The Iron Dirge

by Sam Sykes

  He turned and started for the East Gate. It would have been easy to let him go. Maybe some part of me wanted to let him go.

  But the rest of me needed something else.

  “What did you think I did to her?” I found myself asking.

  Rogo paused, looked back at me. “Huh?”

  “You seemed to think I’d done something to her,” I replied. “What did you think I did?”

  “This is hardly the time for—”

  “I’ve got time.”

  The earth rumbled under our feet. Rogo did not flee. Neither did I.

  “For a moment,” he said, softly, “I feared you had hurt her.”

  “Why would you think that, Rogo?”

  A longer silence. The kind that comes before the pain.

  “Because…” he paused, “of what happened to you.”

  “What happened to me, Rogo?”

  His mouth hung open, the answer cowering beneath his tongue.

  “What happened to me, Rogo?” I repeated, my voice growing louder.

  He swallowed something bitter, shut his mouth, did not blink.

  “Who did it to me, Rogo?”

  His jaw tightened.

  “WHO DID IT?”

  His eyes fell.

  “WHO GAVE ME THESE SCARS, ROGO?”

  And he said nothing.

  I’ve heard terrible things in the Scar. I’ve heard the sounds of bones of people I knew crunching in monster jaws. I’ve heard the furious litanies of the fanatics of Haven, of the Revolution, of the Imperium as they call for each other’s deaths. I’ve heard words and curses so foul drip from lips so vile that they laid on the ground and festered like a rotting, dead thing.

  But somehow, I never get used to the silence. The mouths open with no words to follow. The empty shrugs and shaking heads and mutterings of “isn’t that a shame.” As though scars just appear on people. As though blades are never wielded. As though it all just… happens. No villains. No responsibility. Just more scars and more silences.

  I don’t know what I wanted from Rogo just then. A curse, a threat, something—something that would acknowledge what he’d done to me.

  I want to say I would have let him go if he had.

  The earth heaved. We were knocked from our feet. A house beside us collapsed into rubble.

  The western half of Paarl’s Hollow was pulverized rubble. The Gate, the houses, the fountains and plants had vanished beneath a pair of gigantic feet. The shadow of the Compass Beast plunged the city into darkness as it took another colossal step into town.

  Rogo said nothing. He didn’t even try. He turned and started rushing for the East Gate, desperate to escape. Smart fellow.

  Good thing one of us was.

  A hammer clicked behind him. He twisted out of the way in time to see a shell go streaking past him. It struck the East Gate and exploded in a wall of sound. Discordance erupted with the sound of a hundred blaring trumpets, an ugly harmony that shredded stone, wood, and mortar.

  Rogo shielded himself from debris that went flying. When he looked at the gate again, all he beheld was a ruin of rubble and hissing dust. Destroyed. Shattered.

  Utterly impassable.

  He turned to face me as I stood there—bloodied, wounded, wisps of steam peeling from the Cacophony’s barrel in my hand—his face contorted in anguished shock.

  “NOW?” he screamed. “With the city falling apart and everyone dying, Salazanca, you want to fight now?”

  “Who the fuck did you think you were talking to, Rogonoroth?” I snarled back as I drew the hammer back and aimed again. “WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK I AM?”

  My finger on the trigger slipped. The earth rocked beneath us again, throwing off my aim. I narrowly managed to avoid firing off a shell into the sky as a curtain of dust came roaring over us.

  I pulled my scarf up, narrowed my eyes, searched. Only swirling veils of grit and grime met me, clinging possessively to the few buildings still standing. But even as my heart pounded and told me to run, all I could hear was the whisper inside my head.

  No, it moaned desperately. No, no, NO! He can’t get away. Not again. He can’t flee. I can’t let him. I can’t—

  “Patience.”

  Another voice. A voice of flame and a smile full of cinders.

  “He is here.”

  Softer. Bleaker.

  “Listen.”

  Crueler.

  I took the deepest breath I could manage. I closed my eyes as much as I dared. I opened my ears to the sound of swirling dust and groaning stone and…

  There.

  A song. Faint. Melodious. Terrifying.

  The Lady Merchant.

  Rogo was still here. And he wasn’t alone.

  I held the Cacophony close and whispered.

  “Show me.”

  He burned in my grip and smiled that horrible smile that only I could see.

  “As you wish.”

  And then, on a whisper of steam.

  “There.”

  I spun, sword raised. My steel met his in a spray of sparks. He snarled, bore down on me, struggled to push me to my knees. I grit my teeth, planted my heels, shoved him back. Rogo didn’t even bother to glare before he fled back into the dust.

  “Behind.”

  I whirled, met his clumsy parry with a strike of my own. He recoiled, shocked that I’d caught him. I pressed the attack, driving him back with each blow, his feet growing more unsteady beneath him with every slash. He leapt from me, turned, and bolted into the dust. I made to move after him.

  “No.”

  The Cacophony hissed. Fire coursed through me.

  “Not him.”

  Another silhouette at the corner of my eye. Another blade flashed out of the grit. I struck it back, as I parried the next one, and the next two. They kept coming. Wherever I swung, Rogo the Dervish was there, fleeing. Whenever I turned my back, Rogo the Dervish was there, blade out and aimed for my spine. Where I cut, Rogo the Dervish was there. Where I dodged, Rogo the Dervish was there. Where I—

  The earth shuddered again. The dust was drowned in darkness. I ducked as a great foot came swinging out and over me. With one incredible step, the Compass Beast had cleared the entire town. Its immense body loomed over us, so close I could see the plants and moss growing on its underbelly.

  Time was out. If we ever had it.

  “Where is he? Where’s the real one?” I snarled to my gun.

  “Patience,” he replied.

  Which is not something I want to be told by anyone, let alone a magic fucking gun that talks.

  Of course, I didn’t fucking keep him around because he’s a sparkling conversationalist, did I?

  I raised the Cacophony. Aimed into the dust. Silhouettes danced in the grime, phantoms searching for an opportunity. They darted, ran, hurried this way and that, trying to trick me into choosing one of them to attack while the others ambushed me. Good strategy.

  If they’d been fighting someone who didn’t have a magic gun.

  I pulled the trigger. The shell sped, screamed, exploded. A hundred tiny shards of metal burst out in a spray, clattered uselessly to the ground. I saw the silhouettes cease their darting and pause to look at the tiny metal things.

  “Patience,” I whispered.

  And the shards answered.

  It began with the humming. Then with shudders and flashes of metal as the shards grew metal wings. And when they took flight, their metallic buzzing challenged even the screams of the collapsing city to be heard.

  The silhouettes of Rogo immediately began to flail and swat and strike, struggling to fend off the tiny metal beasts that swarmed and stung and pricked as they sped through the clouds of dust, tiny silver stars twinkling in the Beast’s shadow.

  A flash of light caught my eye. One of Rogo’s copies fell to the ground beneath the stinging frenzy and vanished. And then another. And another. Bursts of brilliance lit up the shadows as Rogo’s copies succumbed to the Shardswarm shell.

  I winc
ed as a pair of fluttering razor wings swept past me, close enough that I felt the chill of their metal. This wasn’t good. Shardswarm wasn’t easy to control—it needed to kill and wasn’t particular about the target. If it couldn’t find its quarry in Rogro…

  He can’t keep it up, I knew as I searched the darkness. He can’t hold on to his magic. Sooner or later, his copies will be gone and the only one left will…

  Wait.

  My ears twitched. Footsteps behind me. Heavy with desperation and pounding with fear.

  “There.”

  “There.”

  I waited, waited until the sound of his feet was as heavy as the sound of my heart in my ears, waited until the blade was burning in my hand, waited until my scars ached the same way they ached that night when I got them.

  And then, I faced him.

  His black blade flashed. I felt strands of hair part from my head as I ducked under his blow. I leaned forward, caught his belly with my shoulder and his balls with my arm. My teeth clenched, my leg screamed, my lungs burned as I raised up and tossed him over my shoulder to land upon his back.

  There was the sound of glass shattering and his screaming. He struggled to get to his feet, grasped at the ground. His fingers snapped off, red-stained glass fragments spilling to the earth as he fell back to the ground.

  And my sword followed.

  His eyes popped open. His mouth struggled for the words he’d never said. Steel flashed. Glass crunched. A body stiffened.

  And whatever last words he’d said came out only as a wet, labored breath.

  I held my sword in both hands, kneeling over him, the steel buried in his chest, a tiny monument of silver and red to the horror that had taken place here. I held it there, as all around me, flashes of light erupted in the gloom and disappeared. I held it there, as the singing metal fell. I held it there, as an enormous body on enormous legs walked over us, the Compass Beast completely heedless of what had occurred beneath it.

  The shadow moved past us. The dust settled. Timid daylight shone down upon the town that had once been Paarl’s Hollow, too terrified to gaze upon it while the Beast still stood. What it gazed upon, between the gray clouds that swirled over it, was a cemetery.

  Homes stood as morbid headstones, their skeletal remains presiding over the shattered rubble. Walls lay as coffins, stone cairns that tried and failed to hide the ruin. And in the earth, embedded beneath immense footprints, the clocks and tea sets, the wagons and beds, the stuffed animals and the nice hats and the blankets that people had since they were babies…

  Weeds on headstones. Trivial memories of a world that no longer existed.

  I suppose I couldn’t blame myself for still feeling cold, for still feeling like the sun couldn’t warm me. Maybe it couldn’t bear to look at us. Maybe it didn’t even notice me, or either of us. After all, among the carnage, who could be blamed for not picking out a tired woman and a dying man as they sat there in the ruin.

  Just two more ruined things.

  “Sal…”

  When the Beast was far enough away, I could hear him.

  “Sal… Salazanca…”

  Rogo gasped my name. I leaned over him. With shattered fingers, he reached up and grasped my hand. I tensed, ready to shove him off. But there was no hate in his hand, no anger in his grasp. Just the same cold fear that everyone feels when the lights start to go dark.

  “Virian…” he said. His voice was wet and choked. Blood was filling his lungs. “Virian… please, Sal, for all that I’ve done to you and all that we’ve been through, don’t…”

  He didn’t have enough left in him to finish his plea. I saw the terror in his eyes, the desperate wish he still wanted to make. Even after all this, even after he couldn’t even acknowledge what he’d done, he still had a favor to ask of me. I wanted to hold on to that terror, to let him die in darkness not knowing what I’d do once he was gone…

  “She’ll be safe.” I squeezed his hand slightly. “You have my word.”

  But whatever kind of killer I was…

  Whatever kind of end he’d deserved…

  Virian didn’t.

  His hand relaxed a little in mine. The skin of his hand began to go translucent and brittle, turning from flesh to glass. It spread with each slow, labored breath he took: down his arm, across his chest, up his legs.

  “She is… a good girl, Sal,” he whispered. “I wish… I wish I had been…”

  “Yeah,” I whispered back. “She deserved that.”

  “She does…” A slight smile crept across his face, even as the glass-rot spread up to his chin. “I was… so stupid. I thought I could… run… if I just kept running… if I ran far enough, fast enough…” He closed his eyes. “Stupid. So stupid.”

  “You’re not stupid, Rogonoroth.” I pulled my sword from his chest. Glass flaked from its edge. “Everyone tries to run from their past.”

  The sunlight caught Rogo’s face. Through the pale glass that his body had become, a beam of light shone through, painted a prism of green and yellow and purple upon the ruined earth.

  “It’s just that no one gets away.”

  I stayed with him. As the Compass Beast continued to lumber away. As each shuddering step caused another crack to split across his glass body. And by the time the earth stopped shaking, there was nothing left of him.

  Nothing but shards of glass and pale, fading light.

  NINE

  The Scar

  I don’t think we tell stories to remember the past.

  Not really.

  Ask the people who were there—the people with the scars, the people who can’t sleep without dreaming of blades in the dark—they have no trouble remembering how it happened. They remember every inch of the steel that gave them their wound, every drop of their own blood on their hands.

  Or at least, I do.

  But people aren’t meant to carry those scars, those dreams. Our bodies are too frail, they’ll collapse under the weight. So our stories change—we skip over the parts that hurt too much to remember, we make the hard decisions sound easier, we make up reasons why we did the things we did, and that they were good, and the things they did were bad, so we can pretend that we at least tried to make things make sense.

  We don’t tell stories to remember the past. We tell stories to forget it.

  For all the days and miles I put between me and Paarl’s Hollow, I heard the stories about it. More than a few were about me, about the killer who came to town for reasons no one knew and left it like she left every other town she visited. A fair amount were about the Beast, about how it was punishment sent for some transgression no one could begin to guess. And some were about the bandit lord Dread Niri and the army of unstoppable, fearless murderers she commanded.

  None of them mentioned Rogo. Or Virian.

  But maybe that’s for the best. Maybe it’s better that no one really knows what happened—sometimes, I have trouble putting it together myself. And maybe it’s better that we have these stories instead of the truth that a lot of people died and a lot of shit got broken for reasons no one’s really sure of.

  Or at least, on that night, I sure as shit couldn’t figure it out.

  From high on a ledge, I stared at the ruin of Paarl’s Hollow, searching through its rubble as if I could find the cause for how all of this went to shit. But from up here, it barely even looked like it had once been a town.

  The walls were completely gone, the heavy stones that had made them haphazardly strewn where they’d fallen after the Beast kicked them down. The forges and looms and wagons were buried beneath the imprints of colossal feet, fossils of a long-lost civilization that died only that day. And the houses…

  Outside the collapsed walls was no better. Even the scorched-out hellscape of the forest had looked better than the shredded earth the Beast’s stride had made. And that trail of destruction continued all the way to the horizon.

  Where I could still see it.

  Hours later, miles later, it was sti
ll so huge that I could see the Compass Beast’s muscles twitch and jump as I lumbered across the land, tearing apart forests and crushing hills under its feet. And throughout its rampage, it did nothing more than let out a low, rumbling groan, never anything more than inconvenienced by the destruction it wrought.

  Did it care that it had just destroyed an entire city in a few steps? Did it notice what it crushed underfoot? Had it ever been moved by pity, at some point, by compassion?

  Or did it just see what I saw that night: a city that had been destroyed by people just as handily as it had been destroyed by a giant monster? Did it see us, fighting and killing each other and burning down everything, and figure, “Well, shit, I might as well?”

  Maybe it didn’t care. Or maybe it just figured we didn’t.

  I couldn’t find the answer in the ruins.

  But someone did.

  I squinted to see, but in the darkness of the night, I could see tiny lights moving. People in simple clothing picked their way through the ruins, pulling out timber or metal… a few bodies. Without ceremony, they carried the retrieved to a pair of wagons pulled by farm birds. Materials were placed in one. Bodies in another.

  The people of Fleatown. Picking through the ruin of Paarl’s Hollow with the same lack of ceremony as their massive patron had destroyed it.

  But then, my thought came unbidden, why are they bothering to pick up the bodies?

  I saw more lights on the road of destruction that the Beast had wrought. A train of people followed the great creature, carrying their camp on their backs. Walking among the simple clothes, I saw fancier outfits and hides—people who’d survived Paarl’s Hollow and the Children who had survived me, now both just more Fleas clinging to the ankle of something bigger.

  This morning, they’d been willing to kill each other. Months ago, they’d been willing to let each other die for more metal. And now… now…

  What the fuck was it all for? I wondered. All this fucking trouble and they just end up together? Just like that? Why the fuck did we fight so hard if it wasn’t worth it?

  That was the question I asked myself.