Like all assassins in Jhutaar, Yima knew that Gideon Xifer Deathdrum always drank with his back to the door. And like most of her dark ilk, she was working on a theory as to why.
From her seat across the crowded cantine, she noted his elkhide bracers, his whalebone-rimmed goggles, his tunic stitched in the northern style. All of it marked him as an outlander to these sultry shores. But it wasn’t a foreigner’s ignorance that caused him to take his ease so recklessly in this bloodsoaked tavern.
Was it arrogance, then? A preening display of wordless boasting about his skill at bloodplay? Certainly the number of maimed and crippled men who had come for his purse in the two weeks since he’d arrived in the harbor would bear that out. But Yima had known—and killed—enough arrogant fighters in her day, and he didn’t carry himself in the same fashion.
So why, then? Why put your back to a room full of scoundrels and cutthroats, night upon night, undoubtedly knowing full well the heft of the price tag pinned to it?
“Gots your eye on a sweet young mans, there, Yee?” the barkeep’s voice boomed, laced with a hint of laughter. “Shall I sends him a drink on your courtesy?”
Yima instantly crumpled into herself, turning her eyes from the Deathdrum’s back, as though her innermost thoughts had suddenly been blared, foghorn-like, at full volume across the harbor. “Xero’s quoint, Bhawg,” she spat at the broad, dark-faced man. “Can you not see someone trying to keep a low fucking profile?”
Dressed in his apron and matching cap, Bhawg chuckled. “Oh, aye. On the hunts, are we, then?” he asked with a broad grin as he slid a fresh stein of sweet in front of her.
Yima grimaced. No matter how many men she put in the ground, to Bhawg, she’d always be an eight-year-old girl who spent her idle afternoons curling the hair of her family’s pig. “Saints,” she whined. “If you’ve nothing useful to tell me about this one, can you at least do me the favor of fucking off?”
Still grinning, the brawny barkeep leaned down, putting his head level with Yima’s, and pointed. “See that theres? That sheath?”
A different shade of brown from his other leathers, the piece was elaborately worked, and bore some manner of etching that seemed to perpetually move and reshape itself…though perhaps that was just a trick of light and shadow in the poorly lit harbor cantine.
“Magic?” she asked.
“Likely. And in it? Drumsticks.” Bhawg straightened up and smoothed his apron. “That’s alls he carries, that’s alls you’ll see him draw.”
Yima frowned up at Bhawg. “Drumsticks?”
“Aye. Deathdrum’s more like a titles, I gather.”
Thoughtfully, Yima turned her stein around and around on the bar. “So who puts a price on the head of a sodding musician the size of two kings’ ransoms?”
Bhawg leaned in close. “You know, it’s not my place to go spreading no gossips, Yee, but we had us a nailmans in here just on Tuesday from up the north.”
Yima blinked. A nailman. All the way down here. She looked back to the foreigner, who was, somehow, calmly finishing a stout from his own stein.
“This nailman,” Bhawg continued, “he has him a few pulls, and he lets slip what you might call a theory about why your young mans there drinks with his back to the door. His take were, Mr. Deathdrums is like, some kinds of a monk, or a friar, or some kinds of holy man, like. And like that sort, he were all set aside up in the mountains, all his long life, studying and learning and reading. And in amongst all that learning, him and his brother holy men, they takes to studying music.”
“So,” Yima said, following along, “in getting good at hitting drums, Brother Monk starts getting good at hitting people.”
“Well, that’s the start of it. Or maybe the ends of it. I’m not sure. The way the nailman tells it, though, the good’s not in the hitting. It’s in the vibrations that come with. Footsteps. Heartbeats. Everything that’s got a beat, everything that causes vibrations. Them brother monks figured out how to listen for ‘em, feel for ‘em, read ‘em.” Bhawg doffed his hat and held it over his heart in mock reverence. “The rhythms…of the universe, like.”
Yima scoffed and looked back at the Deathdrum. “And the reason he drinks with his back to the door?”
“Because,” Bhawg said, returning his cap to his bald spot, “he doesn’t need to see troubles coming. He just knows troubles is coming.”
“Okay,” she laughed. “All right.” She watched the muscular young man for a moment; he continued to sip at his stein. Perfectly calm. Perfectly relaxed. As if there weren’t a dozen other eyes on him, with a dozen other unknowable intentions.
Rhythms of the universe, she thought, dryly. Quietly, she flicked open the small bronze clasp on the crossbow belted to her hip.
And across the room—across a beer hall packed with shouted drink orders and bellowed conversations—Gideon Xifer Deathdrum’s head twitched in her direction.
Yima’s eyes went wide. It was a test; she’d only loosened her clasp as a test. And now, in one fluid movement, her target was turning, rising, drawing a pair of drumsticks from their sheath.
His arm whipped outward; one of the thin wooden staves flew across the room, and Yima’s eyes followed it—past where she’d been sitting, between a dozen or more taverngoers, and soaring straight toward the front door of the cantine. A door which only began to open when the drumstick left his gloved hand. A door which swung aside to reveal a tall, blonde man in a black sarape…a man who was struck directly above the adam’s apple by the butt of a projectile drumstick.
A dagger with a curved blade fell out of the blonde man’s grip as both his hands went to his throat, his mouth gaping open with a sharp wheeze. Before the drumstick could hit the ground, the Deathdrum was there to catch it, closing the distance between himself and the blonde man almost as fast as his weapon had. The blonde fell to his knees; the Deathdrum, still in full sprint, planted a foot on the smaller man’s shoulder and launched himself out the door into a small crew of other men, also blonde, also donned in black sarapes.
The Friesans, Yima realized. Fellow cutthroats from up the coast. She’d heard rumblings that they might make a play for the foreigner’s bounty, but with the tides, she figured she’d have at least two more days to make her own attempt.
But now she was left, like everyone else in the cantine, craning her neck to steal a look at the tumult outside. In the moonlight, all Yima could make out was a wild fury of flailing fists, a drumstick clenched in each. Putting her hands on Bhawg’s broad shoulders, she scrambled up and over the bar, then pushed her way past the other bartenders to get to the window at the far end.
By the time she got there, there was only one blonde assassin left standing, and he was soon to receive a whirlwind of strikes to the head and neck, the last two of which shattered both his orbital bones, leaving his eyes dangling from their sockets on long veiny nerves, there to bounce against his cheeks in the passing breeze.
The blonde crumpled to the rotting dock planks of the marina. The Deathdrum surveyed the scene. When he seemed certain no one would be rising from the ground to challenge him further, he returned his sticks to their sheath, straightened his tunic, and turned back to the cantine.
The crowd, stunned into silence, parted as he passed. Still behind the bar, Yima followed him as he made his way toward his seat; she stopped and stayed when she reached Bhawg’s side.
Back at his table, the Deathdrum picked up his empty stein and turned to the barkeep, whose easy grin had been replaced by an anxious stare. “Keep ‘em coming,” the foreigner said, slow and quiet. But then his eyes met Yima’s, and held them.
Yima could feel her heart hammering in her chest. The message in those ice-blue eyes couldn’t be any more clear: I know who you are. I know why you’ve been watching me all night. You’re just one more in a long line.
Keep ‘em coming.
And with that, he returned to his seat. With his back to the door.
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Excerpted from “Sex Gods of the Jhutaari” by E.V. Toombs. Originally published in Men’s Adventure Stories, May/June 1977.
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