The Iron Dirge

by Sam Sykes

“You’ve never called me that before.”

  “You’ve never been that before,” she replied. Her voice was soft, cold. Snow falling on a dead bird. “Are you that now?”

  “Of course I am. I have always—”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “No. You’re not.”

  “Virian, don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m not being ridiculous.”

  “We don’t have time to—”

  “What’s your real name?”

  Rogo recoiled, stung. “What?”

  “Is it really Rodaya Lowhill? Are we really from a village called Lowhill? Are you?”

  “Virian…”

  “How are you able to use magic? Could you always do it? Have you always been a mage?”

  “That’s enough.”

  “Why are you fighting with Sal the—”

  “THAT’S ENOUGH!”

  A roar. And another scream. The shards shifted inside him, cut tender meat. He collapsed, first to his knees and then to his face. Waves of red-hot agony washed over him as he hauled himself to a nearby rock and laid against it. Sweat caked his brow, his breath came wet and sopping, his fingers were stained with his own life. Every twitch of muscle was pain.

  “Virian…”

  And yet, he still struggled to speak.

  “Virian…”

  To explain.

  “Virian…”

  To say what he needed to say. As the blood wept from his wound. And the night grew darker.

  I heard once that killers don’t dream.

  There comes a point where you’ve spilled so much blood that it floods every part of you: smothers your heart, drowns your dreams. I don’t think it’s true. Or if it is, I don’t think I’ve done enough to hit that point.

  But I do know that you don’t dream of pleasurable things, if you kill enough. Fights can run for hours or days or sometimes you just never stop fighting them. You fight them in your sleep, in your dreams, running through them over and over, feeling the same push of air as you swing a sword, the same shock running down your arm as it hits someone, the same fire racing through your skin when steel finds it.

  Or, at least, I do.

  And I wonder, sometimes, if Rogo dreams of the same thing.

  I wonder if he dreams of that night. Of what happened down there.

  “But to do what you propose…” Rogonoroth, as he was back then, said. “Summoning is already a reckless art. Even you have trouble controlling it, Prodigy. To draw a Scrath out is one thing, to make it an Emperor…”

  His words still rang out in my dreams. Echoing steel in the dark.

  His words.

  “What if we could summon it… without a host? What if we could summon it in its purest form?”

  Vraki’s.

  “It falls to us to honor the sacrifices of those who came before and those who will come after.”

  … Jindu’s.

  That’s what we’d come down there for. Or so I thought. Words. Ideas. Great plans for great dreams for the Imperium we’d all turn our backs on and go Vagrant. We’d given the Empress everything from Barters to bodies and in exchange, she’d given us a nul heir. A king without magic, to whom all mages would be expected to bend the knee.

  It was an outrage. A betrayal. A defilement. All the big words people use to convince themselves the things they’re going to do are necessary.

  I was in that dark place. I was there with those dark words. I heard about how we were going to make a new Emperor. A new Imperium. One that honored the mages who’d built it.

  And I heard what they were going to take from me to do it.

  “It is the only way.”

  Vraki.

  “I suppose it is.”

  Rogo.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Jindu.

  I can remember their voices, clear as their faces. Is that what Rogo dreamed of, too, when he had fallen from the pain? Did he remember regret? Remorse? Did he remember the darkness of that cold place? The great ambitions that led us down there?

  Or did he remember only the wound I gave him before they took the sky from me?

  I don’t know.

  I don’t think I’ll ever know.

  But on that night… the night before Paarl’s Hollow was ended and everything went wrong… the night before Rogo the Dervish and Rodaya Lowhill both disappeared…

  I hope he did.

  Clink.

  I don’t know how Rogo got back on his feet, either. But somehow, he came out of that blood-drenched darkness. Alive.

  Clink.

  Maybe it’s the simplest explanation… or maybe I just want it to be true… but I like to think he awoke to warm hands, cold tweezers and the sickly smell of his daughter tending to his wounds.

  Clink.

  “Virian?” he groaned, fluttering back to consciousness.

  “Don’t move,” she replied, voice cold and clinical as the forceps in her fingers. She carefully reached them into his wound, pried free a shard of glass. “I haven’t gotten all of them yet.”

  She dropped the shard into a tin dish to land atop a pile painted crimson with his blood, a morbid stained glass window, disjointed and awkward. He’d never wanted her to know about this. About him. He’d feared for her. And now she was prying it out of him without even blinking.

  “Are these… you?” she asked, looking at the glass shard. “Is this your magic?”

  I like to think he didn’t lie. I like to think he looked at her, then at his wound, and came to the same realization every Vagrant comes to. And I like to think…

  I like to think that, in those moments, at least they trusted each other.

  “My Barter.”

  He met her gaze. He spoke plainly. He bled into her hands.

  “The Lady Merchant takes it from me,” he replied, “and in exchange…”

  He made a vague gesture toward the devastation surrounding the town.

  Virian stared at the tin of glass. “Does it hurt?”

  He nodded. “It does.”

  “If you don’t stop… does it happen to the rest of you?”

  “It does.”

  “And you tried to stop… for me?”

  He opened his mouth, a rehearsed lie crawling up his craw. Some story about how she was the light of his life, how she’d shown him things he never thought he’d know. He’d rehearsed it, over and over in his head for the day she’d find out, ready to let it out with all and say the words that would make everything better.

  And yet…

  “No,” he said, painfully soft. “You were the reason I built the basement, the reason I hid everything, but I stopped…” He frowned. “I stopped because I was tired of killing.”

  She sat. She stared. She did not run.

  And so he spoke.

  “I am not Rodaya Lowhill. I am…” He shook his head. “I was Rogonoroth yun Shouth. A Mirrormage in service to the Imperium. I slew many people in the name of my empress.”

  She stared at the ground. “Did they deserve it?”

  “I did not ask. I never asked. Not until…” He drew in a deep breath. “I made a choice, Virian. Long ago, I made a choice to pick up this sword and wield it against someone.”

  He pulled his shirt aside.

  “And I have been living with that choice, ever since.”

  Her eyes widened as she beheld them: the grotesquely healed scars where his skin had shattered away, the empty holes in his body where muscle had turned to glass and broken. He had never showed this to her. He could not bear the pain of her screaming at his ruined body. But she did not scream.

  What she did was far more painful.

  “What the Cacophony said, then…” she whispered. “You did that?”

  He winced, but nodded.

  She swallowed hard. “What you did to her… how bad was it?”

  “Bad.”

  “How bad?”

  He closed his eyes. “Very bad. But… not the worst.” He ges
tured to the tattoo on his chest. “When I… abandoned the Imperium, I became a Vagrant. Like many others who did. And like them, I did terrible things. Things I cannot take back. They called me… Rogo the Dervish.”

  A long silence. A thoughtful silence. Worse than the pained silence. Pained silences ended in screaming, tears, oaths, and swears. Thoughtful silences end wordlessly and permanently.

  “Am I…” she whispered softly. “Like you?”

  “No.” His reply. Heated. Fervent. “No, Virian. You are not like me. You will never be like me.”

  “But I’m your name,” she said.

  He smiled. It hurt.

  “You aren’t, Virian,” he whispered. “Lowhill is not my name. But…” He swallowed something hard and sharp. “It is yours. Lowhill was the village I found you in… what was left of it.”

  He didn’t open his eyes. He couldn’t. The painful thing in his throat wouldn’t let him stop talking.

  “It was… a small place, nothing more than a trading outpost between townships. Trading caravans came through often. They had money. When I arrived…” He shook his head. “The houses were blackened husks. The flames had guttered out and left everything stained with smoke. Everyone… your parents… I…”

  A long silence. A blade in the dark. The deep breath the undertaker takes before he tells you.

  “Did you destroy it?” Virian whispered.

  Rogo kept his mouth shut.

  “Did you destroy my home? My parents?”

  Rogo tried to speak. His throat was full of the sharp thing. He couldn’t. It hurt too much.

  He did not open his eyes. He couldn’t. He couldn’t see her. Couldn’t know what was on her face. Couldn’t see the eyes she looked at him with.

  She spoke. He tried to listen. But the painful thing in his throat spread to his ears, his neck, his head, until every thought cut him and every future was full of sharp edges.

  When he opened his eyes again. She was gone.

  He told himself this would happen. He tried to make peace with the day it would. He lived every day with the fear of it. He’d sharpen the story he’d tell her to a razor’s edge and perfect every forgiveness he would beg down to the letter. And when the time finally came, when she finally learned…

  He did none of those things.

  I need to believe he didn’t weep.

  In the cold hours when I relive those days, I can’t think of him as a person. I can’t think of who he’s disappointed or what holes are going to be left when he’s gone. I can’t think of him as grieving, wounded, and hauling himself sobbing after her. Not out of any primitive notion of spite—we were just both Vagrants.

  And yes, Vagrants are human—we do weep, we do bleed. But more than that, we are killers. We have weighed everything against our blades—our families, our lovers, our futures—and every time, we choose the blade until one day.

  And there’s nothing else left.

  I want to tell you Rogo the Dervish wept. Just like I want to tell you Virian forgave him. Just like I want to tell you Sal the Cacophony walked out of that town with her head held high and another name crossed off her list.

  But Rogo knew what I did. What Virian had just learned.

  Life isn’t opera.

  Operas are neat. Tidy. When the curtain falls, the story is over.

  People aren’t like that. When their curtain falls, their story doesn’t end.

  They just pick up where they left off.

  SEVEN

  The Scar

  Revenge is an incredible thing.

  It can make a bloodless heart start pumping and turn a sweet child into a killer. It can make a spark from the smallest hearth become an inferno to set the biggest city aflame. It can keep you warm on cold nights, quench your thirst in a desert, and light the way through any darkness.

  What revenge can’t do, apparently, is improve your stamina.

  Which wasn’t something I hadn’t thought about until my… fifth hour of chasing Niri through the forest?

  It might have been the sixth, honestly. I stopped keeping track after my ass went numb.

  I squinted into the darkness as I jogged between the trees, searching the ancient limbs and the carpeted floor for my quarry. There—between a pair of rocks, I saw a flash of blue spell-light. I brought my gun up, squeezed the trigger.

  The Cacophony’s maw erupted. Discordance screamed into the night. And exploded. A wall of sound rippled through the night, buffeting me with a barrage of dead leaves and branches as trees were torn apart, rocks were pulverized, and earth was rent from the ground.

  The echo shook in the tree bark, lasting until the leaves stood still for fear of being noticed by my gun. I studied the devastation, the calamity of wood and earth, certain that no one could have survived that.

  But as it turns out, Dread Niri was a hard woman to kill.

  “Damn, bitch!” The blue light appeared amid the devastation as she screamed out. “I said I was sorry!”

  Had she? I had been too busy trying to kill her to notice. Either way, I couldn’t accept it now.

  That would be awkward.

  I snarled in reply, took off after her. She turned and fled.

  Well, I say “fled,” I meant “limped.” She hadn’t been the most athletic woman to begin with and after six hours of running, her gait was little more than a tumbleweed of flesh pushed along by wheezing, desperate breath.

  Easy prey.

  For anyone else.

  My lungs were ablaze in my chest. My body was numb from the ribs down. I couldn’t feel the Cacophony in my hand, the blood leaking from my leg, the hundreds and hundreds of frayed nerves in my body screaming at me, begging me to stop.

  Sensible advice, honestly. Six hours, three shells, and however much forest I’d fucked up between the time I’d started chasing her and now, I wasn’t any closer to catching her. I should have stopped. I needed to stop.

  But wouldn’t you know it, I was just too fucking pissed off to remember how.

  I pushed through the pain and the dark alike, following that little blue dot through the forest. Until it stopped being so little. And soon, I saw the rest of the miserably scrawny sack that the blue dot was attached to.

  By the time I caught up with her, she was already up a tree, little legs flailing as she hauled herself up to a branch out of my reach. I made a pathetic grab, my fingers brushing against the toe of her boot, and cursed myself for missing her by that much. I had been so close, so—

  Oh, wait, I had a magic gun.

  “Wait! No! NO!”

  Niri screamed as I raised the Cacophony at her and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  Ah, fuck.

  “Ah, fuck,” Niri gasped, almost falling out of the tree. “Thank fuck.”

  I searched my satchel for another shell, realized I had spent all of them on this chase. The rest would be in Congeniality’s bag. And Congeniality was probably gorging herself on something dead and reeking and miles away by now.

  In better, less-bleeding-out-of-my-leg times, I could have crawled up there after her and beat her to death with a branch.

  “Out of ammunition?” Niri chuckled as she leaned over to look down at me, her spellwritten eye making some vague attempt at pity. “What a shame. The mighty Cacophony, empty as a meaningless—OW!”

  True, it wasn’t as flashy as Discordance or as traditional as a branch, but there is a certain satisfaction to hitting someone in their ugly face with a well-thrown rock.

  “For fuck’s sake, woman,” she gasped, wiping blood from the mouth I’d just split open. “What’s your fucking problem?”

  “We went over this,” I replied, reaching for another rock. “I was already going to kill you, Niri. If you make me repeat myself before I do, I’m going to kill you and use your skull with that fancy eye as a hand puppet.” I drew my arm back, hurled it. “I’m going to name it Clarence.”

  Her eyes widened. “Damn, I try not to judge, but you seem really pissed off
.”

  “Honey, if you make me go through this ‘you and I are the same’ birdshit before I kill you, I’m not going to stop with your skull.” I winged a rock at her. She ducked. “My quarry got away. My gun’s out of shells. My leg is killing me because you and your little troupe of assholes want to be judges.”

  “I don’t fucking recall asking you to chase me five miles or to blow everything up.”

  “It was six miles and I was happy to do it without you asking.” I winged another rock at her. “You’re welcome. Now be a dear and come down here so I can skullfuck you.”

  “All this… for them?” Niri waved a hand out toward the devastation. “You were there, Cacophony. You saw what I saw. We gave them a chance to flee. All they had to do was leave behind their money. And what did they choose?”

  “They chose to understand that no one comes to a truce with explosive alchemics,” I muttered. “Save this shit for someone dumber. You and I both know you ran that flag ready to kill everyone.”

  “Ready, yes. But it was their decision that sealed their—OW! FUCK. WOULD YOU QUIT WITH THE ROCKS?”

  “You think you’re the first clan to put on a cape and pretend you’re doing good?” I snarled, picking up another stone. “Every spring, the Scar is crawling with shits like you, too cowardly to admit that you’re just another pack of sniveling shits scrounging for metal.”

  “We’re not! The Children of the Dead are the righters of injustice! The vengeance that answers to the cry in the night!”

  “Yeah, I heard a lot of crying back there. Didn’t see you giving much of a shit then, either.”

  “Just like they never gave a shit about them!” Niri snarled in reply. “The Paarl Peacekeepers kept this land safe for years, but not for the Children. They’d send an army to clean a monster from a rich fucker’s lawn, but not so much as a sword for a farm on fire. The Children grew their crops, baked their bread, cut their lumber and their reward? A lot of sympathy, a lot of ‘isn’t that a shames’ and no fucking help.”

  “Scar’s a tough place. Are you going to burn down every city that couldn’t save a farm?”

  “Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t every city fear their farmers? Why shouldn’t the Children be a story every child in a big, soft bed hears that makes them think about where their money comes from?”