The Iron Dirge

by Sam Sykes

  “It’s not like Terassus here,” she said softly. “We don’t have rich people. I know you’ve done more for this town than we deserve, but…”

  She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence. He couldn’t bring himself to press her.

  Wounds, he’d learned, came in two kinds. If you were lucky, you got to treat the broken bones, the split-open heads, the horrible burns—wounds that herbs and bandages and sutures could fix. If you weren’t, you had to treat the wounds like the kind Sindra had, like the kind all soldiers had.

  The war had left them all over the Valley: soldiers who woke each night seeing the faces of their best friends melting off their skulls, soldiers who were visited by the ghosts of people they’d strangled to death, soldiers who had seen all the fire and blood and bodies that had heaped up across the Valley and simply lay down and didn’t see a reason to get back up.

  Sindra was a strong woman. If half her stories were true, one of the strongest the Revolution had seen. She had been a sword of the Revolution. But she had been left behind. Too broken to be used by her comrades.

  How did you fix a sword that couldn’t kill?

  Meret didn’t know. He only knew what his master had taught him: how to keep wounds from getting infected and how to set broken bones, and one important cure that almost never failed.

  “Do you have cups?”

  Sindra looked up, confused. “Huh?”

  “Cups. Glasses. Bowls will do, if you’ve got nothing else in this dump.” He slid a hand into his satchel and pulled the whiskey out, giving it a come-hither slosh. “You want to pay me back? I just finished my rounds and I hate drinking alone.”

  Sindra grinned. “Close the fucking door, then. Snow’s coming.”

  He smiled, walked to the door, looked up to the clouds. She was right. Winter was coming early to the Valley, as it always did. Snow fell gently, a layer of cold, black flakes falling softly upon the town’s—

  “Wait.” Meret squinted. “Black?”

  Somewhere far away, beyond the thick cloying gray of the sky, he heard a sound. Like a voccaphone, he thought, that strange crackling machine warble that couldn’t ever quite sound like a human. A tune, growing louder, one he could have sworn he’d heard before. What were those lyrics? What was that song?

  “Is that,” Sindra muttered to herself, glancing out the window, “the Revolutionary anthem?”

  And then the sky exploded.

  First, sound.

  A roar split the sky apart, a wail of breaking wood and shrieking metal fighting to be heard. The gray clouds shuddered and swirled, chased away to reveal a bright red flash, as though someone had jammed a knife into the sky and cut a wound lengthwise.

  Then, fire.

  In cinders, in embers, in fist-sized chunks and shards as big as Meret, it fell from the sky. A splintered timber crashed in Rodic’s field and lay smoldering like a pyre. A blade of metal as long as a rothac speared through the roof of a house and belched fire through the wound it had just cleaved. All around the town, the fires fell, erupting in gouts of flame, an orchard of laughing red blossoms in the span of a soot-choked breath.

  And then, the ship.

  Its prow punched through the clouds, the gray parting for the great iron figurehead of a stern-looking man, his hand thrust out in defiant warning. A hull followed, riddled with wounds of black and red as fires burst out of its timbers. Propellers across its deck and prow screamed in metal agony as they came apart under the stress of the flame. For one glorious moment, the sky was alight with the beautiful view of the ship, as magnificent as any he had seen in the richest harbors across the Scar, burning as bright as a tiny sun.

  And then it crashed.

  Meret had the presence of mind to scream as it plummeted into the earth. If there was a god, they must have heard him, for the ship veered away from the town and smashed itself into the fields nearby, carving a blackened scar into the earth as it tore through the trees there. A cloud of smoke roiled up, sweeping through the town and casting them into blackness.

  “Shit.”

  He hadn’t even noticed Sindra standing beside him that whole time. She was still staring at the wound in the clouds, mouth agape despite the ash gathering on her lips.

  “That was… a ship,” she whispered reverently. “A fucking airship. The Great General’s very own fleet. I remember the propaganda, the paintings they made.” She swallowed hard. “That thing’s a Revolutionary prize. They won’t let it sit here. We have to get everyone and get away from the town before they come.”

  That was very good advice, Meret thought.

  And had he caught the whole of it, he’d probably have agreed.

  As it was, he only managed to catch about half of it before running off toward the wreckage of the site like a fucking idiot.

  It was stupid, he knew. But he had been stupid to come to the Valley to help people, stupider still to become an apothecary in the first place, so he saw no reason to stop now. He slowed only to shout warnings to get clear to the curious and horrified onlookers who had gathered outside to see the sky fall. He didn’t stop until he found the first body.

  He tripped over it, planting face-first into the burned dirt. He looked back and grimaced at the sight of a blue coat laden with fancy-looking medals. Treating Revolutionaries always came with risks—they tended to “thank” you for your service by conscripting you into their armies.

  Fortunately, this guy was dead.

  Unfortunately, it had been magic that killed him.

  An icicle jutted out of his chest, as long as a man’s arm, still whispering frigid mist even as fires burned around him. Only a mage could do something like that. And there weren’t many mages who weren’t part of the Imperium. Which meant war had brought this ship here.

  And this ship had brought war here.

  He pulled himself to his feet and beheld the other bodies scattered like ash across the field, half hidden in the cloud of dust and grit. Most were burned to death, smoldering alongside the ship’s rubble. A few had been crushed or broken like toys, tossed when the ship had been struck. A few others were dead of more unusual circumstances. But they were all dead.

  More than he’d ever seen in one spot.

  “You fucker.”

  A hand grabbed him by the shoulder. He whirled, fearing the Revolution had already come to claim their war machine or that the dead had risen due to some magical birdshittery. Seeing Sindra’s angry face made him think that either of those might have been preferable.

  “Do you not understand what’s happening here?” she snapped. “Everyone in the Valley must have seen this ship come down. Either the Revolution will come to pick up the pieces or the Imperium will come to finish the job and both of those things end with Littlebarrow and everyone in it dead.”

  “But I had to help—” Meret began weakly.

  “Help what?”

  Good question. There was nothing left for him here. Even if he did find survivors, what could herbs and salves do for people who had been crushed by a giant airship or electrocuted by doomlightning or whatever the fuck those mages did?

  But he could still help the people of Littlebarrow. And they’d need help. Whatever else happened after this day, it would not end well.

  He sighed, turned, and nodded at Sindra. She nodded back, cuffed him lightly across the head, and together they started walking.

  Until the rubble started moving, anyway.

  The groan of timber caught his ear. He turned and saw a pile of debris shifting. He walked toward it and, as if in response, something reached out.

  A hand. Wrapped in a dirty leather glove stained with blood. Tattoos of blue-and-white cloudscapes and wings stretched from the wrist down to the elbow. It reached out of the rubble, fingers twitching.

  Alive.

  In need of help.

  Or so Meret thought when he started to run toward it. But when he came within ten feet of the pile, it shifted suddenly. A great beam of wood rose, pushed up
ward by a shape shadowed in the cloud of ash. Two tattooed arms lifted the great beam and, with a grunt of effort, shoved them aside.

  The smoke cleared. The fires ebbed. And Meret saw a woman standing there.

  Alive.

  She was tall, lean, corded with muscle that shuddered with labored breathing, her dirty leathers not making much of an effort to conceal it. Or the numerous old scars and fresh injuries she wore. An empty scabbard hung at her hip. Her hair, Imperial white and cut rudely short, was dusted with ash. Pale blue eyes stared across the field, empty.

  He started to move toward her. Sindra seized him.

  “No.” No anger in her voice, just quiet, desperate fear. “No, Meret. You can’t help that one.”

  “Why not?”

  “The tattoos. You don’t recognize them?”

  He squinted at her inked forearms. “Vagrant tattoos. She’s a rebel mage?”

  “Not just any, you fool,” Sindra whispered. “You haven’t heard the tales? The warnings? That’s no outlaw.”

  She pointed a baleful finger at the woman.

  “That’s Sal the Cacophony.”

  And a cold deeper than winter wrenched his spine.

  He’d heard. Everybody who ever hoped to help people in the Scar had heard of Sal the Cacophony. The woman who walked across the Scar and left misery and ruin in her wake. The woman who had killed more people, made more widows, and ended more townships than the fiercest beast or the cruelest outlaw. The woman who painted the Scar with the remains of her enemies—Vagrant, Imperial, Revolutionary…

  Sal the Cacophony, it was said, had tried to kill one of everything that walked, crawled, or flew across this dark earth.

  And maybe that was true. Maybe all of it was. Maybe she had done even worse things than what the stories said.

  But at that moment in that ash-choked field, Meret did not think about what may be. He thought about the only two things he knew to be true.

  First, he should definitely turn around, start walking, and keep going until he forgot Littlebarrow’s name.

  Second, he was not going to do that.

  “Meret.”

  Sindra, a woman who had once screamed the whole town awake when she thought someone had touched her sword, sounded strange, whispering his name as he started walking toward the white-haired woman. She didn’t go after him, making little more than a fumbling reach for his shoulder as he headed deeper into the ash.

  Sindra, who had once slain a Bittercoil Serpent by leaping into its mouth and cutting her way out, was scared to draw the notice of this woman.

  Truth be told, maybe he was, too. Or maybe he thought that the closer he was to the damage, the more he could keep it from reaching Littlebarrow. Or maybe some dark part of him, the morbidly curious part that had driven him to come to this war-torn land, wanted to look into the eyes of a killer instead of a corpse.

  He didn’t deal with what may be. He dealt with what he knew to be true.

  Someone was injured. And he could help.

  “Madam?”

  His voice was so timid he barely heard himself over the mutter of nearby fires and the groan of fragmenting metal as the gunship’s remains continued to crumble. Sal the Cacophony, breathing raggedly and staring out into the distance, did not seem to notice. He came closer, spoke a little louder.

  “Are you hurt?”

  She didn’t look at him. She didn’t even seem to notice the fact that her immediate vicinity was almost entirely on fire. Trauma, perhaps; he’d seen it before.

  “We saw the ship come down…” He glanced toward the ruin of the machine, wearily sighing plumes of flame. “I mean, everyone did.” He looked back to Sal. “What happened—”

  Or, more specifically, he looked into a gun.

  A polished piece of brass, its barrel forged to perfectly resemble a grinning dragon’s leer, stared at him through metal eyes. Steam peeled off the cylinder, almost as if the thing were alive and breathing. A polished hilt of black wood clung to her hand—or she to it—as she leveled the gun at his face, finger on the trigger, and pulled the hammer back with a click that carried through the sounds of hell.

  Including the sound of his own heart dropping into his belly.

  Meret stared into the weapon’s smile, into that black hole between its jaws. For every story about the woman, there was another one about her weapon. The Cacophony could set fires that never went out. The Cacophony warped metal and broke stone. The Cacophony sang a song so fierce it killed anyone who listened to it.

  He hadn’t heard as many stories about the gun. But even if he hadn’t heard a single one, he would have believed them.

  Weapons ought not to look at people.

  Not like that.

  “Imperial?”

  A ragged voice caught his ear. He looked up the barrel to see her looking down it. Her blue eyes, no longer so distant, were fixed on him. A long scar carved its way down the right side of her face, and a cold stare punched through him just as cleanly as the gun’s brass eyes had.

  “W-what?” he asked.

  “You Imperial?” Sal the Cacophony asked again, with the slightest variation in tone that suggested the next time she asked, it would be to a corpse.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Revolutionary?”

  “No. I’m just…” He, without taking his eyes off the gun, gestured in the direction of Littlebarrow. “I’m from the village over there. Unaffiliated. Neutral.”

  She stared at him for a long moment. Slowly, her eyes slid to the gun with an expectant look, like she expected it to weigh in on whether he was lying or not.

  Could it do that? Was there a story about that somewhere? He thought he had heard something like that once.

  “You know this gun?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “You know what it can do?”

  He nodded.

  “Am I going to need to use it?”

  He shook his head.

  She either believed him or realized that she could probably wring his neck just as easily as shoot him. The gun lowered and, with a hissing sound, slid into a sheath at her side.

  Without the threat of imminent death by firearm, he had a chance to take stock of her. Her breathing was steadier and she seemed unbothered by the wounds decorating her. Was that part of her legend? he wondered. Did Sal the Cacophony simply not feel pain?

  “You a healer?”

  Apparently not.

  He noticed her eyes on his satchel. “Y-yeah,” he said, opening it. “I’ve got salves and… and stuff.” He swallowed hard, looked over her wounds. “What sort of pain are you feeling and when—”

  “Not me.”

  He looked up. She stepped away, pointed down to the earth.

  “Her.”

  There, nestled amid the wreckage, was a woman.

  Pale, slender, dressed in clothes that weren’t Revolutionary, weren’t Imperial, weren’t anything special. Her black hair hung limp around a face peppered with cuts and scratches. Her skirts were torn and her shirt was stained with blood and soot. A pair of shattered spectacles rested on her chest.

  She didn’t look like a Vagrant. Or anything that the stories said Sal the Cacophony was interested in. She was just a woman. A plain, ordinary woman you might find in a plain, ordinary place like Littlebarrow.

  Why, Meret wondered, would a monster like Sal the Cacophony be around her?

  “Help her.”

  A good question. One he’d answer someday, if he had the time. But that would be another day, another place, another person. Right now, he was here, the only one who could help.

  He knelt down beside the pale girl. He performed all the tests he had been taught: moved her as gently as he dared, listened to her breathing, studied her many cuts. He did not look back up to Sal the Cacophony, did not dare give her hope. Whatever monster she was, right now she was like any of the other fretting people who doted over their injured. She did not need hope. She needed information.


  He could give it to her.

  “Her breathing’s difficult,” he muttered. “Probably not surprising, given the fall. But it’s dry. No internal bleeding that I can tell.” He looked down at her leg and winced. “Thighbone is broken. Her left arm, too. And I’d be shocked if that was all.” He dusted the considerable amount of ash that had gathered on his clothes as he rose. “And that’s without however many cuts and wounds she’s got.”

  “Can you help her?”

  When he turned to face Sal the Cacophony, her stare was no longer so distant, nor quite so cold. It was soft. Wet. It didn’t belong on a monster. It didn’t belong in a place like this.

  “Tell me what happened here,” he said, “and maybe.”

  Those eyes hardened. Cold and thin as scalpels in a corpse’s body. She spoke in the voice of someone who was used to speaking once and did not repeat herself without steel to accompany it.

  “You don’t need to know that,” she said, as slow and calm as a sword pulled out of a ten-days-dead body. “Help her. Help yourself.”

  Despite the flames, he froze. His legs turned to jelly. His breath left him and was replaced by something weak and rotten in his lungs. He hadn’t felt that wind, that cold, since the day he had come to the Valley and seen the bodies.

  He hadn’t turned away then, either.

  “N-no,” he said.

  “What?”

  “No.” He forced his voice hard, his spine straight, his eyes on hers. “Whatever happened here, it concerns this town. And if it concerns this town, it concerns me.” He swallowed lead. “I’ll help her. But you have to tell me.”

  She stared at him. Did the stories say she never blinked or had he just made that up?

  She raised a hand. He forced himself not to look away.

  Her hand shot out toward his waist. He felt ice in his belly, terrified that he’d look down and see a blade jutting out of him. His breath left him as she slowly drew her hand back.

  In it, she held the bottle of whiskey he packed.

  “Avonin.” Her eyes widened a little. “Damn, kid. What do you use this for?”

  “Disinfecting wounds,” he replied.

  She looked at him like he had just insulted her mother, then gestured at the unconscious woman with her chin.