The Justice in Revenge

by Ryan Van Loan

  Up close, I was reminded that she avoided the sun because if she ever came out she might catch fire like a scrap of paper under a magnifying glass. I knew she was old, but up close it was obvious that “old” was too small a word for the years she’d lived. Ancient and wizened, but with a rod of steel through her back that kept her straight in her chair even if her dress nearly swallowed her thin frame. I’d have admired the Chair, save that she was content to see the world enslaved by the Gods so long as it meant the Company turned a profit. What was the world to her and the rest but common rabble, existing to serve, to purchase, to be purchased?

  “I—”

  “Am about to give me the famous side of your profane tongue?” She made a sound in her throat that might have been amusement. Or merely clearing phlegm. “I’m sure that would make you feel better, but I’m not here to indulge your precious feelings, child.” Her smile was warm, her eyes harsh winter, full of storms waiting to break against whomsoever dared sail their seas. “You keep basking in our failure last summer without seeming to realize that now it’s your failure as well.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You and Eld are of the Board, Sambuciña. Our success is your success and our failure…”

  “Is ours,” I muttered.

  “Precisely.” She licked her lips. “You say you prevented the Doga’s assassination?” I nodded. “Tell me. All of it.”

  “Not much to tell. Two raggedly dressed parishioners tried to kill her on the steps of the Dead Gods’ cathedral. One with a pistole, the other with a grenado of some sort. Eld and I intervened.”

  “You and Eld intervened,” she repeated. “Well. I need you to intervene again.”

  “Intervene? How?” I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I’d never heard the Chair ask anyone to do anything. Demand, sure, but ask?

  “I’m not sure she considers this a request,” Sin whispered in my mind.

  “Semantics,” I told him.

  “Salina told you of the unrest in the Tip?”

  “Aye. Murders,” I said, thinking of the lad I’d found in the alleyway two days ago, a rusty black line drawn acrost his throat, his lifeblood soaked through the new coat my alms had bought him. “Gang rumbles.”

  “I fear there’s more to it than that,” the Chair said. “Taken with the attempt on the Doga’s life, I smell smoke.”

  “And where there’s smoke…” I muttered.

  Her lips creased in a hint of a smile. “You know all too well about that, don’t you?” She held up a hand to forestall my reply. “We’re all in this ship together, Buc. Rich … and poor.” She didn’t sound happy about the last. “Every ship has cats to keep the rats belowdecks. Usually, that’s enough, but when there’s a fire the rats become afraid, and fear is a powerful thing, powerful enough to overcome their fear of the cat, of the crew, of anything that isn’t the flames at their back.”

  “I’m not quite sure I follow where you’re leading,” I said.

  “You must have been a child the last time the gangs of Servenza went to war,” she said. “You wouldn’t remember—”

  “I remember,” I growled. I was the reason for that war, though none knew it. I’d pinned the leader of the Krakens, Blood in the Water—La Signora, as she was known to her followers—to a wall with a whaling spear and burned her manse down around her corpse. The power vacuum had turned the canals around the Tip red with blood for a full season.

  “Then imagine that along with the death of the Doga. She’s the cat in this scenario, her and her Constabulary. With the cat gone and the flames rising higher, the rats will overrun us all.”

  “Interesting way to think of your fellow Servenzans.”

  “They aren’t Servenza,” she snorted. “Servenza is of the sea and ships and trade and coin and power. Servenza is the Kanados Trading Company.”

  “So you want me to be your ratcatcher?”

  “Who better?” she asked.

  “Fuck you.”

  “There’s that tongue,” she said. The Chair ran a hand through the jewels in her hair. “You want your hand on the tiller right away, child, but my locks are more white than black and I didn’t gain true power until they were grey. I’m in this seat not just because I am intelligent and cunning, traits we both share,” she admitted, “but also because I understood what this Company required of me: loyalty and service. You come to us because of a shrewd bargain you struck and seem to imagine that we’ll hand over the ledgers and the gavel with it, but what you fail to appreciate is that your bargain was just the price of entry.”

  Her lips curled. “You’re looking for power in all the wrong places. Treating with the undead in their macabre temples may seem to you a way to gain that, but every time you go near them you risk putting your head through the noose.”

  She put a purple-lacquered fingernail to her chin. “If they were to somehow find out the truth of what happened to that Ghost Captain of theirs, what would they do to you? I hear the Veneficus have a raging bull’s own temper. But you know that better than I, eh?”

  “So kind of you to care.”

  “I care about the Board, Sambuciña.” She sighed and for a moment looked her years. “And despite what I would wish, I told you, you are of this Board. We protect our own.” The Chair straightened. “And that brings me back to loyalty. It’s something the Board demands. Something I demand. A lesson Eld learned long ago. And one you would do well to learn now. Do you understand?”

  “Perfectly,” I said, the grinding of my teeth loud in the silence. Do your bidding or the Dead Gods will find more reasons to want me dead. Loyalty at bayonet point. Half a year on and nothing had changed. Here I was, still with a blade at my back.

  “I wish I could believe that were true,” she muttered. Shaking her braids, she drummed her nails on the tabletop. “I gave you a chance, just now, and you didn’t leap to it. You didn’t even come to it grudgingly.” She looked up, her eyes hard. “I’m done making offers. The trade winds will shift after Midwinter’s Day and when they do, I’m going to call the Board to vote on expanding our operations throughout the Northern Wastes. I’m going to send you as our representative to oversee the expansion.”

  “I don’t have time to go haring off to that frozen ice bucket,” I growled.

  “I wonder what exactly you were hoping to gain through us?” the Chair asked, her lips downturned. “Power without the knowledge of how to wield it is more dangerous to the owner than any other. I gave you time to learn and you did not, so now I will teach you. You know our bylaws. What happens if you refuse an approved request from the Board?”

  I closed my eyes and saw the words before me. “‘Saving illness or malady, should any seated member of the Board decline a request having the voted and approved consent of the Board, they shall be removed forthwith, reduced to shareholder status, and banned from a seat for life.’” I opened my eyes and bared my teeth in a grin. “Try it, old woman, and I’ll request unanimous consent, as is my right … which you won’t have.”

  “Mmm, you could try that,” she admitted. “But do that and I’ll ensure your mission keeps you away until the ice fields freeze over again. It will be two years or more before you return to Servenza. Do that and I’ll see Eld sent to the Burning Lands.” She matched my grin tooth for tooth. “And you’ll never see him again.”

  “I would care?” I sniffed, Sin hiding my racing heart. Not just threatening me at bayonet point, but running me through. “You don’t know me very well, do you?”

  “Well enough, child,” she murmured. “Well enough. Now, run along and enjoy the few weeks you’ve left,” the Chair said, dismissing me with a wave. “Oh, and, Buc?” Her use of my actual name pulled me back around to face her. “This is the last chance you’ll be given. See that you don’t burn this one to ground, too.”

  * * *

  The Chair’s threats still echoing in my ears, I jumped into the gondola, ducking under the canopy that covered three-quarters of its length, and Joffe
rs nudged the boat out into the canal. Somehow, after discovering the Chair had been following us even more closely than I’d imagined, and had discovered a way to fuck us over in the bargain, the newfound awkwardness between Eld and me didn’t feel as important.

  “I think we have a way to control the Board,” I said quickly, taking the seat opposite his before the strength of the current sent me tumbling. I crossed my legs. “If they don’t strangle us first. Our news about the Doga has broken some things loose.…” I quickly filled him in on what the Chair had told me about the Doga, leaving out the part where she threatened us both with exile. “I don’t trust her sudden concern about the Doga, but I’ll be the first to admit feelings are a foreign concept to me.”

  “She sees the Doga as chief mouser.”

  “Aye, I get that, but she’s given us something we can use—if the Chair is worried, the Doga must be frantic.”

  Eld nodded. “There’s got to be a catch.”

  I snorted. “Of course there’s a catch. Probably several. She already brought up the Dead Gods. Again.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him the rest and caught the words on my tongue before they could pass my lips. The Eld I knew before I returned to Servenza filled with magic would have been at my side, finding ways to thwart the Chair’s move, but the new Eld, the Eld who’d kept his distance since he realized what I’d become, that Eld I wasn’t so sure of. What if he thinks I should go? Worse, what if he chose to fight beside me in front of the Board and the Chair followed through on her threats? If we gave up the Board we’d lose everything we fought so hard for over the summer. The Gods would win. The Chair thought me a willful child grasping for power like it was a lolly I wanted to swallow whole. That was fine, I didn’t want her to ken my true purpose, but I couldn’t wait a year or two to make my play for control of the Kanados Trading Company. The Gods were already closing in; this morning’s meeting with the Veneficus had shown the truth of that. Turns out killing the Ghost Captain and Chan Sha had put us in the sights of Gods both undead and new.

  “We need to have something to hold over her, but if we’re going to use the Board, Eld, we have to support them, aye? Or at least be seen to support them.” I tapped my lip. “I wonder how we can get an audience with the Doga? Leverage our saving her life this morn into controlling the Chair from the shadows?”

  He plucked at his tricorne on the seat beside him. “We don’t have to do this, you know? We could give back the seats, or keep them and collect the dividends without showing up. Go do something else.”

  “Eld, this is everything we’ve been working toward for years. Gods, man, we both nearly died half a dozen times alone this summer to get here. Aye, it’s not as straightforward as I thought it’d be, but we’ve a seat at one of the places of power. We’re going to need that power to destroy the Gods.”

  “We have been at it for a long time,” he admitted. “I guess I just imagined it all happening … differently.” Rain began to fall softly against the canvas top, then harder as the winter winds picked up, and the gondola drifted for a moment, pulled to the side as Joffers paused to huddle beneath his oilskin slicker. With the pause came silence.

  This was what we—I—had been working toward. Once I’d realized who was really to blame for the suffering I’d grown up in. A disease plaguing the world, one that allowed any manner of evils so long as the war was won, a war begun ages before Eld or I were born, that wouldn’t end until either Ciris or the Dead Gods no longer existed. But if one had to die for this to end, why not both? Why not give the world the chance it never had: to be free? I didn’t think freedom was the magic that would cure all ills, but it would give us the chance to try. We were so close to obtaining the resources required to make that dream a reality and … Eld was right. We were failing.

  Failure. A bitter word no matter how much coin we had to sweeten the deal. The Chair might not understand my motivations, but she could be counted on to follow through on her promise. Unless, of course, I could pin her down, though I wasn’t sure anyone had ever managed that. I’d always be a commoner to her, and even if I weren’t, I’d be little better than Salina, condemned to wait until I was old and grey before I’d have my shot at being the Chair. Which meant I had to find another way. A way that either forced the Chair’s hand or forced her bony arse out of the seat. I’d reached this conclusion before, several times, but how to achieve this continued to elude me. My schemes to improve sugar production and leverage those profits against the Chair had gone up in flames, taking my chance for a quick coup with them. Failure.

  “Say, is the gondola drifting?” Eld asked.

  “The gondola’s drifting,” Sin said right on top of him. His curse reverberated through my mind—he hated when Eld beat him to anything. “It shouldn’t be possible,” he muttered.

  “Joffers?” I called, sitting up in my seat. The old man didn’t answer. Shit. I met Eld’s eyes, saw his widen, caught the shadow against the canopy at his back, and threw myself into a roll. He did the same, passing me as we rolled across the cushion-covered deck. I came up lunging, Sin’s magic making my arm tingle, my fingers both simultaneously numb and dexterous as the blade up my sleeve slid into my palm.

  I punched it through the thin canvas.

  Right into the shadow on the other side.

  A throaty gasp sprayed the canvas with dark drops. Blood. I jerked the blade out, slammed it home again in the opposite lung, withdrew, and began carving the canopy open, revealing a figure in a full sealskin suit, still dripping wet from the canal’s waters. The man, dark stubble like gunpowder burns blackening his cheeks, gave a bloody gasp and collapsed to the deck with a dull thud. Behind me I heard Eld’s rotating pistole bark twice, but I had no time to see how he was faring as two more would-be assassins, in dark-grey, fur-seal suits, levered themselves out of the winter-dark canal waters. One leveled a speargun while the other drew a blackened blade the size of my forearm.

  Without Sin they would have pinned me to the gunwale and eviscerated me. With Sin, his magic flooding my veins so that my entire body burned like liquid steel, they never had a chance. I leapt forward, time stilling as my mind sought the path for my body to follow. Shoulder to rib cage, wristlock, squeeze, blade falling at an angle with the current.

  “When?” Sin asked breathlessly.

  “Now!”

  I moved like chained lightning, jumping the low cutout of the forward seat and slamming into the taller one—the one with the speargun. I heard his breath hiss from between clenched teeth at the impact as I kept moving, intertwining my hands over his wrist. His bones cracked with a snap before my supernatural strength and then his arm was my plaything. I turned his speargun—still in his grasp—toward his compatriot, barely a pace away, and squeezed the trigger. The barbed harpoon punched through the fur suit and sent the other flying over the side of the gondola with a strangled grunt. Their legs hit the gunwale and they flipped backward, their blackened blade scything through the air.

  I caught it by the hilt, a finger’s breadth above the deck, and stepped backward, driving it up hard behind me. The tall one tried to scream but the blade had impaled his tongue to the roof of his mouth. For a moment we rocked back and forth, the gondola perilously close to overturning, then I found my footing and my leverage and ran the blade up through his skull. He dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

  “Eld! Blade?”

  “Please,” he cried, his voice thick with effort.

  “On your left.”

  I ripped the blade free in a wave of gore and flung it behind me, Sin guiding the throw. I spun around, finding the canopy collapsed under the weight of three more invaders. Eld was using his now-empty pistole to parry the blows of a fourth wielding a shortened trident. Eld’s sword was half out of the scabbard, but too long for the close quarters. His pale arm shot out and he caught the hilt of the blade I’d tossed without looking. He swung it up low and across and the woman with the trident shrieked, dropping the weapon to the deck, b
oth hands abruptly busy trying to keep her intestines from spilling across the deck. Eld smashed her in the face with the butt of his pistole and she went over the gondola’s edge. He swung around to the three facing him and growled.

  “Who’s next?”

  I took a step forward, nearly tripping on the spare gondola oar strapped to the deck. It gave me an idea. The oar was fastened down in half a dozen places, too many to cut quickly, but with Sin’s magic I didn’t need to cut anything. Muscles, tendons, ligaments, and I all screamed as my magic-infused limbs ripped it free. The heavy oak oar was nearly the length and weight of the gondola itself. I whipped around in a circle, dangerously close to overbalancing as the entire boat pitched and rolled from the violence and the waves.

  “High! Low!” I shouted.

  Eld dropped to the deck a fraction of a breath before the oar swept through where he’d been standing. I felt the thick beam reverberate as I caught one of the figures in the head and sent the body spinning into the choppy canal waters. Still spinning, I dropped the oar, grinding my teeth with effort. Eld jumped high as the other two attackers were sent overboard, shouting in pain and fear until they hit the water. I let the oar’s momentum spin me half around again, then dropped it; it rolled back and forth in the bottom of the gondola before coming to a stop.

  My breath came in ragged gasps as Eld and I stared across the wreckage of the canopy at each other. He raised his eyebrows and I shrugged and gave a weak laugh that caught in my throat. The shattered canopy shifted and Eld drew his sword; then Joffers’s head appeared, followed by the rest of the man, bloody dirk in one hand, broken pole in the other. He pulled his oilskin cloak back into place around him and blew his twin mustaches out, rainwater and blood flecking his lips.

  “Killed your man?”

  “Woman,” he said after a moment. He took a shuddering breath and nodded. “Aye.”

  “That military service doesn’t leave your bones, does it?” I said.

  “I was your age when I left it behind, child.” He cleared his throat. “Signorina.”