BROKEN KATANA
an excerpt from the cyberpunk novel by E Rathke
E Rathke's Broken Katana, the third in a dystopian cybergoth vampire hunting adventure comedy series, just dropped today.
This series is beautifully paced and full of everything that makes Rathke one of the best: hilarious and poetic dialogue that feels specific to this strange world, iconic characters you can't stop thinking about, sharply written action, and an endless cyclone of tonal shifts.
Peep the excerpt below for a sample.
cover art by Kelby Losack
III
“Goddamn snake bit me, now I’ma die!” Turned to see a man with a beard tucked into his belt clutching his wrist while a snakeheaded freak raced past us. Kicked my leg out. Snakehead tripped over my foot. Tumbled and rolled and barely slowed down. Was back on their feet and running through the crowd.
Took a step to pursue but Lady Agova’s heavy hand landed on my shoulder. “Absolutely not.”
“But he—”
“Don’t give a shit.” The pink and vermillion lights of Avalon cast her ghastly. Her bonewhite skin soaked up the lights. Standing there naked but for her long bloodstained coat hanging open. She appeared like a giant corpse. “We’re getting me my new teeth.”
Turned to my man to roll my eyes but his face was a wolf’s. “Need teeth now?”
“Yes.” She bit the word and rounded on me and loomed over me. “Yeah, I fucking do.”
Didn’t say nothing to that. Didn’t even look at my man. Knew it would piss her off. There are times to stand your ground and times to bend with the breeze.
Angry giantesses cause their own gales.
The man bit by the snake howled his agony. “Ah lord, my dang arm! Somebody take this from me! Aw my gawd, lord below, I’m dyin.”
No one seemed to notice the man or the whole city collectively ignored him. Wasn’t the first I’d seen suffering loudly in Avalon. Though they shrieked and wailed the city responded in silence.
Lady Agova walked through the crowd. Her limp gone.
Followed her through the night. Through the swelling crowds of Avalon. Wondered if there were always so many out and about even at night. Imagined this place in daylight but thought maybe the city lived backwards and there’d be no one out during the day because they spent all night doing whatever they did here.
Freaks and monsters and some who seemed more machine than flesh. Wanted to ask Lady Agova but she was her own bit of freak. Ten feet tall. Wide as two people. Her body built for violence and sex. Turned to my man whose face hid beneath the iron wolf mask. With my remaining hand I grabbed his.
Flinched like struck. He turned his whole head towards me. Likely the only way he could see. Smiled at him and leaned in to be heard and said, “We’ll make this right.”
He took my hand. Laced his fingers between mine.
Was enough.
Was all I’d get until we got that off him.
The curse covered his face. Saw the smoky tendrils of it beneath the skin of his neck. Kept him going without pain as well. “I think our curses aren’t curses.”
He didn’t react or not in a way I could tell. Took that for listening and pulled him closer and continued. “Know what you’re thinking. No way that antlered raider meant us anything but harm. Been thinking about that. Might be he meant it as a curse but look what it's done to us? We're strong. We're fast. It's holding my arm together and free of pain. Holding down your pain too, yeah?"
He nodded.
“Might be some kind of mushroom magic. We’re born to it though. Spend our whole lives among the fungus and surrounded by the fungal forest and living inside their hollow stalks. What if our curses found life within us that they recognized because it was like them? My mother used to say that we are the mushrooms. It’s why we hang on the deadtrees when we die. The fungus pulls us into their cycle of death and rebirth and our ghosts become one with the maelstrom, with the blackheart beating at the center of the earth. Our curses are alive. They’re not like what we thought they were. They’re gifts.”
He didn’t react in any visible way but he held me tight. Pumped three squeezes into my hand. Took it. Held onto that.
Lady Agova hurried towards the toothseller’s stall of teeth.
He bowed his tiny body. “Lady Agova. You look—”
“Unsuccessful, yes. Still got my Ashitaka’s?”
“Of course, m’lady.” He reached beneath the table. Pulled out a set of glass teeth just like the ones in her head.
Lady Agova smiled wide enough to show every one of those teeth in her skull. “Excellent.” She touched a spot beneath her left and right ears at the same time and her jaw plopped down. Unhinged with a click.
Startled me. Recoiled and pulled my man with me.
The toothseller glanced at us and held in laughter. He pushed the glass teeth displayed on his stall to the side and climbed the table while Lady Agova bent over. Pulled a tool from his pocket that he jammed into Lady Agova’s unhinged jaw.
Her lower teeth popped out.
Disgusting. Baffling.
This was the true curse. The swirling blackness beneath my skin was alive. Not of my choosing. But I felt the brush of it against my ghost like wind in my hair. But this exchanging of body parts was the true curse.
Snakeheads.
Antlered men.
Machine men.
They warped and disfigured their ghosts. Stole what was essential about themselves in exchange for power or for beauty.
Or beauty of a sort.
The tiny toothseller popped out her top teeth too. He set her old teeth down and said, “Going to sell those as White Wolf exclusives.”
Lady Agova laughed the strangest sound with her mouth hanging open like that. A wet clicking mixed with a strange depth that echoed out of her.
He slid her lower teeth into place. Clamped his hands over her jaw. Fingers beneath the jawbone with palms on the teeth and pushed down until they clicked. Sliding the top into place he jammed them up until they locked into place in her skull. He raised his left hand and the flesh parted. Not like a wound or a severing. Like puzzle pieces separating. From the new openings launched a dozen black tendrils that probed the new teeth and danced in the wide open mouth of Lady Agova. More disgusting than anything I’d yet seen since leaving home. The broken inhumanity of it shocked me. Wondered if this toothseller built his body to be so small the way Lady Agova built hers to be huge.
The snakes dancing out from his separated hand retreated. “There you are, m’lady.”
Tendrils snaked out of the holes at the back of Lady Agova’s neck. Dozens of little translucent tentacles soaking up the violet and pink lights of the night as they entered her mouth. Didn’t understand what was happening but the tentacles danced within her mouth for a few minutes while she stood there. Eyes closed. Almost in ecstasy.
She shuddered and the tendrils retreated into her neck. Grabbing her lower jaw she pushed it back into place. Smiling so wide. She chomped down three times and bared her new teeth to the world.
“Exquisite,” the toothseller said.
Lady Agova turned to me and my man.
Said, “Looks good.”
Her smile died. “Shut up, V—” She cocked her head. “You dummies need names.”
The toothseller’s eyebrows shot up. “Names, m’lady?”
Lady Agova turned back to him. “You heard rumblings about me while I been gone?”
“M’lady, I’m only a toothseller.”
“Bout to ask the Magpies.” She loomed over the table and stared down at him casting him in her shade. “They tell me you knew something and didn’t tell me before I walked into the Necromancer’s Hall and I’m going to fry your legs in butter. Feed them to the ferals. Just saw a snake bite some old man in the street. He died right there.”
The tiny man shrank somehow smaller. Like his body became a puddle beneath her glare. Quaking and shaking his head. His voice croaked out of him in a rushed stutter. “I would never betray…would never—”
Lady Agova reached her big hand down and he froze. Still as stone. Waiting for death. Thought for a moment she was going to do to him what she did to Sister Death but she tapped him lightly on the cheek. “I believe you, Alyosha. But if the Magpies tell a different tale, I’ll be back.”
He nodded rapidly.
“Oh,” Lady Agova pressed a big hand on his table. “As you see, I’m all fucked up. Have to pay on credit.”
“Of course,” he croaked.
Her eyes flashed white and bright and his went dark before lighting up.
“Thank you, Lady Agova.”
She grunted. “I’ll be sorry to kill you, Alyosha. Don’t disappoint me. And thank you, for the Ashitaka’s.”
“Who the Magpies?”
She sighed and shook her head. “Shut up, V—” Chomped her teeth once more as she stood up straight and turned to me and my man. “You idiots need names. Can’t even talk to you without them.”
I opened my mouth to give shape to the new name inside me but she held a hand up. “Not in front of him. He might’ve betrayed me.”
Alyosha cowered. Knew he was disappearing as soon as we were out of view. He’d bury himself somewhere deep and dark in Avalon where Lady Agova couldn’t find him. Where none would ever even look.
We followed Lady Agova away from the stalls of the midnight market and she said, “Best place not to be heard is within the seething detritus ambling always through Avalon’s cluttered veins.” She placed a hand on my shoulder and asked me my name while we walked.
Felt something. Cold. Like a piercing blade entered my shoulder. Only a moment. Then gone. But a power there. Felt my curse flinch and attempt to investigate. But to leave would open the wound at my stump and release the pain back into me.
It remained where it was.
“Viola.” Speaking it caused something to take root in me. Felt it. The way the sounds solidified and reached out with thousands of tendrils that grasped onto my ghost.
Lady Agova said, “Can’t call yourself Vera and then Viola, idiot. Take a different name.”
The sound swelled within me and I closed my eyes soaking it in. Knew the name was mine but I spoke a different one for Lady Agova. “Fiona.” Felt nothing when I said it.
She sighed heavily and lifted her hand. “That’s the same fucking name.” She circled us and came to my man’s other side and placed a hand on his shoulder and asked him his name.
He said nothing and Lady Agova shrugged. “Suppose he can’t. Well, until we fix this, you’ll be Iron Wolf, yeah?”
Was going to disagree and give him a new name to fill his ghost but he nodded.
“Beautiful.” She bared her teeth. Obscenely proud of them. Translucent like the ones she left behind. They filled with the strange harsh lights of Avalon’s pitch black night. “My babies have names again. Come on, dummies.”
“Where we going?”
“You got somewhere else to be? We’re huntin Magpies.”
Didn’t know what that meant.
Followed anyway.
IV
Lightning slashed across the black and fulminated the sky but no rain came when I stared up past the vertiginous buildings slick with moisture like the congealed slime of leviathans crashing up from the pulsing maelstrom below and the beat of that great black heart pumping all life into existence thrummed through my feet and chest and took hold of my entire body as if some great yet gentle jaws gripped me while I followed Lady Agova through the vibrant violent lights of Avalon and past the deranged and deformed freaks that left humanity long behind.
Iron Wolf beside me held my hand and I told myself it was enough. But it couldn’t be his name. Not really. Our names hold power. Why we had to leave our old ones behind when we were banished. Without kin or names we were naked and vulnerable but someone wearing the wrong name became a threat to themselves as well.
A group of men and women with shaved heads and flowing crimson robes trailing like blood behind them entered the street and grabbed my attention for the discordant way they walked through a strange purposeless crowd with fixed determination as they surrounded a large man with unbelievable girth made of mountainous rolls of bared fat. He hovered through the crowd like a fleshballoon dressed only in iron. A band of metal wrapped round his face where his eyes should have been.
Almost asked Lady Agova what the deal with everyone’s eyes was but the crimson robes formed a half circle behind him and trailed him like that for half a block without notice or any seeming design or intention but to follow. No expression on their faces. Not the hunger of the violent or the zealot.
They didn’t communicate but they coordinated in some way as if every movement in sync when they made their move. All at once these dozen robed flew at the fat floating man. From their robes appeared knives and hatchets and they fell upon him with abrupt viciousness. A dagger in the back released the man’s shrieking and brought the attention of the entire street. Rather than keep walking and ignore it like every other petty violence I witnessed many turned and ran.
Lady Agova’s eyebrows shot up and she bared her teeth. Someone from a dozen paces away whispered, “Those Ashitaka’s?”
While the fat man continued hovering there the knives carved into the great mass of flesh and the robed ones shoved their arms inside and yanked out metal and wires and black tendrils while the fat man vomited and shit blood into the street.
Their crimson robes and their skin coated with the fat man’s blood and grease while they ripped the technology from his living body. Two smaller ones hopped on him while he floated and began carving away at the metal band covering his face. Wet bone came with the metal when they ripped it out and Lady Agova rushed forward.
The entire desecration and butchery lasted only a moment and I remained frozen there both awestruck and disgusted by this brutality.
“Lady Agova!” One of the crimson robed called out but they held their ground rather than scatter before her giant fury.
The fat man continued hovering. Dying.
A woman whose shaved head was so coated in thick blood I could make out nothing of her face but the scar carving from beneath her left eye through her lips and down her chin. When she parted her mutilated lips to speak they appeared even more ghastly. The scar was thick as my thumb and twisted and puckered the flesh viciously. She pointed her bloody blade at Lady Agova and said, “Lady Agova.”
Lady Agova didn’t slow down to chat but threw a kick right at her. The scarred woman ducked and one of the others threw their hatchet at Lady Agova.
She grabbed it out of the air and swung it down at the scarred woman who rolled between Lady Agova’s legs and kicked her in the back of the knee. Lady Agova buckled slightly but remained standing and slashed the hatchet into the side of one of the robed men. The force of it collapsed his chest and though the hatchet entered his right side the hatchet became caught in the ribs on his left side. Lady Agova tried to yank it free but let it fall from her hands as his body split in half. Before it left her hand she kicked out at the others and her momentum already carried her into them.
And I was there with her slashing through the throat of one and then another and hacking off the arm of a third when the kick to my jaw sent me spinning to the grime and trash of the always wet street.
Only then did they scatter from her.
The woman now behind her leapt to stab Lady Agova in the back but I called out and she spun and blocked the stab with the hilt of my sword buried still in her chest. She roared at the pain and the scarred woman laughed as she disappeared into the crowd.
Lady Agova cursed and I asked her who the fuck was that she said only one word. “Luddites.”
Turned to Iron Wolf and saw the wideness of his eyes. Like always he was too slow to react and stood there useless and feeling foolish.
Ignoring the rest of my questions she walked on.
Lady Agova’s limp returned. She slowed. The heads bouncing against her limping leg.
Said, “All the bloodloss.”
“Shut up, Fiona.” A sheen of sweat coated her skin and caught the lights. She took a deep breath and winced.
“We need a witch.”
“Necromancer Guild did this to Iron Wolf. We find a Magpie and they’ll show us an independent necromancer. They’ll know why. Fix us right back up.”
Almost asked who the Magpie were again. “Where we find them?”
Her huge chest inflated with her breath and she released it long and slow with eyes closed. Wiped her face with her bloodstained sleeve. “Come on.”
We kept walking and the lightning streaked the black skies visible between towering structures. Gripped Iron Wolf’s hand tight and he gripped back and pulled me a bit closer as we shouldered our way through the seething mass of humanity and inhumanity. Saw a man with a shark head and torso laughing with his mouth open wide to reveal layers of serrated teeth and his companion’s head burst into flames and screamed that it hurt while everyone else laughed at him. The flames engulfing his head dissolved rapidly as if done on purpose and he said, “That fucking hurt!”
The shark head nearly fell over laughing.
“This place is so strange,” I said to Iron Wolf who didn’t even look at me. Past him a face stuck out to me in the crowd sucking on a smoking lit stick. Last time I saw him he had green mossy skin and red eyes. “That Harlo?”
He reacted to that. The wolf mask snapped in the direction I pointed and Harlo saw me pointing too. He smiled wide and flashed a mouth full of shining rocks. “Yo, baby girl, where yo arm at?”
Lady Agova turned and snarled and Harlo dropped the lit stick from his mouth and it bounced on the glistening street.
Saw the apple of his throat bob. Saw him mouth the words White Wolf. He scowled. “You hurt, Lady Agova?”
Lady Agova took a breath and a step towards Harlo. “What makes you feel good?”
Harlo cocked his head. A slow smile spreading. “Yo—”
“What makes you angry inside?” Lady Agova took two more steps towards Harlo and half-sang the words as she danced. Rolling her hips and holding her bloody coat wide open. Inviting him. Taunting him. Her voice rich and low. Felt the spin of violence in all this. Saw a future where Harlo’s skull cracked open and leaked upon the street.
Harlo took a step towards her. She stood nearly twice his height and weight but he didn’t back down. Thought he knew where this was all heading. A body made for sex and violence.
Made for sex or violence.
He reached to take her massive hand.
“Why don’t you love me?” Lady Agova snatched his wrist. Even still the fool showed no fear. His smile widened and he was about to speak but Lady Agova yanked him up into the air.
Dangling. His eyes wide but still smiling. Turned to Iron Wolf and saw the way he watched her. The long bloodstained coat hanging open revealing all of her body perfectly constructed.
Before Harlo could speak or adjust to the new weightlessness Lady Agova brought his face close to hers and sang with her whole chest, “You wanna fuck me or fight?”
Only then did eyes turn to her and Harlo dangling in the air. I hurried to her before she broke him there in front of the crowd. “He’s the greenman, Lady Agova. Don’t hurt him.”
Harlo said, “Girl, what?”
Lady Agova looked at him and then me. “Girl, what?”
“We met him in the Wall. Virgil stopped to listen to him even though you said not to and that’s him. Right there. You’re holding him.”
“Not green though,” Harlo smiled. Understanding nothing. He straightened the collar of his shirt with his free hand.
Lady Agova said, “Covered in plants?”
Nodded.
“Red eyes?”
Nodded again.
She snorted. “Would be a kindness then.”
“No. If you kill him now he won’t be able to help us back then. Won’t be able to know us.”
Harlo said, “Yo, I met you in the future?”
“Our past.”
Lady Agova kept him dangling in the air. “Not how it works, Fiona. You can’t meet him in your past but his future. It just—” Her expression changed as she looked off into the city. Into nothing. She broke off and shook her head and cursed. “This place is so fucked.” Shook Harlo who seemed to enjoy it. “Say thank you to the girl.”
“Whole time, bet I know a better way.”
His lascivious look disrobed me and I covered my chest reflexively.
Lady Agova spun round and threw him over the heads of those gathered. Heard the dull smack and then crashing of a body colliding with the garbage filling the streets of Avalon. She turned to me and Iron Wolf. “Told you stupid idiots not to talk to anyone inside the Wall.”
“He did it.”
Iron Wolf shrugged.
Lady Agova shook her head. Deflated by pain and the effort to keep going. To mother us. “Come on, babies.” She touched the locket full of Lucienne hanging round her neck and falling between her breasts.
Read E Rathke’s Substack and buy The Howling Earth series.