Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

  “That is the total reason I asked!” she cried, rolling her eyes. From wise to silly again in seconds, like a fancy wine glass spilled on a nice tablecloth! “A face to punch or a force to endure—I can even do both at once!” she added.

  With no more questions, she sprang up and headed to the next wagon, which was her favorite in the whole caravan. The dining room wagon! They used it for many things, but eating was the best part. That’s what she found Trath the guard doing when he let her in with a wink and his friendly saying, “Captain.”

  Trath checked all three locks on the door three times before he sat down at the table again. He was nervous from the start, but now that Littalia was dead and Lain had been eaten by frost-grims, he was really bad. Well, it was good for a guard to be worried about safety, but Mieux worried about him more. It was the guards’ turn with Mr. Pudgymouth the cat, and Mieux was pleased to see Trath had him at the table for petting. She was even more pleased to see that Trath was slicing cheese, onions, and tomatoes to put on crackers.

  “You had your lunch yet, Captain?” Trath asked her.

  “Yes, and I am full now. Except for a snack.”

  He smiled a little sadly and pushed one of the huge crackers to her. She held it in both hands and took a big bite. She looked at him over the tomato slice. He did the same, only he looked at Mr. Pudgymouth.

  Trath and Fortin worshiped a super weird god also. Mieux had learned this in their ritual for when Rinka and Elsbeth Steeleye reported that Lain was gone. The guards believed in a baby cow that was so brave it went into an underground world of torture that was run by an evil god. Mieux had to admit that would be pretty impressive if it really happened, but probably it was a symbol of how soldiers do what they are told, or that some stupid evil god is no reason to be a big coward, or that cows do whatever they want because they have no king, or something like that! More interesting to Mieux was that they did not grow up in the baby-cow religion and did not remember who taught it to them or when! How crazy is that!

  Trath’s aura had new wrinkles and colors of sadness and fear. But there were those weird new loops like everyone else had. The aura of Mr. Pudgymouth also was different, with forms almost like bubbles coming off of him. But Mieux quickly lost interest. She looked at the cat’s pudgy mouth, and its little nose, and its stubby ears.

  “He is super-cute!” Mieux cried, and Trath nodded. She lost track of time as they sat there looking at him.

  Finally, Mieux noticed the aura of the cat again, and remembered she still wanted to talk to other people. She thanked Trath for the snack. He just nodded, still petting Mr. Pudgymouth.

  She used a square-headed key to get into the lead wagon, where the guards slept. No one was home because Fortin was guarding the end of the caravan. It was even more lonely with the empty boots of Littalia and Lain, which the others left standing near the bunks as a memorial. The wagon swayed in a gust of wind, and the rattle of polearms held in ceiling racks made it sound even more empty somehow. Mieux blinked at the boots for a moment, then darted through the skinny door on the other side of the wagon.

  Behind it, a ladder led up into the drivers’ cab, where Arnbold was reading Goldham’s Miscellany of Games and Puzzles. Through the big windows, she could see the wagon where she and Rinka lived, with Fortin standing guard on its outside platform.

  “I will do a puzzle with you!” she offered helpfully, leaping into the seat beside him. Arnbold was pretty jumpy, and he flinched instead of saying how great her help would be. “I have solved at least twenty rope puzzles!” she continued, holding up the right number of fingers to illustrate.

  But Arnbold was not interested. Instead, he stared at an advertisement for a My Bitey Kitty game that you could buy in a shop. Bitey stared up from the page with her big eyes and pink claws. This was weird because Arnbold did not even know any of the good lines from the Bitey plays. Also his aura had the same unusual rings. Again, not cozy! Mieux declared to herself.

  If there was no puzzle fun, then she would look at the testabestia instead. She slipped through the hatch that led down to them through a culex-covered chain ladder. The reins ran through here also, but Mieux was careful not to touch them. At the bottom, the testabestia stood harnessed to a metal frame. Right now the canvas and culex on the frame was rolled down, so it was like they were inside a tent. A plank ran along both sides of the frame so that you could feed the testabestia without getting your feet dirty, plus also a little stove was bolted there in case the animals got cold.

  Mieux was the only person besides Arnbold that Elsbeth Steeleye allowed to see the testabestia up-close. Most people didn’t want to do that anyway because the beasts smelled bad and went to the bathroom all over the ground, plus also they might kick you to death. Still, Mieux had earned the right by spending time with them and learning their ways, and even then, she wasn’t allowed to pet them. She looked into Fastr’s big eye. She liked how his long lashes wiggled when he blinked.

  “You are the only ones whose auras are not totally messed up!” she praised them. “Besides mine!”

  Remembering how she learned the testabestia names made Mieux think of Elsbeth and all the questions she might know the answers to. She clambered back up the ladder and trotted through the wagons again, finally getting Fortin to let down the stairs at the caravan’s end. Tightening the cape’s cowl around her face, she dashed out to the lakeside.

  Elsbeth Steeleye sat on a big flat stone, soaking her bare feet in the water and shaving her legs with a hunting knife. Her hair was damp and looked like metal in the pale light. She gave Mieux a rough smile. Pretty much everyone smiled when Mieux showed up. So different from the nights at the Blade & Ladle!

  “Are you shaving your legs because Ashton Arrowmask likes them that way!” Mieux guessed, joining Elsbeth Steeleye on the stone and leaning against her.

  Elsbeth Steeleye’s face went pink and she grumbled something “heart-sharing,” which her word for not wanting to talk about something.

  “I almost never have to shave my legs, but I have to cut the hair on my head over and over!” Mieux chatted.

  Elsbeth Steeleye was more like Elsbeth Steel-leg as she continued scraping the blade on her skin. “You should try a swim,” she suggest to Mieux.

  Mieux pulled a foot from her slipper and dabbed at the water’s gray surface. “It is super cold!” she objected. “I will watch you survive its trials instead!”

  Mieux looked out of the small, tree-covered inlet at the salty lake stretching away in the distance. A heavy mist hung over it, so she could barely see an island out there. It seemed like everything here was shrouded in mystery, just like the Shrouded Vast name said!

  “Fetch some twigs from that tree,” Elsbeth Steeleye said, pointing at a skinny white tree that had been twisted by the wind. It was away from the shore, like all of the vegetation, because the salty water killed everything.

  Once she had them in hand, Elsbeth Steeleye cleaned off the knife in the water. Taking up two of the white twigs, she carefully peeled the bark from the tip and cut little notches into the wood. She handed one to Mieux and said, “Chew,” while doing the same.

  When she did, a sugary but rich taste flooded her mouth. “It tastes like rock candy!” Mieux exclaimed. “It’s amazing how many kinds of tree you eat!”

  “I thought you would like it, Squirrel,” said Elsbeth Steeleye, giving her head a rub. “The life-blood of most trees is not good, but I will show you a few more tasty kinds on our travel.”

  “Will our travel go near where you lived before! Do you want to visit it!”

  Elsbeth Steeleye crossed her decorated arms and chewed the stick a moment. “We are not far now, but I will not take us there. It is a graveyard, and I made it so.” She shifted on the stone.

  “When I was a child, an old granite house remained on the edge of the village, near its boundary-stone,” she continued. “An old woman with no family lived there. We liked to call it haunted and visited it to spy on this strange w
oman and her ghosts.”

  “How many ghosts did you see!” Mieux demanded.

  Elsbeth Steeleye shook her head. “None. What haunts a haunted house are poverty, famine, loneliness, loss. There is no thrill to seeing such ghosts. I will not forget that lesson.”

  Mieux pondered this for a moment. “What do you think the Godkillers really killed!” she asked. “Was it a god or a person who thought they could be one!”

  Elsbeth Steeleye shrugged. “It was powerful enough to deserve death, and weak enough to be killed. I would like to know more also. But that is enough.”

  Mieux gnawed on her yummy twig. “I have been trying to find out more, but it is not easy! The Imperial language is super hard to learn, as I am sure you will agree! It has like ten words for the same thing, and then some of them do not even mean what they say!”

  Elsbeth Steeleye chuckled. “A language says much about its speakers,” she said. “That is why unlocking their word-chest is not as hard for me. The Imperials are thieves by nature, and south-tongue has stolen many words from Skógr.”

  Mieux knit her brow. “If a god can be murdered, do you think you also could just meet a god and tell it to stop acting totally crazy instead of killing it!”

  “Maybe. When my people die, one of two places we may go is into battle alongside the gods.”

  “That sounds exhausting!” Mieux said. “My bottom hurts from sitting for so long on this rock!” she added, clambering up and still chewing her stick. Elsbeth Steeleye got up also and put her knife away.

  “What is the other place you might go!” Mieux asked as they walked back to the caravan.

  “A forest,” Elsbeth Steeleye said, extending a finger for Mieux to clutch. “Like this one.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Thinking back, the first thing Ashton could remember about their journey was the bridge. That was the sort of thing to stick in the memory.

  The bridge was made of planks and ropes, and it spanned a picturesque gorge in front of a sun-catching waterfall. Bridges were among the ten million things that made Ashton antsy, and this one did not disappoint. They got halfway across when a Skógr warband emerged from the trees at either end and threatened to cut the ropes unless they handed over their treasures and hoofed it back south. Between Elsbeth’s sense of honor and Rinka’s temper, it was the negotiations that went south instead. The Skógrs hacked through the ropes, and the caravan was saved only by Alfie’s incredible feat of causing the waterfall’s rock to grow into a platform holding them up. Then came the honor-duel where Elsbeth beat the biggest guy half to death, and tossed the rest of them all off the waterfall when they admitted a connection to a “bone-god” cult. Lain and Littalia had been lost to violence, too, and while he couldn’t say exactly when or where, it was probably in this battle.

  Seeing Elsbeth so blinded by rage that she forgot to question them about the cult before killing them was uncomfortable per se, and doubly so for a boyfriend whose relationships inevitably involved rage-inspiring fuck-ups. But he was even more worried about Alfie, who seemed damaged by the strain of using such powerful magica, something that involved the blue dust he’d brought back from some trip to the Jadal. He tossed and turned at night, and hissed through his teeth during a morning piss, poor guy. So yeah, Ashton remembered all that pretty well.

  After that, they had found the roads so ruined by treefalls and avalanches that they had to hitch a testabestia to each wagon and thread them individually through the ruined path’s hairpin turns. They spent twenty days going as many miles; the month of Spinthir came upon them, as evidenced by Atel’s Trail now filling the night sky with twinkling lights. Finally, as it rose into a range of low mountains, the Old Way returned to a semblance of a road. They found it now lined with artistically carved wooden pillars, ten feet tall, each topped with a cute figurine of a small animal—bunnies, squirrels, birds. Their dark wooden eyes had gleamed with forest mist; their pleasantly rounded flanks had fattened with a patina of lichens.

  The pillars led them to an entire palisaded village crafted out the same brand of whimsical woodcarving. Each plank in the palisade was topped with a similar figurine. Every house had spires and crenellations like old-fashioned Imperial forts—not historic forts, but the elaborate fantasy versions from books and plays like Ladypug. Mixed among the Old Imperial insignia above doorways and winding around columns were Skógr decorations and still more of the cartoonish animals, making for a weird cultural stew.

  The people were the same: many dressed in homespun version of Old Imperial outfits, some platinum blonds with scattered Skógr tattoos, but either way, nearly everyone sprouting some exaggerated near-deformity. Noses blunted to be almost skeletal, hands and feet spread like paddles, and many instances of eyes even freakishly bigger and darker than Mieux’s. And the children—there was no charitable way to put this even to oneself—were just plain ugly. Inbreeding, no doubt.

  But they were friendly enough, even to such strange strangers, and welcomed the caravan into the village they called Falcon’s Nest. It seemed they were the descendents of a lost Imperial legion—at least, they presumed the Empire had presumed it was lost. Lost, too, was any sense of legion discipline, which was fine by Ashton. Everyone spent the majority of their time lolling around hearths or the pretty stream that ran through town, toying all the while with the plethora of pets. Cats, dogs, rabbits, sparrows and owlets on strings, weasel-like things…If Ashton could name it, they had it, and lavished attention on it.

  And so it was that Ashton and his compatriots lounged around a tavern on pillows upholstered in a weave of soft bark, petting the spare beasts that scampered all over the place. They awaited an audience with the legate of Falcon’s Nest, a guy named Archand who presumably was petting a bunch of animals also and would see them whenever he got around to it.

  Ashton tickled a cat under the chin while leaning back in Elsbeth’s embrace, his head cushioned on her massive shoulder. He enjoyed the way she lifted him effortlessly into bed and the bracing steeliness of her hugs. It was a relief to not have to be the strong one in a relationship for a change; it soothed his fidgeting nature and appealed to his general sense of irresponsibility. Her strength wasn’t just the luck of being born as a bulk-discount package of solid barbarian stock. Early in the morning, she drove herself through a ferocious routine: lifting fifty-pound feed sacks, pounding through seventy push-ups, and similar activities he found exhausting to watch. He had patted kisses onto each of her hard-won muscles and ran his tongue along each of her tattoos as she recounted the feats that had earned them. A hard past had left her with a hardened body, but not a soul to match. He luxuriated in her strength as she cradled him gently with it.

  In short, he had fallen into a love verging on worship. Automatically, he sought to sabotage this by having a deliciously wrong affair as soon as possible, and there was someone not that far away, back down that road, who would be perfect for a life-shattering roll in the hay. Weird thing was, he couldn’t remember her name. Apparently his cock could stretch all the way back beyond that rickety bridge, but his brain could not.

  Maybe that should worry me more. But this cat is nice, and Elsbeth is nicer.

  He turned to her for one of her sweetly stiff, pine-flavored kisses, which he duly received.

  “Give him some tongue,” Rinka suggested impatiently from her nearby perch in—naturally—the room’s tallest chair.

  This advice flustered Elsbeth rather than encouraging her. His kiss lost, Ashton regarded Rinka instead.

  Everyone else had an animal on their lap, but of course Rinka had to have something better. Mieux, in this case. She held the smaller woman protectively—or maybe just possessively—with one arm, stroking Mieux’s cheek. Mieux had a silver-furred rabbit in her lap, but out-adorabled it by wearing her face-framing white cowl and cape.

  “You’re tickling my face!” Mieux suddenly complained to Rinka.

  Rinka rolled her eyes and took to petting Mieux’s felt-covered scalp i
nstead.

  “Better?” she inquired.

  Mieux nodded firmly, still focused on feeding turnips into the rabbit’s ever-nibbling mouth.

  Ashton got to his feet languidly, smacking his lips and looking around the place. He made his way to the bar running the length of the back wall, anchored by a crosseyed young Skógr woman who muttered at a tiny yellow bird perched on her finger.

  “You got anything to eat around here? Or even better, to drink?” Ashton inquired, rubbing his hand in a lazy circle on his stomach.

  She looked at him blankly. “It’s all for the pets,” she replied, running a wooden spoon along a row of vats behind her. Each vat had a spout with a handle carved into a bug-eyed animal, just like the pillars outside. Signs of carved bark labled each one: “Seeds,” “Giblets,” “Nom-Yums,” and so on.

  “Yeah, sure. Of course,” Ashton said, now rubbing his head instead. It didn’t quite seem right, but…. He shrugged and asked for some seed, then joined the barkeep in feeding the bird for a while.

  He glanced back at his gang as they pet their beasties. He had some absurd fantasy—or was it a memory?—of a cat wearing a helmet.

  “Hey, Mieux!” he called across the room. “Do you remember something about a cat wearing armor? Maybe in a play?”

  “Don’t shout in my baby’s ear!” the barkeep cried, punching his shoulder while shielding the bird’s head with her other hand. Even scrawny Skógr women packed a wallop. He staggered back a step as he watched Mieux shrug elaborately.

  “Cats do not wear armor! They do not even wear shoes or underpants!” Mieux cried, her volume causing the rabbit to leap from her lap. “Underpants are always called that, even if there is just one of them!” she added informatively.

  The lecture was cut off by a distant sound like a rising wind. Resonating like a high note on a pipe organ, it swelled into a warm, soft vocalization that seemed to fill the world.