Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

  There was a long pause marked only by the chirping of katydids in the fields and the cobblestone-and-chain rattles of the approaching third wagon. Nobody wanted to leave the armored wagons, knowing they’d meet a crossbow volley from the other side. Only idiots made the first move.

  Ashton, however, had long and successful experience with acting like an idiot, and there was no reason to stop now. He slid the cannonball back out of the tube, its dull sunset shine vanishing in the darkness of his Shadow-wield touch. Hefting it in both hands, he heaved the sphere off the side and onto the roof of Butterby’s wagon, letting the momentum take him with it. The cannonball hit with a wood-denting crack, and Ashton rolled into a crouch beside it. This was like a luxury ship-boarding attack arranged by the navy for some rich guy’s adventure fantasy party. A motionless deck, only two guards, and, oh yeah, he was invisible-ish.

  Butterby and his crossbow-pointing guard stood and turned at the noise. Ashton immediately drew his sword and slashed at the guard’s forearm. She wore mail, but she raised her arms defensively against the invisible blow as it struck. The reflex made her fire a bolt right into Butterby’s pudgy jawline. The pyramidal tip popped through the top of his helmet, a piece of tongue dangling from it, bringing Butterby’s long and inglorious gang career to a short and inglorious end. A quick slice to the guard’s throat turned her astonishment at the unseen attack into an eternal mystery.

  As his fortune seemed to be matching his audacity, Ashton figured he might as well find a way to get the rest of the bastards out of the wagon. Sheathing his sword, he grabbed the cannonball and brought it down on the rooftop again and again until it bashed a splintery hole and fell inside with a thud. Swords instantly poked out, but he rolled aside.

  For a moment, he pondered those works by history’s greatest strategic minds he had read a boy in Millennium. What would Sir Triplegate do?

  Probably not this. He shrugged, unbuttoned his trousers, and, standing at a safe distance, commenced relieving himself down the hole.

  Amid the disgusted shouts within, the third wagon arrived, stopping in the field off to starboard in a position parallel to the caravan. Loaded crossbows poked out the window, their bolts alarmingly wrapped with flaming cloth. Telvyr stood in its driver’s seat, one foot braced on the roof, armored arms crossed and a disapproving glare further marring that ugly mug. Ashton realized the Shadow-wield had worn off.

  He glared back at the ex-paladin, noting the bloodied nose and charred beard with satisfaction, and spoke the gravest challenge that came to mind.

  “I can’t go when you’re watching.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  As the flaming bolts flew, the worthless little thief hopped into the gap between the crash-locked wagon and the caravan, disappearing for the moment like the light-startled rat he was.

  Telvyr couldn’t blame his children for taking shots, no matter how wasted, at Arrowmask as he shook his unproductive genitalia like a street cur marking a lamppost. Still, their advantage lay in discipline, and as pater, it was his to restore.

  “Hold your shots! Deploy the blocks and barrels!”

  His family leapt to obey. Shields raised against the inevitable volley of crossbow shots, some rolled barrels of oil-pitch, painted red to warn of their flammability, beneath the caravan’s lead wagon and before its brace of testabestia; others pried off the hubcaps from a few of the wheels, looping lengths of chain through the spokes to further prevent any movement.

  The road before him was illuminated by freshly ignited bolts ready to be fired at the barrels from the window just below him. He could hear their flaming rags grumbling against the light breeze.

  “Those are barrels of oil-pitch,” he called to the caravan. “Any disobedience or disrespect, such as firing upon me, and a single shot will ignite them with inextinguishable fire. We can burn you alive within your wagons and send liquid fire through the culex around your testabestia.”

  He let the words sink in, and plainly they did, as no one took the clear shot at him. The tactics had changed, but his strategy remained the same: remove their strongest assets, then squeeze the proverbial fist.

  “Very good. Now, we desire only to take two of you into custody. The rest will be welcome to go free. You shall begin by handing over Rinka Svetkov.” He felt some thrill run through Magdeira, standing beside him with her crossbow raised.

  The caravan’s rear steps dropped with surprising alacrity, and the whore strolled out. She was clad in ludicrously obscene armor fit for the vulgarities of the theater. It surely reflected her empty, fruitless sensuality, but still his gorge rose at its aggressive perversion of all that was martial and maternal alike.

  “Thought you’d never ask,” she remarked breezily, her voice muffled in her helm. “I don’t usually play with ugly old men, but your beating’s on the house.”

  She unsheathed her sword and charged, her dark pigtails flying like war banners. Telvyr stamped on the wagon’s roof. At his beck, crossbow bolts pelted her in crossfire from his wagon and Butterby’s as well.

  The impacts knocked her to the pavement. But, despite the armor’s eggshell thinness and pantomime costume appearance, it simply shrugged off the bolts. Burning pitch speckled its surface, seemingly to no ill effect upon the whore.

  “Gratia! The leostrix!” he shouted to his deadly daughter.

  From behind the caravan, he heard the rear door of Ransoom’s wagon bang open and the leostrix growl at its freedom. The animal-trainer shouted orders at it in her peculiar tongue, then sprang atop the caravan to direct it to its prey. Head to toe in leathers, her face a dark mask of suede, she crouched there like one of her own exotic pets.

  This one, the leostrix, had recently been on display at the Spectaculum arena. Perhaps the whore had seen it there; she was about to get a closer look. She stood to face it as it rounded the end of the caravan, snarling and hissing.

  A two-headed monstrosity from the depths of the Greenarch jungles, the leostrix gave even this cocky dominatrix pause. It main aspect was that of a large panther furred black with moss-green stripes, its muscles rippling in the wagon lanterns. Yet mounted on its rump, facing backward, was a secondary false head like that of a gigantic owl, with a beak that snapped aimlessly and pupil-less eyes that detected only broad, threatening motion. Perhaps the false head served to prevent attacks by even larger jungle predators; perhaps it attracted the huge and delicious avians that populated the tree canopy. Telvyr’s only interest was that the beast was a grotesque freak suited for killing grotesque freaks.

  Svetkov raised her sword, but too slowly as the beast pounced. It slammed her to the ground, then took her in its mouth and tossed her a dozen feet in the air as if toying with a mouse. He could only hope that more of Arrowmask’s chaotic band would race out to help her and be torn to ribbons.

  Even as he smiled, he heard a scraping of metal off to the front of Arrowmask’s caravan. The barrel of oil-pitch beneath was now shielded by one of the steel hubcaps previously removed. It bore the image of a duck, its beak wide open as if mocking him with coarse laughter.

  “Shoot him!” Telvyr commanded as he spotted Arrowmask scurrying away from the scene. But the pirate snatched up another hubcap and used it as a shield, rolling it on the ground edgewise as he duck-walked behind it, to take up a position at the caravan’s rear doorstep.

  Telvyr pointed instead at the barrel of oil-pitch before the testabestia. But even as he prepared the command to fire, he saw the aberrantly masculine driver Elsbeth springing from the caravan rooftop with surprising agility as a thin boy peered through the window at her with concern. Quite the mistress of the unexpected. But she would burn as quickly as her beasts. She muttered soothing words to them and took a grip on the red barrel’s rims as he ordered his children to loose the bolts of fire.

  One struck her in the meat of the arm; the other plunked into the barrel, which immediately began leaking a stream of burning liquid. Heedless, Elsbeth shouted in exertion as she hefted the five
-hundred-pound barrel first to her waist, then to her chest. “Impossible,” he thought stupidly, but then found himself smiling grimly as the staves started to give way, spilling the flaming, smoky pitch by the gallon.

  Her scarred, contorted face was illumined for a moment in that evil firelight, her white-blond braids taking on the hue of a spurting artery. Then, with a twist of her torso and a hoarse shout, she hurled the blazing drum at his wagon. It turned end over end in the air, spitting sulfurous sparks that ignited the grass where they landed, and spewing a ribbon of liquid flame from the widening hole in the side. The barrel disintegrated just before impact, exploding in a blinding ball of orange-white fury. Half the wagon and the adjacent field were painted with fire.

  Telvyr’s already sore old bones protested afresh as he dove to the pavement, with Magdeira clattering down beside him. He rose quick as he could to finish the burned horses with Separatist before they could drag the wagon away in their madness. It could still serve as cover for the time being. As he opened the beast’s throats, Magdeira tapped his shoulder and nodded toward the barbarian brute, now advancing on them with insane eyes and a farrier’s hammer in hand.

  Bolts loosed by Magdeira and the guards in the wagons pincushioned Elsbeth’s arm, thigh and upper back, staggering her for a moment. Telvyr apprehended that such wounds were little more than goads in a bullfight. The barbarian was a challenge for any two of them. He seized the opportunity to retreat with Magdeira into the darkness beyond the ring of firelight, made deeper by its blinding glare. Perhaps the guards would achieve a headshot while he planned a coordinated attack.

  Elsbeth attained the wagon before the guards could reload and, growling deep in her throat, jabbed a hand through the arrow slit in the culex. She grabbed hold of one of the guards—Edwards, he recognized, from the screams—and began yanking him against the metal screen with terrific force.

  “Pale-heart! Fire-starter!” the barbarian freak shouted over his screams as she heaved him by the arm against the merciless screen again and again. Edwards’ cries turned into dreadful childish shrieks mixed with the deep seismic sounds of bones shattering and ligaments tearing. At last her arm whipped free, her hand locked around the wrist of his amputated forearm as she drew it through the arrow slit. Rended flesh fell away from the glistening bone, tendons and vessels stretching from the stump until snapping.

  “My poor, sweet son,” thought Telvyr, squeezing the grip of Separatist. Yet he knew that only by keeping his wits cool, his actions strategic, could he hope to save the family. Better to give up a single kit than the entire den.

  Magdeira, that passionate girl, lacked such control. Perhaps she had a bit of the Cynrican in her as well. Without a word, she slipped away and was at Elsbeth’s side, her open palm glowing aquamarine as she touched the barbarian’s sinewy shoulder where the skin was dark with tattoos and pouring steam in the humid night. Many times had he witnesses the hideous effects of that withering touch—not so much a wasting as a regressing, reverting the limb, or head, or body to that of a spindly child. His heart leaped.

  But if the withering touch had any effect at all on that massive body, it had too little time to shrink so much muscle before Elsbeth wheeled on her gentle attacker. She brought Edwards’ severed arm down on Magdeira’s neck with a thunderous smack, knocking the smaller woman to her knees. Then Elsbeth followed with a hammer blow to the head that knocked Magdeira’s helmet off and stunned her. Dropping the hammer, the barbarian lifted her by the throat, pinned her to the wagon wall, and commenced pounding her face with a meaty fist.

  Elsbeth wore fingerless gloves with metal knuckles, the studs reflecting firelight like eyes of rabid cats. They fractured Magdeira’s face with a sound like a melon hitting pavement. Elsbeth screamed again, now wordlessly, incoherently, bestially, as she hammered her fist harder and harder, deeper and deeper, until Magdeira’s body went limp and her head slid wetly forward on the thick forearm, the fist protruding from a gaping hole in the back of her shattered skull. Still Elsbeth screamed into that annihilated face, her own shivering with the exertion, teeth bared, spittle flying.

  Telvyr realized he was screaming as well. What the mind of a strategist might endure, the heart of a father could not abide. Fury took him and sped him at the mannish monster, Separatist prepared to divide.

  Elsbeth raised Magdeira’s broken corpse between them, spearing the poor child upon Separatist’s blade in some perverse instinct to besmirch whatever familial purity it retained. The dead weight on the sword disarmed him. He felt his jaw crack as a gloved fist hit him; then a powerful kick to his armored chest sent him sprawling fifteen feet across the pavers.

  He righted himself, spat blood, and lay in the road eyeing the utter chaos that was Arrowmask’s only progeny.

  To his left, from whence he had been thrown, Elsbeth put her shoulder to the wagon to tip it fully into the pool of flame and finish Ariotle and any life that still Edwards might still cling to.

  Before him, the whore still danced with the cat. She stood splay-legged, one broken arm hanging useless, the other pounding the leostrix with her flame-speckled gauntlet, as she shouted to her compatriots to hold their tactically advantageous position within their caravan. He could smell the beast’s rotten-meat breath on the wind.

  To his right, guards fled Butterby’s wagon as its wood warped with a sound like a gaggle of some nocturnal birds. An unseen force contorted the timbers until the culex windows popped out of their frames and sap squeezed from the very wood. The magimath once lived among the unholy wood-worshipers of Greenarch; probably one of his tricks.

  The cold fingers of shock tightened themselves on Telvyr. His most solemn promise to Magdeira—to entomb her, if it came to that, in a family crypt in Cor Cordum—came to him unbidden and unwelcome. He glanced at her ruined body crumpled on the pavement, like a pup that had raced beneath coach wheels.

  An unnerving howl of morbid lust from the leostrix’s maw switched his attention yet again. It had seized the whore in its mouth and was shaking her like a baby rabbit, knocking her senseless against the walls of her own armor, which gleamed with feline saliva.

  Perhaps they still had a chance. The whore was in trouble. The barrel of oil-pitch remained tucked under Arrowmask’s caravan. Gratia presumably still lurked atop the roof, awaiting the opening for dagger or garrote. Some surviving guards were taking up positions behind the magica-wracked wagon, and others edged around the tail of Arrowmask’s caravan, crossbows cocked. Telvyr calculated that even his worst strategic oversight—forgetting that halting the caravan would free its savage driver to fight—could be mended. Steeleye, the oversized she-beast, stood over the tumbled wagon, stamping and bellowing mindlessly like a bull still trampling a dead trespasser in its corral.

  Telvyr shook off the numbness seeping into his limbs and rose in an awkward crouch. He gave the whistle, an imitation of the nightjar, that instructed his children to aim their crossbows, and with a silent gesture directed those nearest him to target Elsbeth. He envisioned her falling, followed by Separatist back in his hand, a quick finish to the whore, and a quick spark to the oil-pitch.

  The iron stairs at the rear of Arrowmask’s caravan crashed down with a sound nearly as loud as the cry that accompanied it.

  “Arr, by me one good eye, I can see you being naughty!” the addled girl Mieux shouted, hopping off the last step with both feet, her fists clenched.

  She disappeared a moment behind the wolf-decorated hubcap, left there by the vanished Arrowmask, which stood nearly as tall as herself. Then the metal disc flashed in the light of lanterns and fire as she swung it into Ransoom’s guards with a dull ringing. They tumbled to the ground in useless unison.

  In the blink of an eye, Mieux hurled the hubcap to the road and jumped inside it, like a teacup in a saucer. The disc slid down the grade with a skin-crawling grinding sound, shedding sparks that illuminated her gigantic, glowering eyes. She looked like some absurd chimera of a vengeful Fury and a child thwarted at d
elaying her bedtime. Of course, in reality, she was merely the idiot reject of her own country and family; albeit one whose combat prowess had caused Magdeira to peg her as the number two strategic threat.

  Her expression remained as grave as her mode of travel was ridiculous. In less than a second, she slammed into the legs of Butterby’s guards, bowling them over as their crossbows loosed bolts aimlessly into the air.

  Telvyr stumbled forward to grab her, already knowing he would be far too slow in his armor. She sprang away, still gripping the hubcap, and cut a cartwheel in the air to add momentum as she tossed it at the leostrix.

  “Get that out of your mouth!” she shouted as the disc caught the cat’s shoulder. It indeed dropped its catch. Furiously fighting for its supper, it struck a menacing pose, arching its back while showing her both its real feline face and the blindly snapping false owl head.

  Heedless, the girl continued twirling and hand-springing, deftly snatching the cat’s whipping tail. A twitch of her head saved it from being crushed by the owl’s bite. As it was, the beak snipped off a swatch of her bangs.

  “Bad kitty! Bad! Bad! Bad!” she screamed as she leaned back, tugging on its tail like a ship rope.

  A dark shape swirled through the air, and Gratia was upon her. His acrobatic daughter ended her somersault as lithely as the equilibrique, and wrapped a garrote around that thin neck. Years earlier, he had observed his young daughter—the true child of his loins—beating a smaller girl who encroached on her corner of the public garden. He smiled now with the same fatherly pride.

  A backflip later, Mieux was the one doing the strangling, wrapping the cat’s tail around Gratia’s head. The ensuing combat was a blur of kicks and spins, flips and whirls, punctuated by yelps as the leostrix’s beak nipped one of the women. The equilibrique was by far the superior hand-to-hand combatant, but Gratia her equal in speed and agility, and her better in reach. The beast-mistress also had more tricks. When Mieux kicked her under the chin, knocking off her featureless mask and freeing her blonde curls, Gratia responded by tossing a pocketful of squirming toads in the girl’s face. They squished under the equilibrique’s bare feet, their slick guts sending her slipping onto her little bottom.