The Gallows Black

by Sam Sykes

  “Child,” I said. “I’m no Imperial, no Revolutionary. Daiga’s no hero who can get you out of here.” I stared into his eyes, forced myself not to blink. “And you’re no killer.”

  His hands shook a little. Arm was getting tired. He held the hand cannon up higher to compensate.

  “You’ve got a shit deal here,” I said. “I know. But pulling that trigger isn’t going to make it better.” I took a breath. “Put it down.”

  Second thing you do to see what a man is made of, you put a weapon in his hands.

  If he’s got any sense, he’ll put it right back down. If you’re fresh out of luck, he’ll hold it as tenderly as he would hold his wife. But as much as I don’t believe in luck, I believe in sensible people even less, so most of the time you get people like this kid: scared, powerless, thinking a piece of metal that makes loud noises will make anything different.

  So when he realized it wouldn’t, when his arm dipped just a little, I knew I had this.

  I grabbed him by the wrist, pushed the cannon away, and twisted his arm behind his back in one swift movement. He screamed as I pulled him close against me, circled my other arm around his neck, and looked over his shoulder at his friends. They hadn’t even raised their autobows before they realized what I had done.

  “Listen up,” I snarled. “You want to put holes in your friend, you pull the triggers right now. You want everyone to come out of this alive, you put those things down and tell me where Daiga’s hiding out.”

  I watched them intently, waiting for them to realize the shit they were in, waiting for them to drop their gazes, then their weapons.

  Only, they didn’t.

  They looked nervously at each other, saw the fear in each other’s eyes, fed off it. They raised their weapons, pointed them at me, fingers on the triggers. They took aim like they thought they wouldn’t hit their friend.

  And that’s when I knew this whole thing had just gone to shit.

  I shoved the kid out of the way just as I heard the air go alive with the screaming of autobows. Tiny motors whirred as they cried out, bolts flying from thrumming strings. Their shots went wide, missing both of us. I leapt behind the bar, ducked beneath it.

  I heard wood splinter as they fired, bolt after bolt, into the wood, like they hoped the bar would just disintegrate if they poured enough metal into it. Sooner or later, they’d run out of ammunition, but I couldn’t wait for that.

  Especially not once I heard the hand cannon go off.

  A colossal flash of fire lit up the room. The ancient reek of severium smoke filled the air. And a gaping hole was now where half a bar had once been.

  I pulled my scarf low against a shower of smoking splinters raining over me. He held a primate’s weapon—those things were just as likely to explode as fire—but it made a lot of noise and did a lot of damage, so I imagined he didn’t give a shit.

  Besides, as I heard him reloading, I came to the same realization that he no doubt had.

  He only needed to hit once. And I only had half a bar left to hide behind.

  I pulled my gun free from its holster and it greeted me, all bright and shiny and eager to please. It burned warm, a seething joy coursing through my glove and into my palm. His bright brass barrel, carved like a dragon’s mouth, grinned at me as if to ask what fun thing we were about to do.

  I hate to disappoint him.

  Another hand went into the bag at my hip. The shells met my fingers. Across each of their cases, engraved in the silver, I could feel the writing. I ran my hands over each one, mouthing the letters as I did.

  Hellfire—too deadly. Hoarfrost—too slow. Discordance—there’s my girl.

  I pulled it out, flipped the gun’s chamber open, slid the Discordance shell in. I drew the hammer back, counted to three, then rose up behind the bar.

  And, for the briefest of moments, I saw the look on the kid’s face. I’ve seen it a thousand times before and it never gets old. Eyes go wide, mouth goes slack as they stare down the barrel of my gun and, with numb lips, whisper the same word.

  They knew his name.

  I didn’t aim; with Discordance, you don’t have to. I pulled the trigger, laid the shot right beneath their feet. The bullet streaked out. An instant later, it hit the wood. And an instant after that?

  Well, I guess I ruined Ralp’s bar.

  The spell kicked in as soon as metal hit wood. There was a flash of bright light. Then the air swelled and tore itself apart as a noise so loud it took on a rippling, shimmering shape exploded out into a sphere.

  The kids were hurled aside. They flew like they had wings, tumbling through the air along with the shattered floorboards and chairs. Their screams would be drowned out by the spell if they had any breath left to make them. The girl struck the railing to the stairs and tumbled down them bonelessly. The boy skidded across the tables before coming to a halt against the wall.

  When I hopped over the bar, I surveyed the wreckage. Tables were shattered, chairs were splintered, and where the bullet had struck, the floorboards had been torn up and the earth had been carved into a perfectly smooth bowl.

  Discordance is a hell of a spell: not lethal, but hurts enough that you might wish it were. Imperials used to use it to suppress riots in the colonies before the riots became revolutions and nonlethal spells weren’t cutting it.

  I found the kid lying next to the door, breathing shallowly. I glanced at his friends long enough to make sure they were, too. Might have been stupid to leave them like that, but I won’t have it said that I was so stupid I couldn’t think of a way to stop a bunch of punks without killing them.

  Of course, they didn’t need to know that, did they?

  I grabbed the kid by the lapel of his coat, slammed him against the wall, put my big, grinning gun in his face.

  “Daiga tell you what this is?” I pressed the barrel up under his chin. “Daiga tell you about me?”

  The kid, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, nodded feverishly back at me.

  “You know what I’ve done with this, then,” I snarled. “You know I’m not going to ask you again. Where is he?”

  “T-the old ruins,” he stammered. “Four hours east of here, at the foot of the mountain. I… I can show you if you—”

  “I don’t.” I threw him to the ground. “I’m going to let you live, child. But you’re going to do something for me.”

  “Y-yeah! Anything!”

  “First, you’re going to tell me what you do for a living.”

  “I’m an apprentice!” he said. “Scribe’s apprentice!”

  “You need both hands for that?”

  He looked at me weird. “Uh, no?”

  And then he screamed as I brought the heel of my boot down on his hand and heard each finger break under it.

  I suppose it would have been more poetic to make him swear to give up his life of crime. In truth, I’d tried that before in my more callow days. Enough scars and mistakes later, I learned that experience teaches best.

  I didn’t kill kids, sure, but I also didn’t let them put weapons in my face and walk away unscathed, either.

  “Second,” I said, leaning down. “You’re going to tell me what you’re going to tell your peacekeepers when they ask you who did this.”

  Last thing you do if you want to know what a man is made of, you look him dead in the eye and listen when he says your name.

  And the kid fumbled around it for a while, trying to find his way around the fear in his eyes and the pain in his hand, before he said to me:

  “Sal the Cacophony.”

  He sounded like he was going to piss himself.

  I put my weapon away, pulled my scarf back up over my head, and made my way back out into the storm. There were going to be a lot of people here before too long with a lot of questions. I didn’t have time for that.

  I had a mage to kill, after all.

  If you enjoyed

  THE GALLOWS BLACK

  look out for

  THE GUTTER PRAYER
/>   The Black Iron Legacy: Book One

  by

  Gareth Hanrahan

  A group of three young thieves are pulled into a centuries-old magical war between ancient beings, mages, and humanity in this wildly original debut epic fantasy.

  Enter a city of saints and thieves…

  The city of Guerdon stands eternal. A refuge from the war that rages beyond its borders. But in the ancient tunnels deep beneath its streets, a malevolent power has begun to stir.

  The fate of the city rests in the hands of three thieves. They alone stand against the coming darkness. As conspiracies unfold and secrets are revealed, their friendship will be tested to the limit. If they fail, all will be lost, and the streets of Guerdon will run with blood.

  The Gutter Prayer is an epic tale of sorcerers and thieves, treachery and revenge, from a remarkable new voice in fantasy.

  PROLOGUE

  You stand on a rocky outcrop, riddled with tunnels like the other hills, and look over Guerdon. From here, you see the heart of the old city, its palaces and churches and towers reaching up like the hands of a man drowning, trying to break free of the warren of alleyways and hovels that surrounds them. Guerdon has always been a place in tension with itself, a city built atop its own previous incarnations yet denying them, striving to hide its past mistakes and present a new face to the world. Ships throng the island-spangled harbour between two sheltering headlands, bringing traders and travellers from across the world. Some will settle here, melding into the eternal, essential Guerdon.

  Some will come not as travellers, but as refugees. You stand as testament to the freedom that Guerdon offers: freedom to worship, freedom from tyranny and hatred. Oh, this freedom is conditional, uncertain—the city has, in its time, chosen tyrants and fanatics and monsters to rule it, and you have been part of that, too—but the sheer weight of the city, its history and its myriad peoples always ensure that it slouches back eventually into comfortable corruption, where anything is permissible if you’ve got money.

  Some will come as conquerors, drawn by that wealth. You were born in such a conflict, the spoils of a victory. Sometimes, the conquerors stay and are slowly absorbed into the city’s culture. Sometimes, they raze what they can and move on, and Guerdon grows again from the ashes and rubble, incorporating the scar tissue into the living city.

  You are aware of all this, as well as certain other things, but you cannot articulate how. You know, for example, that two Tallowmen guards patrol your western side, moving with the unearthly speed and grace of their kind. The dancing flames inside their heads illuminate a row of carvings on your flank, faces of long-dead judges and politicians immortalised in stone while their mortal remains have long since gone down the corpse shafts. The Tallowmen jitter by, and turn right down Mercy Street, passing the arch of your front door beneath the bell tower.

  You are aware, too, of another patrol coming up behind you.

  And in that gap, in the shadows, three thieves creep up on you. The first darts out of the mouth of an alleyway and scales your outer wall. Ragged hands find purchase in the cracks of your crumbling western side with inhuman quickness. He scampers across the low roof, hiding behind gargoyles and statues when the second group of Tallowmen pass by. Even if they’d looked up with their flickering fiery eyes, they’d have seen nothing amiss.

  Something in the flames of the Tallowmen should disquiet you, but you are incapable of that or any other emotion.

  The ghoul boy comes to a small door, used only by workmen cleaning the lead tiles of the roof. You know—again, you don’t know how you know—that this door is unlocked, that the guard who should have locked it was bribed to neglect that part of his duties tonight. The ghoul boy tries the door, and it opens silently. Yellow-brown teeth gleam in the moonlight.

  Back to the edge of the roof. He checks for the tell-tale light of the Tallowmen on the street, then drops a rope down. Another thief emerges from the same alleyway and climbs. The ghoul hauls up the rope, grabs her hand and pulls her out of sight in the brief gap between patrols. As she touches your walls, you know her to be a stranger to the city, a nomad girl, a runaway. You have not seen her before, but a flash of anger runs through you at her touch as you share, impossibly, in her emotion.

  You have never felt this or anything else before, and wonder at it. Her hatred is not directed at you, but at the man who compels her to be here tonight, but you still marvel at it as the feeling travels the length of your roof-ridge.

  The girl is familiar. The girl is important.

  You hear her heart beating, her shallow, nervous breathing, feel the weight of the dagger in its sheathe pressing against her leg. There is, however, something missing about her. Something incomplete.

  She and the ghoul boy vanish in through the open door, hurrying through your corridors and rows of offices, then down the side stairs back to ground level. There are more guards inside, humans—but they’re stationed at the vaults on the north side, beneath your grand tower, not here in this hive of paper and records; the two thieves remain unseen as they descend. They come to one of your side doors, used by clerks and scribes during the day. It’s locked and bolted and barred, but the girl picks the lock even as the ghoul scrabbles at the bolts. Now the door’s unlocked, but they don’t open it yet. The girl presses her eye to the keyhole and watches, waits, until the Tallowmen pass by again. Her hand fumbles at her throat, as if looking for a necklace that usually rests there, but her neck is bare. She scowls, and the flash of anger at the theft thrills you.

  You are aware of the ghoul, of his physical presence within you, but you feel the girl far more keenly, share her fretful excitement as she waits for the glow of the Tallowmen candles to diminish. This, she fears, is the most dangerous part of the whole business.

  She’s wrong.

  Again, the Tallowmen turn the corner onto Mercy Street. You want to reassure her that she is safe, that they are out of sight, but you cannot find your voice. No matter—she opens the door a crack and gestures, and the third member of the trio lumbers from the alley.

  Now, as he thuds across the street in the best approximation of a sprint he’s capable of, you see why they needed to open the ground-level door when they already had the roof entrance. The third member of the group is a Stone Man. You remember when the disease—or curse—first took root in the city. You remember the panic, the debates about internment, about quarantines. The alchemists found a treatment in time, and a full-scale epidemic was forestalled. But there are still outbreaks, patches, leper colonies of sufferers in the city. If the symptoms aren’t caught early enough, the result is the motley creature that even now lurches over your threshold—a man whose flesh and bone are slowly transmuting into rock. Those afflicted by the plague grow immensely strong, but every little bit of wear and tear, every injury hastens their calcification. The internal organs are the last to go, so towards the end they are living statues, unable to move or see, locked forever in place, labouring to breathe, kept alive only by the charity of others.

  This Stone Man is not yet paralysed, though he moves awkwardly, dragging his right leg. The girl winces at the noise as she shuts the door behind him, but you feel an equally unfamiliar thrill of joy and relief as her friend reaches the safety of their hiding place. The ghoul’s already moving, racing down the long silent corridor that’s usually thronged with prisoners and guards, witnesses and jurists, lawyers and liars. He runs on all fours, like a grey dog. The girl and the Stone Man follow; she stays low, but he’s not that flexible. Fortunately, the corridor does not look out directly onto the street outside, so, even if the patrolling Tallowmen glanced this way, they wouldn’t see him.

  The thieves are looking for something. They check one record room, then another. These rooms are secure, locked away behind iron doors, but stone is stronger and the Stone Man bends or breaks them, one by one, enough for the ghoul or the human girl to wriggle through and search.

  At one point, the girl grabs the Stone Man’s elbow to
hasten him along. A native of the city would never do such a thing, not willingly, not unless they had the alchemist’s cure to hand. The curse is contagious.

  They search another room, and another and another. There are hundreds of thousands of papers here, organised by a scheme that is a secret of the clerks, whispered only from one to another, passed on like an heirloom. If you knew what they sought, and they could understand your speech, you could perhaps tell them where to find what they seek, but they fumble on half blind.

  They cannot find what they are looking for. Panic rises. The girl argues that they should leave, flee before they are discovered. The Stone Man shakes his head, as stubborn and immovable as, well, as stone. The ghoul keeps his own counsel, but hunches down, pulling his hood over his face as if trying to remove himself from their debate. They will keep looking. Maybe it’s in the next room.

  Elsewhere inside you, one guard asks another if he heard that. Why, might that not be the sound of an intruder? The other guards look at each other curiously, but then in the distance, the Stone Man smashes down another door, and the now-attentive guards definitely hear it.

  You know—you alone know—that the guard who alerted his fellows is the same one who left the rooftop door unlocked. The guards fan out, sound the alarm, begin to search the labyrinth within you. The three thieves split up, try to evade their pursuers. You see the chase from both sides, hunters and hunted.

  And, after the guards leave their post by the vaults, other figures enter. Two, three, four, climbing up from below. How have you not sensed them before? How did they come upon you, enter you, unawares? They move with the confidence of experience, sure of every action. Veterans of their trade.

  The guards find the damage wrought by the Stone Man and begin to search the south wing, but your attention is focused on the strangers in your vault. With the guards gone, they work unimpeded. They unwrap a package, press it against the vault door, light a fuse. It blazes brighter than any Tallowman’s candle, fizzing and roaring and then—