Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

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Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast Page 26

by John Ruch


  “Well, it happened. And maybe I even learned a lesson or two. Not that I wouldn’t cut the bitch’s head off for it.”

  Crawling on hands and knees into her thoughts was Pesh, that soft sponge soaking up her rage on a regular basis. There was a time Rinka would have made her a wall trophy, not a pet. Did I get all better? Or just different? She ran her tongue along the edges of her teeth and gazed down at Mieux.

  “Did your messed-up friend use her Life magica on other people also!” the equilibrique chirped.

  “I don’t know,” Rinka replied with a dismissiveness that masked a thousand suspicions. “Unless they show up on my doorstep, they’re not my problem.”

  “You need better friends!” Mieux cried. “In the One-Thousand-And-Three Fables it says that an honorable enemy is to be prized above an untrustworthy friend! And now you have some better friends in me and Alfie and also Ashton Arrowmask, even though his aura needs a lot of work!”

  “Well, we’re sure locked together in this now.” Rinka ran her nails lightly along that soft little face and considered Mieux. “But let’s keep this our little secret at this point. Trust is earned, and I believe I can stay my dagger as long as the rest of you do the same.”

  Mieux nodded firmly. “And I will keep your secret. But if you are mean and hurt me ever again, I won’t be your friend anymore!” Her brow crinkled at the mere thought. “But if you’re nice then I’ll be your friend forever!”

  Your ideas of “totally” and “forever” are as small as you are, Rinka thought, but why fight it? She flashed a smile and tossed the equilibrique a “fair enough.”

  Mieux rested a hand on Rinka’s cheek and stroked softly with her tough fingertips. She gazed upward with a shy half-smile counterbalanced by those bold, enormous eyes gleaming wetly.

  Rinka flinched and fought the urge to draw the dagger from beneath the pillow. No one in the past century had dared to touch her with this sort of gentle affection. Not without asking permission or begging indulgence. Mostly, just not at all.

  The two women sat silently for a time, exchanging stares and each caressing the other’s cheek. Rinka found herself wondering yet again what the girl wanted from her. But this time, she was more impressed by her bravery in demanding it. A warrior in all things, just like me.

  “Come here,” Rinka finally said. Mieux went agreeably limp as Rinka pulled her into a cuddle. Mieux laid her head on Rinka’s chest and nuzzled beneath her chin, clutching the taller woman in a wrestling hold.

  “Rin-chatte,” Mieux said, her voice muffled by cleavage.

  “Emi,” Rinka replied, echoing the nickname she’d heard Pesh using. The girl squeaked and rubbed her feet together in pleasure, clutching tighter as her slippers fell off. Rinka found herself grinning and planted a kiss atop that orange-scented head.

  “So you do not bite girls on the neck?” Mieux said.

  “Only if they pay Asvelt extra at the Incendium.”

  “I am glad you are just a fake empousa!”

  Rinka rolled her eyes, but chuckled. “Let me fuss over you for a change.”

  She slipped Mieux’s robe off her right shoulder. She allowed herself a glimpse of the girl’s breast, pert and firm. Mieux made no protest; they were both shameless, though Emi was obliviously shameless while Rinka was just shamelessly shameless.

  She ran her fingertips along the skin of Mieux’s back, detecting various scattered scars. Some were typical blade-made weals. Others were strange star-shaped inflictions that looked like burns. One of the trials, perhaps. She moved on to the bandages on Mieux’s shoulder. One covered a typical slash wound, but the larger hid a nasty, triangular cut with bruising around the edges. A nip from the leostrix’s beak, most likely.

  Rinka adjusted the bandages and rested her chin on Emi’s head. She rubbed the girl’s back in a slow circle. She had a sparrow’s weight, but a tiger’s strength. Rinka felt twice her size and half as full of unjaded passion.

  Cradling the girl to herself was unexpectedly pleasant. She fiddled with Emi’s hair and patted more kisses on her scalp while the girl made little noises against her throat. But something else roiled within Rinka. Not just the familiar urge to lock a collar around her neck, or drop her pants and give her a thrashing. Mieux’s affection was kindling for a slow-burning fire of some category of suspicious disgust. Rinka was too battle-weary to figure out exactly what type, even if she cared to.

  “Hop up,” she commanded, giving the girl’s firm bottom a couple of pats.

  Mieux immediately complied, rolling off her lap and springing to her bare feet. She stood there, unfailingly straight as a steel dildo, blinking and smiling that half-smile. Her left cheek was red from pressing against Rinka.

  “You should go have Trelleck take a look at that shoulder wound,” Rinka advised.

  Mieux nodded. “You’re right! And you should have your super weird cut looked at by Alfie in case he knows magica to fix it! But I won’t say anything because I promised to keep it secret!”

  Rinka nodded distractedly. “Off with you, then, Emi.”

  “Very well—Rin-chatte!” she cried with embarrassing relish, tightening her robe and darting out of the door.

  Rinka whipped her towel off and downed another lump of hetbane before slipping into bed. She touched herself idly to stave off the bite in her shoulder, thinking of all the sweet girls who had sat in her lap. Mieux just might be the sweetest, she mused as she rolled her head on the pillow.

  But she left the dagger sharp and silent beneath it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  They could see Calisia five miles out. It was built out of purple stone and had a fortified bridge over the mile-wide river, but otherwise it looked the same as every other city: a bunch of fancy towers surrounded by a giant wall. No doubt the wall was walked by soldiers getting paid fuck-all so the snobs in those towers could sleep soundly. That was always the same, too.

  Lain Clyst squinted against the “twixt-n-tween weather,” as they called it in the army—the kind of mist that existed somewhere between rain and not-rain, lit by a glare between sunny and not-sunny—and watched Arrowmask gnaw a fingernail as he sat on the opposite bench atop the lead wagon. He’d considered gutting the mangy little git. It was nothing personal—Arrowmask just happened to be the kind of smirky lowlife who practically begged to be a target. Murder would’ve been on the brain of a priest of Tranquility after mercy-killing a comrade and leaving her in a roadside hole dug from dirt laced with piss-bottles and jack-off mags tossed as litter by a thousand years of caravans.

  Littalia died in a bullshit way, that chance grab putting her face to the wheel, but then, what death ever wasn’t bullshit? ’Specially on post, you didn’t sob about it to your fucking Bitey Kitty doll. You gritted your teeth cleaning up your friend’s innards, you laughed at Trelleck’s pitch-black jokes about it, and you saved up the hate for the day you caught up with the pig-twat who was responsible.

  ’Course, it’d be different if they had been bodyguarding the usual type of seat-polishing civilians who’d hide in their bunks while a veteran optio died for them. He might be dishing out some of that hate right now, paladins be damned. But these civs? Shit. He’d seen legionnaires weighted down with so many medals they couldn’t piss standing up for doing stunts half this hardcore. Bastards fought like a wasp’s nest some dumbass slapped a jar over and didn’t know what the fuck to do next.

  Arrowmask using the enemy wagon as a latrine right in the midst of battle—he’d be scoring a free drink at any bar in the Empire for retelling that one, even if no one believed him. The butch driver tearing people apart with her bare hands, the old dandy demolishing a wagon with magica, the Voidiva duking it out with a tiger—he’d never seen the like of it.

  And that pipsqueak Mieux, she gave Littalia a chance, darting out there to save her with only her pajamas as protection from a paladin’s sword that had cut right through his own shield. He’d asked her after how she learned to fight like that. “My aura is to
tally great!” she chirps, like it’s no big deal, the little hardass.

  It all raised some ball-shrinking questions about who was bodyguarding who. Not that he felt like he owed them anything. His rump decanus had spilled it share of blood and guts. Arrowmask had done the decent thing, helping them dig Littalia’s grave when a privileged posh cunt like him didn’t have to; but then, he’d also been screwing her like a privileged posh cunt while Lain stayed locked up in Svetkov’s cock prison. Didn’t think they knew about it, either, as if the decanus weren’t professional watch-keepers, for fuck’s sake. And thinking of the Voidiva, he couldn’t wait for the chance to get her all on fours learning to say “yes, sir” if she wanted his choke-chain off her neck.

  All things in their season. For now, he was happy enough to travel with what was basically a second decanus, not a bunch of cushion-squishers. Like them or not, he understood them. Like good soldiers, they were built for insane danger; it was straight civ life that would trip them up.

  Good thing, too, ’cause Calisia was starting to look like trouble.

  Every once in a while, creepy bluish flashes blinked over the city and across the Atelrush to the north. Looked like lightning, only too slow and with no thunder.

  Meanwhile, the city seemed have shit itself in fear, dumping its population a mile out into the surrounding farmland. Fields, shacks and tents were fortified with a half-assed wall of sharpened logs, behind which teemed thousands of dirty-looking buggers. Presumably they thought the breathing room would keep them away from the “Leveling,” or whatever their plague was. Pit latrines and drinking out of rain barrels was no way to stamp out disease. Neither was keeping bunnies and baby raccoons as pets on strings, as almost everyone seemed to be doing, even the guards who stepped out warily as the caravan approached. When Arrowmask leaned over the rail to have a word, one of those raccoons took a leap at him off a guard’s shoulder.

  The people didn’t have any better manners. They weren’t letting anybody in until the mayor and the temples had figured out a cure. Not even adventurers willing to risk a ride through their city of dumbasses. They didn’t seem to get why anyone would want to use their mile-long, billion-aurei bridge. Those flashes of light were quick-burning of plague corpses courtesy of some temple magimath working some trick on pitch fumes. How come it was also flashing in the boonies across the river like a perv at a convent window? They only answer they got was the stare of crazy eyes.

  Whole place had the nasty stink of insanity, that mix of unwashed pits and brain fever sweating out the pores. He’d smelled it before, on shipwreck survivors who’d had a nosh on their best friend’s liver. Bad catches you were better off throwing back.

  The bosses held a conclave in the dining wagon. Took them a quarter-hour to come to the brilliant decision that trying to boss their way through an entire city of insane plague victims wouldn’t work. At least he had the Voidiva to ogle. She was wearing silver leopard-print shorts with dots of quartz crystals forming a wolf’s head over one ass cheek, and a blue pull-over shirt decorated with black lip-prints tight across her tits. As if the cock cage hadn’t chafed enough during battle, he thought. Her own lips were painted purple with tiny white skulls as polka dots. She shot him a withering look where her earrings did the talking; the one on the left ear had a pendant reading “Fuck,” the one on the right adding, “Off.”

  The plan was to dodge the whole city and head to the river, see if the Trals would take them across. Lain didn’t like the sound of that. The river nomads were like Godsblood pirates, only mangier, shadier, hungrier and twisted up in some strange religion with no gods. Some said they were the only ones who knew how to get rid of the crib-thieving imps that steal children in the night, leaving behind a faceless driftwood doll; others said the Trals did the kidnapping themselves. Either way, he wasn’t keen on crossing the Atelrush in wagons balanced atop their flatboats.

  The river was dotted with Traline vessels. Most were the flatboats they used to get under the low, ancient bridges around Cor Cordum. A couple had cottage-sized wheelhouses, probably the homes of their chieftains. All had garish paint and pennants, the former faded and the latter tattered. They had ramshackle quays floating on old barrels—probably set up to avoid taxes of the city’s docks downtstream—and a few equally shitty buidlings, half wood and half tent stitched together from old carpets and such.

  You could tell one was a tavern from the pile of empty bottles out front and the piss trough out back. After they circled the wagons, Arrowmask headed straight for it, keeping everyone else behind—except Lain and Trath as back-up. My lucky fucking day.

  Him and Trath plunked down at a table where a patch-furred cat roamed between their feet. Fuck if he wasn’t flea-bitten immediately. A group of kids played in the straw on the dirt floor, and he flipped them a coin to watch them fight over it. An oversized one came up with it, grinning like a savage and biting the metal with a victim’s suspicion. Lain had a kid somewhere on the Kundh Coast. Could only hope he scrapped like that. Or maybe not, if the day ever came he went abroad looking for the bloke who’d knocked up his mommy.

  Meanwhile, Arrowmask bellied up to the crates that passed for a bar, each one saying “Property of Lampley’s—Do Not Steal” in letters burned into the wood. A yard-long pike hung stuffed on the wall, its scales unpainted and flaking, where a real hardbitten dock dive might have a swordfish or a bloodrunner shark. The place was full of lazy Trals. For hats, they wore rags tied tight. Where a real Godsblood pirate might have a pearl earring and a gold necklace, they wore polished freshwater clamshells and strings of old iron coins from Atel’s days. Greasy, tacky little shits.

  Arrowmask hit it off with them right away, of course. Bitched about the weather, badmouthed the crazy squares behind the blue wall, casually dropped in how he’s a smuggler who just hit a nice score and wants to buy everybody a round to celebrate. Then he launched into some bullshit story of a smuggler ship mutiny back when the navy was offering amnesty to pirates and a ransom for any vessel handed over. The weasel leaned over the drink he was carefully nursing while everybody else got shitfaced. Told how he found two of these mutineers killing the captain—his best friend—near the head. Ran ’em through, but too late to save his pal. Still had a dozen mutineers elsewhere on deck.

  “So I went mid-deck with the captain’s bloody hat speared on my sword and dragging his body with the other hand, boasting how I killed him and took command,” Arrowmask blathered. “‘The ship is ours! We’ll head full-sail to Cor Cordum and the bounty! But I’ll need a first mate,’ I says. They all know the first mate gets a bigger share of the bounty—not to mention a better chance of murdering me in my sleep and taking over as captain themselves.”

  The Traline dopes were entranced by this shit. Lain sniffed his beer and scowled at the rank stink as he listened to Arrowmask ramble.

  “I look steely-eyed at the mutiny ringleaders—Silvertooth Jack, Halbert the Dog, and Millennium Pete. I tell them they’re all good men”—the Trals interrupted him with stupid laughter like this was the cleverest scam since somebody first counted cards—“but I can have only one first mate and they’ll have to earn it. ‘In our battle, the captain lost his bejeweled sword overboard,’ I say, pointing to the exact spot with the tip of a boarding pike. ‘The first man to fetch me that sword can keep it and serve as my right hand besides.”

  Trath was pulling funny faces and making Lain laugh, but he waved him off to hear out the tale.

  “The three of them jump into the water while their henchmen cheer them on and start laying bets on the ship rail. Halbert’s killed by the other two almost immediately. Jack and Pete start diving, over and over, tussling to find the blade. After a while, Jack wears out and doesn’t come up again. Pete pumps his fist in the air to his fans and gets ready for another dive, when a shark snatches him under.” Arrowmask grinned and leaned on the bar with one arm. “Well, without their ringleaders, the rest lost their guts. We clamped them into irons. I sailed for Three N
ail Island to sell the booty and swap for a crew I could trust a little better.”

  The Trals hooted and hollered over this claptrap, but one of them had a few more brains.

  “And the jeweled sword? Did you ever go back for it?” he asked, pointing with the spit-slimed neck of his beer bottle.

  “What sword?” Arrowmask said breezily with a shit-eating grin.

  Next thing you know, the locals are buying Arrowmask the drinks and asking what they can do him for. Lain chomped on a disgustingly bitter, bright-pink pickled egg. It was easier to swallow than Arrowmask’s tales. Is this how he got handed the keys to the fucking city? Charming that consul with fantasies of what cool shit might happen if he ever pried his fat ass out of his desk chair and hit the high seas?

  Arrowmask, meanwhile, was all winks and nose-taps. “Why, yes, there is something you can do for me, as it happens.”

  A half dozen of ’em leaned in, toy jewelry swinging from their horseshit-filled ears, to find out what they could do him for.

  “I’d love your help smuggling some very precious cargo.” The classic dramatic pause of the loudmouthed barfly. “Me!”

  Like whoever invented the stink-proof golden chamberpots the army’s legates all availed themselves of, Arrowmask had elevated taking the piss into an art. The Trals roared with laughter, reveling in this crap precisely because it was as tacky as they were.

  No way they’d take them across the river, where the blue lights flashed—anyone who did never came back. But it just so happened they knew a perfect sneak-hole into the city, if Arrowmask wanted to try his luck with its leaders and its bridge. And Arrowmask was gonna get the full tour for a few coins, some bolts of eye-watering cloth Rinka had brought along, and, if Lain was hearing right, a promise to marry some Traline girl, who Arrowmask surely would leave at whatever heathen shrine passed for an altar.

 

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