The Gallows Black

by Sam Sykes

  I expected her to cry out, to spit curses, to shut her eyes and look away and pretend I was a bad dream. And I was intending to be nothing more than that, a nightmare that would be gone when she opened her eyes.

  Only… she didn’t close them.

  She didn’t look away.

  Her eyes were fixed on me—not my scars, not my fists, not the anger trembling across either of them. Her hand was rising slowly, steadily. Her fingers hesitated, an inch away from my cheek, and looked at me to tell her not to.

  And I didn’t.

  She lay her fingers upon the scars on my cheek. She traced them from my jaw to the bridge of my nose. Fingers became a palm, cradling my cheek. The red-hot pain running through my face went dim at her touch and it felt like I’d just taken the first clean breath I had in a long time.

  I didn’t know why. Not really. It wasn’t like her touch was magical and it wasn’t like I was less angry. Maybe it was just the shock of being seen like this. Or maybe it just felt nice to be touched again by someone who didn’t want to kill me.

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice came out as a whisper. “I didn’t mean to go through your things, but I just… I had to know.”

  “Know what?”

  I hated that my voice came out as soft as hers, that it got softer as she continued to explore my face with her hands. I hated that I felt this way again. But I still didn’t turn away.

  “You,” she said. “I had to know more about you. Anything I could. I had to know what you were doing here, where you came from, why you…” She hesitated, bit her lip. “I don’t understand why you’re still here.”

  I caught her hand in mine, gentler than I was feeling, gentler than she deserved. I lowered it, turned away from her and back toward my clothes.

  “Neither do I,” I grunted. “I don’t understand why there’s a dead man in your house, either.”

  I was going to say “and I don’t care,” but I could feel her behind me—her eyes on my back, her mouth struggling to form an explanation. And I could feel her head bow low and her eyes shut tight.

  And I couldn’t deny that I was curious about why she’d done it.

  “I wanted to do something good.”

  That made me pause. I didn’t quite see how turning a dead man into a meat puppet could be good, but then, maybe that was why I wasn’t in the business of corpsewrighting.

  “This city has been fighting between the Revolution and Imperium for years now. I came here to scavenge weapons and Dust from the battlefields. My research thrived. The Freemakers were proud. I got careless. I got found.”

  “By who?” I didn’t look behind me as I pulled my vest around me.

  “The Judge. Olithria.” My body ached at the very mention of the name. “She came to my workshop and I thought I was dead, then and there. But instead, she brought me that dead man and asked me to… to…”

  The man’s words echoed in my head, those breathless words coming from cold lips. And one word stuck itself in my skull.

  Mother.

  “Her son,” I whispered. “She wanted you to bring her son back.”

  “He was a soldier who died in a battle two weeks ago. Wrighting a corpse is forbidden in the Imperium, so she came to me and asked me if I could.”

  “And you could?”

  “I… didn’t know. But I had to try.” She came up behind me. “Think of it. A world where we could reverse death, where no one had to go with regrets, where no one could ever do damage that we couldn’t fix. Wasn’t that worth trying for?”

  My hand drifted down my body, to the scar that carved itself across my chest, from my collarbone to my belly. And I couldn’t say that this world she imagined, this world without pain, wasn’t appealing.

  But that was a different world. This was the Scar. And it was littered with people like her—murderers, blasphemers, villains, and thieves who all raised their hands and swore that they simply had to do it, no matter who got hurt.

  On occasion I was one of them.

  “But it… it didn’t work,” she continued. “It really didn’t work. Tatha, the Revolution, found out. They wanted the corpse to ransom, to display as a trophy, to… do something. They offered money, weapons, but I thought I was so close to a breakthrough that…” She sighed, her words falling. “Eventually they lost patience. They captured me, my assistants, and sentenced us all to the axe.”

  That explained why the Revolution and Imperium had held off hostilities for a day. Corpsewrighting was forbidden in the Imperium and all magic was vile in the eyes of the Revolution—neither could accuse the other of indulging in the art without revealing its own involvement. So they had made a deal with the city.

  Execute the Freemaker and the war stays outside your walls.

  It probably would have gone swimmingly, too, if I hadn’t showed up and put my foot in a steaming pile of collusion.

  “Tell me something, then.” I pulled my trousers on, my boots followed. “It wasn’t a tool you sent me into your workshop to find, was it? Those flasks in the satchel…”

  She hesitated. “Perfume.”

  “Perfume?”

  She shrugged. “I like the scent of flowers.”

  “Then it was the book. You wanted your research. So you could continue this experiment.”

  “Oh, no. I have, like, four other copies of that. I’m smart enough to potentially resurrect the dead. Of course I back up my work.”

  “Then what? There was nothing else in that satchel but some money and—”

  I turned around, my face screwed up in confusion. She stood with her back to the wall, hands behind her, staring at the floor, positively sheepish that, for all this trouble and all this dark research, it had all come down to the same fucking problem everyone else had.

  Money.

  “Huh?” I squinted at her.

  “It’s not what you think,” she said. “The money isn’t for me. It’s for Sennica.”

  “Who?”

  “Fourth law.”

  “Okay, I’m not sure what you think I mean when I keep making confused noises, but it’s not ‘Please say another stupid thing that makes no sense.’”

  She sighed, adjusting her glasses. “All articles, subarticles, clauses and amendments factored in, the Laws of the Freemakers that every one of us in good standing agreed to come to approximately two hundred sixty-six. But none are more important than the first six, of which the fourth is thus: All knowledge has a price. All prices must be paid,” she said, authoritative.

  “One man who helped me is dead because of me. The other is in prison. My research isn’t objective so long as it is owed. I cannot leave until my debts to them are settled.”

  I knew about as much about Freemakers as anyone else—enough to have heard of the maddening labyrinth of words they called laws. And like anyone else, I thought them just a bunch of gibberish to wipe their hands clean in their pursuit of what they wanted—like any laws. This law, the fourth one, was the first I had heard explained.

  And it did a lot for explaining why Freemakers were so… the way they were.

  Specifically this one Freemaker.

  “That’s why you helped me,” I muttered, pulling my belt on. “Courteous of you.”

  “What? No!” I hadn’t heard her genuinely offended before—it sounded weird in her mouth. “I mean… yes? I mean, I don’t know. You saved me, so I saved you, but that only explains the what, it doesn’t explain the why.”

  “Why what?”

  “Why…” She hesitated, struggled for the words. “Why you saved me.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Not the first time. But the second time, with the tower, you… you protected me. After all that you knew about me. Why?”

  “I’m tougher than you. I could take the hit.”

  “From a cannon? No. No one can take that kind of hit and you had to know that. Why?”

  “You still had something I needed.”

  “But you were ready to leave once you found ou
t what I’d done and—”

  “Fuck, I don’t know,” I snapped over my shoulder. “Why’s it so hard to believe that I just… did it?”

  “Because people don’t do that,” she replied, tersely. “They come to you with a problem. They give you something so you can fix it. Then you do, then they…” Her face screwed up, as though the very line of thought was odious. “They don’t just do anything. Not without a cost. Not without a price.”

  Something touched my back. No, not my back.

  My scar.

  Her fingers found it under my vest, the one that matched the one on my chest, and trailed down its jagged length from my neck to my spine. My body froze under her touch, my mind kept going. I hadn’t heard her come up behind me. How could she get so close without me noticing? Why was she touching me like that?

  Why wasn’t I stopping her?

  “What did you ask for,” she whispered, “that this was the price?”

  My chest hurt. Not my body, not the old wounds I’d taken or the new ones I’d just picked up tonight. Something deeper. Something that felt her fingers sliding down my back and reached out from inside me to feel them back.

  There was a time when I wanted nothing more than to let it out of me.

  That was before the scar. Before the gun. Before the list. And I suppose…

  It felt nice to remember a time before I had any of those. I suppose I wasn’t ready to let that go. I suppose that’s why I let her hands linger there. I suppose that’s why I reached back.

  I found her hand in mine. Her fingers were callused from her work. Not as soft as I’d thought they might feel in mine, but still… gentle. Her palm wasn’t as soft as I’d thought it might be as it slid across my belly, but it was still warm. Her kiss was clumsy when her lips found my shoulder, she hadn’t done this in a long time.

  But neither had I.

  I turned. I found her wrists in my hands, couldn’t remember how that had happened. I couldn’t remember what I had been thinking when I looked into her eyes and saw her looking back at me. Or when my eyes settled on her lips. Or when I pulled her into me and found her tongue pushing past my lips.

  I found the wall against my back—she was stronger than she looked, but I didn’t notice that, either. I could only feel her breath on my face and her hands around my back and her fingers on my scar and…

  A pair of burning eyes on me.

  I cracked one eye open. Buried in the leather of his sheath, I could feel the Cacophony staring at me. I could feel his seething displeasure. He wanted to be fighting, to be shooting, to be killing.

  And we would, I knew.

  Dawn was already beginning to peek in through the windows. Later, I would strap him back to my belt and we’d both walk out and do what we had to do. Later, I would remember these scars and that list and the names of the people on it that I still had to kill. Later belonged to the gun, to the killing, to the scars and the fires and the people who would one day curse my name.

  But this.

  This moment. This breath. This ache in my chest.

  Her.

  This belonged to me.

  SEVEN

  It didn’t look like a good morning for a killing.

  But then, they never do.

  Not at first, anyway.

  I stepped out onto the street and into last night’s ruin. Dawn crept cold over the rooftops, a curtain rising on the final scene of a long and bloody opera. The bodies lay still in the street—the soldiers who’d died in the explosion, Resolute’s hulking corpse stiffened into a boulder in his rigor, Tatha’s corpse absent, just another trail of ashes and odor of smoke lost on the breeze. The tower stood at its center, steam seeping from its gaping stone wound like blood.

  And I started walking.

  The houses were shuttered, their windows shattered and their doors barred. No one looked up when I walked past, nor did anyone make a noise as I strode down the street. Whether anyone actually was in the houses or not was irrelevant. After I had done what I’d done, these weren’t anyone’s homes. Not anymore.

  I caught the sound of the distant wail, the song of magic. I glanced up. Hovering in the sky overhead, the mages hung as butterflies with violet wings, their robes fluttering as they stared down at me. I stared up at them, eased my cloak back and placed a hand on the black hilt at my side, saying nothing. They quietly turned around, floated away, disappeared behind a house.

  And I kept walking.

  The town square loomed large before me. The earth was ragged from magical scars. The houses were scorched by severium shells from gunpikes. Blood stained the stones, smeared where people had tried to crawl away or had been dragged by loved ones, still where they hadn’t been that lucky. The gallows lay in pieces around the square, shattered timbers and chains peppering the street like toys left behind by children called to dinner.

  There was one more corpse there, though. And he was at my feet.

  Linnish’s body lay on the square, empty of life and light. His face wore neither fear nor anger in its rictus mask. Only surprise, astonishment at having tried his best to prevent a war and done everything he could to save his people and still died. His mouth was open, maybe about to ask how he could have done everything right and still ended up like this.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him.

  Not like he could have heard me, anyway.

  No one but him greeted me as I walked into the middle of the square. The carnage was at stark odds with the silence that fell over me. I had been expecting to be met with flame and frost as spells were hurled. Or maybe with the rattle of gunpikes and the thunder of cannons. Or someone who stayed behind to curse my name, to scream what evil I’d done, to pick up a sword and try to take revenge for what I’d done to their town.

  Or maybe I was just hoping for that. For anything to keep my mind off the girl I had left in bed when I crept out this morning.

  It’d have been easier if she were as vicious as they said Freemakers were, or as evil as corpsewrights should be. But she had to go and be good. She had to go and be caring. She had to go and… look at me like that.

  In my head, the logic behind leaving had made sense. I couldn’t ask her to be there when I killed the man she was trying to save. I couldn’t ask her to understand why I had to do it. So I’d kill him, then kill everyone else who was trying to kill her. Fourth law. Debts repaid.

  It had seemed fair at the time.

  So. A thought, unbidden, crept into my head. If that all sounds reasonable, how come you didn’t stick around to tell it to her?

  Because I’d thought of how she’d look at me after I told her that. And I’d thought of how she had looked at me last night when I took her glasses off and she smiled.

  I knew which I wanted to be my last memory of her.

  “I do not recall requesting your presence here.”

  My eyes were drawn skyward, to the woman of metal and cloth hovering in the air. Olithria, eyes burning behind her bronze mask, descended from the heavens like she had been born there, alighting upon the earth with a delicacy that didn’t befit this dirty, bloodied place. In one hand she carried her sword. In the other her quarry.

  Zanze—or Talmin, or whatever else he was calling himself these days—hung like a marionette of flesh and iron, suspended limp in chains that she held effortlessly and tossed contemptuously upon the earth. She either didn’t know who he was or didn’t care.

  “But then,” she said in her metallic voice, “you do have a way of showing up where you aren’t wanted, don’t you…” She regarded me down the bridge of a brass nose. “Sal the Cacophony.”

  I glanced up at her, snorted, spat on the ground.

  “If you’re going to take the time to learn my name, you could at least look a little intimidated when you say it.” I squinted at her masked face. “Or… are you? It’s hard to tell, with the…” I gestured around my face.

  “If you could gaze upon me at this moment, you would see nothing but contempt for an oath
-breaking Vagrant,” she replied. “Though, I confess, I might spare a moment’s confusion for your sorry tale. I received a communiqué late last night, once we informed the Imperium of your… abrupt appearance in yesterday’s events.”

  I nodded. That was fast to communicate with an empire an ocean away. But a lot of things were fast when said empire was positively stinking with magic shit.

  “I was informed of your name,” she said. “I was informed of your past. I know what you did when you served the Empress.”

  “Who told you?”

  “I am not at liberty to speak their name.”

  I sniffed. “And?”

  “And I don’t understand.” She stared at me, canted her head to the side. “You had everything: rank, prestige, name, power. To see you go Vagrant is not so surprising—the oaths of Imperium we swore are too rigorous for some, after all—but even then, a woman of your station.” Her stare lingered, too long. “To think that I would ever see you, the great Red—”

  “No,” I interrupted her.

  She recoiled, as though struck. Which was good, because I was looking at her like I wanted to punch her.

  “That’s not my name,” I said. “After today, whatever you tell the Imperium or your servants or whatever asshole you force to listen, when they ask you who did this?” I held my hands out wide, gesturing to the carnage. “You tell them it was Sal the Cacophony.”

  “You’d forsake your name, your station, your power. You’d challenge the very Imperium you swore an oath to, whose bosom supported you.” She glanced down at Zanze, kneeling broken and chained. “All to kill this man?”

  She’d heard of the list. I wasn’t surprised. “I would.”

  “You’d fight me?”

  “Readily.”

  “You’d kill me, too.” Her gaze drifted away. “Your own.”

  For a moment I thought there was something going on under that mask, some conflict of the mind and soul that would render her less willing to fight. For a moment I thought I’d gotten lucky.

  She shrugged. “Oh well.”

  But girls like me don’t get lucky.

  Her sword shot out. Zanze’s body stiffened. A second before his eyes glazed over, he stared down at his chest, not quite sure how the blade jutting out of it had gotten there. She jerked the blade free, let his body drop. My hand found the Cacophony, all but rattling in his sheath and begging to be drawn.