The Justice in Revenge

by Ryan Van Loan

  I began to run my fingers through my hair, stopping at the first tangle. I’d gone to bed in my Masquerade finery—save for the mask itself—and my hair had paid the price, but I could not find it in me to care. I reached for the washcloth, but as the scent of fish-bone broth filled the room, my stomach rumbled ominously. I sat up straighter, using the pillows for support, and took the soup instead. I felt cored out, as if I was lacking something. A small voice seemed to shout at me from a distance.

  “I’m not small, Buc,” Sin growled, suddenly close. “I don’t know where you learned the trick of shoving me beneath your consciousness, but you need to unlearn it. Now is not the time to fall apart.”

  “It seems the perfect time to me,” I whispered mentally.

  “How long?” I asked aloud, voice cracking after disuse as I began mechanically spooning broth into my mouth.

  “Two nights and a day,” Salina said, pulling the door shut behind her. Her peach-colored silk trousers whispered as she walked across the room and sat on the edge of the crimson blankets piled atop the bed. “This is the morning of the second day.” She sighed. “How do you feel, Buc?”

  “I don’t,” I said, dripping broth down my chin, making a spreading stain on the bedsheet. “Sorry,” I muttered.

  “No matter,” Salina said, waving her hand. “You did those in on your first night, thanks to all your makeup running.”

  “Tears will do that.”

  “They will,” she agreed.

  We stared at one another in silence. “So,” I said, finally.

  “So.”

  “Have you ever felt this way, Salina?”

  She smiled faintly, brushing back an errant blond strand of hair. “After Ferdin died, I felt a lot of the things I imagine you are. I think,” she said slowly, “I mostly felt the loss? Knowing that there had been someone out there that set my veins on fire and filled me to the brim with life.”

  “That hurts,” I agreed.

  “What hurt even worse than that was the regret,” she said. “Since I didn’t tell him how I felt when I had the chance.”

  “At least you knew how he felt about you,” I said.

  “That’s true,” she said. She put one hand on my leg beneath the sheet. “You can stay here as long as you wish, Buc, but eventually you’re going to have to face him.”

  “I thought I had him, ’Lina,” I whispered. “We flirted, we danced, and he was gorgeous and the wine was gorgeous and that fucking orchestra was gorgeous. I never thought such things mattered, but they did.”

  Tears threatening to spill over, I told her most of the rest, glossing over my audience with the Doga and leaving Sicarii out completely.

  “You kissed, once?” Salina said, her own eyes filled with tears as she offered me a handkerchief. “That’s not something friends do.”

  “I thought that, too,” I said, “but, ’Lina? If it’s only one moment, even one like that, and nothing follows after?”

  “Did you tell him you love him?”

  “N-no,” I admitted. I stirred the spoon around in the broth aimlessly. “I fucked up. I spent too much time with Eld, became too familiar. Men love mystery and fantasy. They don’t fall for the familiar.

  “There’s more besides. When we came back from facing down pirates and Shambles and the Ghost Captain? We were broken, ’Lina. I’ve tried to win him back these past weeks, but we want different things.”

  “How can you know that if you never asked him, Buc?”

  “I know,” I said quietly.

  “You had plans when I first met you,” Salina snapped suddenly. “Schemes to change the world. Ideas that were worth putting your life on the line dozens of times. Aye, and Eld’s life too. How can one warehouse fire and Eld batting his eyes at other women be enough to derail them?”

  “Warehouse fire?” My mind flashed back to Sister. I couldn’t follow Salina’s change of subject for a moment, didn’t understand why she was angry now. Making a guess, I said, “You think I give a fuck that the Company’s profits took a hit?”

  “It’s not about profits—” she began.

  “You’re damned right, it’s not. It’s about why those plans were worth fighting for in the first place!” I growled, tossing the bowl across the room. It shattered against the wall but Salina didn’t flinch.

  “I want a better world for every child that grew up like me. If I can’t give myself that world, that happy ending, what chance do I have to give them it, too?”

  “So love made you selfish? You’re hurt, Buc.” Salina’s voice was firm, her eyes softer. “You’ve absorbed several body blows in the past year and now someone managed to slip a blade past your guard. For most, this ends with them lying on the floor, choking on their lifeblood. Story over.”

  She took my hands in her own and squeezed hard. “You’re unlike anyone I’ve ever met before, Buc.

  “We don’t tell stories about most. We tell them about the few. The ones who pull the knife out of their side and use it to kill the ones who put it there. Half a dozen of the world’s most powerful people want to see you on your knees, bleeding out. Because if you do, nothing changes.

  “Once, I would have been beside them. I told you before the Masquerade that watching you made me question that, and everything I’ve learned in the past year convinces me you’re right.” She grinned mirthlessly. “Don’t let that go to your head, woman. The world needs you to be the change they fear, Buc. You’re the only one who can do it.”

  “I used to believe that,” I said slowly. “I didn’t feel emotion, true emotion, and that freed me to do what needed to be done.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “I guess love makes mortals of us all.”

  “Do you think, in the stories, the hero feels wonderful when they begin their final stand?”

  “Huh?”

  “When you defeated the Ghost Captain, how did you feel? Full of life and purpose, or bloody and confused?”

  “Aye,” I said, opening my eyes against my will. “What are you saying?”

  “It’s okay to feel hollow, to feel nothing, to be so on fire with pain that all your senses are dulled. None of that means you get to stop, though.”

  I opened my mouth to tell her what a damn fool she was, but her words touched a nerve inside me. The gnawing emptiness in my heart remained, but alongside it was a cold sense of purpose. A blade needed planting and my hand was the one to do it.

  “What do you think, Sin?”

  “Now you remember me?” he asked. I began to mute him again and he twisted frantically around inside my mind. “No, no, you’re right. More importantly, Salina’s right. There’s work to be done.”

  “No converting me today?”

  “There’s always tomorrow,” he said.

  I smiled. “Bring me a razor,” I said out loud.

  “A r-razor?”

  “For my hair,” I said, rubbing the stubble on either side. “Not my wrists.” I laughed and while it didn’t feel good, it didn’t hurt either. “You’ve convinced me.”

  Salina laughed and left to call the servants. My smile vanished when she did and I lay back against the pillow. I’d started all of this wanting a better world, free of Gods and inequality, where all had a fair shake. Eld had made me dream of something more, but that didn’t mean the original dream was gone. When the sheen is gone, the steel remains. Gillibrand was one of the first books I’d read. Number eleven. She’d been right then and she was right now. Salina, surprisingly, too. I’d been wounded and routed, but there was still a war to be fought. In war, any manner of things were possible, and to quote the poets, all manner of things were permissible.

  All manner.

  37

  “This scone is dry,” Eld muttered, spraying crumbs down the front of his slate-grey jacket. “Must be a day old.”

  “Looks it,” I agreed. I’d eaten before we left, little and grudgingly, because I’d had no real need to use Sin’s abilities the past few days, last night aside. My stomach rumbled to give me the li
e, but I ignored it, pulling my own jacket tighter around me against the damp cold of the morning. It was past Midwinter but spring was weeks away at best and even with the maroon scarf around my neck, the cold sent tendrils seeking for my flesh. “Maybe you should have brought some tea along after all.”

  “It was cold and steeped too long,” Eld complained. His boots were overloud on the cobblestone beneath as we walked along the row of palazzos.

  “You really sound the dandy, you know. And is that stomping I detect?”

  “I just want to know where the staff went, that’s all,” he growled defensively. He ran a hand over the reddish-blond stubble on his cheek. “I can do for myself if I’ve notice.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He shot me a look and I held my hands up defensively as we crossed the street toward the gearwork bridge. It was raised high to allow a passing barge through and so shrouded in mist that it looked like it floated on air instead of merely spanning the canal.

  “I figured you had the staff working hard to impress whatever lady danced and bedded you from the Masquerade,” I said after a moment. “A few days with a lady expecting them to bow and scrape and carry on in all the ways I don’t, I thought they might need a break.”

  “I didn’t bed anyone, Buc. I slept alone.”

  “Pity.” I sniffed. “I didn’t.”

  Eld’s face burned red, making his blond stubble stand out more, and his mouth worked soundlessly, either because he had no retort or else because he was still trying to swallow that lemon-spiced scone. It was the size of his fist, after all. I nearly laughed out loud as Sin echoed my thoughts, but that would have given Eld some ground to stand upon and I wanted him on his fucking knees. I actually wasn’t sure I wanted him along at all, but if half my plans made full sheets with the wind as I’d hoped, I would have need of his hand at the tiller.

  “W-who did you sleep with?” he asked finally, picking crumbs off his silver-laced lapel. His voice sounded like an olive put through the press.

  “Ladies don’t kiss and tell.” He made a sound in his throat and I stopped short of the bridge, hearing its gears whir in the morning stillness as it lowered in the barge’s wake. “Do you trust me?”

  “What?” Shock replaced annoyance across his features.

  “Do you trust me?”

  He looked me up and down and I fought the urge to give him something to look at. Those tactics were gone. I stood ramrod straight, my grey jacket a shade lighter than his, with gold buttons instead of silver. Unburnished, the buttons matched the color of my mustard trousers, visible where the jacket flared at the waist, exposing more leg than a dress ever would. Even so, his eyes set my veins on fire.

  Eld nodded. “Of course I trust you.”

  “Then you’re a fool, Eldritch Nelson Rawlings,” I told him with a smile, to confuse him even further. “Never trust a woman you’ve danced with. Especially if she danced well.”

  “Humble,” Sin sniffed.

  “Fuck—”

  “Off. I know,” Sin said. “I thought you were done playing games with Eld?”

  I ignored him and stomped across the now-lowered bridge, echoes chasing after me. Eld kept pace as we crossed into where the Spired Quarto mixed with the Mercarto. Here the streets were alive with merchants opening their storefronts and hawkers elbowing one another as they jostled for position with their carts. Enough noise to mask the silence I’d produced with my admission and enough people to keep Eld at bay.

  “You’re right,” Eld said when he caught up to me.

  “I am?”

  “I shouldn’t have asked you that,” he said. A sad smile creased his face. “You don’t owe me any explanations. It’s not like we’re—”

  I made a small noise in the back of my throat.

  “Whatever comes,” he added in a rushed breath, “I’ll always trust you, Buc. Always.”

  “I slept with Salina,” I said. His eyes popped and I nearly laughed. “Shared the same bed. Minus the kissing, you lecher.”

  “I—I—”

  “Am a pervert, clearly,” I finished for him.

  “I am not.” He drew in a breath and shook his head. “Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”

  “Didn’t you just say you trusted me?” I reminded him.

  “I did,” he said quickly. “And I do. You don’t want to tell me where we’re going? Aye, Captain. You don’t want to tell me what we’re doing when we get there? Aye, Captain.”

  “I feel like ‘Generalissimo’ has a better ring to it.”

  Eld stared at me and burst out laughing. “What? Is this Colgna?”

  “If it was you’d have mustaches,” I said, laughing with him, and patted him on the back instead of the arm. Friends. The word was ash in my mouth, but it was better than tears in my eyes. “I came back by way of the secret passages beneath the streets.”

  “You used the Doga’s map? I thought it was incomplete.”

  “Complete enough that I found one that let me out around the corner of our palazzo unobserved.”

  “Oh?”

  “And it paid off.” I reached into my jacket and pulled out an avocado-shaped object. “Catch.”

  Eld caught the thing deftly and inspected it for a few moments before shooting me a quizzical glance.

  “What’s it look like to you?”

  He shrugged. “A grenado, but this feels almost like glass.”

  “It is glass,” I told him. “It’s also a grenado. I think it’s the same kind Sicarii’s been using to turn people into flaming infernos.”

  “W-what?” Eld squeaked, jumping and nearly losing the grenado in the process.

  “Easy,” I hissed, covering his hand with mine. “There’s some sort of bladder inside the glass that’s filled with … whatever it is that makes this stuff go boom. You break the glass and it breaks the bladder and—”

  “Boom,” Eld whispered, holding the grenado like it was the world’s most expensive egg. Which it might have been, depending on how one valued their life.

  “Aye.”

  I told him how I’d suspected someone had been watching our palazzo, so I’d decided to try to prove myself right. I’d been about ready to give up when I saw a shadow move beneath a carriage waiting in front of the next palazzo. Two shadows actually, one coming and the other going. I’d used the Doga’s tunnels to pass him and had been lying in wait in an alley. I’d meant to try to get some information out of him, but he’d fired a pistole full in my face and that dissuaded me from fucking around. The bastard, a slovenly looking Servenzan with a puckering scar in the corner of one eye, had been trying to toss the grenado but couldn’t get it out of his trousers pocket. That was the first miracle. The second was that it didn’t break when his corpse hit the cobblestones.

  “Once I got home, I read up on what materials could fit in a grenado like this one and cause such violent fulmination.” I added, “Took half the night to get the powder burns off my skin.”

  “That close?” Eld asked.

  “Any closer and my braids would have gone up,” I admitted. “As I was studying, though, it occurred to me we’ve been going about this all wrong.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, we’ve been trying to chase down the leads stemming from the attacks on the Doga.”

  “Which seems logical.”

  “And is, but it’s slow, it’s left us at a dead end, and”—I ticked the points off on my fingers—“it ignores the fact that we already know who’s behind this.”

  “Sicarii.”

  “But who’s behind Sicarii?” Eld frowned and I laughed. It felt good. Laughing. False, but good. “It has to be the Gods, Eld. We should have set up watch on them long since. They’ll lead us to this Sicarii, or one of their cloak-wearing shadows will. The only real question,” I added, “is it the Dead Gods or Ciris?”

  “I was thinking it was the Dead Gods after the way Sicarii breathed down my neck at the Masquerade. She sounded as insane as that Ulfren di
d when he wanted to drink our blood to see if we were telling the truth, back on the day we prevented the Doga’s assassination.

  “Wait!” Eld stopped so suddenly I walked a full three paces before I realized I’d lost him. I turned around and arched an eyebrow. “You. Spoke. With. Sicarii,” he hissed.

  “It was a bit of a one-way conversation,” I admitted.

  Eld made a noise in his throat and said, still eyeing me askance, “I may have an answer to the Ciris question.”

  “Really?”

  “I am competent, you know.” Eld sniffed. “I did manage to make it almost two decades on my own without you.”

  “Sounds like we’ve some catching up to do.”

  “Aye, I guess so. What should I do with this?” he asked, hefting the grenado.

  “Oh, put it in your pocket for now. I’ll have a look at it later,” I said. “Just don’t put it in your back pocket, Eld.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Might break and blow your arse cheeks to the moon and then all the women of Servenza, aye, and half the men, would cry themselves dry over it.”

  Eld stared at me for a long moment, ignoring the increasing numbers of passersby, and then burst out laughing, and I surprised myself by joining in. We might have gone on like that for a good while save Eld laughed so hard he dropped the grenado and if not for Sin’s magic and my preternaturally fast reflexes we would have died laughing, which isn’t such a bad way to go, but then I would have lost and the world with it—so I caught the damned thing instead.

  “Lead the way, Generalissimo,” Eld said, mocking a bow, when we realized we weren’t going to die. At least not by combustible tomfoolery.

  “You’re both terrible at pretending,” Sin whispered in my mind.

  “I know. But we’re trying,” I told him. “Sometimes that’s all you can do.”

  Sin nodded. “Now what?”

  “I lead. He follows. We find out if I’m really a general or just a fool.”

  “Why not both?”

  I didn’t bother telling Sin to fuck off. He was right, we were all pretending. But I was right, too. We were trying.