Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

  “Balances will be required, I take it?” he had inquired.

  Cunodua nodded gravely. “Two we have, and two are demanded.”

  Alfie set his jaw. “Balance” was the local euphemism for a ritual human sacrifice. Always involved young people, specially indoctrinated and pushed into a pit with a pointy bottom. Ugly business.

  “And if we respectfully chose to make our own way homeward instead?” Alfie had asked, already knowing the answer.

  “The lives we took from your city must be repaid.”

  Mathematics was not the local strong suit, as two hardly seemed to balance the scores of Calisians. But then, two was a painful enough ratio for this small group of survivors.

  Alfie had toyed with the de-waxed tendrils of his moustache. Steeling himself to swallow a dose of the old balancing was a practice to which he was accustomed. His larger concern was Rinka’s reaction. Given her kneejerk anti-authoritarianism, inherent bloodlust, and general instability, her response to human sacrifice was impossible to predict beyond the certainty that it would be in equal measures unpleasant and uncontrollable.

  He had chosen the distraction route, leading Rinka outdoors with the promise of a reverse-biddening’s forthcoming appearance. But her sharp eyes spotted the torches burning atop the sacrificial platform at the village’s far edge, and her sharp tongue demanded an explanation. Alfie had attempted to adopt the fast-talking air of Arrowmask, but quite bungled the job. Soon, Rinka was stalking toward the platform, and Alfie was trotting after her, his magica-addled back protesting.

  By the time he clambered up the rope ladder after her, she was gazing open-mouthed at the scene he preferred neither of them see. A lad and a lass, of 16 years or so, sat crosslegged side-by-side on adjacent but separate planks. They were comely, as balancing victims usually were. Their eyes were closed and their lips whispered rapid prayers. Crudely fashioned garlands of jungle flowers encircled their brows, and similarly floral vegetation was bunched before them. Through the magica of Yslifrag, those plants soon would grow at unnatural speed and push the youths down the ten-foot lengths of plank—then into space to drop thirty feet to their dooms.

  “What the fuck?!” asked Rinka, with more oomph than usual.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” he had replied, trying to avoid looking upon the youths.

  “Should they be here? What’s that priest up to?”

  She stood there splayed-legged, arms crossed, glare ferocious, her armor glowing in the moon-and-fire light like a fresh bone outside a wolf’s den. The effect was similar to, but much worse than, certain students at the university who could fluster him with disputatious questions. How to explain the intentions of a god of vengeance to someone who was practically a goddess of it herself?

  “Yslifrag has ordained that these people must pay for Calisia, life for life. It is also the price for sending us home. They call it a ‘balancing.’” He fingered the adder stone on the chain around his neck as he gauged her impatience. “It means a human sacrifice.”

  Her face darkened like a mausoleum with its door banged shut after a funeral. “Leave. I’ll handle this,” she said, taking an aggressive step forward.

  Alfie had heard that before and had not forgotten its curious and bloody aftermath. “No,” he replied calmly, rising on the balls of his feet to come a bit closer to her height. “Meddling in this won’t work, Rinka. The Green gods aren’t like ours. They’re almost human, with personalities…”

  “Good, then I can tell this one to go fuck himself,” Rinka sneered. “He thinks he can execute children we just saved? Not gonna happen.”

  The relief he felt at Rinka’s novel opposition to violent death vanished as quickly as it came. “Defying Yslifrag will just make him inflict something worse, perhaps on all of us—all of the children.”

  “I said I can handle it. Go back to the priest.”

  “Whatever it is you don’t want me to see, lass, I’m not leaving you to it.”

  She was in his face in an instant, her chest bumping his. “‘Lass’? You think you’re my daddy, old man? Because you can die the ugly way he did, too.”

  The crackling of the vegetation undergoing its growth spurt interrupted them. Rinka darted toward the youths. Alfie called out her name and laid a hand on her shoulder. That’s when she turned and popped him in the mouth. A deliberately glancing blow, as the spikes on her gauntlets didn’t take out his eye, but quite sufficient to send him sprawling and beholding entirely new constellations.

  Rinka lept among the flowered branches, which moved like tentacles of a beached squid, and grabbed at the youths. The boy flopped listlessly so that she couldn’t lift him. The girl scratched and kicked, finally driving Rinka off with a bite on the arm.

  “Help me!” Rinka demanded.

  “They won’t come,” Alfie said. “They have trained for this moment most of their lives. To be a balance is a great honor. A divine one.”

  “I can take their place!” Rinka said heatedly. She worked her jaw and ground her teeth a moment as she struggled with some emotion, then spoke determinedly.

  “When I die, I don’t stay dead. That’s how I got us out of that basement.”

  The branches screeched on the planks as they pushed the youths along. The smell of flowers was nearly as overwhelming as Rinka’s claims.

  She suddenly unbuckled her torso armor and let it clatter to the ground. She pointed to a bizarre wound on her chest, its bloodied edges blinking open and shut in an endless cycle.

  “That cartel bitch cut me with necromagica. The wound won’t stay open because I’m ensorcelled with Life magica. An old enemy made me unkillable so she could execute me—over and over again.”

  His head aswim with these incredible revelations, Alfie somehow still found the dignity to snort a laugh.

  “An execution. So this is all about you, eh? Like everything else—your patriotism, your harem, your rescuing of these children—it’s all about your needs.” He shook his head against the pain. “Fool yourself if you like, but you won’t fool these gods. Loathe it though I do, it is these youths who are doing the rescuing with their deaths.”

  Tears unspooled from her narrowed eyes and her whole body shook. Her hands danced on her sword-grip. Her eyes burned with the cold fire peculiar to murder.

  “Killing and dying is all I’m good for,” she said in a low growl, her lips trembling as if she might bite, or weep, or both.

  And thus he lay there wondering which of those options she was about to choose, and she stood there shaking. They held each other by the fraying line of their gazes as the flowery branches stopped their scraping and two hard thuds sounded far below.

  After a long blink-less minute, Rinka wordlessly picked up her armor and clambered down the ladder.

  Alfie took his time gathering his wits and convincing his body to operate once more. Upon reaching the ground, he found Rinka standing at the edge of the twin pits, each ringed with a bamboo fence. He limped over to join her.

  The youths were impaled upon thorn-spears whose lengths were carved with war insignias. Brains protruded from pierced skulls, entrails from punctured stomachs, blood from everywhere. The youths certainly did not look elevated to divinity. Death was as degrading as it ever was.

  Rinka turned her head slowly toward him in her serpentine fashion, her breath clouding in the steamy air.

  “These people are fucking barbaric,” she said, which Alfie immediately understood as a nascent plan to murder Cunodua.

  “We’re all barbaric,” he said into the pits. “This is merely a place where we can’t disguise it with trade wars—or nightclubs. I expect you know that better than anyone.”

  He could practically feel the chill of her sneer. “You think you’re better than me. You always have. Staring me down like some frigid old biddy afraid I’m going to steal her man.”

  Alfie turned away from the horrendous sight in the pits and leaned against the fence. “I know for a cold, hard fact that I’m not better tha
n you, my dear. Perhaps that is what has fascinated me.”

  She looked at him expectantly, instinctively adopting a seductive expression that worked despite her postbellum appearance.

  “I’ve dabbled myself in the magica of eternal life,” he said. “Necrocharming. Here, in the Jadal. There was someone I cared for a great deal, a very great deal, and I lost her.” He looked up at his unlikely confessor. “So I brought her back.”

  Rinka cocked her head sardonically. “Aww. And she didn’t love you anymore?”

  “No, she still loved. The horror was that I could not love her. What was left of her.”

  Rinka looked at him with a new air of appreciation. But he knew she would never forgive him for seeing her this way and knowing her secrets. And perhaps he felt exactly the same.

  As they considered each other, a familiar blue torus twirled in the distance near Cunodua’s tree. They walked back to it separately with a curtain of Jadal night between them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Ashton basked in smugness after he deftly sprang atop the kitchen stoves—without rattling a single pot—and from there into the small doorway of the crawlspace high in the wall. I had a fifth of whisky instead of thirty-two trials and I’m as good a cat burglar as she is, he thought as Mieux hopped up to join him with the same silence. Her eyes gleamed with excitement as she stared at him in the light of his lantern.

  “Eye shadow with more green color would look better on you!” she unexpectedly commanded. “Except for when your face already looks green from drinking whisky!”

  He tossed her a little frown and turned toward the dusty passage. Then he looked back at her.

  “What about the lipstick?” He pointed a finger at his lips and drew a circle in the air.

  She stared at him a moment. “Mm, the color is good, but you are wearing way too much!”

  Suddenly self-conscious, he might have blotted his lips if he had carried a handkerchief instead of wiping everything on his gloves. He produced another little frown.

  “Should I take makeup advice from someone who never wears makeup?”

  “Yes!” she cried.

  “Well, here’s my own advice. When we creep around in here, let’s use your indoor voice.”

  “What is an indoor voice!” she shouted in his face.

  Startled, he banged his head on the low ceiling and slowly closed his eyes. “It means use your voice like lipstick. Just enough, not too much.”

  Wading into this quicksand-dotted swamp of a metaphor kept her quiet for the moment. Ashton forged ahead down the crawlspace, carefully not disturbing a stash of chocolates hidden here by the kitchen staff. He had a thief’s respect for regular folks’ small forms of buried treasure.

  Lined with whitewashed brick and ancient cobwebs, the crawlspace was designed to ventilate the basement and provide access to stovepipes. Ashton had a child’s faith that, like the old family pile back in Millennium, it would provide access to something much more romantic than that, and he was right. A dozen yards down, his cape caught on the ceiling; the handle of a trapdoor that led to rickety wooden steps spiraling up into the palace innards.

  The ascent took them into a gloomy, low-roofed attic beneath some windowless gable. He pushed aside a couple of chairs with blown-out seats that were in the way. The lantern glare shone on the glass of a framed map on the wall depicting the Atelrush from Calisia out to the Blue Weàlae kingdoms. He realized that no one—not here, not back in Cor Cordum—ever talked about news from the Weàlae states, or seemed to notice it was missing. Another loss to the great forgetting.

  The rest of the attic appeared to be empty. Ashton started as goblin-like figures emerged from the shadows as he moved forward with the lantern.

  They froze when he did, and he realized they were waist-high statues. No, not statues…stuffed animals—a wildcat, a pair of boars, and a wild dog. Each wearing a tin helmet strapped to their heads bearing the crest of the Tetragate Palatinate.

  Ashton bit his tongue to stifle a laugh. More props for the dominus’s masquerades, most likely.

  “The four kings of the Empire aren’t animals!” Mieux protested in a whisper-cry.

  “Why don’t you grab one and we can confront the dominus about the error of his ways?” Ashton suggestedly whimsically.

  She nodded firmly and tucked the dusty armored cat under one arm.

  In doubt that taxidermy would have been transported through the kitchen crawlspace, Ashton poked around for another way out. There were no other doors or hatches. But a kicking at the walls found a hollow space behind a wall beam. Pulling and prying didn’t work, but jabbing a knot in the woodgrain did. It sank inward, triggering a hidden latch. The false beam sprang open at the bottom, lifting on a hinge to reveal a short stair behind.

  He exchanged grins with Mieux.

  “A secret passage!” she whispered.

  “For real,” he added playfully, making her giggle.

  They found themselves in a narrow corridor. The left-hand wall was composed of plaster and lattice, the right of solid stone. The wooden floor was grayish with dust ground into its grain, but the surface was clear and cobweb-free, indicating it was frequently traveled. Ashton’s immediate assumption that his honor the dominus was some kind of perv was quickly confirmed by the glimmering of candlelight through two peepholes bored into the plaster. Standing on tiptoe, Ashton peered through, noting that the holes were cut through not the only wall, but also a painting—to see out the eyes of a portrait, most likely. The view was of a bedroom, within which that couple was currently engaged in unimaginative sexual exercises. While feeling morally superior to the dominus, Ashton allowed himself to watch for a few moments to see if it got any more interesting.

  “Let me see!” Mieux demanded, bumping him aside with a shoulder to the ribs. She placed the stuffed cat against the wall and hopped onto its back. Pressed to the holes, her eyes swelled to maximal size, then turned on Ashton with dark fire. “It’s naughty to spy on someone when they are doing that!” she lectured.

  “It’s alright when I do it,” he replied breezily.

  “That is totally crazy!” she observed.

  “You’re right,” he admitted. “But it’s even crazier to create these peepholes in the first place. And even more crazy to be enjoying yourself in bed like that when you’re a brutal murderer—or may possibly be one, who knows, that’s not my main point.”

  She glared at him, her fists on her hips as she stood atop the cat.

  “I have an idea,” he continued, and motioned for her to move aside. This time he put his mouth, rather than his eyes, to the holes. “For shame! For shame!” he spoke at full volume in what he imagined to be a ghostly voice. “Having filthy pleasure after murdering an old man!”

  He peeked through the holes again and watched with satisfaction as the couple lept up and looked about in terror. Mieux’s slipper connecting with his shin tore him away.

  “It’s all part of my plan,” he assured her in a whisper as he rubbed at the bruise. She looked at him doubtfully as she tucked the cat back under his arm, adjusting its helm with her free hand.

  Ashton wasn’t surprised to find another peephole a dozen yards down the corridor, this one opening into their own room. Mieux was even less approving of that.

  The next peephole was improved with a secret door as well, cunningly inlaid in the room’s wainscoting. Unable to resist, Ashton eased it open and padded into the bedchamber. As long as an insane killer doesn’t wake up and stab me, this could be fun.

  He couldn’t recognize the lump sleeping under the blankets, so he began going through the dresser drawers and wardrobes. Finding nothing more intriguing than an unusually large number of socks, Ashton plucked out a handful and employed them to spell out the word “KILLER!” on the floor, with a balled-up handkerchief completing the exclamation point.

  With silent steps and a confused expression, Mieux followed him as he pulled similar pranks on each bedroom in turn. Finally, the co
rridor ended in a narrow door that was concealed on the opposite side by a tapestry bearing the city crest. Slipping past it, Ashton and Mieux emerged into the sprawling chambers of the snoring dominus himself.

  They made it to the exit door, only to find the butler seated in a chair outside it, playing guard. He jumped up with a menacing sneer and called the dominus awake.

  “By the gods, what are you doing sneaking about my bedchamber!” the dominus demanded.

  “An excellent question,” Ashton allowed. “But an even better question is, why do you have a treasonous display depicting the Tetragate as dead animals?”

  Mieux held up the taxidermy accusingly. “Plus also, why do you have a secret passage to look at people while they are naked!” she cried.

  As the dominus stammered, Ashton laid a comforting arm across his meaty shoulders. “Luckily, we have bigger crimes to worry about. In fact, I came here with good news. It’s time to wake everyone up and gather them in the parlor—where I will solve this murder.”

  Mieux looked as surprised as the other two as Ashton rushed out before anyone asked him more good questions.

  He nabbed the most comfortable chair in the parlor and smirked smugly as the suspects filed in looking exactly as he had hoped: sleepless, paranoid, and profoundly disturbed that someone had somehow messed with them within their locked bedrooms. Mieux hopped into a seat beside him and began munching an apple from a nearby bowl as she kicked her feet. The suspects took their usual seats on the couches while the dominus and the butler stood near the fire.