by Sam Sykes
Their fear carved a road for me that I eagerly took, taking off at a sprint down the streets. The crowd thinned out with each corner I turned on my way back to her workshop. I leapt over a few fallen corpses, pushed my way through a few people moving too slow, but I didn’t think of them. I didn’t think of anything but reaching her.
I certainly didn’t think of who might have just seen that Hellfire shot.
Not until the spikes of ice came smashing down in front of me.
I whirled, the Lady’s song ringing in my ears. The mage descended from the sky. His eyes flashed with purple light, frigid winds circling his hands as the spells danced along his fingers.
I slapped a shell into the Cacophony, aimed it at him, pulled the trigger.
Nothing emerged but a click sound.
I wasn’t sure what was happening. Not until the pain hit, anyway.
He burned. Not his usual contented seethe or morbidly bemused heat. Fire shot out of his hilt, pierced through my glove, my skin, into my bones and blood. His heat raced through my arm, tore a scream out of my lungs and sent me to my knees.
I had insulted him. We’d come here to kill Zanze and, when I had him right there, I’d turned and run. He was furious. Furious enough not to fire.
Which was a touch inconvenient, what with the mage about to kill me.
“Have you not done enough?” he snarled as he descended from the sky. “Was it not enough to violate your oath to the Imperium, Vagrant? Was it not enough to use your arts for profit and crime?” The light behind his eyes intensified. “Now you’ve robbed us of an Imperial Judge.”
I fought through the pain to get to my feet. With numb lips I muttered pleas, prayers, curses, whatever he wanted.
Just let me get back to her, I thought. Just let me not lose one thing for once.
“She was a paragon of the Imperium. Just, loyal, merciful.” The mage raised his hands over his head. The frigid winds coalesced into a gigantic spike of ice. “You will find I lack that latter virtue.”
I couldn’t run from him. Not with the pain still wracking me. I reached for my blade with shaking hands. Not much it would do against a mage, but I had to try.
I raised the weapon, trembling in my grip. I watched the ice sharpen itself to a fine point. From somewhere far away, I heard the sound of an explosion, the sound of whistling, the sound of something growing closer.
A blade won’t do much good against a mage, like I said.
But a giant severium charge fired from a huge fucking cannon?
That might do the trick.
The mage glanced up. I started running. A burning boulder came plummeting out of the sky, its whistling shriek tearing through the clouds. I didn’t turn around as I felt the earth shake with the impact, shards of stone and flame kissing my back as I kept fleeing, a fiery wind blowing over me.
Cannon fire kept falling from the sky. The street erupted in columns of severium-tinged fire. Statues and columns were smashed to rubble, collapsing in a chorus of groaning stone. Houses burst into flame as the charges struck them.
It was a miracle I found her workshop still standing.
Mostly, anyway.
Flames lapped against it, threatening to consume it. I kicked down the door, found the inside choked with smoke. The reek of spilled inks and alchemics filled the air. Papers curled and blackened at the edges from the heat.
And at the center of it all, I found the tiny girl with the big glasses, madly trying to save it all.
“LIETTE!” I screamed. “The Revolution started bombing the city!”
“Yes, I could tell by the bombs,” she shouted back, sneering.
“We have to go!” I seized her by the arm, she pulled against me.
“Not yet!” she screamed. “I can’t find the rest of my notes. I can’t remember what sigils I made to animate the body.”
“Who gives a shit?”
“I was so close!” Her movements were frenzied, her eyes wide as she pulled against me. “Do you understand what I did? I almost brought a man back to life! Full mobility, partial personality restoration, I was so close! I WAS SO CLOSE!”
“He was just a corpse.” I pulled harder on her. “You’ll be one, too, if you don’t move!”
“You don’t understand,” she said.
“I do.” I pulled the collar of my shirt down, exposing the top of the scar that ran across my chest, the scar that she had touched, that she had kissed. “More than anyone, I do.”
“Then understand this,” she snarled back at me, finally tearing free. “Understand why I can’t let this go. Why I can’t leave without my notes. Would you leave without killing that man?”
I stared at her for a long moment. With the smoke filling my nose. With the pain coursing through my body. With her wide, desperate eyes held in my own.
“I just did.”
I held my hand out, trembling with pain, stained with blood.
“To come back.”
She stared from my eyes to my hand. The fear, the desperation, everything ebbed out of her stare. And what was left behind, magnified by the lenses of her glasses…
I don’t know if it was worth letting Zanze live for.
But it was worth coming back for.
She closed her eyes. She took my hand. Together, we stepped out into hell.
And ran.
NINE
Far below, a city burned. A great pillar of flame rose from inside its crumbling walls, clawing hungrily for a black sky staring impassively down upon it, an altar of flame reaching to a distant heaven. And like sacrifices, the dead littered the land around it. Cannon fire tore through the sky, met by frost and flame and whatever other spells were hurled in retaliation. Through blackened mud and burning plain, their soldiers clashed with blade and pike and tore each other to pieces. Carnage, ablaze and bloody, sprawled across the earth.
Liette regarded the scene and pushed her glasses farther up her nose.
“I suppose it could be worse.”
I looked up at her through one eye, blood weeping into the other, as I wiped my blade clean of the bits of soldier I had carved through to get us here. I coughed, my breath tinged with smoke, and sniffed, my nose still full of ash.
“How do you figure?” I asked. “There were a lot of people I had to fight through to get to you.”
“The folly of a city with only two gates. Last Word had been losing citizens at a rate of roughly twenty per month since the Imperial and Revolutionary forces arrived,” Liette replied. “That increased to roughly one hundred per week after the Gallicus incident. I suspect whoever remained escaped before the cannons began firing or were guards or other administrative workers. All told, I would put all nonmilitary casualties at roughly under one hundred.”
“That’s… good?” I glanced back at my sword, sighed at my own weary reflection. “They’ve lost their homes, though, maybe everything.”
“Possibly,” Liette replied.
“And you lost your—”
“I did.” She held up a hand to cut me off. “But I can rebuild. Everything I’m capable of. Most of it, anyway.”
I finished wiping my blade clean, checked it for nicks and damage. “You make it sound easy.”
“If you happen to be an incredible genius possessed of the only mind in the Scar—indeed, perhaps the world—of coming close to resurrecting the dead, it is.” Liette turned toward me, adjusted her glasses. “It’s me, by the way. I’m the one who is an incredible genius.”
“Yeah, no, I got that.”
I sheathed my sword, set it aside. I cast my eyes out over Last Word and felt a stab in my chest. It wasn’t the first city to be destroyed in the Scar—hell, it wasn’t even the first city I had had a hand in destroying. But I couldn’t fight the thought that crept into my head.
He got away.
I had come here for a name on a list. I had come to kill a man, a man who was already slated to die, and still hadn’t been able to finish him. I couldn’t even be satisfied that
he was dead by someone else’s hand.
He’d escaped. I knew he had. The minute his escort had turned their backs, he’d have taken a new shape and escaped. Hell, maybe he had been someone in the crowd I had fought through. Maybe even now he was one of these birds perched in the dead trees surrounding me, waiting for the fighting to stop so they could feast on the carcasses left behind.
Worse, I didn’t even know what his plan was. Why had he wanted Gallicus’s body? What did the people he worked for want to do with it?
All I had been left with was more questions. And a pile of ashes that had once been a city. And my aching scars. And the Cacophony, seething angrily in his sheath.
Perhaps it had been for nothing. Perhaps that was just what this whole vile business was. A lot of blood and pain and fire and, at the end, nothing. No names crossed off my list. No revenge. Not even a—
I paused as I felt someone sit down beside me. Liette curled her arm around mine. She laid her head against my shoulder. She closed her eyes and breathed softly and she was so warm.
And I smiled, without knowing it.
She was right. It could have been worse.
I put my arm around her. I pulled her close to me. Together, we watched the flames rise.
And everything hurt a little less.
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Meet the Author
Photo Credit: Libbi Rich
SAM SYKES—author, citizen, mammal—has written extensively over the years, penning An Affinity for Steel, the Bring Down Heaven trilogy, Brave Chef Brianna, and now the Grave of Empires trilogy. At the time of this writing, no one has been able to definitively prove or disprove that he has fought a bear.
If you enjoyed
THE GALLOWS BLACK
look out for
SEVEN BLADES IN BLACK
The Grave of Empires: Book One
by
Sam Sykes
Acclaimed author Sam Sykes returns with a brilliant new epic fantasy that introduces an unforgettable outcast mage caught between two warring empires.
Her magic was stolen. She was left for dead.
Betrayed by those she trusts most and her magic ripped from her, Sal the Cacophony has nothing left but her name, her story, and the weapon she used to carve both. But she has a will stronger than magic and knows exactly where to go.
The Scar is a land torn between powerful empires, where rogue mages go to disappear, disgraced soldiers go to die, and Sal goes with a blade, a gun, and a list of seven names.
Revenge will be its own reward.
ONE
HIGHTOWER
Everyone loved a good execution.
From the walls of Imperial Cathama to the farthest reach of the Revolution, there was no citizen of the Scar who could think of a finer way to spend an afternoon than watching the walls get painted with bits of dissidents. And behind the walls of Revolutionary Hightower that day, there was an electricity in the air felt by every citizen.
Crowds gathered to watch the dirt, still damp from yesterday’s execution, be swept away from the stake. The firing squad sat nearby, polishing their gunpikes and placing bets on who would hit the heart of the poor asshole who got tied up today. Merchants barked nearby, selling everything from refreshments to souvenirs so people could remember this day where everyone got off work for a few short hours to see another enemy of the Revolution be strung up and gunned down.
Not like there was a hell of a lot else to do in Hightower lately.
For her part, Governor-Militant Tretta Stern did her best to ignore all of it: the crowds gathering beneath her window outside the prison, their voices crowing for blood, the wailing children and the laughing men. She kept her focus on the image in the mirror as she straightened her uniform’s blue coat. Civilians could be excused such craven bloodlust. Officers of the Revolution answered a higher call.
Her black hair, severely short-cropped and oiled against her head, was befitting an officer. Jacket cinched tight, trousers pressed and belted, saber at her hip, all without a trace of dust, lint, or rust. And most crucially, the face that had sent a hundred foes to the grave with a word stared back at her, unflinching.
One might wonder what the point in getting dressed up for an execution was; after all, it wasn’t like the criminal scum who would be buried in a shallow grave in six hours would give a shit. But being an officer of the Revolution meant upholding certain standards. And Tretta hadn’t earned her post by being slack.
She took a moment to adjust the medals on her lapel before leaving her quarters. Two guards fired off crisp salutes before straightening their gunpikes and marching exactly three rigid paces behind her. Morning sunlight poured in through the windows as they marched down the stairs to Cadre Command. Guards and officers alike called to attention at her passing, raising arms as they saluted. She offered a cursory nod in response, bidding them at ease as she made her way to the farthest door of the room.
The guard stationed there glanced up. “Governor-Militant,” he acknowledged, saluting.
“Sergeant,” Tretta replied. “How have you found the prisoner?”
“Recalcitrant and disrespectful,” he said. “The prisoner began the morning by hurling the assigned porridge at the guard detail, spewing several obscenities, and making forceful suggestions as to the professional and personal conduct of the guard’s mother.” He sniffed, lip curling. “In summation, more or less what we’d expect from a Vagrant.”
Tretta spared an impressed look. Considering the situation, she had expected much worse.
She made a gesture. The guard complied, unlocking the massive iron door and pushing it open. She and her escorts descended into the darkness of Hightower’s prison, and the silence of empty cells greeted her.
Like all Revolutionary outposts, Hightower had been built to accommodate prisoners: Imperium aggressors, counterrevolutionaries, bandit outlaws, and even the occasional Vagrant. Unlike most Revolutionary outposts, Hightower was far away from any battleground in the Scar and didn’t see much use for its cells. Any captive outlaw tended to be executed in fairly short order for crimes against the Revolution, as the civilians tended to become restless without the entertainment.
In all her time stationed at Hightower, Tretta had visited the prison exactly twice, including today. The first time had been to offer an Imperium spy posing as a bandit clemency in exchange for information. Thirty minutes later, she put him in front of the firing squad. Up until then, he’d been the longest-serving captive in Hightower.
Thus far, her current prisoner had broken the record by two days.
The interrogation room lay at the very end of the row of cells, another iron door flanked by two guards. Both fired off a salute as they pulled open the door, its hinges groaning.
Twenty feet by twenty feet, possessed of nothing more than a table with two chairs and a narrow slit of a window by which to catch a beam of light, the interrogation room was little more than a slightly larger cell with a slightly nicer door. The window, set high up near the ceiling, afforded no ventilation and the room was stifling hot.
Not that you’d know it from looking at the prisoner.
A woman—perhaps in her late twenties, Tretta suspected—sat at one end of the table. Dressed in dirty trousers and boots to match, the sleeves and hem of her white shirt cut to bare the tattoos racing down her forearms and most of the great scar that wended its way from her collarbone down to her belly; it was the sort of garish garb you’d expect to find on a Vagrant. Her hair, Imperial white, was shorn roughly on the sides and tied back in an unruly tail. And despite the suffocating heat, she was calm, serene, and pale as ice.
There was nothing about this woman that Tretta didn’t despise.
She didn’t look up as the Governor-Militant entered, paid no heed to the pair of armed men trailing behind her. Her hands
, manacled together, rested patiently atop the table. Even when Tretta took a seat across from her, she hardly seemed to notice. The prisoner’s eyes, pale and as blue as shallow water, seemed to be looking somewhere else. Her face, thin and sharp and marred by a long scar over her right eye, seemed unperturbed by her imminent gruesome death.
That galled Tretta more than she would have liked to admit.
The Governor-Militant leaned forward, steepling her fingers in front of her, giving the woman a chance to realize what a world of shit she was in. But after a minute of silence, she merely held out one hand. A sheaf of papers appeared there a moment later, thrust forward by one of her guards. She laid it out before her and idly flipped through it.
“I won’t tell you that you can save yourself,” she said after a time. “An officer of the Revolution speaks only truths.” She glanced up at the woman, who did not react. “Within six hours, you’ll be executed for crimes against the Glorious Revolution of the Fist and Flame. Nothing you can say will change this fact. You deserve to die for your crimes.” She narrowed her eyes. “And you will.”
The woman, at last, reacted. Her manacles rattled a little as she reached up and scratched at the scars on her face.
Tretta sneered and continued. “What you can change,” she said, “is how quickly it goes. The Revolution is not beyond mercy.” She flipped to a page, held it up before her. “In exchange for information regarding the events of the week of Masens eleventh through twentieth, up to and including the massacre of the township of Stark’s Mutter, the destruction of the freehold of Lowstaff, and the disappearance of Revolutionary Low Sergeant Cavric Proud, I am willing to guarantee, on behalf of the Cadre, a swift and humane death.”
