The Gallows Black

by Sam Sykes

  Circumstances wholly unwarranted by one Freemaker. No matter how troublesome she might be.

  I wasn’t certain what Liette had done to be sent to the gallows. But if it was enough to warrant a Relic Guard’s presence, then it was something they wanted answered for.

  And it meant I wouldn’t be going through the door. A gun—no matter how big and noisy it was—wasn’t going to scare the soldiers as much as a Relic Guard was.

  “Quiet it is, then,” I sighed.

  The Cacophony burned in indignant response, so hard I could feel it through his sheath. But I preferred a burn to getting my skull punched down into my belly, so I slipped out from behind the cart and into a nearby alley.

  I made my way around, pushing through the garbage left behind the stores and ducking low beneath the windows. No one had left a light on, the citizenry afraid of attracting any attention from the hunt, but I didn’t need anyone noticing me. I crept up beneath the sill of the window of Liette’s workshop. The dim light of a lantern filtered through, the sound of voices drifted out through the thin walls.

  “Books, books, books,” someone, a woman, sighed from inside. “Not even any trashy ones. Who the fuck did we piss off that we got assigned to sifting through someone’s library?”

  “A Freemaker’s not going to leave her work just lying around,” another voice, male, replied. “Remember the Great General’s words. ‘That which corrupts most is buried deepest.’”

  “That’s a good one,” the woman grunted. “My favorite, though, was ‘If you smell shit, you’re probably in it.’”

  “I… don’t recall the Great General saying that.”

  “If he ever got assigned to this chore, he would have.” The woman let out an angry snarl. “What the fuck’s she done that’s got the colonel so upset, anyway?”

  “That knowledge is reserved for the higher-ups. Not for us to know.”

  “So we’re not allowed to know what it is, but if we don’t find it, we’re dead.”

  “Trust in the Revolution. It’ll deliver us from—”

  “Unless it’ll deliver me from listening to you, I’m not interested.”

  The male sighed. “I’ll search upstairs, then.”

  A resigned grunt. The sound of steps ascending stairs. I wasn’t going to get a better chance than this.

  I peered up, saw the back of a blue coat as the soldier rifled around in the darkness. I tried to push the window up—found it bolted shut. Out-fucking-standing. I know a Freemaker wouldn’t want anyone getting into their shop unannounced, but Liette wasn’t making it easy to do this quietly.

  Just as well.

  I wasn’t feeling patient, anyway.

  I backed up as much as the alley would allow me. I slipped my sword into my hand and pulled the scarf up around my face. I took a deep breath, took a running start, and went for the direct route.

  I burst through the window, landing hard on the floor and scrambling to my feet. The soldier looked up and, upon seeing the woman on the floor in front of her, dropped the book in her hand and started trying to pull a blade free from her belt.

  I admit, even as I rushed toward her, I felt bad for her.

  Assigned to a job she didn’t want with a comrade she hated, searching through a library without any trashy books, for a colonel who didn’t appreciate her…

  And now she had a sword in her neck.

  Her mouth hung open, fumbling for words to express her shock. All that came out, though, was a small river of red. The light left her eyes before surprise did, and she slumped to the floor as soon as I pulled my sword free. I whirled toward the stairs, ready to face the other one, who had surely heard the noise.

  But they stood empty.

  I listened for footsteps hurrying above, but heard nothing. I couldn’t help but grin. I guessed it figured that a Freemaker would soundproof her workshop—no need for neighbors to come asking after the explosions, after all. How she did it, I didn’t particularly care.

  Nor did I see what, exactly, she was so worried about me wrecking while I was in here.

  Her entire downstairs looked like a dog lived there. An extremely literate dog, granted. Books were littered, in various stages of read, about a modest downstairs otherwise bereft of furnishings beyond a hearth, a small table and a teapot. Not that I had anything against books—though I already knew there was nothing trashy in here, so I wasn’t about to go looking—but I didn’t see what the fuss was about.

  I had no sooner taken ten steps upstairs than my nose scrunched up under the assault of a noxious reek of ancient paper, old ink, and… what was that? Blood? Shit? What the fuck was she doing in here? I emerged in a dark room and the stink became so overwhelming that I had to lean against the wall.

  And as soon as I did, the light emerged.

  Beneath my hand a sigil sprang to faintly glowing life. I squinted at it—I didn’t know the sigil, but I knew its purpose. I ran my fingers along the wall and a dozen more lit up in response to my touch. I tapped one and it made not a sound.

  And just like that, I knew how she had made her house silent.

  By the dim light I found an alchemical globe. I flicked its switch and it sputtered to life, a flameless glow lighting up and bathing the room in bright light.

  A menagerie of glass and brass greeted me. Beakers, bottles, and alchemical apparatuses were spread across multiple tables, boiling chemicals and substances I didn’t know the names of. Papers, parchments, and discarded tomes lay alongside inkwells and quills. Weapons—swords, daggers, axe-heads—lay neatly arranged on one table, various sigils painted across their surfaces.

  And now I knew why they had gone to so much trouble just to kill one tiny, bookish girl.

  Liette wasn’t just a Freemaker. A Freemaker justified nothing more than a noose or an axe.

  Only for a Spellwright would they bring out the big steel.

  The processes behind the art are known only to them, but a wright can use their talents to simply convince an object that it’s something else. An ironwritten cloak is strong as steel, a flamewritten blade erupts into fire on command, and a rustwritten brand turns a steel door to splinters in a few days.

  A Freemaker, given time and money, can create a truly devastating weapon of war. A Spellwright, with a bottle of ink and a quill, can change the laws of nature.

  The art was rare inside the Imperium and forbidden outside it. The Revolution didn’t care for weapons that could challenge their Relics, either. So yeah, I suspected both sides had good reason to want her dead.

  And I had good reason to have nothing to do with her once this was over, if I was smart.

  But if I was smart, I probably wouldn’t have gotten involved to begin with. And since I was here, I couldn’t leave without getting what I had come for.

  The walls were littered with pinned diagrams and ciphers that hurt my eyes just to look at—the very language of wrights was painful. But wedged between an illustration of various sigils and what I assumed was step-by-step instructions for making a man explode with three letters, I saw it: a framed portrait of a rolling landscape on a cloudy day.

  Perfectly tasteful.

  And yet when I removed the painting, only bare wall greeted me. I ran my hands over it—no hidden compartments, no latches, nothing. I squinted. Was this some kind of wright trick? One of those magic doors where you have to answer a riddle or some birdshit like that? I couldn’t tell by looking at it. It was incredibly difficult to see with the shadow looming over me.

  I blinked.

  Oh, right. There were two.

  “Ten thousand years,” someone growled behind me.

  I whirled around, my hand going for my blade. But the soldier’s hand was faster, and his sword was already out. His forearm caught me by the throat, slamming me against the table, as his sword went high.

  He brought it down in a savage chop, nicking my collarbone as I caught him by the wrist with my sword hand. I could feel the force behind his arm, as surely as I felt the
anger pouring out of his scowl—he had thirty pounds on me and whatever Revolutionary zeal powers these lunatics behind his blow. I couldn’t hope to hold his sword back for long, let alone push back against him.

  I tried to twist away, but he moved with me, smashing me up against a wall beside another table. I felt splinters bite into my back, I felt the rage hot on his breath, and I felt my arm beginning to weaken.

  “You,” he snarled. “I know your name, Vagrant. You masquerade your crimes as righteous vengeance. You are but one more devourer of the weak, same as the rest of your crooked kin.” He slammed my head against the wall. My vision darkened. “The Revolution will protect this city, and all others, from you.”

  That was a fairly hefty charge against me. I’d have been happy to dispute it, but it was hard to do that with his arm pressing on my windpipe.

  My arm weakened, his blade pressing against my shoulder, drawing blood. My breath was trapped beneath his arm, vision going dark. With a shaking hand, I groped around the table, searching for a beaker, a vial, anything to smash against his head.

  Numb fingers wrapped around a hilt. Without thinking, I grabbed it. And I plunged the blade into his side.

  He roared in pain, grip loosening just enough for me to slip out. I scrambled away from him, gasping for air as I fumbled for my sword. When I whirled around, he was wincing, pulling a dagger out of his side.

  “You fight with the same lack of honor that you live,” he snarled. He held the dagger up. “No crude steel can diminish the fire of the Revolution, nor silence the glorious voice of—”

  A sharp whistling sound filled the air. The blade in his hand began smoking. He blinked, staring at it for a moment as the sigils emblazoned across it began to glow dimly, then brightly, then red hot.

  We both realized what was happening around the same time. I was just quicker.

  I leapt beneath a table as he let out a curse and tried to drop the blade.

  There was the sound of a small explosion. The table and walls shuddered as fragments of steel punched into the wood. A shard of metal impaled itself in the floor just beside me, barely an inch away from my side. I heard an agonized groan, the splatter of something hitting the floor.

  When I crawled out from beneath the table, the fire was gone from the soldier’s eyes. And the blood was gone from his belly.

  He clutched his stomach, or rather the four holes in his stomach where metal shards had punched through. He looked at me almost pleadingly, all the fervor and fire bleeding out of his eyes to pool on the floor with the rest of him. He mouthed a soundless cry for help from the criminal he had just tried to kill before he collapsed to the floor.

  I’ve known a lot of people of faith—faith in gods, faith in causes, faith in arms.

  But when you take your seat at the black table, faith’s just one more thing you leave behind along with a cold body.

  And, in this guy’s case, a satchel.

  It wasn’t a military-issued one, draped around his shoulder. And, as I carefully lifted it from his corpse and wiped his blood from its strap, I could see why. Inside was a carefully wrapped book, along with a few flasks and a small pouch of coins.

  This couldn’t have been what Liette wanted, could it?

  I unwrapped the book and thumbed through it. I didn’t recognize the writing, but the sigils were a wright’s handiwork. It had to be hers.

  My eyes caught something as I flipped through the pages and came to rest on a pages-long diagram of a disturbingly detailed corpse, its flesh inscribed with various sigils. My blood ran cold.

  She wasn’t just a Freemaker, nor just a Spellwright. Liette, that sweet little maniac that everyone wanted to kill, knew how to corpsewright.

  Spellwrighting isn’t just limited to making swords sharper or cloaks harder. Dead flesh, too, can be convinced that it’s still alive, to labor without toil, to fight without fear.

  The Imperials had never thought it much of a problem. The Revolution, however, did. Usually because it was their flesh that wound up being animated after their death.

  As for me?

  My hand drifted unconsciously to a scar upon my belly, traced it down to my hip.

  I had issues with people doing things to bodies that weren’t theirs.

  I’m sure she had a good reason. I’m sure she thought she did, anyway. And I’m sure that if I’d decided to listen, she could be awfully persuasive. But I wasn’t going to listen. To her explanation or anything else.

  I picked up the flasks, pocketed them in my own pouch. If this was what she needed to make something explode, I’d figure it out on my own. She could have the journal and the money, and once I had given them over, she could fuck off.

  The soldier wasn’t wrong. I was a Vagrant. I was a criminal. I had ruined lives.

  But I had limits.

  I shouldered the satchel, sheathed my sword and walked out, wearier and bloodier than I had walked in, to the hall of the workshop. I had taken longer than I wanted—longer than I would have had I just broken out the Cacophony and started shooting, anyway—but I comforted myself with the knowledge that at least no one would have heard the scuffle. I could get out before the Revolution noticed two dead comrades.

  But comfort in the Scar tends to be a scarce and short-lived thing.

  “Vagrant dog.”

  Particularly for someone like me.

  “Retribution has come.”

  Particularly when the floor starts cracking.

  The entire house shook with the force of a great blow. A tremendous gash spiderwebbed across the floorboards. I stepped back, reaching for my blade. Another blow struck. The gash grew wider. I drew my blade.

  Five tremendous fingers burst through the floor. They flexed, the sound of stone muttering accompanying the wail of wood breaking as those fingers sank into the floor, clenched.

  And pulled.

  My cry was lost in the groan of earth and the crack of timber as I plummeted through the floor. I landed on my ass in a cloud of dust and fluttering papers, books and inkwells and clouds of alchemic smoke falling like snow. And at the center of it all loomed a colossal lump of stone pretending to be a soldier.

  Resolute stared down at me without hatred or scorn, nor with any emotion on his craggy face. It was as though I were just some kind of gnat that had gotten in his way.

  And stolen the objects he was looking for.

  And killed his comrades.

  So I wasn’t really surprised that he tried to kill me, emotionless or not.

  His brought both fists up and sent them smashing down upon me, stone groaning as they did. I narrowly managed to scramble away, barely staggering to my feet before the shock wave sent me sprawling back down. I tried crawling away, my heart hammering in my chest, my breath rasping in my lungs. And above every ache and pain and fear coursing through my body, I could feel his stride, the floor shaking under every step he took toward me.

  Not good.

  Not fucking good.

  My sword hadn’t even cut it against a really angry regular soldier. Against a Relic Guard, I was helpless. If I ran, he’d catch me. If I fought, he’d kill me. I had only one option.

  And he was burning angrily on my hip.

  I scrambled onto my ass, pulling the Cacophony free as I did. His seething giddiness seared my hand as I drew him on Resolute, a foe finally worthy of facing him. He forgave me, I could feel, for all the times I’d denied him. I didn’t give a shit.

  I pulled the trigger.

  And Discordance shrieked out.

  The shell hit him with a burst of sound, an angry wail that fanned out in an explosion of noise. Books were shredded, windows were shattered, stray timbers were torn from their floors and ceilings—the sound struck so swiftly that the blast even hurled me away, sending me rolling across the floor to slam against the wall, just one more piece of debris in the blast.

  The wind was knocked out of me. Blood wept down my neck. I scrambled to find my breath and my senses as I slowly staggered
to my feet. The Cacophony usually shaped the magic better than that. He must have been excited. But it was fine. I could take it, so long as the shell had taken care of Resolute.

  And it had.

  Sort of.

  When I got to my feet, Resolute no longer stared at me with detached impassiveness. Now, standing with his gauntlets crossed protectively in front of him and his uniform shredded by the blast, he looked slightly annoyed with me.

  I watched him stand, unfazed, and whispered a word.

  “Fuck.”

  Then I screamed it. But you wouldn’t have been able to hear it over the sound of his thunderous stride as he came charging toward me.

  “TEN THOUSAND YEARS!”

  His bellow was as loud as the sound of his fist crashing through the wall, wood and glass shattering and raining down on me as I ducked.

  And I looked up just in time to see his other hand crashing into my chest.

  All five fingers hit me in a savage backhand, sending me flying across the room. I could feel the grip of gravity, the ground beneath leaving me as my body arced into the air and then rising up to meet me as I plummeted. And in that peculiar span of time that stretched into eternity, I had the presence of mind to realize I was dead.

  I could feel nothing of my body. Not the blood in my veins or the breath in my lungs. And when I struck the floor, I expected to feel nothing but cold seeping through my body as every light inside me went dark.

  I hadn’t expected it to end like this.

  I hadn’t expected to go before I could finish my list.

  And I hadn’t expected it to hurt so much when I landed.

  But when I skidded across the shards of glass and wood and felt blood spread across my body in a dozen cuts, it hurt. My blood seeped out warm. My body screamed out in pain. But it still screamed.

  I was alive.

  I didn’t know how. I didn’t know why. Not until I saw a faint glow emanating from my scarf. I held it out before me, watching the writing across it glow a bright purple and then fizzle out.

  Fuck me, I thought. It’s luckwritten.