“You sure you didn't mind me screwing, uh, Star-Eye?” Liam asked.
“Mind? I encouraged it,” Meg said, her voice muffled by how she was kissing his chest.
Liam snorted. “I, uh, kinda got that. But why?”
Meg drew her head back, her brow furrowing. “What do you mean, why?”
“Where I come from, um.” Liam paused for a moment. “Lovers don't encourage their lovers to, uh, fuck other people.”
Meg snorted. “Are you Christians so small hearted that you cannot bear to see your girlfriends ride another man's dick?” She paused. “Okay, there are Dodekatheon worshipers who get just as jealous. Maybe it's a human thing?”
Liam shook his head.
“Maybe it's a people thing,” he said. “I'm sure there are some valkyrie who aren't willing to share.”
Meg pouted, then mashed her face against his chest. “Aww. Now I can't feel smug and superior.”
“Sorry, babe,” Liam said. He looked to the window – to the dim pale white sphere that was Purgatory's sun-moon, to the glinting cities that his brain kept trying to think of as stars. He smiled slightly and sprawled back with his lover as she squeezed him tighter and started to settle in for their sleep. Tomorrow, he and Tethis and Liv were going to set sail down the river that wound along Faiyum Fall's – heading north towards the only ocean that was on this half of Purgatory. From there, they were going to set out on the first of what Sobek promised to be many tasks.
But he couldn't help but think that the real danger of this world had been bested – for himself, at least.
He had faced gods and demigods, hoplites and lightning rhinos, Megara and Star-Eye. Through it all – the temptations and the dangers – he felt that he was still himself.
Liam closed his eyes, laid back in bed and prayed – the first prayer that he had really composed that hadn't been dashed off in a blind panic.
God, I don't know if you approve or disapprove of what we did to these people. It's all a bit late to fix now, what with it being seventeen centuries old and all that. But grant me the wisdom to help them. I think I owe them that – I never banished anyone, but the world I live in exists because we did. Everything I took for granted is built on that. So, please, help me help them.
Oh, he added, a moment later. Please, please, please, please, protect me from temptation. I don't care how pretty she is, I am not going to fuck a slave. Got it?
And in the silence and darkness of night, Liam felt his heart steady.
He drifted off to sleep – dreaming of travels, and battles, and Meg.
And the murder stroke.
Liam, Meg and Tethis will return in Riposte, the second book of the Purgatory Wars series. If you enjoyed this book, please consider leaving a review.
Sneak Peak - Riposte
Vulkas Shieldbreaker took a moment to simply admire the city of Faiyum Falls as his ship nestled into dock. Even with an Aesier's born confidence and love for his homeland, he had to admit that Coptics knew what they were doing when it came to building cities. Monuments might have made them famous, but the same skills it took to erect the pyramids could be seen here. Cranes the size of buildings, with counterweights that were as elaborately decorated as their mundane purpose could allow, lifted entire ship's stores from their decks and set them down in storage yards. Men and women and beasts of burden carted the supplies away – and a bustling crowd surged back and forth throughout the wide streets. From them rose a melange of language – Coptic, Latin, Greek, Celtic – and coins of dozens of different cities were passed back and forth.
But through it all, Vulkas saw no sign of grain.
He elbowed Thu'chan with one broad arm, almost jostling the ship's scribe over the railing. “Told you,” Vulkas said, pride brimming in his voice. “Told you.”
Thu sniffed – the sound turned into an almost musical whistle by his long, narrow, curved beak. His feathers ruffled up and he hunched his shoulders forward. If someone had decided to paint Thu at this moment, the result could have been entitled: A portrait of sour grapes. Thu shook his head, sighed explosively, and then – with the air of someone having their kneecaps drawn from their broken leg – said: “Fine. You were right, Captain.”
Vulkas laughed and slapped his back.
The rumors had been that a great war was brewing between Sobek – the Pesdjeti God of Crocodiles and Ameliorated Evil – and a pair of the Dodekatheon: Aries and Athena. Apollo was officially neutral, but everyone in the mead-halls of distant Thorheilm had agreed he was going to be aiding his fellow gods. But the terrain favored Sobek. Again, everyone had agreed on that. So, while the debates had been running around and around as to who would seek peace first, Vulkas had simply gone to the landowners and purchased as much grain as he could, then set sail.
It had been a harrowing trip around the Platonic Sea. Pirates and lizardfolk raiders alike still plagued the straits not patrolled by the Tuatha mistcraft, and the lizardfolk sometimes had access to queer magic. Two of his crew had died from unnervingly accurate lightning bolts, brought down out of a clear sky by some scrawny lizardthing that had seemed more hunched muscle and robes than proper barbarian raider. It had been one of Vulkas' throwing axes that had split the thing's head – it had taken his ax to the grave before they had a chance to take the robes off and see how it had controlled lightning like the crystalbacks of the jungle.
But through it all, the grain had been kept safe and unnibbled by studious attention from the ship's cats and some simple runic enchantments laid down by a priestess of Sif.
And now, here, they were poised to make a profit – a profit worth all the danger, all the dire risk.
Vulkas nodded. “Find the master of the granaries in this city – tell them they won't need to rely on fish and meat and whatever gods be damned lean pickings they've had to deal with.”
Thu nodded. “I will, sir. What will you be doing?”
Vulkas rubbed his chin and beamed beatifically – but his eyes didn't move from a Coptic woman who was standing on a spar and tying down a ship that was coming in to dock. The woman was bronze skinned and slender, her hair shaved off leaving her utterly bald, her eyes marked by dark khol lining similar to what the Aseir had been forced to adopt since they had been banished to Purgatory. The combination was quite striking, but Vulkas was more admiring the way her bared breasts gleamed with sweat in the morning sunlight, her modesty only protected by a thin cotton skirt around her hips.
“Ah, Coptics,” he sighed, then kissed his bunched fingers.
“Ugh.” Thu didn't try to hide his disgust.
“Come now!” Vulkas looked down at his friend, scribe, and second in command.
“I prefer to not put my attentions in anything as mercurial and untrustworthy as women,” Thu said, primly.
“So, who was it who broke your heart? A pretty lad, aye, not a woman,” Vulkas said, wagging his finger underneath Thu's beak. Thu shot a glare at him as the ship finally finished tying down and Vulkas laughed as he stepped off the gangplank and into the thronging streets of Faiyum Falls. He turned back to his crew – the men and women a motley mixture of races and creeds, all of them looking at him.
“Thu is in charge until I get back,” he said, his voice pitched to carry. “But once the grain is off the ship, you are free to enjoy your coppers. Remember – any who don't get back within the day, you may be left behind.” He grinned. “And none of us want to be trapped here, in such a dreary land, eh?”
His crew laughed and he already saw that several were considering staying. This bothered Vulkas not at all.
Crew came. Crew went. So long as the soul of the ship remained – so long as his hardest hands and best warriors stuck around to carry that soul - he could happily bid farewell to most of the deckhands. With that thought in his head, he turned and started to stride through the docks. Vulkas had been a huscral – a shield bearing warrior – in the arid lands that the Norse had landed when they were banished. There, the Norse peoples had met a simil
arly banished tribe known as the Zapandi. They had fled a terrible god, Tchernobog, who sought to corrupt all of Purgatory with his shadow. Thor had struck him down and the two tribes had intermarried to an extent that none could say who was Norse and who was Zapandi anymore. The new folk – the Aesier – had learned to tame the arid lands. Water had been found and irrigated, and vast fields of grain now spread across the steppe.
But the ancient Norse had sailed ships of hard wood and iron shod men. The iron might be gone, and the islands of the Norse a distant, foggy memory, but there were still seas to sail.
Still a profit to be made.
And selling the grain was only half of Vulkas' aims. He walked past a stall selling charms blessed by one of the Pesdjeti pantheon and shook his head. He hadn't come so far to buy charms that his gods could have made. He walked past a warehouse that seemed to be filled with jars of tar and pitch. Again, he turned up his nose and came to a side-street that bled into the docks district. He frowned as something stuck out to him as being odd. After a moment, he saw it.
There was a giant walking up the street, heading towards the center of the city.
Vulkas started to follow the giant and took a moment to gauge him. He was definitely not Coptic – too pale by half, with hair as blond as a Aesier nobleman. But he didn't have the same facial hair of most of Vulkas' kin, nor did he bear the scars that one might expect from a huscral. And, again, he was a giant. Vulkas guessed his height to be nearly six feet – though, he did note that the man's muscles were more lean than bulky. He had a youthful face, filled with frustration and was dressed in naught but a kilt, a pair of sandals, and looped baldric that held a sword that must have been more for show than anything else.
Who'd make a sword so long with bronze?
It'd have to be three times as thick and five times as heavy as it looked to not simply bend in half – and by the time he swung it, he would have been disemboweled.
Maybe, Vulkas thought. He prefers to simply negate fights by being intimidating?
Then the giant opened his mouth and spoke – and Vulkas realized that the giant was walking with someone. In the captain's defense, the giant's companion was easily missed. She was as short as he was tall, her emerald green skin and long ears marked her as a gobliness. She was holding a clay tablet in one hand, gesturing to it as she spoke in quick Coptic: “I don't think anyone's going to be willing to sail no matter how much gold we offer – not with the tales of the pirates, not with the harpies-”
The giant responded, sounding irritated.
Vulkas' brow furrowed.
The giant spoke no tongue he had ever heard. He caught a hint of Latin, slurred and mashed in with other words that sounded like they should make sense but did not. It was a fast tongue, and from the way that the gobliness laughed, one that lent itself to humor.
The two turned around a corner, ducking into an alleyway with the casual confidence of people used to a city.
And then, detaching from shadowed nooks and emerging from behind closed, ratty doors came five hooded forms. They were clad in black linen and had crude wooden masks over their faces. They held bronze knives and clubs and one even had a lead-weighted plumbata that he tossed from palm to palm with nervous tension. They darted into the alleyway and Vulkas felt his blood chill. He had been party to many a battle – and more than a few muggings – but he had never seen an assassination before. His first instinct won out. He sprang forward, drawing his only weapon – a dagger more for cutting fruit and sharpening a stylus than anything else – and shouted: “Ware! Ware!”
The giant might not have spoken Norse, but he heard the noise. He spun around and shoved the gobliness behind him with the same smooth motion. The assassin with the plumbata hefted it and readied to loose it. Vulkas had fought Hellenes in battle and sneered. Those battle-hardened mercenaries had underhanded those murderous darts, making the throwing harder to spot and harder to defend against.
The assassin's lack of skill gave the Aesier captain time enough to hurl his dagger. The blade plunged into the man's palm and he shrieked – but not for long. A moment later, his arm hit the ground and his head followed shortly after.
The giant stood tall and proud, holding his blade in both hands. It had moved with amazing speed and it shone with a silvery light as it caught the sun. Blood stained the edge, dripping to the floor as the giant glared at the four remaining men as if daring them to make another move. Vulkas could do no more than stare in shock, his mind reeling.
That blade!
The giant stepped forward. He beat aside a dagger – and a good chunk of a man's arm – then counter-stroked upwards, sending the assassin falling backwards in a spray of blood. The assassins weren't unarmored – they wore woven cloth tunics that were tougher and harder to cut than they seemed – but they still fell as if wearing nothing at all. The giant parried a knife stroke – blocking the attacker's blade in such a way that left three severed fingers on the ground – then punched out with his own sword-hilt. Weighted and sturdy, the curious hand-guard on the blade caught the assassin in the jaw. His head jerked back in a spray of blood and teeth.
The last assassin turned to flee – but by now, the gobliness had emerged from hiding. Her palms slapped together and she spoke a word in a tongue that Vulkas didn't recognize. Her hands spread, and then she made a tossing motion. From the space between her hands came a glowing ball of fibrous tendrils that were as tightly compacted as spider silk. They exploded outwards with a crackle, then wrapped around the fleeing man. He was trussed up in an instant and toppled forward to skid along the ground for a few feet before coming to a stop.
The violence had taken less than five seconds.
The giant wiped his blade down with a cloth he drew from a belt pouch, shaking his head as he said something that sounded like: Mudder fakker.
“Thank you, sir,” the gobliness said, adjusting her shift with one hand as she looked up at Vulkas.
Vulkas blinked a few times.
Then beamed.
“I hear you need to hire a ship?” he said, cheerily.
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The Murder Stroke (Purgatory Wars Book 1) Page 10
