Which didn’t look likely, since Cura’s conjured horror lashed two more tentacle limbs around the raga’s waist, hoisting him roughly into the air. Tam forced herself to watch despite the urge to turn away.
There was a sodden tearing sound as Temoi’s remaining arm was ripped from his shoulder. The raga landed on his knees in a pool of blood, and the Hysterium spectators bellowed appreciatively.
Cura staggered to her feet, swaying like a tower rocked at its foundation. Tam could hear her speaking, but couldn’t make out the words. Damp rot and the sharp tang of salt tickled her nose.
The raga roared up at Kuragen, who rammed her spear into his mouth and out the back of his head. The ghostfires guttered like windblown candles in his eyes.
“Incredible,” Jeka whispered. “I’ve seen summoners fight before, but …”
“But?” Tam asked.
“Not like this,” said the wrangler. “Never like this.”
By now Kuragen had coiled half her tentacles around the armless raga. His legs kicked desperately, but he was helpless in the horror’s grip. The Inkwitch extended a trembling arm as she surveyed the sea of howling faces around them. Cries of “Kill it!” and “Finish him!” were lobbed like stones from the circling heights, and at last the noise resolved into a single word, chanted over and again by the Hysterium crowd.
Death. Death. Death.
Cura bowed her head, an acknowledgment, and curled her open hand into a fist.
Kuragen squeezed. The muscles in her constricting limbs bulged beneath water-slick scales. Temoi gurgled around the spear in his throat, and then crumpled on himself like a suit of cheap tin armour. Bones snapped, blood slopped from the bursting seams in his flesh, and the fires in his eyes went out.
The raga was dead. Again.
Kuragen vanished in a swirl of blue-black mist, leaving Temoi’s corpse to collapse in a broken heap as the sound in the arena reached a fever pitch.
“See?” Roderick stole another sip from his flask. The satyr was doing a piss-poor job of hiding the fact that his hands were shaking. “Business as usual.”
They left the arena by way of a nondescript door normally reserved for Jeka’s kitchen staff, a few of whom were seated on crates outside, sharing a pipe of something stronger than tobacco and trying to outdo one another with escalating interpretations of Fable’s performance. Tam caught one of them leering at Rose as she went by, but the man found something exceptionally interesting about his crusty leather boots when Freecloud glanced his way.
Cura—weary, but flush with the thrill of victory—shared a lingering stare with a butcher in a bloodstained apron who’d been preening himself in the reflective surface of a knife. She met his devouring gaze with one of her own.
“You wanna go for a ride?” she asked, and the butcher, for all his affected cool, leapt to his feet like a dog who’d been promised a walk.
Freecloud turned on her. “Seriously?”
“What? Oh, I’m sorry, did you just use a sea goddess to kill a giant zombie-lion or was that me? I’ve earned this, Cloud. Besides, I’m sure he can find his way home when I’m finished with him.”
The druin looked to Rose. Fable’s leader had stripped the armour off her ruined right arm, which vaguely resembled a sausage savaged by quarrelling dogs. “Fine,” Rose said through gritted teeth. “If he wants to come, he can come.”
Cura crooked a finger and the butcher scurried over, trailed by a chorus of hoots and catcalls from Jeka’s staff. He set his knife on a crate and began untying his bloody apron, but the summoner shook her head. “Leave it on,” she told him. “And bring the knife.”
Fable and the Outlaw Nation struck east for Rowan’s Creek. Rose was consigned to the nursing wain and placed under the care of Fable’s medic, a Cartean witch doctor named Dannon. Doctor Dan (as the Outlaws called him) purveyed a variety of ointments, unguents, and dubious concoctions that could cure almost anything, from blindness, to petrification, to early onset lycanthropy. According to Dan, even a missing limb could be regenerated with the right ingredients, though to Tam that sounded a little far-fetched. Freecloud took Rose’s absence as an opportunity to gamble his way through Fable’s legion of followers. Despite the druin’s reputation for winning every game he played, there was no shortage of challengers willing to try their luck. And it wasn’t as if the druin stole their money. When the tour passed through Bryton, a village famous for its sprawling orchards, he bought each and every Outlaw an apple pie and a jug of sweet cider.
Tam and Brune were left to entertain themselves while doing their best to ignore the groans, grunts, and occasional squeal from the direction of Cura’s bunk. They tried playing Shields and Steels, only to find that every shield but one was missing. The remaining piece had a satyr-shaped bite taken out of it, and Roderick grudgingly admitted to having eaten the others.
“I get hungry!” he said defensively.
They settled for a game of Contha’s Keep, the aim of which was to remove wooden blocks from the midst of a precariously stacked tower and place them on top without collapsing the entire structure—a task made even more difficult when the occasional bump in the road jolted the Redoubt’s kitchen table.
“Do you know who Contha was?” Brune asked as Tam was nudging a block free.
“You’re trying to distract me.”
“Is it working?”
The tower didn’t so much as wobble as she set her piece on top. “Obviously not,” she said. “So, who was Contha?”
The shaman chuckled, and began using the tip of one huge finger to push a block out through the centre. He was surprisingly dextrous for someone with hands the size of frying pans. “He was a druin. An Exarch, actually.”
“An Exarch?”
“They were like governors of the Old Dominion,” said Brune. “An Exarch ruled over each city-state on behalf of the Archon, who was basically like the king.” His block tumbled clear. He placed it on top and grinned triumphantly, then scooped up the bottle of rice wine near his elbow and drank directly from the neck.
Tam examined the tower. It was getting sparse near the bottom; she would have to choose her next block carefully.
“Contha was the Exarch of a place called Lamneth,” Brune went on, determined to draw Tam’s mind from the task at hand. “He was something of a recluse, apparently, but a brilliant engineer. When the civil war broke out, and the Exarchs began hurling hosts of wild monsters at one another, Contha fielded an army of golems instead.”
The brick Tam had selected popped free. She put it on top and sighed in relief when the tower stopped swaying.
She’d seen the remains of a golem once, when she and her mother had gone exploring the forests around Ardburg. The massive construct had been blanketed by moss. The druic runes that once served it as eyes were dormant, and some animal had made a nest of its mouth. “Have you ever fought one?” she asked as Brune contemplated his next move.
The shaman shook his head. “We came across a live one, once. Runebroken. Running rampant and killing whatever it could find. Freecloud managed to get it under control. He carved a few symbols into a stone medallion, then used his sword to cut the same runes in the golem. Next thing you know, it’s doing whatever he tells it to.”
“How does Freecloud know so much about golems?” Tam asked.
Brune tried claiming a brick near the bottom, but the structure swayed dangerously, so he went after another instead. “Uh … I’m not—”
“Contha’s his dad,” came Roderick’s muffled voice. The booker was laid out on a sofa behind them with his hooves crossed and his hat perched over his face.
“I thought you were driving!” said Brune, obviously startled.
“This thing practically drives itself,” Roderick assured him.
Tam was pretty certain that wasn’t true, but her curiosity outweighed her concern. “Contha is Freecloud’s father? Is he still alive?”
The satyr lifted his hat. A cloud of fragrant smoke came billowing out, an
d Tam was startled to see that Rod had been smoking a pipe underneath it. “So far as we know, yes. He and Freecloud aren’t especially close. Most druins don’t think too fondly of anyone who isn’t a druin. They liked us all better as slaves. So if Cloud’s old man found out he was shacking up with a human, or—God’s forbid—that he and Rose—”
They heard a sharp yelp down the hallway. Seconds later, Cura’s pet butcher appeared, naked but for a spiked leash trailing from his neck.
“That doesn’t go there, you crazy bitch!” He froze at the sight of Roderick, who was waving his hat to clear the smoke around his horns. Revulsion made an ugly mask of the butcher’s otherwise pretty face. “What the fuck are you supposed to be?”
The satyr spoke around the pipe stem in his teeth. “I’ll be the guy with his hoof up your ass if you don’t apologize to the nice lady.”
The butcher scoffed. “Lady? That painted freak almost killed me! She’s damaged goods, man. Bent as a grass sword! And you …” His lip curled in disgust. “You’re a fucking monster. Go back to the Heartwyld where you belong. Or better yet, go rot in a wrangler’s cell and wait for some merc to come along and srrkk—”
The man was dragged violently around by Cura, who’d given the leash on his neck a hard yank. She was holding the butcher’s blade, and now pressed it against the prickling skin of his throat.
“You forgot your toy, dog,” she told him. “Run and get it.”
The knife went thunk into the cupboard beside the door. The butcher stumbled after it, aided by a kick in the ass from Cura, who was wearing only the bloodied white apron she’d stripped from her suitor—a look Tam found strangely appealing.
The man fled without retrieving his knife. He had a fuzzy, flat little bum that made the bard wonder (not for the first time) why the heck you’d want to see a man naked, much less allow one to crawl on top of you.
The door slammed shut, and the tower she and Brune were building clattered across the table.
The shaman glared accusingly at Cura as she padded over and claimed his bottle of rice wine. She gulped it empty, then set it down amidst the ruins of Contha’s Keep.
“I’m playing the winner,” she said.
Chapter Twelve
The Rock and the Road
Branigan had told Tam once that every town, village, and hamlet along the ingeniously named East Road was famous for something. Two days later the tour rolled into Rowan’s Creek, a town known for its gargantuan lumber mill, which loomed like a lord’s keep over the houses clustered around it. The arena here was a box of stepped benches called the Logger’s Lair.
A band of adolescent boys named Five Rotten Apples skirmished for Fable against a quartet of dead gnolls. According to the Lair’s wrangler, the hyena-headed zombies had been killed in battle three days before, but had risen from the dead with white fires burning in their eyes. Rumours floating through the Outlaw Nation suggested that Kaskar’s necromancer-at-large had been performing this trick all over the north. Ancestors screeched from the prison of their tombs, while graveyards belched up the dead in droves. Country-wide exhumations were under way; columns of black smoke buttressed the sky above every town.
On Rose’s orders, Roderick sent word east that Fable would fight only living monsters for the remainder of the tour.
While they watched the Five Rotten Apples dispatch the gnolls, Tam asked the booker why bands weren’t hiring themselves out to the towns and villages in need of aid.
Rod pulled off his hat and scratched around the base of one curling horn. “Because villagers can’t pay what a wrangler can,” he told her. “There’s more gold to be gained fighting in the arenas, and more glory in facing the Horde than hunting down some demented dark wizard.”
“Well, what about us?” Tam wondered. “Fable, I mean. Is our contract in Diremarch more important than helping people here?”
The satyr replaced his hat. “Why don’t you ask Rose yourself?” he said. “I’d suggest packing your stuff first, though, just in case.”
Tam decided to keep her misgivings to herself for the time being.
When the undead gnolls were dealt with, Bloody Rose and her band made a show out of overcoming their own foe: a massive red toad with four eyes, stubby wings, and a tongue that turned to flame the moment it left the monster’s mouth. Brune and Cura kept it flanked while Rose systematically destroyed all four of its eyes. Freecloud cut its flaming tongue in half before stepping in to put the poor creature out of its misery.
The crowd loved it, but Tam found the whole thing a bit contrived. She began to question every song she’d ever heard about heroic mercenaries and vile monsters doing battle on the arena floor. If those so-called battles were anything like the one-sided slaughter she watched from the comfort of the Lair’s armoury, then the work of a bard was even more difficult than she’d been led to believe.
Something her father had said the night she joined the band resurfaced in her mind. Mercenaries aren’t heroes, he’d warned her. They’re killers.
She was beginning to understand what he’d meant by that, and to see the mercenaries she’d once considered heroes in a new and garish light.
They spent the night in Rowan’s Creek. Fable secured rooms at an inn called the Troubled Troubadour and threw a party that featured no less than four fights, three fires, and, implausibly, a birth. The child—a girl with natural red curls—was named Rose, prompting Tam to wonder how many baby Roses had been left in Fable’s wake throughout their touring years.
The party was in full swing when Tam retired, so she barricaded the door with everything but the bed and a white bearskin rug. Despite her fortifications, Brune clambered noisily through her ground-floor window shortly before dawn. The shaman’s clothes were shredded, his hands sticky with blood. He reeked of booze, and begged the bard not to tell the others.
Tam wondered if this had something to do with the “incident” he’d mentioned a few days ago. “Whose blood is that?” she asked warily.
“Not a who,” Brune said, curling up on the bearskin rug. “A what.”
“What, then?”
It seemed an effort for the shaman to open his bloodshot eyes. “You ever seen a beaver?” She shook her head no. “Lucky …” he murmured, closing his eyes and drifting off. “Vicious little bastards.” His next breath was a ripping snore, so Tam let it lie and pulled a pillow over her head.
The tour rolled on.
In Barton, a village proudly claiming to have the “Tallest Watchtower in the North,” Fable butchered a mob of malnourished goblins before a crowd of well-fed northerners. Afterward, they paid a visit to Barton’s celebrated watchtower. They spent a few minutes catching their breath at the top, gazing out over the snowcapped forest around them, before Cura gave voice to what each of them was thinking.
“What a waste of fucking time.”
The tour rolled on.
In Bell Mill (which boasted neither a bell nor a mill) the band faced off against a giant spider by the name of Bigger Ted. “This here’s the offspring of Big Ted,” his wrangler explained to Tam while Fable hacked it apart, “who was the offspring of Ted, who was the offspring of Little Ted, who was hardly bigger than a housecat.”
Bell Mill, it turned out, was famous for its spider hatchery, which everyone but Cura refused to visit. And since Cura saw rules as things begging to be broken, she stole one of the spiders—a fuzzy orange one about the size of her fist—which Tam watched Roderick eat later that night.
The satyr had been disappointed afterward. “That didn’t taste like orange at all,” he complained.
The tour rolled on.
Salt Creek touted itself as the birthplace of a legendary heroine named Wyld Willa. Everything—from the village cobbler (Willa’s Wandering Feet) to the local pub (Willa’s Wet Whistle)—was named in her honour, as were the villagers themselves, nearly all of whom were named either Willa or William.
Salt Creek’s wrangler (“Call me Will!” he told them) offered up a trio
of grizzled grey-bearded ogres. Rose killed one, Freecloud another. Brune and Cura played a hasty game of Rock-Paper-Scimitar over the last, which the shaman won. He managed to pull off the transformation into a huge brown bear, and made quick work of the band’s final foe.
There followed another wild night, another weary morning, and the tour rolled on.
The weather took a turn for the worse. The clouds dumped snowflakes the size of saucers, and the entire train was stranded for almost a week in a town called Piper, whose illustrious “Golden Road” (which Freecloud claimed was actually limestone cobbles slathered with yellow paint) lay buried under several feet of snow. Fable was forced to share Piper’s only inn with a dozen or so other bands intent on facing the Horde at Coldfire Pass. They were one and all keen to see a mercenary of Rose’s calibre among them, but once word got around that Fable was running off east, she might have been a rotter for the scornful glares thrown her way whenever anyone was damned sure she wasn’t looking.
Tam did a stint onstage one night, playing through her repertoire of Fable-inspired songs. When her audience learned she was the daughter of Lily Hashford, they insisted she play Together and proceeded to sing along when she did.
Piper’s arena, called the Golden Gallery, was built like a theatre: The combatants fought on a stage fenced by barbed netting, while the spectators watched from a semicircle of tiered stone benches. The wrangler here either hadn’t received Roderick’s notice or had decided to ignore it, since his entire stable comprised of previously slain monsters.
Small wonder no one cares there’s a necromancer on the loose, Tam pondered. Killing him would be bad for business!
Rose was livid, but instead of calling off the fight she chose a pair of wargs—great black wolves as tall at the shoulder as Brune—and set her summoner loose. While her bandmates passed around a bottle of Gonhollow whiskey, Cura took centre stage and called forth a monster of her own.
Bloody Rose Page 10
