“The Akarri do another kind of job?” I asked.
She propped herself in the door on her elbow and I could see her pride boil to the surface. It was like when I asked my Marine friend CJ about what made him better than the Army. “The Knights are an elite unit, but they’re for large-scale fights.”
“The Akarri don’t fight in big battles?”
Her face soured, like I’d poked a sore wound. “No.”
“But aren’t the Akarri a guard corps?”
“Bodyguards who don’t often make it to the front lines,” Tammagan said. “But we are also warriors trained from childhood, and each is loyal only to the Queen. While we have certain limitations…” Clearly she didn’t want to discuss them, whatever they were. “…queens of the past have seen value in our loyalty. Queen Eliandra in particular has broadened our training to tasks less suited to knights and soldiers. The sorts of jobs that a small, stealthy, highly trained unit is more suited for. Besides, soldiers are often more loyal to their generals—and to the nobles on the Council—than to the Queen.”
I blinked. “Son of a crap. You guys are a black-ops unit.”
“Black… ops?” She seemed to suck on the words. “I like the sound of that.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You don’t kidnap and torture people opposed to the Queen, do you? You don’t kick in doors at night and drag terrified people to prison?”
She stiffened. “My honor would not allow it.”
Okay, so Seal Team Six, but not the Gestapo. Check. “It’s just that where I’m from, nefarious rulers dispatch ‘secret police’ to crack down on their political enemies.”
“That is certainly not Her Majesty’s prerogative. Though we may provide certain… intelligence… on those who plot against her, our martial functions are only deployed in defense of the Queen’s body or against enemies of the state and beasts of terror—such as the dragons Ronin slew tonight.”
“How do you know Ronin? Where’s he from and why do you work with him?” Ronin felt familiar even though I knew I hadn’t drawn him. Or had I? I hadn’t recognized Tammagan right away because of her disguise. What was under that demon mask?
“Ronin works for Queen Eliandra,” Tammagan said. “I’ve no knowledge beyond that. You’re free to inquire, but Ronin may not react well.”
“What’s his usual way of reacting?”
“He threw one man over the deck. Tied a rope to his ankle first.”
“Was it… a long rope?” I asked, sensing there was more.
“Just long enough to put him at treetop level. Ronin steered the ship and dragged him through the Great Pines. For a mile.”
“Oh.”
“The Akarri don’t do that sort of thing,” Tammagan said hastily.
“…but you have outside contractors who do.”
She shrugged. “The man deserved it. My honor would have demanded I intervene otherwise.” Her gaze sharpened on me. “You’re staring again.”
I couldn’t help it. Watching her have that debate with herself pushed her face through so many expressions. Just seeing them made me want to draw her a second time, to capture her soul and this time include some of the pensive qualities, the guilt, the veteran cynicism. Her ferocity and prowess were only a snapshot of what Tammagan was. “I promise it’s not evil wizard stuff.”
“I didn’t suspect it was,” she said. “Until you said that.”
I shrugged helplessly. Maybe I shouldn’t draw her. What if it changed her or duplicated her somehow? Would the two Captain Tammagans battle to the death or make out? No. Bad wizard. Don’t draw that. “Maybe we’re alike in some ways. We both seem to want to do the right things, but neither of us is totally sure we are.”
Tammagan stiffened. “You insult my honor again. I am doing what is right, Magister Grawflefox. Good night.”
The wooden door slammed shut before I could apologize. I grimaced at it. “Night, Captain.”
Chapter Six: Isaac is Bad at Feminism
I had enough energy to strip down, avail myself of warm water and soap, and cleanse myself of the filth from my battle with the dragon. The next morning, I was scrubbed of all signs of cowardice but woke with a raw ache burning through every limb. It took five minutes to stand, hissing at the state of my frayed muscles. My legs were worthless at first and I feared I’d be bedridden, but the more I moved, the more life returned to my stiff body.
A sharp rap came at the door and I unlatched it, peeking through. Captain Tammagan stood on the other side, stern-faced and icy as last night. “Breakfast in the galley.” She glanced at my skinny chest and arm. “You could use it.”
I struggled into clean breeches and examined the fit. They were firm and rugged, but breathed about as well as my jeans. I was thankful for dressing my characters in semi-modern attire, which meant there was underwear and familiar locations for buttons, hooks, and belts.
The white linen shirt had poofy sleeves that reminded me of a pirate shirt, and it was breezy and comfortable. A handsome black vest topped it off. The polished steel mirror on the wall wasn’t great, but damn if I didn’t feel like Han Solo. The walk to the galley convinced me I was more a post-carbonite Han. An occasional turbulent wobble as the ship hit a rough crosswind nearly dropped me to the floor, so I leaned on the railings for support.
Akarri packed tight into both benches of the galley’s narrow table. Their hoods were down and every woman was a total knockout. They were mainly pink- to pale-skinned like most Amyssians—and here I worried about the racism of filling the world’s largest metropolis with a majority of white people. Their hair hit every mundane hue, worn in thick braids or cropped short. Tammagan’s wild hair was tamed by a silver clasp at the back of her head. Though I could see little beneath their robes, I’d have bellied over broken glass for the right to buy any one of them a drink. Instead, I collapsed into a seat and stared at gray oat mash slopped into a tin for each of us.
“Mm,” I said, spanking my mash with a metal spoon and lifting it to test adhesion. The entire tray came off the table. “Cafeterias are pretty much the same everywhere,” I whispered.
“Did you really kill one?” asked a pixie-faced brunette across from me. Her large-eyed, inquisitive expression was so adorable it hurt to look at her.
“Kill one what?” I’d killed multiple things in the last two days.
“Butterfly,” she said. “Did you really kill one butterfly?”
I shook my head. “Really?”
“Of course not really. The dragon!” She threw her arms into the air. “Did you blow it up or not?”
“I mean, it was only a little blown up,” I said. I’ve always had an aversion to bragging—even so much as taking a compliment. I knew that getting a big head would invite my inner critic to pop out and remind everyone how singularly lazy and untalented I really am. “I didn’t have much of a choice. Rest assured, I thoroughly exhausted my ‘run and hide and cry’ options first. When confronted with death or firing off a potshot, yeah, I shot it. And thank God my gun was basically a bazooka, or I’d have been halfway to Dracon’s torture chamber by now.”
At “thank God” every woman pounded her right fist to her left shoulder in unison. “Praise Varus,” said the cutely energetic brunette.
I nodded and swallowed at my mash, trying not to get my stare caught in the corona of her beauty. “Yes, go Varus, huzzah.”
“Where did you get this… ‘gun’ device?” asked a second dark-haired woman. She was olive-skinned, more Mediterranean than the other Akarri, and I glanced at her and froze. She had the blackest eyes of any woman I’d ever seen. Her eyes mugged my brain. They emptied its pockets and shut it into a dumpster and walked away with the car keys.
“I’m sorry,” I said, as if my mouth were an answering machine for my brain. “Could you repeat the question?”
Instead of growing annoyed at my idiot stare, the dark-eyed woman became visibly flummoxed, as if she had made the error in communicating with me. “This weapon. It’s like ou
r lightning cannons, isn’t it? Where did you come across such a fantastic artifact of power? No one has ever seen such a compact version of the cannon before. It could change the war if we acquired more of them.”
Her eyes were expressive, widening when she was excited, always glinting in the soft galley lights. I was transfixed. “War?”
“The war Dracon instigated in the north, and which he draws Korvia steadily into,” said the dark-eyed woman. “We cannot remain neutral for much longer. That is why we’ve joined Ronin on his hunt—to learn how to slay dragons, in case Korvia goes to war with them.”
For a moment, every woman was silent. Then Tammagan leaned in aggressively. All her ferocity was curled into her lip. “Don’t bother with him, Kyra,” she said to the dark-eyed woman. “He finds our profession dishonorable.”
A collective discontent worked its way around the table and I realized I was the subject of many hard looks. Clearing my throat, I tested the waters. “That’s not exactly what I said.”
Tammagan jabbed her spoon at me. “You suggested I wasn’t ‘totally sure’ that my service is honorable. Which I took to mean you weren’t totally sure, since I know quite firmly what my own feelings are.”
“Okay. Then it’s not what I meant,” I said.
“You stare around this table slack-jawed, gawping like you cannot believe we serve at arms. Next you’ll ask us how we keep our poor, pretty faces from getting sliced up in combat. Or were you going to ask Elsie when she plans to have children?”
“That would be a quarter past never,” murmured the pixie-faced woman, who I took to be Elsie.
“Would you stop putting words in my mouth?” I asked.
“Would you stop staring? This is the third time I’ve asked you this, and if you make me do it a fourth, I’ll write the words on a tent spike and pound it through your thick skull. We are the Akarri, the royal guard, and we catch enough stares from the morons on Council who commissioned our useless armor.”
My heart caught. “Wait. You wear that armor?”
Tammagan slammed her palms onto the table, shot to her feet, and parted her robes. She in fact had on a chain skirt and a band of molded steel around her chest. Her midriff and a good portion of her throat and chest were exposed. Her anger the other night about being excluded from front-line combat suddenly clicked into place. They can’t fight in battles because the Council equipped them with my freaking armor designs.
“Try to see it from his primitive perspective,” Elsie urged, hand to Tammagan’s forearm. “Women who wield the blade are taboo in Korvia. But in his land women are probably relegated to mostly domestic roles. The poor savage likely doesn’t know how to treat them as peers.”
The sheer niceness and total, blithe lack of sarcasm in Elsie’s words cut to my quick. I buried my face in my hands, defeated. “May I be dismissed from the table?”
“I would be more than happy to see you stowed in your bunk,” Tammagan said frostily.
I pushed to my feet and couldn’t quite meet anyone’s gaze, which seemed to range from curious to accusing. “For what it’s worth,” I managed, “I’m sorry if my staring made you uncomfortable. I’m going to go melt into a tiny, self-agonizing puddle for maybe six days.”
In point of fact, I didn’t wait to get back to my bunk to start agonizing. The twinge of guilt struck my most central nerve the moment I left their presence and realized the truth: if Rune was my invention, I had drawn and created Korvia; and Korvia was a massively gender-segregated society, in which women could be jailed for wielding swords. I hadn’t ever included that plot element, but somehow it suffused Korvian society anyway.
I tried fighting that accusation: I’d included a female ruler in Korvia, as well as female warriors. But no, somehow the latent sexism in my art had leaked out and doomed the realm to backward thinking. I realized that had been the trouble at the table. I’d worked so hard making Tammagan’s portrait beautiful and now all the Akarri had faces that stunned me into a state of mental torpor. It had always been faces and expressions that could strike my heart like a ten-pound sledge.
I wished I could explain that to them. Yes, I stared, and yes, you strike a chord inside me. It didn’t mean I couldn’t respect who they were, it just meant I needed a moment to catch my breath. And for that matter, I’d never meant to imply Tammagan’s honor was at risk for being a soldier; I only meant to imply it was at risk if she employed some of Ronin’s less-savory tactics.
Did any of that matter, though? The misunderstandings, their enchanting features, Tammagan’s temper—none of it compared to the fact that each of those women was compelled by law to dress in armor with nice wide-open spots on the midsection, chest, and throat to fill with arrows. Dumbass, I thought to myself. I hobbled toward my bunk using the railings again, ducking the occasional steam pipe crisscrossing the ceiling of the wooden ship’s corridor.
Ronin descended into the hall on narrow stairs, moving with graceful sureness. Still dressed in that dark-gray garb, he wore only half of the demon mask, which covered the lower part of his face. It worked in conjunction with his cowl to obscure all but his eyes, which centered on me. “You should keep to your bunk.” His voice was still gravelly, like it had been electronically scrambled. Everything about Ronin seemed mysterious. I wondered how he ate. Probably alone. Through a straw. And under a blanket.
“I’m on my way to the bunk now. Where I plan to brood on how I’m a terrible human being.”
Ronin set a comforting hand on my shoulder, reaching up to do so and reminding me again how short badass ninjas could be, but then his grip steeled so hard I winced. “I don’t care,” he said. “Stay in your bunk when you’re not in the head.”
I bristled. “You said I’m not your prisoner.”
“I said you’re under my protection. Stationary men are easier to guard. Stay in your bunk.”
“Or what?” I asked, folding my arms.
“If someone hurts you, it had better be me,” Ronin said. He presented one fist and squeezed until I could hear the creaking leather of the glove. “Because if you let someone else hurt you, I’ll save you and then I’ll take my turn. So. What are you going to do?”
I wasn’t sure how idle his threat was, but there was sincerity in his eyes. “Stay in my bunk,” I said with rising outrage. I had to fight to choke it from my voice. All the anger I’d felt at myself was suddenly pointed toward Ronin.
He stared hard, as if assessing my honesty. His eyes were electric blue and lacked the epicanthic fold I’d anticipated. I didn’t recall any Korvians with that precise eye color, but still had the unsettling sense that I knew Ronin from somewhere. “Never talk to me again without a reason.” He turned to leave.
“You should be a counselor!” I called after him.
Back in my room, I collapsed into my bunk with more questions than answers. I gave up on the useless self-loathing and realized I had to figure out precisely how much of this world was mine—and therefore my fault. Things I had drawn were alive now. That jogged my memory and I flipped my sketchpad open to the page where I’d sketched the rune stone and gun the night before.
The page was blank.
That settled it. My illustrations were becoming real. In Rune, I had the power to draw things into being. It made sense—if I had created Rune with my pencil and stylus, why should that power not continue within the world itself? My guilt boiled over and I swallowed it down, hard. If I’d known Rune was real, I’d have been way more responsible.
I flipped through the sketchpad, which was half full with my work. I found my doodle of an adorable cartoon turtle watching me from inside its cavernous shell. I tried twenty different times to drag the turtle off the page, including trite magical words, speaking to it in dulcet tones, concentrating on individual lines, and a couple Harry Potter–style motions with my pencil. Nothing.
The gun had popped out while I slept. I wondered if that was it. Flipping back to the blank page the gun and stone came from, I noticed something:
a splotch on the paper. A water stain? No—drool. I must have rolled over in my sleep.
I flipped back to the turtle and worked the saliva in my mouth. Then, thinking better, I leaned in and exhaled on the sketch.
My breath spread over the illustration. Individual lines lit silver. White-hot sparks hissed from the image and, once the whole page glowed, the turtle peeled off the paper. The foot and head popped out like a movie suddenly played in 3-D. Its enormous eyes shrank and turned wet and black. Its skin darkened, the hints of striation on its shell transforming to the hard texture shared by real turtles. It fell off the page, thumping into my lap, and promptly looked up at me with a surprisingly smile-like expression on its beak.
“Holy smokes.” I lifted the turtle to inspect it nose to nose. “I made you.” My creation scanned my face with a joy born of total fearlessness, then licked my nose.
This established three important facts: I could draw stuff into existence. I had to use my breath to drag illustrations out. And the world had changed my turtle, translating it from cartoony to real. There was still some interpretation involved, but nevertheless, my turtle’s happy expression was reflected in its present good nature. The soul of my work remained somewhat intact.
So what did that say about Korvia’s misogyny? Nothing I liked. I’d drawn scantily clad Tammagan out of an erection-fueled daydream and now Korvian society jailed women for stepping out of line. Terrific. I groaned under the collective, imagined judgment of ten thousand Women’s Studies majors.
Test #2 was to sketch a stack of toilet paper rolls, which produced wooden spools with a cottony, thin, but usable toilet tissue. It turned out to be moot since, to my surprise, the head already had a bidet and box of disposable tissue just slightly better than dorm-room quality. So the world’s pooping culture was more European than Medieval European—I could deal with that—and during my afternoon deuce, I sketched Test #3: my kanji dictionary.
I finished the dictionary in my bunk, unsure if this would work. I didn’t want a book that was blank on the inside, I wanted my book. Magic had transported me to Rune, so maybe I could summon things. I copied its cover art from memory and exhaled. The dense tome that fell into my lap looked precisely as I’d remembered. When I flipped it open, my initials were on the bottom of the front page. If it was a replica, it was a good one. Granted, the paper was thinner and more brittle, the cover a bit less glossy—so it was my dictionary “translated” into Rune’s comparable tech level, much like the toilet tissue.
The Accidental God (A Pygmalion Fail Book 1) Page 7