Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

  What he experienced at this particular moment was a couple of ribs and a finger or two being broken and one of the thugs saying, “Get him to the legate’s office.” As they hauled him out with the toes of his boots scraping the floor, Ashton noticed a sharp-eyed blond girl—a teenager—peeking at him from another of the curtained doorways. Unlike the other citizens, her face was animated and self-aware. She shot him a weird, unnerving grin.

  At the legate’s place, Ashton was taken to a room that was basically a bigger version of Archand’s office: desk, bookcases, cats. Ashton’s companions were there, their eyes glassy, and apparently oblivious to the dozen guards around them, two of whom carried nasty axes with ominous dark stains on the blades. It had the look of a courtroom, and Ashton never did particularly well inside one of those.

  Archand, standing before the lattice window, didn’t seem happy to see Ashton there, either. He made one of his weird hisses through his nutty dentures and flicked his hands at the guards. They released Ashton near his companions, in the thin arc of open space between the small army of guards and the desk.

  The sight of Ashton’s battered face started having the wake-up nudge effect on his friends. A vain horror of permanent scarring flitted through his mind. Elsbeth reached out for him. It took five guards to keep them separated.

  “These are the people who took over your village. Killed your daughter,” Ashton snarled as someone drove a sword handle into his gut. “They murder infants in the basement. Something eats the bodies.”

  Elsbeth bared her teeth in a terrifying expression combining pure hate and utter grief. Over her hulking shoulder, Ashton saw Rinka cock her head in that snake-strike way of hers.

  Archand stepped forward confidently, sweeping his open palms above the desk. “Have you petted the cats?” he suggested smoothly.

  Rinka cocked her head the other way and stamped her foot loud enough to send the felines running.

  Archand’s finger had a notable tremor as he pointed it at Ashton.

  “Defiling a temple. The penalty for that is death!”

  “Yes—yours,” Elsbeth said, shoving the heavy desk aside with one hand and grabbing Archand’s throat with the other. An easy thrust of her arm, and Archand crashed backward through the window lattice.

  They heard him land heavily and wetly far below.

  Taking advantage of violence-shocked pauses was one of Ashton’s specialities. In this case, he ignored his screaming ribs and slid under the desk. A bit cowardly, to be sure, but he wanted a moment to check his nose for permanent damage and see if a dropped sword might conveniently skitter to his feet while the ladies mopped up.

  His hiding place didn’t last long, as Elsbeth chose to pick up the deck and hurl it bodily into a half-dozen guards with devastating results. Rinka took some wounds that didn’t seem to bother her as she disarmed an axeman and began decapitating survivors.

  Soon, Elsbeth joined in, swinging a sword in each hand like a shrub-trimmer working the Tetragate gardens. The wild bloodshed gave Trelleck and Ninebarrow a chance to arm themselves as well, and the battle of the moment was soon done.

  Ashton peeked out the smashed window and wrinkled his nose. Archand, who never looked good to begin with, was a twisted mess on the flagstones. Weird little puffy animals nibbled at his body. Almost like hedgehogs, only twice the size and with the fur of a winter fox. In the distance, Ashton saw what appeared to be a riot breaking out near the temple entrance.

  “Let’s find our weapons,” he suggested, “and get out of—”

  “And slaughter this bone-cult and its mind-thief of a god,” Elsbeth finished.

  “Well, sure, if it happens to be on the way,” Ashton said with a half-smirk that made his broken nose pound like galley drums.

  “Wait. The trouble’s bigger than just this god,” Rinka interrupted. “Archand said there’s a new priestess named Pwyll Wavebrand. Pwyll is an old enemy of mine—and one of the most powerful magimaths ever to use Life magica.”

  “That’s some coincidence,” Ashton blurted.

  “I think she was part of Telvyr’s war-party, traveling in disguise.”

  “And you only mention this now?” Elsbeth growled, taking a powerful step forward.

  Ashton took a step forward, too, intending to stand between his barbarian girlfriend and the Ice Queen of Torture before realizing he’d be like a fly hovering between slapping palms.

  “Look, let’s just kill everybody and figure out who was right later,” he suggested instead.

  This notion appealed to everyone in his criminally insane crew. They headed to the entrance gate guardhouse, finding it unstaffed. As they broke open lockers to retrieve their weapons, that weird “cooooooooooo” sound blasted across the landscape outside again. A certain alluring gleam winked from the bulgy eyes of a puppy statuette on a nearby countertop, and Ashton had a nearly irresistible urge to fondle it. But resist he did, and sidelong glances at his companions showed they were shaking off the feeling, too.

  Outside, the call of Cuteness was affecting the cats and birds and squirrels, sending them all heading toward the temple. As Ashton’s group returned to the caravan, a crashing in the underbrush of the adjacent woods preceded a bear bursting into the street and heading for that mountainside pipe-tower. A doe followed hot on its heels.

  Outside the circled wagons, they found Alfie poking listlessly at a foul-smelling cauldron steaming over the campfire as it gave off occasional blue sparks. He looked awful, his plump cheeks sunken, his skin coated with a clammy sheen. Arnbold alternately tended to him and the cauldron, here adjusting a blanket on Alfie’s knees, there tossing a handful of dried leaves into the concoction at the Stone Master’s direction.

  As Ashton filled them in on the nature of the Cuteness, Alfie merely nodded wearily.

  “It is as Rinka and I saw in the Jadal,” he wheezed. “This cult can command beasts with the highest magica. Undoubtedly comes from this god of theirs. And it explains the universal waning of magica, don’t you see? Only a finite amount in the world, and the quantity needed to raise a god must be staggering. Like watering a prize-winning melon from the fish pond. Only puddles left for the neighbors to drink.”

  “Where’s Mieux?” Rinka interrupted, poking her head out of the wagon window behind him.

  “Ran off to play with some local girl,” Alfie said.

  Rinka’s eyes narrowed into dagger wounds. “With blond curls?”

  When Alfie nodded in affirmation, she growled, “Pwyll,” and dashed toward the temple.

  The others followed, but Ashton’s heart sank, and he hesitated a moment.

  “Alfie, are you alright?”

  The old magimath swallowed laboriously. “Listen, old chum,” he began. “I may have one last trick up my proverbial sleeve. The accumulation of magica here isn’t restricted to this god of Cuteness. Can be tapped by anyone. Even so, whatever dwells up there, you’ll never survive a head-on challenge. Do what you do best, old man. Find a way to smuggle the goods, so to speak. Cheat. Lie.”

  Ashton nodded and tried to half-smile wistfully through the numbness spreading from his nose to his upper lip.

  “We’re all making it out of here alive,” he promised wildly.

  Alfie smiled wanly and gave him a wink. “Good start.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The riot Ashton had spawned was well-stoked at the temple’s mouth. Raging civilians besieged the guards with superior numbers. But it was turning into a bloodbath as all those animals arrived to serve as temple reinforcements. Driven by Cuteness-defending impulse, bears, snakes, and dogs attacked the rioters. Some went down under swarms of cats that were the equal of their counterparts in the Old Empire ruins.

  For a brief second, Ashton worried absurdly about whether Violet would find him attractive again after his nose healed. Like I’m even gonna be alive ten minutes from now.

  Getting into the temple looked impossible, and Ashton eyed that pipe-tower as an alternative; but impossible na
turally meant nothing to the women in his new and probably short life. Elsbeth simply slashed at anything in her way, while Rinka more judiciously hacked down guards and tossed them as distracting meat to the dogs. Ashton followed Ninebarrow and Trelleck as a rear guard.

  The inner chamber had been evacuated, the pink nest torn to fluff, the silver pipes hanging crooked from their housings. Rinka marched straight to the back wall and tore the curtains down. Behind them were ancient double doors of metal-clad wood, the surface etched with the design of a man beating himself with a club while looking down on some seal-like creature, its eyes squeezed shut in savage bliss.

  Rinka gave the doors a kick, but no one had bothered to lock them. In fact, a temple welcoming committee awaited them.

  The room beyond was something out of a Mix-Fiend hallucination. It was a huge natural cavern maybe three hundred feet deep and half again as wide, its entire floor carpeted in what looked like yellow fluff off a baby chick, and its stalactites painted in candy-blue-and-pink stripes and whorls. Someone was blowing soap bubbles into the place from an unseen vent. A chorus of robed, sunglasses-clad figures lined up against each wall, singing a crazy baby-talk lullaby. Along the left-hand wall was another curtained doorway flanked by two armed-and-armored lackeys. At the rear of the chamber was a hexagonal platform capped with an opal dome and encircled in translucent silk curtains, behind which something wriggled unnervingly. Just the thing for a god to lounge on. Two silver pipes passed behind the curtains; at the base of one of them were bones and gnawed bodies of what looked like goslings and piglets.

  Of more immediate concern was what they could see plainly: a half-circle of beasts lined up to prevent their passage further than a third of the way into the chamber. Just like outside, it was populated with bears, deer, reptiles, and those weird creatures, like living puffy slippers, that had been chewing on Archand’s repulsive corpse. At the sight of them, Elsbeth screamed incoherently and slapped the flat of her axe on her arm.

  Ashton didn’t blame her, but there was plenty of scream-worthy visions to go around. Like Telvyr and his sidekick Gratia lined up among the animals. Like Mieux held prisoner.

  The monstrous infantry line was pierced by one narrow gap down the middle, allowing a view deeper into the chamber, where Mieux was kneeling on the floor next to a blond girl. Maybe seventeen, and clad in one of the priestly robes worn with an infidel’s casualness, this had to be the mysterious Pwyll Wavebrand. The hair on Ashton’s arms bristled as he realized she wasn’t standing on the floor, but rather floating slightly above it, her toes dangling. Mieux fussed over a rabbit in her lap, frowning as she intently arranged its ears flat and petted between them.

  “Arrowmask’s sick parody of a family returns to stage its freak show!” bellowed Telvyr, interrupting Ashton’s attempt to figure out some kind of play.

  “Shut up, Father!” Wavebrand said smoothly, with a projection of her voice that would do a speechifying royal proud. She had the same cockiness, and the same faint Duxian accent, as Rinka. Similar ice-chip eyes, too. Telvyr clamped his mouth shut. Ashton noted with satisfaction that his beard hadn’t grown back in properly after being burned.

  “Let her go!” Rinka demanded. “This is you and me, bitch!”

  “Your latest plaything belongs to Cuteness now!” Wavebrand replied smugly. “You’ve lost her, just like you lost—”

  “I am not hypnotized by some crazy god of Cuteness! The rabbit is just super soft to pet!” Mieux cried, leaping to her feet as the bunny hopped away. She glared up at Wavebrand with her fists balled on her hips. “I didn’t know you are a friend of the paladin Telvyr! He’s a total psychobitch!”

  With that, Mieux whipped out her rolled-up Merrykin’s Digest and rapped Wavebrand’s hand with it.

  Ashton laughed hysterically for a brief moment. Then his blood ran cold as he watched Rinka, the greatest strategic mind he’d ever seen this side of the old Triplegate legends, charge madly into an obvious trap.

  The rest of them shouted as she ran through the gap in the line with her sword raised. Ten feet from Wavebrand, the carpet gave way beneath Rinka’s feet. She plunged neck-deep into a hidden pit that instantly emitted a steak-on-a-griddle sizzle and a cloud of metallic-smelling smoke.

  Acid, Asthon realized as he screamed stupid denials at the uncaring gods.

  Even in armor, her body disintegrated so quickly she didn’t have time to scream. There was just a deathly throat-rattle and the clunk of her sword dropping on the floor.

  Wavebrand stepped forward, bent down, and pulled Rinka’s head off, easy as if it were a drumstick on a well-basted chicken. She hoisted it by those raven locks, now singed shorter and still smoldering, and held the dead face before hers for a moment. Her lips parted and her eyes gleamed exultantly. She muttered something in Vollach as the door-guarding lackeys approached, lugging a heavy stone box maybe a yard long.

  “Dispose of this properly,” Wavebrand said, tossing Rinka’s head into the box as if it were an apple core going into a trash can.

  We’ll dispose of you properly, Ashton thought as the lackeys hauled the box off to the doors. And indeed, crossbow shots from Ninebarrow and Trelleck immediately sailed at Wavebrand, and Mieux leapt at her with a keening cry. But even as he thought it, even as they went on the offensive, something shook inside him. Anyone capable of such a self-indulgent murder in front of enemies was confident of some back-up plan.

  The plan turned out to be a bubble of some gross yellowish substance the consistency of egg yolk that Wavebrand instantly conjured around herself with a mere fiddling of her fingers. Mieux’s fists and crossbow bolts alike bounced off it like sleet on a topsail.

  Rinka’s dead and magica isn’t. And it’s supposed to distract us, Ashton thought quickly. Traps within traps.

  From the corner of his tear-scalded eyes he saw Telvyr’s “Separatist” sword coming down. He got his own blade up in the nick of time, falling to one knee amid a shower of metal-on-metal sparks. His broken fingers and ribs flamed so hard the pain made him spit on the floor. It made him angry, and angry was more useful than horrified. Especially when you were trying to get your push-dagger blade between the knees joints of an asshole paladin’s leg armor.

  Ashton liked Telvyr’s screams, but was not so thrilled by the circle of forest beasts that began closing in on them all. Turning his head, he saw Elsbeth grapple a bear face-to-face. Mieux, giving up on Wavebrand for the moment, cartwheeled into the fray, tears spinning out of her narrowed eyes like spray coming off the last fragment of a sinking ship. She grabbed a snake by the head in a lightning move and tossed it at Gratia.

  Dashing to join their fray, Ashton ran face-first into another wall of Wavebrand’s supernatural snot-bubble. It closed around him, clammy and gelatinous, like the flesh of a beached whale. He floated toward the ceiling within this weird prison, and realized Wavebrand was inside with him. She waved a protective membrane into existence between them. Ashton gave it a token sword-prodding with the expected non-result.

  “Rinka deserved to die,” she began, her voice only slightly dampened. “I expect you knew her well enough to understand that, even without hearing my life story. And she would never have worked with me to do what we now must.”

  “I’ll get over it,” Ashton deflected angrily, glaring through the bubble’s goopy floor at the melee underway. “I don’t mind watching more of your friends die, but not more of mine. Let me the fuck out of here!”

  “That’s a waste of time. Even with my magica empowered here, I can’t stop the God of Cuteness from calling endless reinforcements. Beasts of the mountains will heed the ancient maternal call and fight to the death to defend what is cute.”

  Even as she spoke, another weird “cooooooo” sound reverberated through the stone of the place from outside.

  “Makes perfect sense, kiddo,” Ashton said randomly, looking around for some advantage or loophole in the insanity.

  “I joined Telvyr just to track down Rinka,” Wavebrand c
ontinued measuredly, with a lingering smirk at her triumph. “But now that I am here and in charge, I see I have a much larger mission. We all do.”

  She wiggled the bubble to knock Ashton on his ass. He glared up her as they floated around, bouncing softly off the ceiling.

  “The way these people have raised their new god is disgusting—infanticide and war,” she continued. “But I have learned the very good reason they have done it.”

  “Because they’re crazy assholes?” Ashton ventured.

  “Because another god is rising.” She cocked her head in a peculiarly Rinka-like way. “A darker god. A Tetragate god.”

  Ashton felt a cold sweat pop on his brow and the small of his back. Regulus and his games.

  “What god? Where?”

  “We don’t know exactly. Somewhere far to the east of Cor Cordum. But with the power that Cuteness commands, it’s easy to see the lines of magica the other god is drawing upon as well. Some of the darkest and harshest forms.”

  “A war of gods is coming, Arrowmask,” she continued. “It’s time to choose a side.”

  Gritting his teeth, Ashton looked through the bubble’s quavering floor. A bear sunk its claws into the meat of Elsbeth’s shoulder as she arched her back in an axe-stroke. Trelleck and Ninebarrow were falling under a swarm of those weasel-like little monsters. Some members of the temple chorus were fleeing and some were having their bones picked clean by panthers and hawks. Ashton could feel his mind sneaking toward the easy exit of insanity.

  “I think I’ll go with the ‘fuck you’ side,” he snapped.

  “Arrowmask, why do you think they chose you for—”

  A thunderous crash cut her short as the main temple doors came down and two of the testabestia stormed in, trampling the smaller creatures in their path. Arnbold was astride one, Alfie the other. Behind them fluttered a ragged, black-scaled horror the size of a vulture, dust still unloading from its tattered bat-wings with each flap. As it circled the chamber, it spat clouds of purple-black fumes that dropped dead every animal they touched.