Arrowmask: Godkillers of the Shrouded Vast

by John Ruch

  Alfie, you old son of a bitch! You managed to resurrect that stuffed drake after all!

  He turned to Wavebrand with a knavish grin. “That’s Alfie, but you can call him the Undead Prince!” he informed her.

  She was already up to something, frowning like a spoiled child denied dessert and gathering an ominous nimbus of light around her. It was a pretty, golden glow that would probably light everyone’s skeleton on fire from the inside out or whatever. The ring of light expanded and thickened menacingly.

  Ashton shouted Alfie’s name, but the old magimath already saw it coming. He jumped off the testabestia, landing heavily, but upright. For a second that felt like an hour, he simply sat there with his eyes pinched shut while Wavebrand’s suspicious halo swept ever closer to the mass of combatants.

  Telvyr emerged from the scrum and went at Alfie like a lion spotting a straggler. Ashton couldn’t detect any motion, any effort, on Alfie’s part. The wood of Separatist’s grip simply spewed a resinous sap that gushed over the paladin’s forearm to the floor and quickly fossilized into a gleaming orange stone. Then the magimath got serious.

  Alfie stood and extended his hands. The stone floor suddenly lifted in a rolling wave twenty feet high, knocking all aside and exploding on contact with Wavebrand’s competing light. The force sent the hidden acid pit flying, hurling its deadly contents, and burst Wavebrand’s bubble.

  In the fraction of a second before he hit the floor, Ashton saw Alfie scream as his outstretched hands petrified into a grayish, granular stone that flashed across his entire body, head to toe. The frozen magimath toppled over heavily like an Old Empire statue.

  Ashton landed lightly as he could, rolling off the balls of his feet. One of the chorus members dashed by; Ashton tripped him for the fuck of it and kicked him into the puddle of spilled acid. Most of the combat was now invisible to him, as he landed on the other side of the rubble pile raised by Alfie’s stone wave. But he could still see Alfie himself. And Wavebrand, who had already recovered sufficiently to hover over his petrified figure, probably gloating or worse. There was nothing to be done for it.

  What Ashton did have was fifty feet of unobstructed open space between him and the overblown bed of the God of Cuteness. And a bad attitude that had never been worse.

  Maybe it runs in the family. Maybe I really am a Godkiller.

  He wasn’t completely surprised when his dash to the god’s dome was cut a few yards short by the familiar slime-bubble. He glowered at Wavebrand as she floated down beside him. It was infuriating that she was just a smirky kid.

  “Arrowmask. You think you can equal your grandmother?” she said. “Let me tell you what really happened to her. I’m certain the Tetragate already know, and you should, too.”

  The dome’s curtain stirred and the blunt edge of a white-furred flipper-like appendage appeared for a moment beneath its edge. Something about the exquisite roundness and the delicacy of the fur made his legs wobbly and sent him to his knees.

  Cuteness, like pain, is a creature of the moment, impossible to recall afterward in its fullness. Ashton only knew that his rage helped him snap out of it before he began cooing mindlessly. The overwhelming sense of compulsion passed and he averted his eyes from the deity’s dome.

  “Yes, the barbarians raised this very god,” Wavebrand continued. “Yes, the Godkillers destroyed it, and themselves in the process. But really it only dematerialized. Over the decades, it slowly reformed, in part by feeding on the magica energies of the Godkillers themselves. Your family’s Godkiller was also a god-maker.”

  Ashton just looked at her. He chewed his tongue, trying to stop from wondering what was happening to Elsbeth on the other side of the rubble.

  “The very legionnaires sent to guard the site became the foundations of a new cult. They nourished the god as it drew in the world’s magica and radiated Cuteness. Then the Tetragate got the idea of raising their own god. The Temple of Cuteness noticed this competition for magica and began accelerating their sacrifices. Killing infants and deforming themselves into cuter forms.”

  Wavebrand conjured up a weird octagon of dark green light that hovered near her face. She peered at him through it.

  “Likewise, the Tetragate realized that the old god of the Vast was rising again,” she said. “They needed someone to find it and destroy it. Probably by dosing them with some lethal magica.”

  “I didn’t get treated with any magica.”

  “Perhaps hidden in a meal you shared, then.”

  He thought of drinking brandy with Regulus. Or the Shadow-wield potion they confiscated and then returned to him as a “bonus.”

  “I haven’t forgotten the kind of game you like play.” Or did I? Bastards.

  “Undoubtedly, they chose a surviving Arrowmask because they thought the family’s essence might be key to destroying the mystery god, or at least helping you home in on it. Nonsense, of course. You’re not special.”

  Ashton glowered and shrugged. “At least you’re not tossing a glass of wine in my face at the Jury Lane after saying that.”

  Wavebrand squinted through her pane of green light at him. “Ah, yes, there it is. Very clever.”

  She made some complicated signs in the air with her fingers, and his chest grew warm. “Step aside, carefully,” she advised.

  He sidestepped and gulped as he saw, floating at chest height in the vacated spot, a bluish sphere surrounded by vein-like tendrils. The weird energy blob was so metallic and darkly colored it looked made of solid glass.

  “That was inside you. And if you had gotten much closer to the god, it would have exploded with enough force to take off the mountaintop.” She swept her arms as she floated in a circle around him, and the vein-like structures disappeared. “There. No more exploding.”

  Ashton felt his face twitch. Wavebrand continued to regard the magical trap through her floating window. She grinned crookedly.

  “And there’s a recursive anchor as well. So that when it did explode, it would automatically notify the Tetragate, wherever the member who called this magica is at the time.” She chuckled coldly in yet another Rinka-ism that grated on his nerves. “Handy how easy that is to reverse into a biddening portal.”

  With more gesturing, the sphere transformed into a churning doughnut of light like the one Alfie and Rinka had disappeared into in Calisia. Wavebrand maneuvered this one so that it began swallowing the God of Cuteness’s dome, and herself as well. Her slime-bubbles dissipated.

  “Go help your friends, Arrowmask,” Wavebrand said as she and the divine bed faded into nothingness. “I’ll end the Tetragate and their god.”

  He jogged around the rubble pile for a quick look. More beasts were swarming through the main doorway, even a cloud of bats and a pack of wolves. But Elsbeth had dragged her wounded self atop a testabestia and was laying waste, and Mieux was still darting here and there like a barracuda taking bites of a school of weaker fish. The battle was far from won and he couldn’t see how the other humans fared, friend or foe, but his heart lifted.

  A million thoughts raced through his head in that moment. Love for Elsbeth and his friends. An uncertain trust in their ability to beat all comers. A desire to see the paladins and their entire shiny Empire fall in a sea of blood and fire. The fear that exactly that would happen and they’d be slaves to a new Cuteness Empire. The thought that he could die in this battle before telling anyone the truth he had learned.

  In the end, though, what made him turn from battle and leap into that portal as it made its last pale flicker was Mieux. For a split second, he caught the attention of her giant, tear-streaming eyes burning like lanterns across the chamber. She mouthed words to him as she nodded with that familiar commanding firmness toward the portal.

  “Go put fie on her drumsticks!” her lips said. He coughed out a laugh, but he knew exactly what she meant.

  Fuck the gods. Pwyll tore off my friend’s head and threw it into a box, and by Night and fucking Fury, someone needs to do the same thi
ng to her.

  Traveling through the portal brought a nauseating sense of falling, and the landing wasn’t so hot, either.

  Wavebrand wasn’t kidding about the magica returning itself to sender like a letter mailed to one of those abandoned post-inns on the Old Ways. The God of Cuteness’s curtained bed had crashed right atop a massive roundtable during a meeting of half of the Tetragate. The paladins Sir Ulther Eldershaw and Dame Maud Threlkeld—Ashton recognized their faces from coins—stood with swords raised against the surprise intrusion, while Wavebrand hovered, smirking, next to the divine doggie-bed.

  Several clerks and henchmen were dashing around, but there was no sign of the other paladins or Counsel Regulus, who Ashton was looking forward to kneeing in the balls at the first opportunity. Scattered documents fluttered like autumn leaves around them all. The ones Ashton waved away from his face said something about Vyrkanian trade routes and the fabled glitter mines of The Twelve.

  “Where do you hide your tyrannical god?” demanded Wavebrand.

  Ashton was more interested in where they were hiding the nearest exit. Lopping off Wavebrand’s head was a great idea, but it now seemed as realistic as flying to Atel’s Trail. Disoriented and terrified, Ashton felt all the more helpless without the strong women who had become part of his life in the past months. No Elsbeth to hide behind. No Mieux to somersault to his rescue. No Rinka to give him a kick in the pants.

  At least he kept some wits about him, and his knees remained solid enough. Is this what it means to be a hero? Someone who isn’t surprised or frozen by things going violently insane?

  Glancing around, he saw they were in a circular room whose only way out was a stairwell leading downward—unfortunately, with the paladins standing between him and it. Windows ringing the room admitted bright sunlight, a sticky breeze, and the sound of surf pounding far below. We’re atop a tower. Not in Cor Cordum. Some tropical coast. Greenarch?

  While he distracted himself with such pondering, the Tetragate-Wavebrand negotiations had broken down. Wavebrand had whipped the curtains open to reveal the God of Cuteness in all its glory. Ashton was savvy enough not to look, and so were the paladins. But their henchmen were already kneeling and rubbing their fingers together, making that “widee-woo” baby sound so beloved in Falcon’s Nest.

  Dame Maud was quick on the uptake. “A deity of infants or cuteness. So that’s what caused the distractions from the Old Ways.” Her dark eyebrows contrasted with her bone-white hair. They lifted a moment as her eyes flickered at him with an air of recognition.

  Sir Ulther and Dame Maud maneuvered around the dome to stay out of viewing range as they faced off with the young magimath, who tossed up one of her egg-yolk bubbles. Alarm bells sounded somewhere below. The paladins crossed their swords a moment, causing them to throb with a dull red light that Ashton guessed did not bode well for defenses based on slime-bubbles.

  “You think your god of pets and toys the equal of Empire, a threat to the coming Order?” Sir Ulther thundered. His voice was deliberately deep and stilted, like a king in a play. “We’ll fashion it a collar and leash and teach it more useful tricks.”

  As Wavebrand floated backward cautiously, the entire tower shook as if an earthquake had struck, and a roar like an avalanche erupted outside the windows.

  “Calling for your god?” Wavebrand said, her eyes flickering around for some kind of tactic, just like Ashton found himself doing.

  Sir Ulther and Dame Maud both snorted. “Merely one of its minor assistants. It will be more than enough for a girl and her pet.”

  With the possible exception of himself on a good day, Ashton hated everyone in the room. But which one he hated the most shifted moment to moment. His emotions churned and finally spat a wisecrack into his mouth that just had to come out.

  “Hey,” he said to Sir Ulther. “If you hate cute shit, why did you put a Bitey Kitty sticker on your sword?”

  “What?” the paladin snapped, glancing at him and the precious glowy blade.

  That split second was all Wavebrand needed. The bubble faded and her left palm radiated a firefly-green glow as touched it to Sir Ulther’s face and stroked his gray whiskers.

  It happened so fast that at first Ashton thought Wavebrand had simply disintegrated the paladin, like Rinka vanishing in that pit of acid. He was just gone, his armor standing there a second before collapsing in a pots-and-pans crash. As Dame Maud hesitated in shock, Wavebrand leaned down and drew from the armor pile an infant. A baby Tetragate paladin.

  Wavebrand floated to the dome and dangled baby Ulther by one arm. He let out a cry as an adorably blunt snout emerged and gulped him down with a cracking of tiny bones.

  Dame Maud’s face twitched with horror as she backpedaled toward the stairs.

  “That’s what we did to the Old Empire in Vollach. That’s what we’ll do to your New Empire, too,” Wavebrand said like some echo of Rinka. “Adore the fucking adorable, bitch.”

  This history lesson was interrupted by a massive blow that collapsed a section of wall from the outside in like a wrecking ball. Everyone not floating like Wavebrand was knocked to their feet in a cloud of dust and a heap of stone blocks poured down the stairwell.

  In response, the God of Cuteness let out its ear-splitting “cooooooooooo.” The immediate response by birds and beasts was so enormous that Ashton could hear the rustling and shivering in the trees outside.

  Getting stuck inside a tower in the midst of a divine war sounded like even less fun than a panther showing up while you’re liberating the Star of Monksbane Glen. A similar solution presented itself.

  Scrambling to his feet, Ashton picked up one of the chairs knocked away from the table. He stabbed its legs through the glass of one window. Then he wedged the chair in the windowframe, slipped out beside it, and used its back as a ladder to clamber within fingertip reach of the roofline. His ribs screamed, and he screamed back, as he hauled himself onto the low, conical roof of the tower.

  The tower was about fifty feet high and perched above the sea on a cliff of similar height, with waves crashing into spray against it. Sprawling out to the north was a rambling castle or prison surrounded by jungle, from which clouds of birds and herds of boars and deer were emerging. Out to sea, the horizon was marked by a weirdly uniform line of storm clouds lit from within by silent lightning. It looked like the unapproachable mystery island of Bastion, which wouldn’t surprise him, because nothing was capable of surprising him anymore. Definitely not in comparison to the landscape’s main attraction.

  Looming over the tower at double its height, a fist raised to deliver it another blow, was a giant. There was no other word Ashton could think of for it, unless he wanted to retell the stories of Atel’s Children from the legends of Sir Triplegate. It was a human figure, but raised directly from the earth and composed of it. Sand spilled off it, trees sprouted from it, boulders comprised its features and fists. Its surface was in a constant flux of eroding and shifting soils and sands, yet it never lost it coherent shape and strangely expressive face. It was a face of rage.

  As Ashton vomited into his mouth in sheer anxiety, Wavebrand floated out the window, returning to him like a jungle fever that you never got rid of and suffered at the most inopportune moments. She looked at the giant with ice-eyes wide, then turned to Ashton with an extended hand.

  “Arrowmask, I can share the god’s power with you! We can defeat this together!” she offered. “We have to! Or this is the world’s future!”

  Ashton gave the giant another disbelieving glance. He thought about games of Check and cartel compromises. He thought about people he hated at his side and people he loved left behind to fight and die a thousand leagues away. He thought about a world that never loved him back the way he occasionally loved it, and how usually, no matter which way he squirmed, it came down to this: dead friends and new enemies.

  He squinted at Wavebrand against the stinging salt wind and the jungle sun, and made a firm decision to do the craziest possible t
hing.

  “Keep your cuteness. I’ve still got my luck.”

  He turned to the tower’s seaward side, took a running leap off the edge, and aimed for the waves below.

  “How will they remember me?” he wondered as he plunged. “‘Ashton brought the God of Cuteness back from the Vast and sicced it on those dickhead Tetragate dictators.’ Not bad. Violet really might write a song about that one.”

  As the wavespray hit his face, Ashton laughed a reckless laugh until it, and he, were lost in the uncertain swells of an unknown sea.

  EPILOGUE

  The churning chips of golden glitter in the form of a massive tornadic funnel abraded flesh like a whetstone, spitting bits of themselves back into their faces. Tumbling from their testabestia, ten days out from the city of Ljarhuz, they plunged calf-deep into futile sand.

  The writhing metallic vortex spun a mile into the sapphire sky like the stabbing needle of an extravagant brooch on the cape of a mad king. The trillion glitter-fangs within it eroded fur and flesh, spraying chunks of water-laden hump fat, leaving bloody skeletons standing free a moment before the bone powdered. Men disappeared in puffs of thread and beard clippings. Crates of dates and figs were eaten only by this untasting lashing tongue; bound silks and carpets were unfurled only in this empty desert non-home.

  A straggler in the train stood on a dune a mile distant, the only witness, and the only hope of warning for the capital city of The Twelve. He turned his testabestia back toward Ljarhuz.

  So thick and dense that glitter cloud as it revolved nearer him, it mirrored the desert sun precisely, its tiny dazzles resolving into one searing whiteness. His flesh flamed, his bones went molten.

  He arrived at Ljarhuz a day later as a wisp of passing smoke on the same breeze carrying the first window-scratching bits of gold.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR