by Sam Sykes
At some point in my life, I probably should have wondered how I end up trying to kill people I usually agree with.
Because, honestly, that wasn’t the worst idea. I’d seen the carnage wrought by a single beast in a single night and I’d seen the horror wreaked by a thousand bandits with a thousand swords.
Neither of them came close to what just one asshole with a lot of gold and an urge for just a little bit more was capable of.
On any other night, I might have agreed with her. But then, on any other night, I probably wouldn’t have been chasing her through the forest with the intent of tearing her face off. That night, I was tired, wounded, and pissed.
But not so much that I didn’t catch something she said.
“Them,” I muttered.
“Huh?” she asked.
“You say ‘them,’ not ‘us.’”
Her lips pursed. Her stare froze.
“Funny thing,” I continued. “That eye of yours… hard to come by, isn’t it? You’d need a smith to make it, which is hard enough, but a spellwright to enchant it would be impossible to get for anyone from a farm. Last time I saw one, it went for forty pounds of metal. And yours is a lot nicer.”
She told me nothing with her voice. But her eye—that fancy blue sphere of brass and magic—told me everything. She snapped it shut, suddenly very aware of it. Now the Scar isn’t a gentle place—everyone’s got wounds and no one’s got time to be ashamed of them.
But Niri was.
“So where’d you get it?”
“I plucked it out of the face of a wealthy—”
“I asked where you got it, not what you told your gang,” I interrupted. “It takes a lot to make an eye like that, even more to get it put in right. You couldn’t do it yourself.”
Silence. I grinned.
“So, how much did it cost with installation? Sixty pounds? A hundred?”
Silence. I sneered.
“Shit, you don’t even know, do you? So who bought it for you? A lover? A friend? A generous patron who likes seeing shit blow up?”
Silence. And then, softly…
“My parents.”
Niri rubbed at her face, scratching an itch she’d been scratching for years.
“I had a difficult birth. There were complications,” she whispered. “We… had money. Avonin money.”
My eyes widened. “Avonin? The whiskey-makers? Shit, woman, why’d you settle for a pack of assholes in makeup? You could have bought yourself an army.”
“Yeah, I could have. So could my parents,” she snarled. “And with that army, they could have saved the village that made our whiskey when outlaws attacked it. With that money, they could have saved our maid’s daughter when she fell ill. With even a few fucking scraps of their metal, they could have saved hundreds, maybe thousands of people.”
Her face hardened into a cold, ugly sneer.
“I could have taken that money. Like my siblings did. And I could still be at their house, eating fancy foods and sipping liquor that sells for thousands, while everyone else starves.” She stared down at me, imperious. “But I’m here. With the Children. Because they need me.”
“Birdshit.”
That was rude of me. I know it’s not nice to say something like that after they say something like that, but…
“All this blood, all these dead,” I replied, sneering. “And it’s for nothing more than to give you the chance to piss your parents off.”
“That is not true,” she said, fervent.
“Birdshit it isn’t,” I spat. “You think you’re the first rich asshole who struck out to be a bandit? You aren’t even going to be the first one I put in the ground.”
“I am not one of them.”
“No? How many people did you kill today?”
“I didn’t—”
“How many of your own people? Your precious Children? Ten? Twenty?”
She clenched. Tensed. Seethed.
“How many of them have died for you? How many of them listened to the words your speaking coach told you? How many of them believed what you learned in all the books you had?” I spat. “Whatever the fuck you want to pretend you’re doing, you’re still getting people killed so you can feel good about yourself. Every dickwipe with money does that. You think your revenge—”
“Don’t,” she snapped. “Don’t you fucking lecture me about revenge, Cacophony.”
“Honey, I think I know a thing or two about it.”
“Yeah. I bet you do. You and your fucking stories about your fucking list.” She snarled. “You want to talk numbers? How many villages have you destroyed? How many people have you killed?”
“More than you, and I’m not pretending it was good.”
“No?” The fury slipped away, replaced by something colder and crueler. “And how many more people like you have you made?”
I’ll level with you: I like banter. It’s my third-favorite part of fighting. And, at least where I come from, it’s a tradition. You fight, you talk some shit, one of you dies. I’d had people hurl insults at me so fierce their swords looked easier to deal with.
I don’t know why I never felt struck until that moment.
“You think I tricked them into following me?” Niri asked, laughing in that crowing, arrogant way that rich fuckers do. “They came from ruins, from slaughtered families, from homes that had burned so long that they couldn’t even pry a fucking splinter from their houses. You think I had to convince people who’ve lost everything to pick up steel and take it back? I had to fucking stop them from burning everything down in seven leagues.
“They weren’t tricked, Cacophony. They were victims. Every last one of them has a story and every last one of them has someone with a big weapon and not a fucking care about using it, someone like you, who burned it all fucking down.” She settled on her branch. “I may lead the Children of the Dead, but people like you made them.”
She was talking birdshit, I knew. In some part of me, I had to know that—some part of my brain or my heart where little, hateful truths like that live. I don’t know if I found that part.
Because all I could listen to was my scars. The ache of them. The burning of them. The anger in them.
The ones that had been given to me by Vraki. By Jindu.
By Rogo.
And whatever part of me that yelled what she was saying was birdshit, it didn’t speak as clearly as a small, hurt voice that I heard only once, long ago, and had been trying to ignore for years.
How many other people, it asked, had scars that I’d given them?
My chest was tight. My wound was throbbing. I couldn’t think beyond the need to pull her down from her branch, to beat the shit out of her, out of something, out of anything until this feeling went away, until that voice went away.
I didn’t get the chance.
In the distance, I heard branches breaking, leaves rustling, voices rising from the forest. I saw lantern lights, heard aggressive commands being shouted.
“Those are the Children,” Niri said, grinning down at me. “They’ll be here soon.”
Probably following the trail of destruction I left getting here. I was starting to think that solving everything with explosions was more trouble than it was worth.
“This isn’t your fight, Cacophony,” she said. “As true now as it was when I told you. Whatever the fuck grievance you have with this town, leave it. Go in peace for the first time in your fucking life and we’ll do the same.” She shrugged. “Or don’t. And see how it works out for you next time.”
There’s no shame in retreat, especially in the Scar. Pride is fun and all, but no one expects you to live by it. So when I fixed one final scowl on Niri before I limped off into the forest, it wasn’t with shame.
It was with weight. The scars on my body suddenly felt too heavy to bear anymore, their knotted flesh thick with memory. Memories of the dark night, the dark place, of Rogo and Jindu and Galta and all the other names on my list.
Memories
of what they’d done to me.
Revenge is an incredible thing.
It can keep you going. It can keep you warm. It can keep you fighting. But there are things it can’t do.
And it couldn’t shut out that small, wounded voice.
Wondering how many people were carrying a weight I’d put on them.
Around midnight, it became too much.
Too much weight. Too much blood. Too much memory. They stacked themselves neatly upon my shoulders and pressed down until I was on my knees. Then my belly. And finally, only when my face was pressed into the leaf-strewn dirt, did I stop moving.
The exhaustion. Or the wound. Or Niri’s words, sharpened to a stake and jammed into a part of my back that I couldn’t reach.
I didn’t know what had done it. I didn’t care. I didn’t remember how to get myself back up and I didn’t mind that everything was going darker.
Maybe it’s better this way.
That soft, whispering voice.
You’re tired, right? Bleeding. Sore. It’s all the fighting.
Wounded and bloodied and ready to stop.
What’s it matter if Rogo lives or dies?
Whispering.
What’s it matter if you live or die?
Murmuring.
Fewer scars this way, right?
Going softer.
And softer.
Until it was as dark and cold as the night that slid over me like a blanket and took me into a dreamless sleep.
The first heat I felt was moist.
Which was a sign that I was either still alive or in the worst possible version of hell.
I heard a voice. Not the one that had coaxed me to that dark place. No, this one was deeper, alive…
“Squark.”
And smelled awful.
I blinked awake. The moon was still hanging high in the sky—I couldn’t have been out for long. A canvas shelter flapped over my head in a soft breeze, a match for the dirty rug I’d been laid out on.
I was alive.
“Squark.”
And not alone.
Congeniality’s massive beak loomed into view as she regarded with me with what I hoped was animal concern but what I feared was patience to see if I was dead enough to eat yet. Regardless of her motives, she craned her long, featherless neck down and nudged at me with her beak.
“Yeah. Not dead yet.” I reached up and scratched her between the eyes like she likes. “Sorry to disappoint.”
I was surprised enough to find that I wasn’t dead, but as more and more of me stirred back to consciousness, I was even more surprised to find that I wasn’t shitting myself in pain. I was sore, stiff, bruised, but the agony that had been lancing me since I took the bolt was muted.
I glanced down at my leg. My bandaged leg. The crude dressing I’d applied had been removed and replaced with… I don’t fucking know. It looked like tree bark, but it was wrapped around my thigh, exuding a pungent odor.
“Hey, you’re alive!”
But at what cost, I thought to myself as I looked up into a familiar face.
Irvic.
He stood beneath the crude canvas lean-to that I awoke under, his face beaming. The war paint he had worn was gone now, replaced with a layer of dried sweat and dirt. His crude hides and leathers had been discarded, replaced with simple woven clothes. And behind his glasses, his eyes were bright and shining.
“I thought you were dead, for sure, but Murthi disagreed,” he said as he came up beside Congeniality. “When we found you, this little feathery angel was watching over you.”
He reached up to stroke her neck. I shot a hand out—the last person to do that ended up losing an arm.
“Hey, wait, she sometimes—”
Except she didn’t. She closed her eyes and let out a low rumbling noise as he stroked her throat. With a squawk of discontent, she refrained from hewing his limb and instead turned and stalked off.
I furrowed my brow. “She doesn’t let people touch her. What the fuck did you do to her?”
“That sweetheart?” Irvic asked. “She’s a little fussy, I guess, but she hasn’t so much as nipped at me in the past few hours.”
“Hours? I couldn’t have been out for more than one.”
“It’s true! Thanks to Murthi, you weren’t. But your bird found us ages ago. She was enjoying our company, but when she turned and ran into the forest, we thought we should follow. It seemed important.”
“Who the fuck is Murthi? Who the fuck is us?” I grunted as I pushed myself to my feet. “For that matter, where the fuck have you been?”
Irvic blinked. “What do you mean?”
“You fucking disappeared from Paarl’s Hollow!”
“No, I didn’t. I just… you know, followed.”
I asked, but he didn’t hear me. Neither of us could hear shit over the rumbling of the earth beneath our feet. I swayed, grabbed hold of the lean-to to keep from falling over. Irvic had no such problem keeping steady. He wasn’t even paying attention.
How could he? His eyes were drawn toward the sky.
And the mountainous shape that blotted it out.
Hair hung down to blanket the trees and forest in great, thick knots in which uprooted trees and the skeletons of great beasts had become entangled. Colossal feet pressed upon the ground, each one six times as thick as the oldest, thickest tree in the forest. The trees and earth lay ruined—a road of pulverized earth and pulped wood that stretched for miles.
The Compass Beast.
I was less than a fucking mile from the fucking Compass Beast.
“Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit,” I babbled as I fumbled for a gun that wasn’t there. I wasn’t even sure what the fuck I was going to do. I’d be lucky if the Cacophony could even tickle that thing.
“Huh?” Irvic glanced at me, apparently wondering why I was so concerned about the miles-tall engine of utter destruction looming over us.
“It’s the Beast, you fucker!” I snapped. “I’ve got to… We need… Where the fuck is my gun?”
“Oh. With Murthi. But there’s no need to be afraid of the Beast.” Irvic gestured out. “None of us are.”
My heartbeat slowed long enough for me to see what he was pointing at.
The Compass Beast’s foot had carved a small valley into the forest and in that bowl of ruined earth, I saw tents. Wagons. Birds. People.
Spinning wheels and looms worked as elders wove clothes like the ones Irvic wore. Children tottered to and fro, carrying burdens of grain and bird feed to dispense to a hungry flock of avians. Campfires burned, hides were tanned, people laughed and sang and lived in the shadow of a gigantic monster that could kill them with just a twitch.
“The hell is this?” I muttered.
Irvic’s answer was a smile and a beckon. And, after a considerable amount of ignoring all the instincts yelling at me that this was a bad idea, I followed.
“Ever since I saw the Beast,” he said as he led me into the camp, “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s something in its eyes… I saw… too much.” He shook his head. “I tried running. I tried sleeping. But I couldn’t get it out of my head. Not until I came here. It turns out I wasn’t the only one.”
He threw his arms out wide, grinning. “Welcome to Fleatown.”
I’ve been in a lot of towns. Some good, some bad, some on fire, some not on fire at first. I try not to be judgmental—you’d have to be at least a little insane to make a home in the Scar at all. But this… this Fleatown was the weirdest I’d seen.
And the fact that it was made beside the Beast was only the second most surprising part about it.
As Irvic led me through the ramshackle camp, I was tense. Vagrants aren’t exactly welcome among even the best of people. People insane enough to live next to a monster, I imagined, would be worse.
I was expecting trouble. I wasn’t expecting a sandwich.
And yet…
“Oh, you’re up!” A healthy-looking woman rushed up and thr
ust a wrapped package in my hands. “You looked roughed up, so we made you this.”
I blinked, unwrapped the package. Fresh-baked bread, lean bird meat, an array of vegetables so fresh you can’t find them this far south—the minute I bit in, I loved this woman.
But she was gone when I looked up, back to a hastily assembled clay oven around which other people gathered. Another man, carrying a bundle of sticks, smiled as he walked past.
“Feeling better? The Big One will do that for you.”
A young child leading a towering draft bird walked past.
“Hey, does that mean bird belong to you? She’s cute!”
A boy and a girl no older than fifteen walked by, toting a large tent between them.
“If you’re sticking around,” the boy muttered, “could you maybe lend a hand?”
“She’s just passing through,” the girl replied to him. “Maybe.”
If you’ve been paying attention at all, you should believe me when I say I don’t surprise easily and I’m pretty sure you’d believe me if I said I’m very rarely struck speechless.
No offense, but you seem like the judgy type.
But as Irvic led me through Fleatown’s haphazard layout, I was surprised, speechless, struck dumb by what I saw.
People. Normal, ordinary people, helping each other, providing for each other, rushing to help each other with their burdens. I didn’t see so much as a flash of metal being changed, I didn’t hear even a hint of haggling. They gave, they took, they returned the favor, laughing and grinning and singing slow, dirge-like songs.
The Scar’s a hard place. It takes hard people to live out here. People like this, people who helped each other, were rare. People like this living in the shadow of a monster were… well, fuck, I sure as shit didn’t have a name for it.
“Well, hey, you didn’t die!”
I started at the sound of a voice, reached for weapons I didn’t have, as I suddenly became aware of the monster looming over me. Without realizing it, Irvic had led me close enough to the Compass Beast that I could see each individual tree-thick strand of hair dangling from its mane.
Had I really been so dumbstruck by people being good to each other that I failed to notice the mountain-sized monster looming over me?
That might explain an awful lot of the decisions I’d been making lately.
