by Sam Sykes
At that, the crowd rose to an angry roar again. Curses were thrown, stones followed. She made not a move to dodge them, this Freemaker. She barely seemed to notice them, nor the hands that were throwing them. Even as the guards pushed her to her knees and the headsman cleaned his axe of gore, she seemed not at all concerned, her eyes fixed on a distant horizon that I couldn’t begin to see.
And it struck me as odd that I should want so badly to know what she was looking at.
For the first time since I had arrived, one of my eyes was off Zanze. So it was with some surprise that, when I finally thought to look back at him, his eyes were locked on me.
Fuck.
He had picked me out in the crowd somehow. His eyes were wide with recognition, his lips already struggling to form an adequate curse. He hadn’t been expecting to see me again. Let alone at his own execution.
Had this come just a little later, I’d have enjoyed this, that moment where the reality of just how fucked he was came crashing down upon him. After all, that’s why I wanted to take this particular honor from the headsman. I wasn’t about to let someone else kill him—it’s the principle of the thing.
But this was too soon. He was already shuffling backward, restrained by his guards, trying to find a way out. And he would, the minute they took their eyes off him. I knew what he could do. I knew what powers he held.
It was the whole reason I was here to kill him.
I started off toward the gallows.
“Now where are you going?”
I was only vaguely aware of Athropoop or whatever his name had been calling at me. Another voice was in my ears. I felt the gun burning in my hand, his hilt seething with delight at the carnage we were about to inflict. I tried to ignore his delight, keep my eyes on that twitching, feckless bastard in the back.
We were here for a reason, after all.
“I’m not sure what backwater you came from, madam.”
A hand shot out, slid beneath my cloak, and grabbed my arm.
“But no one turns their back on a mage of the Imperium and—”
His words fell as soon as he pulled my arm out.
Across lean muscle, twisting tattoos of wings and thunderclouds and serpents ran up my wrist, the work occasionally marred by scars across my arm. He might have recognized them.
But I think it was probably the gun that tipped him off to who I was.
“You…” He stared at the gun in my hand, the gun staring back with its grinning dragon barrel. “That’s… that’s the Cacophony.” He whispered its name, it burned in my hand. He looked back up to me. “Then you’re—”
“Don’t.”
I pulled away, perhaps hoping he’d seen sense and would let it lie. But you don’t tend to trust mages to be reasonable. He seized my hood, pulled it from my face. Locks of white hair fell free, doing nothing to hide the long scars. And in the light of day, he saw me.
He knew me.
And he screamed.
“VAGRANT!” he howled, turning toward the balcony. “THERE’S A VAGRANT HERE! IT’S SAL THE CACOPHONY! SHE’S—”
His last words came dribbling out of his mouth on a stream of red. Shaking fingers went to his throat, felt the tip of the blade jutting out beneath his jaw. He twitched as the sword came free and staggered around, red weeping out between his fingers. He stared at the blade in my hand, heavy with his life dripping off the blade, before looking up at me. I saw the empty, unthinking horror in his eyes.
And in every eye of every stare of every person in the square as they looked upon me, blade in one hand, gun in the other.
In the silence that followed, I heard everything. A drop of blood fell from the headsman’s axe, hanging just above the Freemaker’s head, to spatter upon her neck. A solitary click of a gunpike being loaded behind me. A distant note of a spell called to a mage’s lips and energy crackling.
The entire world held its breath as the mage who couldn’t take a hint tried to say something, saw blood spatter out from his mouth onto the street, and then slumped over, facedown in a puddle of his own life.
And then, with one great gasp, it all seemed to scream.
“KILL THE VAGRANT!”
TWO
Could have told him to fuck off.
I pushed my way through a crowd of screaming, fleeing, frothing madness.
Could have punched him in the face.
I heard the whirr of autobows, ducked as a flurry of bolts shrieked overhead.
Could have just grabbed someone else and started kissing them. He would have gotten the idea.
A scream was hurled at me, a blade followed. My sword shot up, caught it at the guard. My boot thrust out, caught a guard in the belly. My sword punched through his collarbone as he doubled over, and he fell, screaming and clutching his neck, to the ground as his fellows came rushing toward me.
But you wanted to be nice.
In hindsight, it probably would have been wiser to simply find a more quiet way to kill off Zanze—a long-range crossbow, a rooftop, poison his gruel, I don’t know.
But then he’d have died without knowing, without uttering my name before he drew his last breath, without looking into my eyes and knowing what black hell awaited him.
If you must choose between wisdom and drama, choose drama—all the legends about wise people are boring, the old saying went. I had always thought it sound advice.
“RUN! IT’S THE CACOPHONY!”
Until now, anyway.
They tore this way and that, a screaming storm of sweaty flesh and gaping mouths colliding with each other, crawling over each other, pushing each other aside in a desperate bid to escape. The people of Last Word were everywhere.
“What’s she doing here?”
And their screams filled the air.
“Get the women and children out of here!”
“Why only them? What about me?”
“For fuck’s sake, just run before she unsheathes it!”
I hate to admit it, but there is a certain sense of gratification that comes from so many people running in terror at your name. And the shrieking mob provided enough cover that the Revolution and the Imperium alike were unable to attack me right away. But as I fought my way closer to the gallows, I could hear a voice cut through the panic like a blade.
“Get the prisoners out of here!” Linnish cried out. “Get them out!”
I could see the chains flashing, guards seizing Zanze by his arms and starting to haul him away. And despite the chains on his wrists, a faint smile on his face was aimed just at me, as if to say:
I win.
And I threw back my cloak. And I lowered my blade. And I raised my gun as if to say:
The fuck you do.
He drank in the light of the dying day, his brass barrel ablaze. His eyes seemed to glow a little brighter, the leering grin of the dragon’s maw grew a little wider. And, though it sounds mad to say, I thought I could almost hear him giggle.
“Is that…”
Someone had the presence of mind to speak before his mind, his courage, and what was left of his sense fled him. The crowd’s screams descended into wordless, terrified shrieking. Their mad rush turned into a depraved scramble, they trampled each other underfoot in a desperate bid to get away from me. If they were scared of me, they were outright terrified of my gun.
The Cacophony had that effect on people.
And this time, it worked to my benefit. In their mad bid to escape the woman with the big fuck-off gun, they tore a clear line between me and the gallows. For the briefest of moments, I saw Zanze’s face as he saw me, saw the Cacophony in my hands, and realized what I was about to do and gave me a look that…
Well, it wasn’t better than sex. But it was close.
I squeezed the trigger.
The Cacophony fired.
And then things got bad.
The recoil shuddered down my arm as the shell shrieked out from the barrel. It sped toward the gallows, a bright flash of light and a gasp of gunfire.
In a great eruption of sound and anger, the wail of a thousand trumpets blaring all at once burst into a wall of sheer noise. The gallows were torn apart in the explosion, sending shards of wood and rope and bloodstained nails flying through the air. Bodies of guards and corpses flew, limp, through the sky to smash against buildings and twist around lampposts. The cobblestones were torn apart and a massive cloud of dust arose. And when it cleared, all that remained of the gallows was a stark crater.
Discordance. Not the most subtle of my tricks, but it tends to get the job done.
Or at least I thought it did. I squinted, searching through the dust and carnage for any sign of Zanze. I couldn’t see him—his corpse or otherwise—in the groaning wreckage of the gallows. Had he changed? Had he used his powers to shift into a bird or something and simply flown away? Or had I missed him and—
“Vagrant scum!”
Right. Ponder later.
Fight now.
I heard the chorus of metallic clicks and of boots striking the stone. I glanced up and saw the Revolutionaries, arranged in twin rows of standing and kneeling soldiers, their gunpikes leveled at me, barrels glistening. Beside them Colonel Tatha stood, saber drawn and pointed at me.
“By the order of the Great General, Immutable Scion of the Glorious Revolution,” he shouted in that shrill voice, “I demand your surrender or subject you to the righteous barrage of the Revolution’s justice!”
I raised a hand, lowered my gun. “Colonel, you seem like a sensible man. There’s no need to be hasty now. If we just—”
“FIRE!”
He wasn’t and there was.
Before the gunpikes clicked I went running for cover, away from what civilians still fled, and leapt behind the largest chunk of gallows I could, slamming my back against it. Muzzles flashed. Bullets went screaming past me to punch through wood and stone and unlucky bastards alike.
“Now why the fuck would you demand a surrender and then go and fire before a lady can give an answer?” I muttered beneath the crack of gunfire.
They didn’t hear me, of course. I wasn’t about to poke my head out and say it louder, either. I’d seen gunpike bullets tear a man in armor to pieces. Even now, my makeshift barricade shuddered with each shrieking strike, the bullets tearing off huge chunks of wood.
It wouldn’t last another volley unless I got a chance.
“Reload, damn you! Reload!”
And there it was.
Your average Revolutionary soldier was, from birth until death, hewed, hammered, and polished into a finely oiled, unquestioning machine of a human that could reload one severium bullet into a gunpike in about thirty seconds. That’s not a lot of time for a counterattack.
Fortunately, I only needed about three.
In one, I sprang up behind my barricade, leveled the Cacophony at them. In the second, Tatha’s eyes went wide as they met the grinning dragon’s muzzle, his mouth beginning to form the shape of a command. Had he had a fourth second, he might have made it.
But by the third, I had already pulled the trigger.
And Hellfire came out.
The shell sped from the Cacophony’s maw and struck the pavement before the Revolutionary squadron. The air erupted with a roar as a wall of fire burst from the stone and reached out with a hundred angry red hands.
“Back! Fall back!”
Tatha’s orders were swallowed by the cackle of flame, as were the screams of the Revolutionaries who were swept into fiery teeth that gnawed through cloth, bit through flesh, drank boiling blood, and devoured screams. Their bodies blackened beneath the sheets of flame, ashen memories forgotten by their comrades as they fled.
I leapt over the splintered remains of my barricade, took off at a run for the nearest escape. What stupid civilians remained had been given wit by the Cacophony’s display and were disappearing rapidly into the various alleys. I could follow their lead, disappear into the city, find Zanze—his corpse or his soon-to-be corpse—later, when there was less of a spectacle.
It seemed like a fine enough plan.
Right up until I heard the song, anyway.
A discordant note of a verse with no story in a language that had no words, I heard the sound ringing. I heard the cry of the Lady Merchant, the Giver of Gifts, the Mistress of Barters, She Who Holds the Magic in my ears, my skin, in my very bones.
That’s how I knew there was magic being cast.
“That’s far enough, Vagrant.”
Well, that and the mage flying overhead. That was also a pretty big hint.
I hate mages.
The shadow of Olithria swept over me. I screeched to a halt as she came crashing down upon a dead Revolutionary’s blackened carcass, splintering it to fragments of ash. From the balcony she had looked intimidating. Standing in front of me, looking down through her featureless bronze mask from a height a whole head taller than mine, she looked positively terrifying.
“So it is you.” She canted her head, studying me. “I had thought these peasants to simply be ranting, yet…”
I felt her gaze run across my body, taking me in through those black sockets of her mask, over the tattoos running down my arms, across the scars decorating my body, before settling upon the gun hanging from my hand.
“Sal the Cacophony dares to show her face in an Imperial presence,” she uttered, insultingly unimpressed. “I had heard you were so brash. I’ve heard the stories.”
“Oh yeah?” I grinned, if only to keep the panic off my face—I could practically smell the magic bristling across her body. “Which ones?”
The Cacophony seethed in my hand, begging to be unleashed. I kept him at my side—they don’t make just any apprentice into an Imperial Judge. No sense in firing off a shell if she could fling it back at me with the power of her mind or teleport and switch places with me or whatever other magical shit she could pull.
I hate mages.
She sensed my hesitation, took a step forward.
“They say you brought down a rampaging Catucar Broodmother with a single shot.”
True. Though the single shot was from a very big cannon.
“They say you single-handedly fought off an army of Revolutionary soldiers to protect one deserter.”
Lie. It was a small gang of bandits attacking a small village to kill a guy who owed them money. But the guy also happened to owe me money, so…
“They say you wiped out three generations of a man’s lineage because he dared to touch you.”
Half-true. It was two generations, a woman instead of a man, and she happened to be trying to touch me with a four-foot-long blade that was also on fire at the time. But the embellishment keeps people from bothering me while I’m drinking, so I don’t dispute it.
“If even half of them are true, I confess to being mildly impressed,” Olithria said. “Or at least as impressed as I can be when one stray dog manages not to roll in its own filth.”
She took another step forward. The Lady Merchant’s song was distant in my ears. Behind her mask I could see a violet light bursting to life. She was calling up a spell, reaching for her blade.
“Tell me something.”
She paused at my words, held her blade where it was once she saw I wasn’t retreating.
“Did they ever tell you the story about what happens to people that get in my way?” I asked.
“They did not,” she replied. “How does that one end?”
“I haven’t decided yet.” I scratched the edge of one of my scars with the tip of my blade. “You could put that blade away, step aside, and deal with your own shit, and it’ll end there. Not as dramatic as a good opera, I admit, but much less bloody.”
I let the threat hang in the air. She stood still, the sound of the Lady’s song ebbing away. Emboldened, I took a step forward.
“Or,” I said, “you could draw that steel and things can really get—”
“Yes, let’s do that one.”
FUCK.
Her blade whipped out of he
r sheath like a striking serpent, steel fang aimed for my midsection. I leapt back, batted the blade aside with my own, and brought mine up as she turned the momentum into another swing. Her sword crashed against mine, my knees threatened to give out under the weight of her blow. I broke the lock and sprang away, hoping that she hadn’t noticed how badly I landed.
Turns out it’s actually not as hard as you’d think to see out of those masks.
She pressed her advantage, leaping toward me, swinging wildly. She was taller, her arms were longer, she could afford to be sloppy. Any blow that happened to connect would go halfway through me. It was all I could do to keep backpedaling, keep parrying, keep her at a distance until I could find an opening or she just got sick of playing around.
I’ll let you guess what happened.
She roared and leapt toward me, bringing her blade crashing down. I dropped the Cacophony, held my sword in both hands just to keep her at bay. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I had a strong belief that asshole was smiling under that mask.
“You were trained in Imperial fencing,” she observed. “Whom did you study under?”
“Master… Oroscus,” I grunted, my arms quivering under the strain.
“I trained with Mistress Rendalica,” she said. “I believe she slew Oroscus?”
“Lucky… you.”
“Tell me, did he teach you his famous Dread Serpent Maneuver?” She sounded almost bored. “That would come in handy.”
“No… just the… Screaming Weasel.”
“I am unfamiliar with—”
My knee shot up, caught her in the groin. While it was not as effective as it is with some foes, generally you can’t go wrong by just aiming as hard as you can between someone’s legs. She let out a cry, half in alarm and half in pain, and staggered away long enough for me to reach down and seize the Cacophony.
I brought the hilt of the gun up and smashed it against her mask. Her face snapped back with the blow, a metallic clang ringing out as she struck the stones and rolled away. I seized the advantage, rushing toward her, blade in hand, ready to finish it.
Then I heard the song.
And she brought her fist down upon the street.
And did I mention I hate mages?
Great pillars of stone erupted from the ground, punching up through the pavement beneath me. Jagged earthen spikes shot out, narrowly grazing me, drawing a line of blood from my side as I scrambled away from her, struggling to escape. The song grew louder in my ears, the earth more unstable under my feet as more spikes jutted up.
