. If I wanted to battle a boarding party, I could’ve just gone back to sea on the Crepusculum,” Ashton mused. Still, maybe he could apply his hard-learned lessons in naval combat to this aggravating circumstance. Even the wagon shivered like a deck in small seas. He braced his legs in a wide stance and attempted to focus his flitting thoughts.
He had already obeyed a big rule of warfare: Take out the guy with the biggest beard and/or fanciest sword. Or fanciest beard and biggest sword—whichever. Ashton liked his combat one-on-one, but he also knew that in a larger battle, that could give you a false sense of isolation and control. While you thrilled yourself with your cool-ass parries and witty taunts that Mieux would pay good coin to quote, a random arrow or swinging yardarm could ruin your day, or the entire battle might wash over you like a surprise wave breaching a seawall. Then again, if you got too distracted by your surroundings, the hypnotizing chaos could get you skewered by your foe.
At the moment, however, Ashton was the one doing the hypnotizing. The cannon blast had stunned most of the combatants. Wagon-drivers struggled to control their horses, while the others looked up at him and saw nothing. That was the problem with stealth—it would be a bitch to get credit for saving the day. For now, Ashton seized the chance to survey the crazy carnival of destruction and see whether his friends were still alive.
The powerfully smelly, alarmin
gly large wolf was not. Clyst and his chain gang had hacked it to pieces with polearms and were fending off the Thousand Leaguers who outnumbered them—not without a cost in blood that streaked their chainmail. The enemy line was backed by a semicircle of parked wagons, from which flew the occasional crossbow bolt. Over his left shoulder, he saw a fiendishly realistic painting of a cliff laid before the testabestia, and he could just make out Elsbeth’s bulk as she hunched with them, leading them across it with a crisp crunching of cardboard, convincing them to trust her more than their own eyes.
He grinned and looked to his right, down the line of caravans to the campsite, where Mieux executed a backflip while whipping a Thousand Leaguer with a length of chain she’d found who knows where. He shook his head with a chuckle. No sounding of a cannon was going to distract that little whirlwind—shit, it’s quieter than she ever is—and no single swordsman stood a chance against an equilibrique.
Also not distracted was a woman in Thousand League captain’s armor kneeling atop Rinka, who struggled beneath her within the bonds of a metal net. Ashton’s stomach twitched as the woman carved into Rinka’s torso with dagger that glowed in the twilight like a firefly. He drew his sword instinctively. But before he could come up with anything dashing, nearby saplings and one of the stumps they employed as campfire stools suddenly burst forth with strong new limbs brimming with blossoms that puffed clouds of pollen. They lifted Rinka’s attacker a good six feet into the air, leaving her thrashing and wheezing.
“All aboard, lasses!” shouted the former Plant Lord from somewhere below.
At that moment, the closest Thousand Leagues wagon split in half with a deafening crash that spewed yard-long splinters everywhere. Ashton laughed even as he ducked and shielded his face with his cloak. Welcome back, my old friend Mr. Stray Cannonball. Good to see you again.
That brought to mind the truest lesson of war he’d learned in a score of battles: Pull the dirtiest tricks you can think of, and leave the rest to blind luck.
The explosion sent everyone back into motion. The caravan lurched forward as Elsbeth’s barbarian-lingo bellows directed the testabestia toward the wrecked wagon—the gap in the line. Still enmeshed, Rinka staggered to her feet. Mieux darted to her side and dragged her by the wrist toward the caravan’s tail end.
Clyst called a retreat, his team employing halberds to cover the rear stairs as Rinka and Mieux boarded. Both Clyst and Trelleck took arrow hits, but kept up the fight. They were successfully holding a half-dozen Thousand Leaguers at bay when Telvyr reappeared and waded in. A swing of that stupidly named sword severed the haft of Littalia’s polearm. As the blade toppled, Telvyr gripped her half of the pole and yanked her toward him. He seized her chin in his mailed grip and shook her until her helm fell off. Her face contorted as he pushed it against the rim of the wagon wheel. The iron rim became agleam with wetness as it spun ever faster. She shrieked as he held her there, teeth and blood spraying in gruesome arcs in the wagon’s lantern light.
Ashton heard himself shout incoherently. A matching cry came from Mieux, who darted from between Clyst’s legs and sprang onto Telvyr, kicking his nose open and alighting with a bare foot on each of his shoulders. From there, she leaped into a somersault and spread a metal net onto the whole group of Thousand Leaguers. The tangle gave her and Clyst just enough time to retrieve Littalia’s crumpled body and retreat with the others into the caravan.
A little fairy dagger of guilt stabbed into Ashton’s heart at the atrocious disfigurement of a woman he’d so recently slept with and hated; then a little syringe of anaesthetic relief at the convenience of her possible demise; then another dagger of guilt poked him about that. The whole deal was far too appalling, too dismaying, to handle on nothing stronger than a Mix-Fiend potion buzz and a swig of barbarian gin.
Elsbeth saved him from thinking about it by driving the caravan straight through the riven Thousand Leagues wagon. “Forstor! Forstor!” she shouted again and again, over the roars of the testbestia. The impact threw Ashton onto his back, so he rolled with it, narrowly avoiding the cannon still steaming in the humid evening air, and sliding on his back into the brass rail around the rooftop. His forehead met the metal with a solid clunk. When he reopened his eyes, the testabestia thundered in the dark sky of his upside-down vision, as another Thousand Leagues wagon moved to block their path.
“Forstor” seemed to be a multifaceted barbarian word embracing a host of way to smash stuff. At Elsbeth’s urgings, the testabestia simply ran over the smaller two-horse team pulling the offending wagon. The raw screams of the horses and the trumpeting of the beasts dragged claws down Ashton’s spine. A brief hot wash of horse blood sprayed high up onto the roof and across his boots. The other wagon rolled over with the crash, its broken tongue grinding against the caravan, its upended wheels spinning lazily. Then the wreckage was gone as the caravan pierced the cordon, exactly as Rinka had commanded, and regained the open road.
Ashton struggled to his knees in the spatter of gore. Two wagons down, but four remained, all far faster than the caravan. Looking down the road, he could see them already wheeling around each other like mouse-rapt kittens learning to hunt.
The landscape opened into scrubby heath and the trees thinned to only a line along the river to the north, its water a dull orange fireline in the waning sun. Birds vanished with the trees, bats swooping in their stead. For a moment, Ashton could hear only the rhythmic rattles and chain-clanks of the caravan and the light breeze of momentum across his ears. The eye of the storm. He caught himself starting to wonder how badly injured were any of his crew, then reminded himself that injuring others remained more important for now. He reloaded the cannon with another of the slippery spheres, its bulk disappearing into his Shadow-wield cloak for the seconds he touched it.
Aiming on the fly would be nigh impossible, and as the wagons began to overtake the caravan, they wisely hewed close to its sides, out of safe targeting range. Ashton, however, had some liberal notions about safety, and a firm belief that no one liked a pothole.
He pivoted the cannon down at the road surface and flipped the latch.
A pavement volcano erupted instantly. A spinning flagstone nearly took his head off, despite his precautionary crouch. The caravan swayed as rocks and gravel peppered its side, sang off culex, smashed exterior lanterns. Shouts and curses and “totally crazy!” emanated from within. The testabestia roared and seemed to double their pace.
The horses of the lead wagon in pursuit dodged the crater, but the vehicle didn’t have their agility and outright fear. Jutting himself over the railing, Ashton saw the wagon’s wheels catch on the shattered stones, sending it rolling wildly in the air, taking the horses over with it. Too bad we don’t have some magica that kills only human fuckheads, not horses, Ashton mused as he lifted the third polarity cannonball out of its box.
He heard the trapdoor above the driver’s compartment clank open, and Elsbeth’s chiseled head protruded like a hobnail. He gave her a wink and a grin, but she continued to scan the rooftop with her scowl.
“I’m shrouded in magical darkness from a rare Mix-Fiend potion! Don’t worry, I’m still handsome!”
She glowered in his direction and grunted as she gave her pine tar a chomp.
“Kill them without killing us,” she growled before disappearing back within the wagon.
That wouldn’t be easy. It never was, in any combat, anywhere, anytime. But especially now with two of the wagons hewing so close, like whales diving under a ship’s keel to avoid the harpoons, that a cannon shot really would be suicidal instead of just rakishly risky.
As they all snaked around a bend, he saw the third wagon—surely containing that nutjob paladin—lurking too far back to get a bead on. Ashton sucked the corner of his mouth. The image of Littalia’s face grinding off intruded on his thoughts for a moment, and he automatically distracted himself by refocusing on the need to name his sword. From the bowels of the old Sanitation Department rises the blade… Janitor?
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His meditation on this significant theme was broken by the crash of the two side-hugging wagons slamming into the caravan simultaneously from port and starboard. Ashton fumbled the cannonball and joined it in rolling around on the shivering rooftop.
The caravan took on a serpentine motion, weaving side-to-side, much like the hips of that bellydancer at the This End Up Tavern & Delight Emporium who allowed him to buy her twelve drinks before telling him she was only attracted to women, happily married, and/or about to join a convent. He’d bought her a thirteenth drink anyhow and then went out and got into a pointless duel with the first asshole he saw wearing a puffy velvet shirt.
“Fuck!” he shouted, partly from that tawdry memory, but mostly from the fifty-pound hematite cannonball rolling lazily over the toe of his right boot.
Elsbeth was making the caravan weave that way, like she was cracking a wooden whip, to smack the smaller Thousand Leagues wagons aside. But collision was what they wanted, Ashton saw, as they drove in to meet the caravan in a wooden kiss. Butterby sat gaunt and grim-faced in the driver’s seat of the starboard-side wagon; he was no greenhorn and no fool. Some plan was afoot, and it involved the smaller wagon wedging its left front wheel behind the right front wheel of the caravan. The metal screamed and burned in a shower of sparks.
Stumbling to port, Ashton felt the same shock, saw the same glow, as the Thousand Leagues vehicle there drove into the wheels of his and Alfie’s wagon, third in the caravan train. Sparks continued to fly and clods of dirt spewed as the mass of wagons swerved off the Old Way and back on again. The testabestia slowed to a crawl with the extra weight, then stopped as the jammed wheels began to jackknife the caravan.