The Iron Dirge

by Sam Sykes

  She stepped up to be heard.

  Virian had always been one of those people who thought she was much larger than she was. Tall, she might have been, but still so painfully slender, still so proper in how she tied up her brown hair in a bow, still so gentle in her face. Even the long scar that marked her from jaw to brow couldn’t diminish that gentleness.

  And in her eyes, still so, so angry.

  “I did.” Virian narrowed her eyes, spat the next word. “Grylla.”

  The snarl on the young outlaw’s face became its own war paint: broader, crueler, angrier. Rogo, I like to think, realized who his daughter was talking to at that moment.

  Was this young man waving a sword around truly Grylla? Big Grylla who had unloaded shipments of ink and blushed whenever Virian looked his way? What had happened to him? When had he gotten so big?

  He didn’t know. Virian didn’t, either. Only one of them cared.

  “And I’ll do worse next time, to you and your fucking mistress, if you don’t get the fuck out of Paarl’s Hollow,” she snapped, “and go back to Lucid Thought.”

  “Lucid Thought is gone,” Grylla replied. “The fields are gone. The houses are gone. The people are gone. Everyone died there. Including me.”

  “Then go back to your fucking grave. We don’t need you here.”

  She looked to the townsfolk for support. The townsfolk looked at their feet for their lives. And when she looked back up, the outlaw had descended his small pile of treasures and approached her with the kind of grin only vile men wear.

  The kind that Rogo had seen far too often.

  “Why do you stand with them, sister?” Grylla asked, his eyes drifting to the long scar across Virian’s face. “These mewling fools who huddle behind their walls and their guards and leave everyone else to die? You belong with us, Virian, with the Children of the Dead.”

  Rogo’s heart froze as he looked at Virian. Just like it froze whenever someone noticed her scar. Whenever someone mentioned her old town.

  There was a time when even a mention of it was enough to make her break down in tears. But that was a long time ago. These were angrier times.

  “A gang,” Virian corrected, meeting his snarl with her own glower. “Just another fucking gang. Your leader isn’t a prophet, you’re not a soldier, this isn’t a mission. You’re just another pack of beasts sniffing for scraps.”

  “It started that way, I admit,” Grylla replied. “But I’ll tell you what she told me.” He swept his hand out over the crowd. “When the steel comes out and the blood starts spilling, are you really ready to find out if they’ll choose you…” He glanced at a nearby merchant, who looked away. “Over their comfortable beds and nice shoes?”

  Virian grimaced at that. How could she not?

  “Lucky you’ve got someone smarter than you to give you words, then, because I know you’re too fucking dumb to come up with that on your own.” She sneered. “How great can this cause of yours be if you show up to terrorize people trying to escape a Compass Beast?”

  “Huh. That’s a pretty good question.” The outlaw scratched his chin briefly with the tip of his sword before shrugging. “But Niri told me that it’s never smart to ask her questions, either.” He drew his blade back. “Too bad, huh?”

  Virian was a smart girl, I was told. Had been ever since they’d met. So she knew how this was going to end and there was no reason for her to look so shocked when the outlaw raised his blade, aimed for her throat, and swung.

  But, like so many people who grow up with a bad deal, Virian was also a good person. Good people are rare, rarer still in the Scar, for precisely this reason. Good people, even smart ones, are never as quick as bad ones. Some big asshole with a big sword is never going to worry about what he’s doing beyond the fact that it makes him feel even bigger to hurt people.

  Good people—people like Virian Lowhill—can never think quick enough to get ahead of people so awful.

  Good people did what she did on that dark day.

  She closed her eyes, spread her arms out in front of the townspeople, and waited for the blow to hit.

  She told herself she was ready for death, I heard. But every good person says that—it’s the lie they always tell themselves. And while no one in Paarl’s Hollow was ready for death, they probably all expected it.

  What they didn’t expect—what they couldn’t possibly expect—was finding out their neighbor was a killer.

  Not until they all saw the man leap out of the crowd, until Virian opened her eyes and beheld the outlaw’s meaty wrist held effortlessly in place by a hand stained by ink that never quite washed away.

  She didn’t know what to say when she saw it. No one did. After all…

  How are you supposed to react to seeing a man as kindly and quiet as Mister Lowhill standing in front of a bloodthirsty outlaw carrying a sword as big as him… and winning?

  Rogo shoved the outlaw away, the brute looking as astonished as everyone else present.

  “Mister…” Grylla gasped. “Mister Lowhill?”

  He went rigid as Rogo leaned in and whispered harshly.

  “You do not want this fight,” he said. “You do not want this town. Go to the woman you serve and tell her what I have just told you. Leave Paarl’s Hollow in peace. Find another town.”

  I didn’t know the outlaw that Niri sent, but I heard he wasn’t that bright. Which made sense, since he bit the terror on his face down behind a snarl and leaned in to tower over Rogo and growled.

  “I don’t just want the fight,” he replied. “I want the town. I want the people. I want everything you miserable little shits ever deluded yourselves into thinking people like me couldn’t take. I want it. I’m going to take it.” He held his blade up again. “And I’m going to start with your head.”

  Rogo held his gaze for a moment. Every townsperson there watched him, waiting for his response, waiting to see if they were going to have to bury their neighbor before this day was up.

  And when he stepped back, stood perfectly still, and closed his eyes, they weren’t sure what to think. I don’t blame them.

  They couldn’t hear the Lady Merchant’s song.

  The outlaw drew his sword back, aiming for Rogo’s throat and grinning, pleased that he wasn’t even going to try dodging. He didn’t notice someone approaching behind him. Not until another hand seized his wrist.

  “Who the fuck—”

  He growled as he turned to see. And both the anger and the fear fell off his face. He had no idea how to react to what he saw. No one did.

  There, holding the outlaw’s wrist, was Rogo the Dervish.

  The outlaw blinked, glanced back to the man he was about to kill. There, watching expectantly, was also Rogo the Dervish. And when the outlaw looked back to the man behind him and, from his left, an elbow caught him square in the jaw with a sickening crack…

  Well, that was also Rogo the Dervish.

  The blow hammered him so hard he dropped his blade. Rogo the Dervish plucked it up, tossed it aside. The outlaw cried out, made a grab for it. Rogo the Dervish caught his wrist, brought his fist down upon his elbow, shattered it with a shout and a crunching sound. He shoved the outlaw back into Rogo the Dervish, who jammed a fist into his spine even as Rogo the Dervish delivered six punches to his kidneys while Rogo the Dervish hammered his face with relentless blows.

  You’d have thought there’d be screaming from someone other than the outlaw. Maybe there was and I just didn’t hear about it. But from what I heard, on that day, every last person in Paarl’s Hollow, including Virian, stood in stunned silence and watched six individual Rogo the Dervishes beat the shit out of a very large man.

  The flurry of feet and fists lasted for countless bone-crunching seconds before the Rogos, apparently satisfied, stepped aside. In orderly unison, all of them stepped back and folded their hands behind their back. The outlaw, his face a twisted mass of blood and broken noses, stared up through the one functioning eye they’d left him and tried to speak
through a mouthful of broken teeth.

  “The Dervish” is a popular name in the Scar. So much so that every three months or so, another thug with a better than average vocabulary and something to prove picks it up and wears it until another Dervish comes and seals their claim on the title.

  “Mage,” he gasped. “You’re a mage. You’re a fucking Vagrant!”

  Rogo, all the Rogos, were the only ones who could hold onto it.

  The Rogos didn’t reply. There was no need. Anyone with even a hint of magical talent would have known a Mirrormage when they saw one. And now, everyone in Paarl’s Hollow knew one, too.

  “I’ll tell her…” The outlaw gasped, body shaking as he struggled to get back to his feet. “I’ll tell her… I’ll tell them all… I’ll—”

  “You will not.” Rogo stared down at the outlaw through six different sets of eyes, none of them moved by the blood staining the street or the echo of broken bones that lingered like a memory in the air. But only one of them stepped forward. “It is clear that words will not suffice to send a message.”

  He raised one leg high into the air, perpendicular with his body. His heel, slick with the outlaw’s blood, hung there.

  “Your body, however, will.”

  And then, came down.

  Before the outlaw could beg, before anyone could scream, before Virian could stop her father. Rogo’s foot came down too swift to see, let alone stop. What meager reaction followed was drowned out by the sound of something thick cracking.

  And then the outlaw went silent.

  A great dent staving in his skull.

  And he did not move.

  What happened after that is rather bare, from what I’ve heard. Rogo—just one of them—rolled down his sleeves, buttoned his cuffs, removed his glasses and cleaned a spatter of red from their lenses.

  But I think that he did more than that. I think that Rogo the Dervish, the Mirrormage who had marched for the Imperium, who had marched for the Crown Conspiracy that sought to overthrow that Imperium, who had marched over the corpses of all the people he’d killed to reach both of those goals, looked down at the body of that outlaw whose name he’d never known before or after he beat him to death…

  And knew that he’d just taken his first step on a road he never wanted to walk on again.

  “Father…”

  Rogo whirled about and saw their gazes. Mister Rathaxes with the broken clock, Madame Onu who made bad tea that he loved, Little Cadel who was teasing girls last year and writing poems about them this year…

  All of them looked at him, the neighbor they never knew, with a fear deeper even than the outlaw had stricken them.

  But only Virian stepped forward.

  “Father,” she whispered again, “what… who are you?”

  Rogo regarded her through the glasses whose stain he just couldn’t quite clean. “No one important. See that the body is taken outside the walls, put it on the road and do not bury or burn it.”

  “But you’re—”

  “Rodaya,” he finished for her. “Rodaya Lowhill.”

  He smiled a smile that wasn’t as warm as he had practiced. He placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently.

  “Please,” he said. “Do as I say. We do not have much time.”

  There were more questions in her eyes—how could there not be? But Rogo didn’t stick around to answer them. All six of him walked purposefully through a crowd of his former neighbors who now scrambled over each other to get out of his way.

  One by one, the other Rogos faded out of existence, their outlines growing hazy and insubstantial before disappearing back into the collection of sunlight they had been made from.

  A Mirrormage’s power—to bend light into solid shape—is one of the more complex arts. A smart girl like Virian doubtlessly wanted to know more, which Rogo knew.

  He was a bad person, after all. And all bad people had to move quickly to keep ahead of the smart people, the good people, the people who would ask him how he’d learned to kill so well and who he’d killed to learn.

  Or so he thought, anyway. I heard, from more than one person, that while they didn’t know who this man who had been their neighbor was, they were grateful for him that day. He was a Vagrant, true—but he was also a father, a bookbinder, a man who had stood up to protect them when no one else knew.

  There were a lot of people who loved Rogo the Dervish.

  Almost made me wish I hadn’t come all this way to kill him.

  Almost.

  TWO

  The Scar

  So, here’s the thing about Paarl’s Hollow.

  It’s boring.

  Which is precisely why it’s popular. Surrounded by light forest, tall barriers, and just enough trade to ensure a small army of peacekeepers to put down anything that got past the trees and the walls with liberal amounts of violence. Paarl’s Hollow is a nowhere town full of people waiting to die from boredom.

  Which, when the alternatives are death from being devoured by a monster, slaughtered by an outlaw, or more pertinently, ground into a fine dust beneath the massive feet of a Compass Beast, sounds not too bad at all.

  Granted, it’d seen its share of troubles lately. Its famed peacekeeper force had been diminished lately: patrols picked off, caravan of arms stolen, outposts harassed. And it was, of course, as vulnerable to someone with more people and more weapons coming in, like the Imperium or the Revolution, and taking over. And also—

  My thoughts were interrupted by the sudden tremble of the earth beneath me. I glanced down at my feet, saw pebbles quaking.

  Fuck.

  It was moving.

  Now, here’s the thing about Compass Beasts.

  Despite how much destruction they wreak, we don’t know all that much about them. Possibly because they’re giant, murderous beasts unmoved by pity, mercy, or fear. But I’m not a naturalist, so don’t ask me.

  No one’s ever been able to even slow one down, let alone kill one, so an autopsy is right out. Even when they’ve been caught sleeping during one of their century-long naps, their skin is so tough and thick that even a severium charge can’t puncture it, so getting samples of its anatomy is also not possible. That leaves us with two sources of information about them: what we can piece together from the wakes of their rampages and the ravings of madmen.

  “I SAW ITS EYES! IT SPOKE TO ME!”

  Guess which one I had the pleasure of working with that day?

  Irvic—which, I had pieced together through the screaming, was his name—didn’t belong in a bandit clan. Frail, flabby, and with a pair of glasses so thick that they offset the intimidation of whatever ghostly visage had been painted on his face, he wasn’t capable of doing much more than limply flailing when, say, an incredibly attractive woman with a magic gun ambushed him.

  “Irvic,” I sighed, “I’m going to need you to decide to either shut your mouth or tell me something new because if you go on about this fucking beast again, I’m going to make the decision for you.”

  Irvic wisely pressed his lips shut.

  Which is why Irvic, while not being particularly blessed at the arts of banditry, was an ideal henchman: smart enough to know he wouldn’t last long in the Scar on his own, dumb enough to not be able to think of any better ideas than letting someone bigger than him tell him what to do.

  He lay against the moss-covered log, right where I had found him, cowering. But silent.

  “IT’S COMING! ITS MESSAGE IS CLEAR! WE’RE DOOMED! DOOMED! DOO—”

  For a moment, anyway.

  You’ll hear the wise and lucky among us argue that violence never truly solves anything. They’re probably right. And if any of them were around, I would have taken suggestions on how to get him to stop raving without punching him in the mouth.

  But I was kind of short on time that day.

  “For fuck’s sake, Irvic, if you’re going to rave, could you at least not be so fucking cliché about it? Where’s the poetry? The loving descriptions of rivers o
f fire?”

  “No.” He shook his head, his voice breathless with hysteria. “No, no, no. You don’t understand. I saw it. I saw what it’ll do to me. What it’ll do to all of us. It’ll crush us, it’ll consume us, it’ll—”

  Click.

  He paused in the middle of his rant and stared, with something resembling attentiveness, down the barrel of the gun thrust in his face.

  And the Cacophony, through brass metal carved into the leering grin of a dragon, stared back at him.

  And I? I grinned down at him in the way that made my scars deeper, regarded him through a stray lock of white hair that dangled over the scar running down my right eye. The tattoos on my arms, all the painted wings and storm clouds, twitched beneath muscle as I leaned over and pressed the gun’s barrel against his forehead.

  “Son,” I said, cool as I could manage, “what do you think we’re going to do to you?”

  He pursed his lips. His eyes refused to blink. And it was probably my imagination, but I thought he let out a little bit of pee.

  All typical reactions to meeting Sal the Cacophony.

  Not that I felt good about—what would they say about me if they saw me threatening a clearly hysterical man with a clinched-ass tough-guy saying like I just uttered? And normally, I would have been a little gentler.

  Or at least, I would have punched him a couple more times before bringing out the gun.

  “Okay.” Irvic’s breathing slowed, terror un-clouded his eyes. “Okay, I just… I… the Beast…”

  “Yes, it’s very scary,” I replied. “And I’d love to let you get back to screaming randomly, but I need something first.” I drummed my fingers on the brass barrel of the Cacophony, pointedly. “Dread Niri.”

  “Ah.” Irvic swallowed hard. “Of course.”

  Now I know I made them sound very interesting, but at the time, I wasn’t particularly interested in the Children of the Dead.

  Bandit clans, like man-eating plants and storms that rained fish, were a fact of life in the Scar. You could track the seasons by their raids. In winter, you get the specialized clans like Doom Hive and The Bad Dreamers. In summer, you get the ostentatious and ill-clad clans like The Locust Boys and Vixen Rampage—twice as bloodthirsty, but they at least tend to be prettier. And in fall, they came pouring out of the hills to steal pumpkins or some shit.