Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

“Let’s die,” she suggested, and rolled off the edge of the nook with the creature in her embrace.

  She and the beast fell together through many small, lashing branches and hit a few huge ones with bone-breaking force. Rinka screamed at the pain, but focused all her energy in hanging onto the frost-grim so it couldn’t fly away. She wanted that fucker to feel it. That crumpling-metal sound suggested to her it did.

  One impact broke her spine, and her suddenly useless legs slid off the icy form. Still, as the rocky ground rushed up to meet them, she felt sure the frost-grim was about to swallow its first—and last—taste of someone who fought back.

  When you’ve waited this long for a good meal, you don’t complain about stains on the tablecloth. So Lain thought to himself. Meaning he didn’t mind that Rinka’s legs and left arm were busted in unsightly angles or that her pretty skull was kinda split open. She was face-down in the dirt—that was what counted.

  He’d dusted himself, if not his pride, off and followed the icicle sound here. Saw the Voidiva coming down from the trees like a bow-shot duck. Maybe she brought the frost-grim down with her and it shattered into slush. Maybe it flew away at the last second. Either way, it was gone now. The sleet and snowflakes thinned, then vanished. The normal gloom that passed for daylight in the forest returned, along with birdsong and insect chatter.

  Some rulebook-waving legate might say that Lain owed Rinka something for defeating the frost-grim, and owed the Tetragate a promise to bring the four civs back from the woods alive. But there weren’t no fucking legates out here, and just like in Fort Glasspoint, what mattered the most was what Lain owed himself. The way he figured it, Arrowmask was the only one he really needed to bring back to get the title and land. Which could be done, need be, with that git bound and gagged in a trunk. And impressive, even fun, as Rinka was as a one-of-a-kind spitfire, that just meant more spirit to enjoy beating out of her.

  ’Cause it was Rinka what owed him. Any bitch who told him what to do—let alone who literally broke his fucking balls—that was a bitch that took out a loan he’d be sure to collect. It would take the rest of the crew a while to find them out here, long enough for the payback.

  Crouching over her, Lain took a fistful of that gorgeous hair and yanked her head back. Her eyes were rolled white and her mouth hung slack, like a dead fish, but he didn’t mind that, either. A faint rasping gurgle came from her throat—the familiar shallow breaths of the dying.

  “You still alive, Voidiva?” he said through a grin. “That’s good. Hope you’re awake enough for this to be the last thing you ever feel.”

  He ran his hands over that kinky armor for a minute, then fished through the pouch on her belt until he found the key to his chastity device. He tugged his trousers halfway down to unlock himself. He was a little worried the plumbing wouldn’t work after all those weeks locked up, but he figured the mood was more than right.

  Rinka’s right arm suddenly swung up and her hand slapped his ass cheek. For one astonished moment, he lived an entire daydream that she was playing along and ready to pull him in like a good girl. Then her hand snapped away, revealing the drug-smeared spike hidden in the top of her skull ring, and everything went black.

  The pounding in his head and butt woke him up. His pants were still down, drool was dry-plastered all over his cheeks, and the way his stomach growled and his bladder burned, he’d been out at least a day. Rolling his eyes around, he saw no sign of Rinka—of course. That was no surprise. Neither was the fact that he didn’t recognize the nearby trees, meaning she’d dragged him even deeper into the forest. But the perfume-smelling thing stuck to his face—that was a surprise. Thought it was a leaf at first, then he realized it was a note that had been tucked under his sleeping head.

  The thick purple paper was wrinkled, torn at the edges, even had a bloodstain or two. He called it all the names he wanted to call Rinka and then he read the fucking thing anyhow. What else was he gonna do?

  Lain—

  I’m writing this on the day we first met. You impressed me with your “yes m’ams” and your unit’s loyalty. But you didn’t fool me. Sooner or later, the time will come when it’s either you or me.

  It’s gonna be you.

  That was decided and guaranteed by me thirty minutes after slapping eyes on your ugly mug. I wanted you to know that.

  By the time it happens and you’re reading this, I’m sure you, like any evil wanker, will have had a thousand sick and disgusting fantasies about me. But I’ve had only one thought about you. And it’s the only one you’ll live out.

  You see, Lain, I’ve known a hundred boys like you. Dick-for-brains who think they’re the last of the hard-men. The lone truth-tellers in a world gone soft. Tough guys who don’t need anybody, except the whores they beat so they feel strong, and who take what they want, as long it’s from somebody weaker than themselves.

  So when the time comes, I’m going to fulfill your greatest fantasy. Take a look around whatever desolate shithole I ended up dumping you in. It’s just you and that hard, cold world. You’re master of all you survey, free to bend it to your will.

  Show your voidiva what a big, tough boy you are.

  Or just shut up and die alone.

  Ta-ta,

  Voidiva Rinka Svetkov

  P.S.: Ninebarrow’s cute. She’ll choose me over you.

  Lain screamed curses back at every line. He raved at the cunt’s arrogance and insults, and how she dotted the “i” in “Rinka” with a motherfucking star like that cocksucker Cap’n Trent signing an autograph. He shouted as he ripped the letter to shreds.

  He kept on shouting until he realized he was attracting dark shadows from the trees that were probably as hungry as he was, and three times his size.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  A fat green caterpillar with golden dots on its sides curled on the window screen, just like the caravan wagons were curled into a cozy circle here along the rocky shore of the Stjarnafall Sea.

  Mieux stared at it as she sat crosslegged on the window bench, munching on a piece of toast she held carefully in both hands. In the blurry distance, Elsbeth Steeleye trudged toward the salty lake. Even though it was spring and time for caterpillars to come out, it was pretty chilly here, so that Mieux wore her cape. But Elsbeth Steeleye still walked around with bare arms, probably because she was almost as big as a horse, and horses are so warm they never need to wear clothes at all! Well, maybe she is more the size of a pony, but ponies are naked all the time also!

  A wasp appeared at the window and attacked the caterpillar, which twisted to get away. But the wasp stabbed it with the stinger and flew away with the whole caterpillar, probably to get eaten alive in a horrible wasp nest! Some of the One-Thousand-And-Three Fables said this was the balance of nature, but Mieux suspected those stories were ones people said to make themselves feel better. Different fables said nature was about violent extremes that defeated each other in an endless war. Just like the super weird wound on Rinka’s chest that went back and forth, over and over, in pain.

  Mieux turned in her seat and licked butter off her fingers as she stared at Rinka. Rinka didn’t notice at first because she was reading a book called Thank You, M’am, May I Have Another?, which must not have been that great because no one had turned it into a play yet. Mieux cracked her knuckles, forgetting that Rinka hated that sound. Rinka looked up with her angry-cat face, but then smiled again and patted her leg.

  Mieux trotted over and hopped into Rinka’s lap, nuzzling her neck. Rinka interrupted to wipe jam off Mieux’s cheek and her own neck, which made Mieux feel stupid. Her cheeks got in the way of food all the time but sometimes she did not remember to clean them up. But Rinka did not make fun of her! In fact, Rinka had kept her promise to be nice ever since the time she went crazy and threatened Mieux with the mini-weapon fork for asking about empousas. Of course, it was super hard to be even meaner and crazier than that! But still.

  Now that Rinka had admitted she was two hundred years old,
she answered all sorts of fun old-person questions. She had seen plays that did not exist anymore even written down, like The Wraith-Raisers, and animals that went extinct because people ate all of them, like the Atelrush River cow! Plus also, Rinka finally told about the time she fought the equilibrique, when she tried to expand her country into the Ni-kyrin mountains.

  “Ha! Ha! Ha!” Mieux laughed aloud at the memory of the story.

  “What’s so funny?” Rinka asked.

  “I remembered how when you were a crazy warlord, you thought that fighting the equilibrique would not hurt because of your naked-person armor!”

  “Yeah, hilarious,” Rinka said, rolling her sapphire eyes. “The joke was on me and my two-thousand troops that got our butts kicked by only fifty of your pals. Only we didn’t laugh very much.”

  “It is also funny that one time a real empousa tried to bite you! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  “I’m glad you find my adventures so fucking amusing,” said Rinka, who swore all the time. “Now, my next entertaining tale is about a traveling equilibrique who helped me with my makeup.”

  It took Mieux only a moment to realize that was a joke about her! It made her giggle. She held a paper stencil with skull-shaped holes up to Rinka’s purple-painted lips, while Rinka ran white lipstick over it. This way her lips would look dotted with tiny skulls. Mieux never wore makeup and did not ever want to leave skull prints on stuff by kissing it, but if she had learned anything on her travels, it was that everyone had their own way of doing things.

  After that, Rinka combed Mieux’s hair for a while. She was more ferocious on tangles than Pesh was, but it was still nice. She called Rinka “Rin-chatte,” and Rinka called her “Emi.” Then Rinka just held Mieux for a while as Mieux planted some kisses on her neck.

  But just like the curled-up caterpillar, the curled-up caravan was not as cozy at it seemed. And not just because Rinka was still at least half-crazy, or that everyone’s aura was messed-up somehow, or that they all seemed to have a secret. The secrets seemed to deepen, and something was stretching those auras into weird ovals. It reminded Mieux of a play she had seen. The most totally craziest thing of all was that she could not remember which one!

  Leaving Rinka to her book, Mieux squirmed away and went out the door leading to the “Boys Wagon,” where Alfie and Ashton Arrowmask lived. Before looking at people and their crazy auras again, she stood on the platform for a moment. It was totally screened up with culex, which gleamed with water from the cool yet moist air. On one side, she could see into the center of the circled wagons, where the testabestia stood under their canvas-and-culex tent. She could hear them munching feed and smell them for sure. On the other side, she could see the lake and Elsbeth Steeleye wading in it.

  The wagons were parked underneath a huge umbrella-shaped bunch of roots from a giant stoneleaf tree. Water dripped off the roots either onto the wagon roof or onto the bushy ferns and velvet moss on the ground—one or the other, but mostly on the ground. Mieux liked the sound either way, and also the rich vegetable smell that came up from the soil. But she felt questions filling her up like the water rising in that hollow tree stump near the caravan.

  With sudden determination, she trotted across the metal-floored walkway between the wagons, beneath its tunnel of culex and leather. She pounded a fist on the next wagon’s door until Ashton Arrowmask poked his head out. His hair was all tangled and he squinted like he just woke up. He waved her inside with a shaky hand and sat down on a bunk.

  Between Ashton Arrowmask’s balled-up laundry and Alfie the Stone Master’s weird experiment gear, the wagon was as messy as the Blade & Ladle floor after two-for-one ale night. The smell was the same also.

  Alfie barely glanced her way as he poked a big plate full of blue sand with a pointy metal rod. Alfie had been quiet ever since his super freaky Leveling experience, and everyone said it was because he had this blue sand to study. But Mieux noticed he sat at a funny angle, and his moustache was droopy, and his aura was full of pain flames. Probably she would politely ask him a bunch of questions later, but for now she wanted to learn things from Ashton Arrowmask.

  “Did we really solve a murder or were you just making fun of me the whole time!” she demanded, hurling herself beside him on the bunk. She glared up at him.

  “I don’t really care whether all those rich fucks kill each other off,” Ashton Arrowmask said casually as he pulled out some paper and started making a cubeb. Then he put it down and shrugged. “But yeah, I did let you get confused in the hopes you would confuse them. Sorry. I can be a real dickhead.”

  Mieux blinked at him. “I think probably you just wanted to save Rinka and Alfie more than anything,” she said. Ashton Arrowmask seemed to like that idea and nodded humbly at its wisdom. “But you can’t be a real dickhead all the time!” she added helpfully. “Especially to your friends!”

  As he flinched and banged his head on the upper bunk, Mieux felt something poking at her bottom from beneath the blanket. She yanked it free.

  “Plus also, you can’t steal Rinka’s magazines about naked women kissing each other while they do acrobat positions!” she cried, waving the Honeypot. Ashton Arrowmask’s face turned as red the stage at the end of the totally great play Pirate Queen of Redwave Reef. Ashton Arrowmask made a sound of apology and reached for the magazine, but she held it away from him.

  “You’re still my friend, but you do two million naughty things per day, more or less!” she cried, frowning judgmentally, while she rolled up the magazine and tucked it into her jacket alongside Merrykin’s Digest.

  “Naughty is my house specialty. But I’ll try to get it down to under one million per day,” Arrowmask said breezily before fidgeting under Mieux’s continued glare. He sighed. “I really am sorry. Well, not about the Honeypot, but everything else. I’m not used to being around someone like you. Someone who, you know, tries to be a good person.”

  Mieux settled in next to him and gripped the hem of his cape. He was being nice, so she decided to give him more good advice.

  “You might want to add little white skulls to your lipstick!” she suggested. “It is the new thing to do!”

  She assured him the skull lipstick, unlike many fashions, was up to him and not decreed by the four kings of the Tetragate Empire. Besides, they might not even be in the Empire anymore, which is why Mieux allowed herself the luxury of not consuming Cap’n Trent’s manticore jerky. Ashton wisely agreed to take all of this under advisement, then asked for the Honeypot back.

  “What is a god!” Mieux demanded instead, finally getting around to her real question. That got even Alfie to look up from scraping at his plate of sand.

  “You and Alfie worship Fortune and Night, which you say like a person’s name!” she elaborated. “And Pesh and Elsbeth Steeleye have gods who act just like people, even doing bad things sometimes! Plus the Godkillers even killed a god! It sounds totally crazy that a god would have a messed-up aura or get killed by assassins, but I don’t know. But probably it is totally crazy!”

  Ashton Arrowmask exchanged a look with Alfie and said, “You’re the priest.” Alfie tapped his sand-poking stick to his chin and cleared his throat.

  “‘Totally crazy’ is perhaps an overgeneralization,” he began in a voice lower and less jolly than usual, “but you are correct in perceiving that defining a deity is quite an excerise in head-scratching. Put simply, a god is a force we know exists, we know has power, but whose nature is a mystery. Some, like the Green Weàlae, conceive them as personalities, which does explain much. Others, like those in the Empire, see them more as impersonal forces, which has its uses, too. I believe they are indeed different entities in different places, though they may simply act differently in response to their worshipers.”

  “So basically, nobody knows!” Mieux concluded. “It is better to say you do not know something than to make it up and then build a temple, even though a temple is neat if it is shaped like an egg or two towers twisted together, or at least sells a yummy Nu
tknocker drink that I would like more of!”

  “Erm, well, yes, perhaps,” Alfie sputtered. “But certainly we do not invent Night, or Pain, or Light, or Family. It is more a question of how we engage with them. It is fair to view them as personas to worship and placate. It is also fair to consider them forces to which to submit. Or merely an idea around which to form a convivial social club, if you will.”

  “I thought you worshiped Nature or something, with your Senchie-dough,” Ashton Arrowmask said to her in his messed-up accent.

  “The wisdom part of the Sénche-do is a way, not a thing or a person!” she lectured. “It is different for each equilibrique who travels it! And it does not divide into Night and Day or anything! The world is not all chopped up like meat in a butcher store!” She screwed up her lips trying to think of Imperial words to describe it. “It is like a rainbow where you say it has different colors and one is on top of the others, but it is all one thing and it is not even really there!” she cried desperately.

  Alfie just frowned and made sounds like a small dog sniffing at a gutter, but Ashton Arrowmask listened closely.

  “That makes almost no sense, which makes sense to me,” he said, pointing at her with his unlit cubeb. “I believe in Fortune, but what does that mean? Sometimes it’s good luck, sometimes bad, sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter. Sometimes it’s all of those things at the same time in different parts of my life.”

  Mieux stared at him with her lips parted. “My stars and garters! You keep saying things with a bunch of wisdom right through your super-crooked pirate aura!” she cried. “Maybe you would like to follow the Sénche-do. It would be better than your Real Dickhead-do! Ha! Ha! Ha!” She threw her head back, laughing.

  Alfie did not seem to find that amusing, but Ashton Arrowmask did. She liked making him smile.

  “Maybe you’ll get your god answers soon enough,” he said. “After all, we’ve promised to kill one.”