Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

  She cocked her head, her raven hair spilling over her shoulders in that nerve-grindingly perfect way. “You know what your problem is, Arrowmask?”

  “I’m of the expert opinion that there’s a lot more than one,” he cracked, wincing at the darkness.

  “Your problem,” she continued, ignoring his quip, “is assuming you’re the only one who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”

  “You think the rest of us aren’t winging it?” she continued, puffing blue smoke. “You think that paladin’s a genius, after he outnumbered, out-planned, and out-armed us, and we still fed him his own hot shit?”

  “Littalia’s still dead,” he grumbled, knowing it was pathetic, luxuriating in it.

  “Littalia’s a soldier. You’re upset just because this was a war instead of a bar fight? If you beat these odds in a street brawl, you’d be crowing about it to the cheapest whore or drunkest barfly.” She smirked down at him approvingly and handed him the cubeb. “Get over it. Take the win.”

  He shook his head and let himself smile, then laugh. This must be the first time in my life it feels good to be seen clean through. He took a drag on the cubeb and instantly felt his crotch stir at the flavor of her saliva.

  “Can I kiss you now?” he dared with a grin.

  “Fuck, no.”

  “Just thought I’d ask. It seemed like we had a special moment,” he said, flailing with the cubeb, spilling ash down his shirt.

  “Good for you. You should always take your shot,” she replied, jabbing a finger at him.

  She poked into a pouch on her belt and fished out a fingernail-full of hetbane. She put it on the tip of her tongue, which she then drew into her mouth and swallowed in a silky move that made him want to help spawn an entire new generation of Svetkovs.

  “You alright under that armor?” he asked instead, arching an eyebrow. “That’s enough hetbane to poison a well.”

  “Doing drugs makes me cool,” she said dismissively.

  So we’re back to normal now, he thought with a chuckle. “I’m glad I chose you for this journey. Or at least that my dice did. That Argento guy totally sucked.”

  She rewarded him with another pissy smirk. “You have decent taste—for a boy.”

  “You know, Littalia had some decent final days,” he said with a quaver. “I picked the lock on her chastity belt,” he confessed.

  She rose smoothly with another, warmer chuckle and let the memory float there between them for a second. Then she gave his shoulder a little tap with the toe of her boot as she drifted back into the wagon.

  “Like I said, Arrowmask—take the win.”

  He wrapped his cloak around himself against the chill and smiled again until he heard the steps on the lead wagon bang down. Littalia was a clump of bound blankets as the guards shouldered her out into the night.

  Ashton stood and watched a moment. Then he pulled a key out of his pocket, its head etched with a Gallatine “G,” its teeth still sharp, its surface still gleaming with mineral oil. With it, he opened the toolbox on the wagon’s side and drew out a spade. He held it over his shoulder.

  “Take the win.” He remembered winning Regulus’s game with its expendable pieces. He felt the perverse, tiny, secret victory of being left free of any nasty entanglements with Littalia. He figured you could call most anything a win, if you were crafty or sad or scared or selfish enough.

  Down the dots of caravan-lantern lights, Clyst saw him watching and gave a slow nod. Ashton followed them out into the dew-moistened fields and helped them dig her grave.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Rinka hunched within the cramped closet that doubled as toilet and shower. The frigid water from the rooftop rain barrel beaded on her skin as she secured a bandage over the wound in her chest. In the quiet between the plashing droplets, she could hear the unnatural incision. She gritted her teeth, then popped another lump of hetbane between them. She was eating enough of the stuff to make a great-grandmother’s panties as wet as the Godsblood. But the buzzing in her nipples and mound was only a slight distraction from the pain.

  What the fuck did they cut me with? And how did they know to do it in the first place? She leaned her forehead against the wall and closed her eyes. The Tetragate pigs knew enough to call me a “countess.” Could they have known more? Everything? If they did, why didn’t they tell Arrowmask? Why did they tell Telvyr? Or did the Thousand Leagues do its own research somehow?

  Then there was the woman who had done the carving. Her face was masked by her helm—and then by a Skógr fist. But those curls were a familiar celestial gold.

  Impossible, she thought. But then, so am I.

  She gently wrung her hair and scowled at the blank dark wall. Whatever. Let them know. It just gives me one more reason to kill them all.

  She opened the door, grabbed a towel from the hook beside it, and wrapped it around her midsection as she strolled to the small vanity she had set up in one window. The room was pleasantly warm thanks to Mieux stoking the stove to make a gigantic bowl of beef-and-noodle soup, the unjustly famous national dish of the Empire since the invasion of the Weàlae, whose taste buds worked about as well as their brains. She perched at the small dining table along the wall, slurping noisily. As Rinka exited the closet, Mieux turned her head fully to stare while sucking down a noodle between those plush lips. She kept on sucking and staring as she moved her head, tracking Rinka’s movement, the noodle stretching like a leash on a wayward dog.

  Rinka had found the girl surprisingly easy to live with. Aside from the fact that she appeared to somehow meditate crosslegged instead of actually sleeping, there were no weird-ass equilibrique rituals to put up with. At “home,” without the excitement of the whole wide world, Mieux was more quiet than not, reading her magazines or practicing her juggling. Or eating.

  Then there was the staring. It surely would bother the average person, but Rinka had never been average at anything. Someone was always checking her out constantly anyhow; if it was a cute schoolgirl for once, she wasn’t going to fight it. And she didn’t mind having a look back at that athletic little body. Or, though she’d never confess it under the worst tortures, watching some of Mieux’s adorable mannerisms.

  Still, there was something different about the current staredown, Rinka thought as she peered into the mirror and daubed away her ruined eye makeup. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a wrinkle of judgment in Mieux’s brow as she solemnly slurped the noodle until its end flicked against her lips and disappeared. It continued as she gravely picked bay leaves out of the bowl and replaced them with some small, hexagonal crackers. Mieux’s huge dark eyes gleamed portentously over the rim of the bowl as she tipped it into her mouth, gulping the broth. She chewed the crackers with serious intent. She licked her lips and patted her mouth with a perfectly folded napkin as if doing so was a somber judicial ritual of the land’s highest court.

  Finally, she put her hands in her lap and devoted herself to the stare. Her brow furrowed. Her lips pressed together, trembling. Her tiny nostrils flared. Her hips wiggled like a cat considering a pounce.

  Rinka turned in her chair with a sigh. “Well, let’s have it,” she said with a flick of her fingers.

  There was a second’s pause before Mieux’s question exploded like an oil-pitch barrel.

  “Are you an empousa!” she demanded, her skinny limbs quivering.

  Shit. Rinka flickered her eyelids, a charming look that usually solved any problem. “There’s no such thing as an empousa.”

  “There are whole plays about them!” Mieux counter-argued, springing to her feet and flailing her hands. “They are super beautiful noblewomen, mostly from Duxum or Millennium, who bite other girls on the neck when they are asleep! And drink their blood!”

  Rinka rolled her eyes.

  “Plus also!” Mieux continued, holding the floor, “The empousas are already dead! Death magica powers them! So they can’t be killed except by getting shot with a crossbow from the Temple of Light!
Or if they smell a giant onion that the river nomads hang inside their boat kitchens. One or the other, but mostly the crossbow!”

  “There’s a play about Ladypug, too, but were-dogs aren’t real,” Rinka noted, hoping to divert Mieux’s interests.

  “Nothing is impossible!” she retorted, quoting another of the play’s popular catchphrases while lifting her chin philosophically.

  Rinka smirked. “Empousas came from Duxum folklore. They were just a way for moronic peasants to express how scared they were of their betters. Some of whom were indeed violent—just like your beloved pig paladins.”

  Mieux’s huge liquid eyes burned. “Then how come you are from Duxum…”—she turned her head to the left, still staring—“…and totally super beautiful…”—her head rolling the other way—“…and when you got stabbed in the Thousand Leagues basement you had no aura!” she cried, stamping her slippered feet triumphantly. “No aura means a dead person!”

  Rinka’s eyes narrowed viciously, but Mieux rattled on heedlessly. “And how come you got shot in the belly with an arrow but there is no wound there at all now! And also the mean giant cat broke your arm but it is perfect now already with no splint or anything! And you have no scars anyplace even though you go totally crazy and fight all the time!”

  “Listen, Girl Cop. Maybe your equilibrique aura isn’t as perfect as you think it is when you go around judging everyone,” Rinka snapped. “Maybe you don’t know what you’re seeing, just like you don’t understand what people are saying half the time.”

  Mieux’s moon cheeks reddened, but her eyes flamed defiantly. Hurting her feelings wasn’t working anymore. Rinka suddenly felt trapped in the inescapable confines of the caravan and the useless wilderness outside. This sort of confrontation over her personal oddities was inevitable, but she had thought she’d have more time to prepare and keep a lid on it.

  “Then riddle me this!” Mieux cried, balling her fists on her hips. “What’s underneath the bandage on your shoulder, the only bandage you have ever worn in all the times I saw you get beaten up!”

  “Piss off,” Rinka replied with a little wince, turning back toward her makeup stand. Her mind raced.

  “Let me see!” Mieux screeched, darting forward with her stubby fingers twitching.

  “You little bitch!” Rinka cursed, trying to shove the glossy head away. But the girl was blindingly fast, ducking and rolling behind the chair until her little paws got under the bandage and tore it free.

  The wound winked open and shut, over and over, like a gouged-out eye. With a snicking sound, the slash opened between her collarbone and shoulder joint. It welled blood, then healed and vanished just as quickly—before slicing itself open once more.

  Mieux screamed something in her native tongue while dropping the bandage and covering her mouth with both hands.

  Rinka jumped to her feet, knocking the chair over, and grabbed the little cunt by the jaw with her left hand. With her right, she seized a fork off the table and pressed it against that fat cheek. The dark eyes half-closed like a dying baby bird as Rinka squeezed and lifted her to her tiptoes.

  “You want to see a real monster, bitch?” she sneered, looming over Mieux. “Empousas are for selling tickets to little twats like you. I didn’t bite girls. I flayed off their skin in front of their families. Played with the naked skull like a puppet until I smelled Mommy and Daddy piss and shit themselves. Then they got the same treatment. I did for it two hundred years and I can start again any fucking time you want.”

  “You are hurting me,” Mieux said with quiet composure. She blinked once. “I will hurt you back if I have to.”

  Rinka snorted, but a fighting threat from an equilibrique was not something to brush off lightly. She released Mieux and tossed the fork back to the table, retreating a few steps.

  Rinka fondled the amber grip of her dagger hanging from the bunk. “I don’t stay hurt. I don’t even stay dead,” she taunted, flicking her fingers in front of her in a mocking gesture of healing by spellcalling.

  But in her head, there were no jokes at all. Do I have to kill the bitch? All of them?

  Mieux stood there like a stupid lost child, her arms limp at her sides, absorbing Rinka’s words.

  “I think you’re just frightened. I am also,” she whispered.

  “You should be scared,” Rinka growled, sliding the dagger sideways out of its sheath and tapping her glittering fingernails on its blade. “You already know enough to convince our good, good friends here to torch me alive with lantern oil. Maybe you’d even strike the first spark from up there on your high horse.”

  “That is not fair to say!” Mieux cried sharply, glaring up at Rinka with her mouth set. “I have been your friend this whole time and I fought in battle to save you!”

  As Rinka cocked her head, considering the dangerous little potential tattle-tale, tears sprang from Mieux’s giant eyes, streaking her blazing cheeks.

  “I did every single one of the Thirty-Two Trials, even though it was totally hard, even though it hurt really bad!” she cried, her voice shaking, her face crumpling. “Even the one where I can’t tell anyone what it was, forever and ever, no matter how good it would feel to say!” She stamped both feet, clenched her fists, and shook her head rapidly in a flurry of dark hair. “So do not tell me anymore that I can’t keep a secret!”

  Rinka held her tongue, but also her dagger. The trials of the Sénche probably really were hardcore punishment rituals wrought by horny old masters perverse enough to make Pain herself blush. I’ve surely suffered more over the years than she has, but I won’t do her the dishonor of turning pain into a competition. Not that kind of pain.

  But that didn’t still mean that temple bell of a mouth wouldn’t ring at the wrong moment to declare her a “totally crazy empousa” in front of a less sympathetic crowd.

  Mieux suddenly sprang a yard forward. She shook her head to whip her tears off her cheeks like a fighter tossing off an encumbering jacket. She wagged a finger up at Rinka.

  “And don’t ever threaten our friends Ashton Arrowmask and Alfie the Stone Master! If you want to smash the precious gift of friendship and make an enemy to fight instead, then start with me and see how that goes for you!”

  The warrior spirit was as admirable as the emotional manipulation was transparent. Rinka sucked her cheeks and gestured casually with the menacing skin dagger.

  “So this is about taming me into your little best buddy?” She bared her teeth and grinned like a wolverine. “I’m not a good person.”

  Mieux’s face smoothed again like a banner amid the settling dust of a battle. She blinked silently.

  “No. But you are not a bad person.”

  Rinka felt something come loose inside her, like overcooked meat falling off the bone. A twitching stung the back of her throat and made her eyes water. She inclined her head and looked down at Mieux for a moment. Then she sat on the bottom bunk, legs crossed and toenails flashing lavender, and slid the dagger under her pillow.

  She patted the mattress. “Want to come sit with me?”

  Mieux nodded once before darting onto the bed and clambering right into Rinka’s lap. She perched crosslegged, her shimmering eyes inches from Rinka’s own. She smelled of chicken soup, crackers and orange peel.

  Rinka chose to mark this unbelievable intrusion with only a sigh rather than an over-the-knee belt-whipping. She looked down into that beseeching face and brushed the girl’s black bangs with her fingernails. She stroked the curve of a cheek with the back of her knuckles, right above the livid mark her grip had imprinted minutes before. Mieux blinked sweetly.

  For a moment, the truth lay between them like a coiled serpent ready to randomly spit its venom. Then Mieux curled a hand against the side of her own mouth.

  “It’s totally crazy that you are two hundred years old!” she whisper-shouted confidentially. “And that you can’t be hurt except for this cut that is super disgusting and weird!”

  “Tell me about it,” Rinka sigh
ed.

  Mieux nodded once, firmly. “Very well! It’s crazy because people die when they are like seventy years old, plus also…!”

  “Shhhh,” Rinka advised, pressing a finger against Mieux’s plush lips.

  “Is it because of Death magica!” Mieux demanded, talking heedlessly against the finger.

  Rinka sneered but resumed petting Mieux’s head. “Everyone thinks death is so evil,” she said bitterly. “It’s Life magica. Mindlessly fertile, blindly unceasing, madly clutching, pointlessly painful Life.”

  “Who called this spell on you!”

  Rinka cupped the girl’s chin and met her gleaming gaze with her own icy eyes. “The last friend to tell me I’m not a bad person. Until she learned otherwise.”

  “Did she like you so much she wanted you to live forever and ever!”

  “She hated me so much she wanted to torture me forever and ever.” She smiled coldly, until even that ember extinguished. “She had me executed by slow hanging. Every day. For two months. She would have had me dangling for a year and then burned me like a feast-day torch, if an invasion hadn’t accidently set me free.”

  Funny, how she could remember the smell of the oil on the chains and the sawdust from the freshly built gallows, the sound of the rope stretching, the burning pressure of her eyes popping out of their sockets—every detail. Yet her memory of Pwyll’s face was like a charcoal sketch worn to a blur by handling and sunlight and naughty children with erasers. Even though she would treasure the chance to disfigure it, a pleasure diluted by forgetting. Even though she had the little portrait to remind her, a painting that never caught the full joy, nor depth of perversity, behind the wall of that simper.

  Mieux’s eyes swelled. “She was not much of a friend to do that! I would never hang you even one time!”

  “Don’t be so sure. She saw me at my worst. I even killed her sisters. I deserved it.”

  Mieux absorbed this information with silent blinks. “Even though you should not have done those things, no one deserves to be hanged one hundred times!” She pressed a little paw softly to Rinka’s neck, where her pulse beat.