Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

  Besides all of that, he was the only one who could keep up with her in drinking. At the moment, the drink was gin, and the drinking was done in the common wagon as Arnbold piloted them through the forest. Elsbeth leaned back in the window-seat bench as their talk turned to the Ásdráp—the Godkillers. She asked about his grandmother, Nire Arrowmask. He shrugged, as he so often did.

  “My father’s mother. She was an assassin—of whom and for whom I never found out. My father only said she killed ‘the right people.’ Night only knows what his idea of the ‘right people’ was. My father was not a good person himself. My mother, either.”

  She tilted her head in interested worry, but he waved his hand casually.

  “Nothing dramatic, no beatings or whatnot. They were just cold. Creatures of imaginary duty and instinctive façade. Hard as the stone they built our house from on that Millennium island. I’m a disgustingly well-born son of semi-privilege. Most of my problems are self-created. Often with this wonderful tool.”

  He held up his glass and tossed the gin down his throat, motioning for her to refill it.

  “Your father passed down Nire’s secrets of this shadow-craft to make you a lock-enemy and gem-friend?” Elsbeth asked while pouring.

  “Nah. My parents preferred legal thievery—they were merchants. My mother still is. Father’s gone now. My sister Nalia is the one who followed in their footsteps. I learned my dark arts through necessity, boredom, and the advice of port-rats with names like Toadskin and Fastfinger Jane. Nire would probably laugh at me.”

  “You follow her footsteps now. And another bone-god rises.”

  Ashton nodded glumly. “Tell me about your family, what they were like.”

  So she told him of clan Vinr, of strong-handed Rogvahtr and wise-speaking Ulfrun. She spoke of her sister Heike and brother Gerlach—their joy in the hunt, their cleverness in craft, their triumphs in war. And she told of Valka, who was born weighing ten pounds and bearing her father’s iron grip, as strong as the future she should have had.

  “Did any of them escape the cult?” Ashton asked after a long pause in which she felt her face twist.

  “All joined it. Then it took Valka.” She considered him a moment, this man of the city, and knew she now trusted him with heart-sharing. “I killed them. All of them. So I am alone, with no clan or tribe.”

  Ashton did not flinch or turn away as she feared he would. She felt her lip tremble and her eyes burn. But she had vowed there would no more tears for Mengroenn.

  “We’ll find that cult and kill every last one of them,” Ashton said in one of his usual wild pledges.

  “You already promised that,” Elsbeth snapped with more bite than she meant, her heart-fires flaring.

  “I say a lot of stupid things I half-mean,” he admitted, still not flinching. “I don’t know what we’ll find out here or what we can do about it anyway.” He sighed and fidgeted with his glass. “I’ll just promise that whatever it is, you won’t face it alone. You’ve got yourself a new clan.”

  He stuck out a hand and she shook it stiffly as her heart thrummed. His fingertips trailing on her palm set off a warmth in her belly. They looked at each other for a time, their hands interlocked. “Thank you,” she found herself saying quietly.

  Ashton rose unsteadily. “I understand that if I want to kiss you, I have to fist-fight you. Let’s go,” he said, beckoning with his hands.

  The thought of tasting her first kiss in five years made her cheeks flame and her mouth grin. But then, it might take this scarecrow as long again to heal from such a duel.

  “Sit down, little man,” she advised.

  “No, I’m serious. Give me a shot to prove myself before I sober up enough to think twice.”

  The old horse-kick of fight-lust in her chest joined the tickling in her belly. She got up, also unsteadily, and moved around the table to join him in the wagon’s narrow open corridor.

  “Whoever falls first—,” Elsbeth began, but Ashton interrupted with a sucker-punch.

  His reach was too short, and her punches were too slow. They did more damage to the plates and glasses as they lurched between table and counter, both firmly mounted to the floor. Finally, Ashton made a surprising slide forward while bending low, slipping between her legs. Along the way, he gripped her belt-buckle and tore it loose. As she grabbed for the loose flap of her trousers, he jumped onto her back. She got a fistful of his cape and swung him, one armed, over her shoulder. His flailing feet knocked down an entire rack of dried herbs and rabbits as he crashed to the floor.

  As he groaned in loss-pain, she straddled chest and leaned over him, her hands planted on either side of his head so she could grin down in triumph.

  “You city-dwellers, always thinking you can trick your way to a victory,” she said.

  Ashton shrugged and flashed his best charming-bastard smile as he ran his hands up her arms. “Does that mean you won’t kiss me?”

  “It means I doubt our joining will last after I do,” she replied as she pulled him close and pressed her smiling mouth to his.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Like any spoiled little voidiva-to-be, young Rinka had a collection of dolls in elegant robes and gowns and uniforms. But while her friends played-acted courtly weddings or aped their wet-nurses, little Rinka had darker dramas in mind. Her dolls endured forced marriages, lost pregnancies, unrequited romances, wrongful imprisonments, scarring tortures. They were strung up on the lantern sconce by assassins and shoved out of her bedchamber window by scheming relatives. One night she sentenced her very favorite to burning at the stake in the fireplace, her heart fluttering at the deliciously appalling finality of the loss.

  Then came a day in her twelfth year when the dolls stopped working, their glamour gone like water left in the rising sun. She suddenly saw them as lifeless objects whose names and fates no longer stirred anything inside her. It was time for her to move on to other kinds of toys.

  She looked across the wagon and watched Fortin Ninebarrow sweep crumbs off the stovetop. The guard had slipped naturally into a role as Rinka’s maid. She was pet material, with her subservient instinct to please, even if so much of that had been wasted on that thug Lain. Rinka enjoyed watching her lean hunter’s body put to domestic use, and how her ears and chest flushed helplessly at the slightest arousal. As an occasional bonus, Rinka took Fortin to bed for an unlocking and teasing. But for a girl like this, service was its own reward.

  Rinka patted her own thigh. Fortin quickly trotted over to kneel and lay her head in Rinka’s lap. Her arms encircled the taller woman’s waist. She looked better with the makeup Rinka had taught her wear, but the innocent bright-pink glow of her cheeks and ears were the look Rinka enjoyed the most. As the girl looked up with lust-glazed eyes, Rinka ran her nails through the stringy red hair.

  Next, Rinka ran a fingertip around Fortin’s lips. The girl opened her mouth to take it in. Rinka withdrew the finger teasingly out of reach of the girl’s stretching tongue. Finally relenting, she let the girl suck while she worked the digit gently in and out, stretching those thin lips and petting that velvet tongue.

  Rinka cocked her head and regarded the slurping little pet. “When this is all over, I’m thinking of keeping you locked up forever as my frustrated little pussy girl. That’s what you want deep down, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you are?”

  Fortin nodded stupidly and closed her eyes, huffing through her nose as she suckled Rinka’s finger all the way down to the silver-skull ring with black-diamond eyes.

  Normally, this was the time Rinka would grab a handful of hair and mash that sweet pink face against her soaked panties. The appetite was there, but something dulled its urgency and thrill.

  She had felt this non-feeling for a while. Out here in the middle of nowhere, far from home, she got to thinking about Pesh, and the thousand girls before Pesh, and the thousands who surely would follow her. Each girl had her special color, but at a distance, the picture was a gray blur of endlessly repeating acq
uisition and loss. Then there was the thrumming pain of the wound in her chest, like a bowstring drawn and snapped on the flesh, that reminded her of Pwyll and those early days when love was still a fresh corpse just starting to go rotten.

  As she looked down at Fortin’s head on her lap, an unfamiliar fear began creeping up her spine. What if these toys stop working, too?

  “Hop up,” she suddenly commanded, and ordered Fortin to return to her guard duties. Then she swallowed a lump of hetbane and sat at the vanity. For a long while, she stared at her face in the mirror. It was a face that thrilled or enchanted others. To her, it simply inspired self-satisfaction at looking damn good. At the moment, though, she didn’t even feel that. She was staring at makeup on skin on skull in glass. Lifeless. Deathless.

  On impulse, she drew her dagger and pressed its trefoil tip to her cheek. One of the lobed blades split the skin just beneath her right eye. With an expert slice and tug, she flayed the flesh off her cheek. It dangled like a tarp roof on a market stall failing in a storm, spilling blood like rain down her blouse. She hissed through gritted teeth and kept her eyes locked on those in the glass. She looked insane and terribly damaged. But still she felt nothing beyond the pain.

  Tossing the dagger aside, she leaned back and closed her eyes for the minute it took for her cheek to heal and the dead flesh to wither and drop away. When she opened them, she saw a face that was once again perfect. “Perfect.” She mouthed the word silently to her reflection.

  A heavy banging on one of the doors startled her. She just had time to wipe a towel across the blood on her face when Elsbeth Steeleye barged in, her eyes rolling like a bull escaped from a paddock. Rinka rose smoothly to greet her, trying to maintain her poise.

  “Finally dumped Arrowmask and come looking for some real action?” Rinka purred.

  Elsbeth glowered, even though, Rinka marked with amusement, she couldn’t resist taking a quick eyeful of cleavage. Maybe the sight of the blood on it will warm that barbarian cunt.

  “No. Trelleck and Ninebarrow are gone. They are being hunted by monsters.”

  “Monsters?” Rinka arched an eyebrow expectantly.

  “We can talk or they can live,” Elsbeth replied. “They still have a small chance. If I can fight alongside a true war-chief.”

  Once upon a time, the warlord of a defeated Vollach battalion stood high in her stirrups to point across a valley, its rocky depths carpeted with burning forests and a legion of Weàlae troops, to the redoubt where five of her soldiers remained wounded and stranded. The priestess of the Incendium still felt nothing. But the voidiva stirred.

  “I leave no soldier behind, at any price,” she said, half-oath, half-command, as she took up her breastplate and her sword.

  Outside, things weren’t quite so dramatic. A nasty mix of sleet and snow tinkled off her armor, in what passed for springtime in the north. The cold drew a creepy fog from the leaf-littered soil. It fucked up the visibility enough that Rinka could understand how Fortin and Trelleck could get lost after only a half-hour of their unauthorized hunting trip. She shouted their names, but her voice died in the fog as if it were a wayward sheep wandering into the lethal fumes from a Kundhmur volcano.

  Rinka turned to Elsbeth, who stood in the cold in her sleeveless vest like the big badass girl she was.

  “I see really shitty weather, not a monster,” Rinka said. “I think they’ll survive a runny nose.”

  Elsbeth squinted agains the sleet as the wind flapped her weird little braid across her cheek. “It is no gods-made storm. It is the ice-home the frost-grims carry with them as they prey, like a turtle shell to live in and a hunter’s blind to hide in.”

  “What the fuck is a frost-grim?”

  “This, only the dead can say for sure,” Elsbeth replied, drawing her horseshoe hammer off one hip and her hand-axe off the other. “Their wind-fangs cannot be seen as they eat their victims. But there is one sign. You will feel their warmth in the air if they have just killed. It is the heat of victim-blood.”

  “Kill anything that’s hot,” Lain remarked, leaning in fake-casualness against a wagon wall.

  Sounds like the motto of his fucked-up torture-murder prison back in Old Spandrel. Rinka glowered at him with general distaste, and with specific disdain for how he overdressed in the fur-trimmed version of the black-and-green livery. Her fingers automatically toyed with her skull ring. Elsbeth had wanted the boys to stay behind due to their overall uselessness, and Mieux to stay as well because they needed a Class A warrior to watch over them in case the monsters came calling. But Lain insisted on coming along, supposedly because he would never abandon his decanus. Rinka understood that to mean she and Elsbeth would do most of the work while he got most of the credit. Well, if it lowered her odds of being frost-grim bait, who gave a fuck?

  A strange shift in the wind cleared the fog a moment, long enough to see the tower-like trunk of a gigantic tree about a thousand feet away. Elsbeth said that’s where Fortin and Trath would have headed, since the trees were basically townhouses for edible birds and squirrels.

  The jaunt quickly became a nightmare as the fog returned and the ankle-twisting landscape was covered with wet patches of moss half a foot deep, leaves the size of a tabletop, and acorn-like seeds bigger than Lain’s thick head. It felt like they were shrinking to the scale of prey. A consistent snow-dotted breeze with occasional colder currents made the rings in her sword sing and the limbs above creak like hangman’s nooses. Birds and insects had gone quiet. The tension was as thick as the fog. They all knew this was a batshit-crazy place to make any kind of stand. A kid with a slingshot could defeat them here, let alone some invisible frost-grim.

  The tree emerged from the mist. Like all these freaks, it wasn’t a normal bark-covered cylinder. It was a crazy mass of tumor-like lumps, knobs, and burls. An Imperial legion could live in its innumerable holes and nooks, let alone these frost-grims.

  A weird, fog-dulled thudding brought them to attention. It was a combination of knocking and scratching, like someone banging on a door with a garden rake. They padded on the moss around the tree until they found the spot.

  A dense cloud of wind-blown snow ten feet across churned against the trunk near ground level, held in place by some unknown force, making that grating sound against the bark. Beneath it lay a gutted elk, with its own antlers as tombstones. Then the trio noticed other sounds—grunts and muttered curses. And they realized the snow-cloud was pressing not against solid trunk, but against a hole that someone inside was blocking with a shield of fallen bark.

  Lain hesitated. Elsbeth and Rinka did not. Rinka charged the cloud heedlessly, leaping over the fallen acorns in her path. But before she got there, Elsbeth’s thrown hammer flew by. It struck the cloud with a bizarre sound like metal crumpling. It dissipated and seemed to instantly make the weather worse, with the sleet intensifying. Ignoring its fury, Rinka shouted the guards’ names, and the bark shield moved aside a few inches. Fortin and Trath stared back, crossbows at the ready, from within a narrow cleft in the trunk half-filled with punk wood.

  “Run!” she advised them.

  They got about a hundred feet before Elsbeth shouted that she felt heat and swung her axe without hitting anything.

  “Octritje diamant!” Rinka shouted automatically in Vollach. “Diamond defense!” she translated, then remembered her companions didn’t know Vollach strategy any better than they knew the language. “Just get back-to-back!” she commanded.

  Whatever you called it, it was a last fucking stand. She had found many comrades piled dead on a battlefield in this formation. No need to mention that now.

  They obeyed, the five of them pressing their backs together and forming a star bristling with crossbows and blades. Lain and Trath were on either side of Rinka and the women behind her.

  “If you feel warm air, that is the creature,” Elsbeth explained.

  It didn’t take long. Fortin cried out that she felt it and cracked off a shot. She must have been too slow,
because Rinka immediately felt it, too. It wasn’t like a beast’s hot breath before a bite. More like the way a body felt warm as it slid dead down your sword. Which sounded like a pretty good idea at the moment.

  She never got a chance to take a swing. Icicle-like claws hooked under her armor and yanked her off her feet. Her sword tumbled out of her hand as the unseen creature pulled her ten feet off the ground—and Lain, too, right beside her, presumably in the other claw. They shot away at horse speed into the forest.

  “So it can fly, too. Great,” Rinka grumbled to herself as she struggled to find some limb to attack. Lain fought just as hard alongside her.

  They swooped upward sharply. Lain found some opening in the maneuver to free himself. Rinka glimpsed him toppling down into the fog from only about fifteen feet. But she was going all the way.

  The claw unlatched and she was tossed into a wide nook between two forking branches at least a hundred feet up, maybe a lot more. Through sleet-stung eyes, she surveyed the area. Maybe twenty feet across, more or less flat, and dotted with bones. Decaying carcasses of panthers and deer were draped over adjacent branches.

  A lair. She immediately dropped into a ball, presenting mostly armor for the frost-grim to attack. Not a moment too soon. Her back was immediately beset by a clattering impact like being stabbed with two-dozen knives, all coupled with a new crazy sound, this one like old bones falling out of place in an ossuary.

  Fast as she could, Rinka flipped over and got her arms and legs around the thing, hoping to keep its mouth—or whatever it killed with—pressed harmlessly against her torso armor. She saw her hands gripping only sleet-filled air, but her palms felt a weird skeletal form, hard and cold like a wrought-iron fence. It was strong, and she could feel the torque of a bulk behind it, as if she had an alligator by the snout. She couldn’t hold it for long.