by John Ruch
“She first appeared in the totally great play His Crime, Her Kewl!” Mieux continued.
“What’s her technique for solving mysteries?”
“First, she knows everything in the world! When she was a little girl, she was aboard a ship carrying the entire library of a prince so it could go to a new university! Then the ship wrecked on an island and she was the only survivor, so she read every single book until she got rescued!”
Ashton looked at her blankly.
“Now she looks super-hard for clues that no one else would know the meaning of!” Mieux chattered. “And when she finds one, she says, ‘What a cool clue!’”
“A cool clue,” Ashton repeated, feeling himself slumping into the chair.
“No, you have to say it the right way!” Mieux commanded. “‘What a kewwwwl clllyuuuu,’” she enunciated, cocking her head and posing her hands with pinkies extended.
Ashton put his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes. So I just have to become the world’s smartest person with the world’s dumbest catchphrase. As Mieux crawled back onto the bed and began chewing on the sorbet ice irritatingly, he contemplated ordering enough liquor to finally kill off his sobriety once and for all.
“What is an ‘arrowmask’!” Mieux suddenly demanded, startling him out of his funk. He looked up to find her watching him expectantly as ice crunched between her molars.
“What’s a ‘Mieux’?” he shot back.
“I am a Mieux!” she chirped.
“I think you can see where this conversation is heading.”
“But Mieux is a name! An arrow and a mask are things that are for real!” she lectured, leaping back to her feet, her bangs swinging. “And they are totally different things that don’t go together! You can’t shoot a mask out of a bow, and you can’t wear an arrow on your face! Well, without getting hurt super bad, anyway!”
He folded his arms and leaned back in the chair, closing his eyes. “Some things just don’t mean anything at all,” he explained.
She counter-chattered something, but Ashton wasn’t paying attention. His eyes blinked open as he grinned broadly to himself.
I think I just solved our mystery.
“You actually like this nature shit, don’t you?” Rinka grumbled, peeling a spiderweb off her hair.
Alfie panted a moment as they sat together on the damp log amid the jungle mist and scattered moonlight. He sucked some water out of a rainbarrel-plant stem and offered it to her. “It does one good to get out for a trot after all those days in the caravan. Though I must confess I can’t trailblaze as quickly as I once did.”
Rinka glowered as she produced a lipstick from her belt pouch and dabbed her mouth an asphyxiated blue. He detected a slight wince pinching the corners of her eyes.
“Something troubling you, eh? Are you injured, lass?”
“This whole place is a pain in my ass,” she said dismissively, smacking her lips to spread the color.
He didn’t believe her, but he was not about to grumble over his Jadal Foot acting up again, either. Embarrassing enough he had to ask for yet another pause in their day-long march from the village to confront the spellsinger of Thaneyll. And she was certainly giving them plenty of larger concerns.
An eerie pale-emerald light filtered through the tree canopy from the direction of the town. Accompanying it was an otherworldly song combining ancient Weàlae shanty and ballad melodies with Greenarch birdsongs and frog-calls, along with less identifiable tones punctuated by baby-like cooing that gave a sticky, sentimental effect. Spellsingers were soloists, yet this song was supported by a sizeable chorus. And while spellsongs were always as brief as their magical results, this one stretched on like a storm one hunkered under a table fervently wishing an end of. Presumably, such was the sustained effort necessary to hypnotize an entire army into child-annihilators—and quite probably even worse crimes. One could accomplish more than enough evil with typical spellcalling, after all. Alfie recalled Melthissa’s face as it was, and as it became. A chill passed through him.
“I can’t wait to shove a fist down her piehole,” Rinka remarked, breaking his revereie. “This crap sounds worse than that idiot Woodgreen singing the Tetragate anthem.”
“Quite. Let’s see how much worse, shall we?”
They crept forward three hundred yards through the underbrush until the trees segued into meadow. They crouched behind a curtain of vines. They were on a rise above Thaneyll town, the clearing ornamented with a double ring of limestone menhirs holy to the widuwitas. Design was meant to be dramatic and inspiring, and surely was in normal use. But now, under the nameless new deity, it had been redecorated into something utterly gobsmacking.
A vortex of yellow light swirled fifty into the air from the spot where the menhir-rings interlocked. Its sides were wrapped in an undulating, translucent green skin composed of veiny scales. Alfie recognized them as the gigantic leaves of the lakeen tree, which grew twenty feet long and ten broad, with razor-sharp edges. Adhering to the column of light, they shifted in concert with the song, like an outsized wind chime. He required no confirmation that the whole job was magical, but any doubts would have been erased by the glittering blue crystals that drifted from the top of the vortex and dusted the surrounding area like an azure snow. That was the hallmark of excess magica interacting with the humid air and precipitating out in mineral form—probably quite toxic. Rather unnerving, the idea of someone possessing surplus magica for the first time in living memory.
That someone was plainly Tywi. Clad in a robe of Eubachtrian pheasant feathers, she posed beneath the light vortex, producing it with melodramatic movements of her limbs and the maudlin strains of her lullabye-like song. Encircling her—a third human ring interlocked with those of the menhir—was her chorus of eight men and women in common widuwita garb; at the feet of each lay some unidentifiable gray-furred animal glistening with the blue dust. In a wider circle still, surrounding the entire arrangement, were two dozen warriors with tree-bark armor and thorn-spears. Torchlights danced in the town below; perhaps the next round of troops on the march.
Alfie always found the typical widuwita art-magica to be a tad embarrassing with its overwrought and unseemly emotional displays, but this was a spectacle on par with one of the tawdry bards for which Rinka had such affinity. Still, sloppy though such flash might be, there was no overestimating its perils. The vortex’s matrix implied an emotion-altering magica, and he could detect the lines of several wards around Tywi. Dropping the curtain on her performance would be no small task.
Alfie conferred with Rinka about strategy, though the odds were so discouraging that there wasn’t much to be said. She would attempt to engage the entire guard singlehandedly, while he would empty his meager bag of tricks upon the most powerful spellcaller of the past century.
He warned her that Tywi likely would call spells upon them of types unknown, and advised her to listen for changes in the song as harbingers. Rinka nodded and kept her helm affixed to her belt, presumably to keep her ears uncovered.
“And what if I hear a change?” she asked.
He shrugged as he whipped up a quickie ward upon first her, then himself. “Duck, I suppose,” he suggested. That he noticed a bizarre flux of magica around her chest, he kept to himself. This was no time for an interrogation.
“One more thing. Don’t look at their pet creatures,” he added, fidgeting with his moustache and finding it drooped like a frown. “The beastie that killed that poor girl…I couldn’t stop looking at it, even after what it had done. It was so adorable… Cuteness is like a spellcalling that never wears off.”
She gave him a sideways look but followed with a respectful nod. “Eyes up and ears open. Got it.”
They looked at each for a moment. Her lipstick was as absurdly flawless as her mascara was absurdly disarrayed. Even here, in grime and sweat, her youthful face was hauntingly beautiful, her cheekbone cutting an elegant line in the gloom. Yet in her eyes and expression he saw someone far olde
r and harder.
She flashed him a wolfish grin and said something in ceremonious Vollach. She stuck out a hand to him as she translated: “If tonight we must fall, we shall fall last, and rest atop the enemy dead.”
He locked his hand with hers. “Quite so.”
She rose, still grinning, and charged into the meadow with the rings in her sword rattling like bars giving way to the kicks of a mad prisoner. “Claj Tashlin!” she shouted as she kicked up bluish dust, drawing the instant notice of the surrounding guard. The man nearest her barely had time to raise his spear before she hit him at full speed, running him through and lifting him off his feet to die writhing on her blade.
Alfie fingered the adder-stone pendant around his neck for a moment, then took off running as well on a perpendicular path. He aimed to circle behind the distracted guards and head straight for Tywi. The air around him sparkled and the blue snow crunched beneath his feet. Bizarre as it all was, his mind traveled back to his Jadal campaigns of yore, and a disciplined calm fell over him as he closed on the spellcaller.
Through the haze of light and crystals, Tywi’s dark eyes appeared unnaturally huge, perhaps from some ritual facepaint. Catching sight of Rinka, Tywi altered the key of her song and flourished her fingers around her eyes before conducting her chorus. Whatever the intended effect, Alfie’s warding was strong enough to stave it off, but was disrupted in the process. His lungs burned as he tried to propel his unathletic form across the remaining fifty yards before she could try again.
He could not. As he vowed to Night to abstain henceforth from his port-wine cheese habit, he watched Tywi’s hips roll and her song shift to a salacious rhythm that the chorus joined. His legs instantly clenched together involuntarily and he toppled over in unexpected extreme pleasure. His old soldier, which, if one were frankly honest with oneself, had not stood at full attention for the past five years, assumed firing position and erupted with an emission that surely ruined his pair of Lampley’s finest silk boxers.
“Oh, oh-ho-ho,” Alfie said aloud with a shiver. “Oh, dear me. Sex magica.”
He heard Rinka laugh her musical laugh, and suspected that Tywi had just made a profound tactical error. As the next wave of pleasure hit him, forcing him to curl up in the blue snow, he glanced her way for what proved to be spectactular confirmation.
Tywi’s guards were similarly stricken, fallen to their knees. Not Rinka. She arched her back, thrusting her pelvis and first biting at the night air, then wiggling her tongue.
“Oh, that’s so fucking good!” she growled lewdly. She gripped the scalp of one helpless guardsman and decapitated him, expertly flaying a large section of skin from his back along with it. With arterial blood still spraying across her face and chest, she speared the hideous trophy on her sword and lifted it high. Orgasmic grunts mingled with cries of terror among the cringing guards. Rinka laughed again as she ran a hand up and down her armor’s bloody curves.
“Mmm, more, you hot bitch!” she commanded.
Tywi lost her place in the song a moment as she realized her mistake. The cone of light flickered and the lakeen leaves made ominous flapping sounds. She tilted her head and emitted a drawn-out “coooooooo” that rubbed Alfie’s fur quite the wrong way. As the chorus harmonized with it, he trundled past its members and attempted to grab the spellcaller.
If a powerful ward had not stopped him, her appearance might have. Her face must have once been pleasant enough, as was often the case with the charismatic widuwitas. But now her eyes were grotesquely enlarged by fine silver clamps forcing the lids to remain open, and their entire surface had been dyed or tattooed a coal black.
A glance at her chorus saw they shared her taste in eye disfiguration. Alfie wondered about their pets as well, but set his jaw and willed himself not to look, even as he heard them scamper toward him and began nipping at his pantlegs.
Over the shoulder of one singer, he saw Rinka contending with some of the braver guards. One grabbed her hair from behind to slit her throat, and Alfie’s heart—already in unhealthy commotion—skipped a beat. But she produced her dagger and sliced off her locks along with a few of her attacker’s digits. With a dancer’s spin, she confronted him and removed most of his face as a horrid mask that she tossed aside like a used napkin. Spears clattered off her armor as she left that victim and pounced on another.
She crouched near the choral circle, and Alfie followed her gaze as it locked onto one of the furry pets. Her face went slack, her eyes clouded, and she cocked her head. Alfie tried to gulp but his throat had gone dry. But the danger of losing Rinka was overwhelmed by a far larger threat heading toward them all.
A massive rustle emanated from the surrounding jungle. A few birds emerged, then more; then a crashing wave of fowls and beasts of all description. Cranes and fruit bats, boars and monkeys, lizards and panthers—all seemingly drawn by the damnable cooing. The swarm passed over Rinka and the battling guards, assaulting them all.
There was no time for wards or calculations. Alfie hurled a generic unsorcellment at Tywi. He could hear it go to work, crackling and snapping. The power was astonishing, far beyond anything he had produced before, and left his fingertips numbed.
Crystalized magica must be giving me a resonant boost somehow, he surmised. The spellcaller leveled her gaze at him, and he knew he had but a blink in which to act. A stone-growth calling, then, to knock her off her feet.
The power was again immense. The menhir beside Tywi, rather than swelling a few inches, exuded a stalactite that swallowed her right arm and shoulder, and half of her face. Her song ended abruptly, and the light vortex swayed wildly.
This time, Alfie was not spared the blowback of unwarded magica. An agonizing stiffness rocketed through the small of his back and crawled up his ribcage. He toppled into the snow, screaming, and for the first time realized the crunching beneath his feet had been not merely the blue crystals. The circles were carpeted with the skeletons of infants.
He looked up at Tywi. Her eyes remained horrific blanks, but a furrowing of her brow suggested great fears and regrets—or perhaps he just wanted to think so.
The vortex of light dissipated, and in the stark silence, he could hear the billowing of the razor-edged lakeen leaves as they fell like executioner’s axes. He tried to roll over and shield his face, but his back would not cooperate.
Something hit him like a crate of geodes from the Silverhold mines. Like a scene from the ill-advised sexual fantasies of innumerable Cor Cordumians, Rinka suddenly lay atop him, joined by a writhing chorus-singer whom she secured in a chokehold. The leaves whipped down on them like sails on a wind-snapped mast. There were screams and blood, and in the end, neither seemed to be Alfie’s.
Rinka hacked her way out of the leaves and hauled Alfie to his feet. He hid the pain in his back with as much dignity as he could muster. His eyes adjusted to the torchlight as he looked at the aftermath. Members of the chorus fled into the jungle, their pets darting before. Also retreating, with a skirmish here and there, was the multitude of animals.
Alfie made his way back to Tywi. She dangled from the stalactite, her legs limp. A leaf-slice to the neck had finished her. Her dead face still bore that curious expression.
He was still studying it when Rinka knelt beside the corpse and unceremoniously hacked off Tywi’s head with the dagger. A silver clamp popped off in the process, leaving one of the spellsinger’s eyes to droop shut while the other stared at Death.
Sensible enough to take the head, wrapped in a square of lakeen leaf, as proof of demise for Cunodua, and Alfie watched the bloody work dispassionately. He’d seen worse things in these jungles. Though there surely was something discomfiting in the contrast between that inscrutable pain etched on Tywi’s face and the sensual hedonism filling Rinka’s.
Afterward, he joined Rinka in wandering Thaneyll. Most of its population was fleeing along a road eastward. But here and there, people cautiously emerged and offered thanks, first in whispers, then in joyous shouts. Paren
ts showed children they had kept hidden. Alfie related the condition of Herlwaine and was met with pledges to support Cunodua and the children he sheltered.
They returned to the rise overlooking the town and gazed on the strange ruin of vegetation and crystal. Once again, they exchanged looks, and once again, Rinka reached out her hand.
“Worst damn concert I ever went to,” she said with a grin.
He gripped her hand and nodded with a small wince that was not wholly about his hidden pain. Then he unfolded a square of parchment he had found tucked within Tywi’s robe, and read it in the moonlight.
Not too surprisingly, it was the lyrics to a song, though the choice was rather curious: a lullabye so ancient and popular he already knew it in its Corcorid translation.
Sleep well now, my children
Here you are safe and warm
For we have built this roof and walls
To stand against the storm
Yes, we have built this roof and walls
To stand against the storm
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Gray Eyes tasted like savory herb-sprinkled butter, as it turned out, and her name was Fisarex. The reason Ashton was getting a taste, sprawled here on her straw mattress in the Vigilium headquarters with his head between her carelessly shaven thighs, was that his cock had decided to perform no further functions than eliminating the excess whisky from his system. This was due to indulging in the aforementioned whisky well before dawn, as well as to an uncharacteristic attack of guilt for lying to her about his identity to get her into bed.
Night and Fury help me, I actually like a watchman. He swallowed a mouthful of her juices as she came, then crawled up to lie beside her.