Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

  A guard’s gray eyes glared at him through a grill. Her disembodied voice told him to get lost and clear the stoop so visitor carriages could pull up.

  “I happen to be the guest you anticipate,” Ashton lied automatically. He judged the squint of the gray eyes a moment. “The…Leveling investigator,” he bluffed, gesturing with a con-man’s open palm.

  Gray Eyes relaxed. Ashton flashed a double-duty grin, genuine in his pleasure at hitting the guess, phony in his attempt to charm. “I was running a bit early, and it’s such a beautiful night, I decided to walk rather than ride,” he elaborated pointlessly.

  “Your papers,” Gray Eyes demanded.

  “Ah, yes.” Much like one of his morning wanks in the Jury Lane, Ashton patted himself down while dreaming up some nonsense. “Unfortunately, it seems my valet forgot them back at the mansion.” He gestured piteously at Mieux, who offered only, “What is a valet!”

  “Come back when you got ’em.” Gray Eyes slammed the grill shut on any further wit.

  Ashton turned to Mieux. “It’s yet another thing I’ll never have. Come on.”

  Ashton’s mind raced. He would have been obsessed with the challenge of getting into the place even without the imminent peril facing Alfie and Rinka. He stalked down a street that followed the base of the wall, looking for any loose grates or makeshift ladders. Still, he found time as well to think, Gray Eyes has nice eyes.

  He glanced at Mieux. She was more grimly obsessed, to the point that she didn’t notice as they marched past a theater showing Gone with the Slavery. She barked a few palace-invasion concepts that even Ashton dismissed as far-fetched.

  They rounded a corner dominated by a tavern with its shutters pulled for the night. With routine suspicion, Ashton shot a sideglance at two tipsy guys hanging out on the curb. One was tall, elegant, clad in cream-colored formal wear, and puffing a silver pipe. The other, gussied up in high-end servant’s livery, sat on a suitcase and held an umbrella across his knees. Nice clothes means not-so-nice people, Ashton mused misanthropically as he overheard a snatch of their conversation.

  “No need to rush,” Pipe Dude was saying. “He’ll pay beastly well, but I’d rather be doing simple divorce cases someplace without a plague. Somewhere with a decent local and some proper cathouses. If one would just come to mind…”

  Ashton and Mieux were nearly past them when the dreaded sniggering arrived. They had been drunk-detected.

  “Now that’s a sweet little ass!” Pipe Dude belched.

  Ashton pretended he didn’t hear them, and further pretended that Mieux didn’t, either.

  He immediately hated himself for this peculiar strain of cowardice. He’d leap into any insane bloodbath of a battle to save a friend in a millisecond. But when a friend got humiliated or insulted, his mind twisted it up so he somehow calculated that if he stuck up for them, he was making it worse. And now, even if he did say something, all his time-wasting brain-churning made it too late.

  He glanced guiltily toward Mieux and saw only cobblestones. She had already trotted back to Pipe Dude and was frowning up at him.

  “Well, hello, little lady,” Pipe Dude smarmed as his lackey giggled.

  Mieux stamped firmly on his right foot. As he collapsed screaming to his knees, his pipe trailing smoke as it spun into the gutter, she poked a finger at him.

  “You have the aura of a jerk! It is a jerk aura!” she cried. “You must fix it or people will keep kicking you over and over!”

  The minion tried some dumb move and ended up on his ass after Mieux hooked his own umbrella handle around his ankle. “You also have the jerk problem!” she cried, brandishing the brass tip at him.

  Now that Mieux had sorted things out, Ashton strolled up confidently. “Yeah,” he added stupidly.

  A rectangle of tan leather sat on the curb. Seemed Pipe Dude had lost his wallet when he bent over to fondle his shattered instep as if it was the nearest barmaid’s rump. Ashton stepped on the wallet and deftly kicked it behind him for later retrieval.

  Dumping the contents of the suitcase into the gutter ensured that the Jerk Aura Twins would be too busy to give chase. Ashton scooped up the wallet as he and Mieux moved a few alleys away. He stopped under a lantern hung outside a shop’s delivery entrance and glanced at Mieux. Her brow remained furrowed, her feelings still scraped raw. He wanted to say something comforting. But he was just a thief holding a wallet, and his own aura was probably quite jerk-colored.

  He cheered himself by shaking a handful of aurei from the wallet. There also were ID papers and a letter of credit in the name of a “D. Craigh,” and a card from a dive called the Hot Box. Then there was a packet of identical business cards, fancy little things the cream color of the prick’s suit, with raised gold-leafed lettering:

  DAETAN CRAIGH

  INVESTIGATOR EXTRAORDINAIRE

  MATTERS PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

  Five minutes later, a pair of gray eyes swelled as they scanned the ID papers through the metal screen.

  “Daetan Craigh—the West’s greatest detective!” Gray Eyes marveled.

  “You said it, not me!” Ashton replied unctuously with a panic-masking grin as the gate creaked open in welcome before them.

  The curtains of blood billowing from Rinka’s sword. The biting greenwood smoke clinging to the heavy, humid air. The intermingled stench of decaying carcasses and humus. The screams people make when killing, and the different screams they make when dying. The garish hues of jungle flowers illuminated by burning buildings in the night. The dislocation in recognizing those species and that architecture as native to the Jadal.

  Every bit of this place they had so suddenly appeared was overwhelming—but none moreso than the rage.

  The rage didn’t build. It came from nowhere as an instanteous pressure drumming on his heart and bulging his eyes. Rinka surely felt the same, as she fought madly, hacking at the approaching troops with blind wood-chopper swings, a move tactically suitable only in the sense that they wore tree-bark armor. A familiar russet dog suddenly lept beside her, ears flat in rabid aggression. A throat was in its jaws within the second.

  The same compulsion consumed Alfie. He didn’t want to bother with spellcalling, just to stab with his stone knife.

  Yet by his conscious thought of spellcalling, he realized the rage itself was a thing of magica. He was able to feel its edges, like the dogeared page of a book in the dark. A quick unsorcelling, dared without any warding, made the feeling vanish. He fell to his knees, panting into the bloody mud.

  With his full senses and sensibilities, the horror of their situation now fell upon him. He preferred being blinded by rage. Without a doubt, they were in the Jadal, at least fifteen-hundred miles from Calisia, in the remains of some battle-wracked village. The nine Weàlae warriors assaulting them with tortoise-shell hatchets and giant-thorn spears were hardly the first unwelcome guests here. While some houses were newly aflame, others were charred rubble from weeks or months previous. And the ground was littered with corpses. Of those that had not skeletonized, some were recognizable variously as jungle beasts and domestic pets. With a piteous howl, their recent canine companion joined the fallen. Others were human—many Weàlae, just as many Corcorids in civilian garb.

  The Leveled of Calisia.

  They lay very flat indeed. Adults and children, those finely dressed and those in rags. None of them, thank Night, were Arrowmask or Mieux.

  There was no sign of anyone else alive, including whomever was responsible for the monstrous act of pitting spell-crazed citizens and children against footsoldiers. Such a feat must have required the ultimate power of their fickle and ferocious gods.

  Leveling Rinka would be a challenge even for them. She stood splayed-legged, filleting anyone in reach. But she would defeat herself soon enough. The poor girl fought insanely, her breathing ragged, her exhaustion approaching.

  Alfie fairly exhausted himself as well by calling another unsorcelling on her, and leaving his own future health up to For
tune. She did not pause in her combat, and recklessly left her helmet still hanging on her belt, but her movements adopted a new precision and control.

  Still, that allowed two of the warriors to dare flanking her and prodding at Alfie with their spears. Backing away, he found himself tripping ingloriously over a putrefied forest boar.

  As the spears closed in, Rinka threw herself bodily across them, snapping the shafts. From the ground, she severed one warrior’s legs at the knees. Then she tripped his fellow and rolled atop him, peppering his face and neck with dagger jabs. Nasty business, professionally done. She snickered as she worked.

  When all were dead, Rinka pulled Alfie to his feet. For a long moment, enough for the monkeys and insects to resume their calls, they looked at each other in the firelight. Sweat plastered Rinka’s hair to her head and made her mascara streak as if her eyes exuded pure black hatred. Enemy blood dripped from the breasts of her armor into the mouths of its infant dragons. The lass is either the first person I’d want to be stranded in a violent jungle with, or the last, Alfie thought with unease.

  Finally, the silence was broken.

  “What the fuck,” Rinka half asked, half-spat.

  She took the news with composure, merely flicking her eyes warily at the surrounding jungle. As she considered, he could hear the clicking of beetles crawling to feast on the latest corpses.

  “I assume if you could get us back, we wouldn’t still be standing in this shithole,” she remarked.

  When his heartbeat slowed to something less resembling a carpenter’s hammer just before lunch break, Alfie would fully consider the theoretical possibility that the anchoring ward may offer them a route home. It would necessitate deciphering the sloppy curves of widuwita magica that hung over the landscape. And unbiddening oneself would take as much unthinkable, mysterious power as being bidden did.

  “Not without help,” he replied, sparing her such details. “And it’s a bit odd there’s no one here to demand it from. Biddening’s really just a complicated way of hiring a bodyguard. Plain enough what danger we were preventing. But who were we guarding?”

  Rinka’s eyes continued flicking, then settled on a spot somewhere above Alfie’s head. She gave a nod. He looked up.

  A dozen feet up among the overhanging branches, barely visible in the smoke and shadows, was a tower-like hut. Its round walls of woven branches were built along the tree’s massive trunk for support, and were interlaced with living vines to provide camouflage.

  Rinka pulled herself into the branches with a boost from Alfie, and returned the favor by lowering a rope ladder she discovered. Her armored shoulder battering the door served in lieu of a knock.

  As a former King of Vegetative Magica, Alfie was not surprised to find that the wooden tower was the lair of a widuwita. As was typical, its contents were bizarre—unfurled snakeskins, heaps of adder stones, Atel’s Trail charts, fulgurites—yet arranged with a tasteful sensitivity. Indeed, all widuwitas were artists, manipulating magica through emotion and craft rather than mathematics. This one was a sculptor of clay whose massive spellcalling of late had resulted in an exquisitely detailed landscape of cliffs, waterfalls and peaks sprawling across an entire tabletop.

  The widuwita, on the other hand, was quite surprised to have visitors. He lept to his feet, knocking his curiously pleated green cowl askew and holding up strong, clay-smeared hands. He was dressed in tanned skins in the local fashion. An amorphous jade pendant swung on his neck. He was perhaps fifty, his arms strong from sculpting, but his face thin with sleeplessness and his eyes sunken. His beard was trimmed around the bright green tattoos adorning his cheeks, reflecting a rank akin to a Corcorid mayor.

  Rinka’s terrible beauty and impressive armaments had the standard stunning effect upon him. So did Alfie speaking a warning in the local Grenold tongue.

  “I…I did not know Yslifrag would release anyone from the madness of the biddening,” the widuwita said shakily, naming his god of vengeance.

  Rinka sneered as Alfie translated. “I don’t need your magica to make me angry,” she snarled, kicking the table into the widuwita’s stomach. He gasped as the sculpture crumbled into useless chunks.

  “Blast it, lass, must you speak only in epitaphs!” Alfie remonstrated, stepping between them. “We may need his magica to get home. Let’s hear the man out.”

  Alfie helped the widuwita to his feet, while also preventing any nasty magical surprises by placing him in a thumb-lock—a little trick he’d picked up from Arrowmask. They quickly learned he was named Cunodua, and had managed to pull off a biddening spree thanks to the divine interventions of Yslifrag and Aithewyn, too.

  “Impressive, indeed—but why, man?” Alfie demanded. “You’re emptying an Imperial city! Dooming children to throw themselves onto soldiers!”

  “We fight against the worshipers of a new god, one with no name,” the man replied tremulously. “In the past year, this worship spread throughout towns to the east. Their god is harsh and demands constant sacrifice.”

  Alfie knew the import of such a strong judgement coming from a widuwita; the standard Green Weàlae gods were hardly the pleasant sort to tuck one into a bed with a hot toddy.

  “Some of our people converted, and slew their own families,” the widuwita continued. “As for the rest of us, refusal meant invasion. By warriors and beasts alike. Here in Herlwaine and in dozens of other villages. All the way to the sea, it could be.”

  Alfie exchanged glances with Rinka as he translated this tale of a horrid new deity. “Ask him why he’s still summoning people to fight here,” she said. “Maybe he doesn’t know they’ve already burned all his stick huts. Or are we just covering his wrinkled ass?”

  “Why did you bring us here? What is left to defend?” Alfie asked more judiciously.

  Cunodua examined each of them with his wise eyes. His shoulders slumped an inch under an invisible weight.

  “I will show you,” he nearly whispered.

  With Rinka pointing her dagger in his direction, they allowed him to open a door behind a tapir skin, and followed him down a narrow passage to a similar portal. “This is what the new god demands,” he said, and pushed the door open.

  Children filled the room.

  At least two dozen of them stared from benches and makeshift beds. Still more looked down from walkways on two floors above the atrium-like chamber. All had the disciplined silence of the fugitive.

  Alfie’s eyes met Rinka’s knowingly once again. A new cult demanding child sacrifice. Practically the mirror image of what befell Steeleye’s village in the Vast.

  “The people brought here from your city…” Cunodua let his words trail off as he made a face like a man about to spit poison he had just sucked from a snakebite. “What would you have done?” he finally concluded, gesturing at the children.

  As Alfie translated, Rinka’s face darkened with a brutality deeper and older than the sensual violence that usually animated her. “Anything. I’d do anything,” she said coldly, in a tone indicating she already had, several times.

  “Not everyone would agree with killing children to rescue children,” Alfie told both her and Cunodua in the suitable languages. “Nor with killing us, for that matter. Can you send us back home? Perhaps we could take the children with us.”

  “I do not know,” Cunodua replied. “I would have to speak with the adder stones and consult Atel’s Trail. But there is no time! They will attack again, and I must have another army ready.”

  “Now you’ve got something better than an army,” Rinka boasted. “Just tell me who needs to die.”

  The widuwita at last was spurred to ask the obvious question: “Who are you?”

  They explained as best as they could. They astonished Cunodua with the truth of how far his biddening had cast its magical net. They learned that the fiend leading the invasion was one Tywi of Thaneyll, a former high widuwita who sang her spells. And finally they agreed that they would attempt to distract this Tywi from her evil ends, if
not defeat her outright, to purchase time for Cunodua to find another way out—for them and for the children.

  There was every possibility that Cunodua would simply take the opportunity to retreat with the children. Still, it was worth chancing a faster way back than marching to the sea, possibly through other fronts of the same war, and attempting to find a ship homeward. Night only knew what Arrowmask and Mieux were facing alone in Calisia, but at least it was not, for the moment, any further biddening.

  Before he joined Rinka in stealing a few winks, Alfie looked in on the children again. He recalled his pockets contained two sticks of rock candy that the little equilibrique had pressed upon him one evening. The smiles were grand as they shared the treats politely, eventually even passing them up to their brethren above. Always something a bit precocious about Green Weàlae children compared to their urban counterparts. Have to be, to survive in a place like this.

  The sharing urge was as infectious here as anyplace else. A few of the bolder children pressed treasures into his hands—a feather from a Eubachtrian pheasant, a pebble glittering with mica. A girl of about five years, her hair pulled back into twin topknots, stepped smiled shyly and opened a pocket in her boarskin to share a secret: a tiny squirrel or chipmunk with reddish fur, a blunt snout, and bright eyes. She gave its head a pet and offered him the same opportunity. “We’re not allowed to have animals!” one of her peers protested, soon joined by others. It’s cute enough. A polite little headrub and she can put it away to silence the fuss.

  The creature leaned its head into his petting fingers approvingly, rubbing back with all of its miniature might. The petting seemed to overstimulate it. The beastie pressed its head into his fingertips aggressively, squeaking and attempting a scamper up the sleeve of his robe. He shook it off with a friendly chortle. He was still smiling when the blood jetted into his face.

  The creature had gone straight for the girl’s throat, gnawing a rathole into her flesh. As she grabbed at it, it nipped off a fingertip and delved beneath her clothes. Wet clacking bites commenced beneath.