by Sam Sykes
Wish I could have seen his face when I staggered to my feet.
Pain shot through me. I gasped to find the breath that had been struck out of me. I was hurt to hell, but I was still alive. My cloak shimmered, a long line of letters glowing brightly down its length before they sputtered out and faded into darkness, their magic going dead.
Fucking magic.
“A luckwritten cloak,” Daiga chuckled. “You are full of surprises, aren’t you?”
He didn’t sound impressed. Why would he? He knew that luckwrites were aptly named—good for avoiding maybe one blow before the magic in them needed to recharge. And he had many blows left.
His phantom panoply hovered around him, an angel with barbed wings and a halo of arrows. But my eyes weren’t on his weapons. They were on him, hovering in the air a good ten inches off the ground. And right behind him, the Hoarfrost still glistened eagerly, spikes out and reaching.
I raised my gun. He pulled his grinning barrel toward the Phantom. I squeezed the trigger. The bullet flew and exploded in a bright red light. Hellfire erupted in a miniature explosion, knocking the shields back. Daiga let out a scream as the fire seeped past his shields, licked at his clothes. He fell from the air, dropping back to the ground to escape the crackle of flame.
I aimed once more. Shot once more. My gun let out a thunderous laugh as the last bullet flew.
Daiga saw it, flicked his arm up. One more shield rose to block the bullet.
Good.
A bright red light. A wall of sound and force. Discordance hit the shield like a fucking battering ram and erupted. The wall of metal kept the sound from damaging him directly, simply knocking him back. But that was fine. Discordance didn’t need to kill.
That was Hoarfrost’s job.
Daiga flew backward from the force of the impact, letting out a shout that lasted for just a second. After that, all I could hear was the juicy popping sound of flesh being skewered.
The weapons hung in the air for just a second longer. Then they trembled, drooped, and fell to the ground with a clatter. They formed a ring upon the earth. And at their center hung Daiga.
Impaled.
His arms were splayed out to his sides. His legs hung limp beneath him. His body twitched. And all the while, his demon mask remained grinning as he looked down at the massive icicle jutting from his chest, staining the metal trinkets of his necklace red.
He hung there for just a moment longer before his weight made the ice snap. He slumped to the earth, falling to his knees. And there he sat, hollow eyes turned to the ground as he gasped for air, groping at the icicle in his chest.
I drew my blade as I approached, slowly. No sense in taking chances with any mage, let alone one who could tear that icicle out of his chest and fling it at me. But as I came up beside him, I could see, for the first time, the eyes behind his mask.
They were wide. And terrified.
“Last…” he gasped, pausing to cough a spatter of red through his mask’s mouth. “Last… words…”
I grimaced. So this was it, then. No last curses, no desperate attempts, not even a plea. Daiga the Phantom was a gentleman to the very end.
I nodded to him. I reached down and gently pulled the opera mask from his face.
I’m not sure why I imagined him younger. I’m not sure why it felt weird to look on his face—a face that could have been my grandfather’s, if both of us had made better choices in life—and see his rheumy eyes shining bright with the last traces of life. Even the skeletal hands tattooed across his throat couldn’t make him look any less gentle.
I’m not sure why I let him stare up at the sky and speak through a mouthful of blood.
“Lady… find me worthy…” He paused to cough. “Ocumani… oth rethar.”
I pressed my blade against his throat. He closed his eyes. I closed mine.
“Eres va atali,” I whispered in reply.
Before he turned rebel and became a Vagrant, Daigalothenes ki Yanturi was one of the greatest Graspmages in the Imperium. He was a lecturer, a scholar, a decorated war hero against the Revolution back in his younger days. His telekinesis was so strong as to have a hundred Graspmages in his bloodline.
But when I drew my sword across his throat, you know what came out?
The same wet red that comes out of everyone.
FOUR
HIGHTOWER
You knew each other, then?”
Tretta leaned over the table, her eyes in a hard glare upon her prisoner. The white-haired woman merely shrugged, leaning back in her chair and propping dusty boots up on the table.
“In the same way I knew him,” Sal replied. “He’d heard my name, knew what I’d done. Among Vagrants, that’s all that really matters.”
“Even among Vagrants who hunt other Vagrants?” Tretta asked, sneering.
“It pays.” Sal shrugged. “But most of our little family tends to find the money easier in becoming warlords or robbing caravans.”
“As Daiga no doubt desired,” Tretta muttered. “And he knew of your weapon, too.”
“Well, obviously.” Sal’s grin was so wide it made her scars deepen. “Find me a man in the Scar who hasn’t heard of the Cacophony.”
Tretta was not a woman who tolerated that kind of flippant talk from her own soldiers, let alone a prisoner. Her eyes narrowed into angry slits, her frown a scar on her face. Without looking away, she raised a hand to a subordinate.
“Bring it.”
“Governor-Militant!” a soldier barked back, firing off a salute.
He hurried out of the room, gone for barely a few moments before he returned with a metal box secured with a dense iron lock. He set it upon the table, saluted once more, and returned to his position at the door.
Tretta fished a key from her pocket, unlocked the box, pushed the lid off. She gazed upon its contents and paused.
The Imperials, in all their vile sorceries and superstitions, were the ones who believed in depraved magic and put their stock in the impossible. Men and women of the Revolution were made of more sensible stuff. They believed in hard things: hard metals, hard answers, hard truths.
It shamed Tretta that she should feel so hesitant to reach into the box and produce the weapon.
The Cacophony was a large gun, it had to be said, even among the gaudy and impractical weaponry of Vagrants. Though its color was that of an ancient brass organ, it was far lighter in her hands than it ought to be. Its grip was polished and black, its cylinder oversized, its barrel carved into the visage of a dragon. She studied its face—its horned brow, its grinning, toothy maw—until she met its empty gaze.
And wondered, in a fleeting and shameful thought, if it was staring back at her.
“A ridiculous weapon,” she scoffed. “Ostentatious, even by Imperial standards.” She tested its heft. “I’m not sure how anyone could even aim this thing.” She flicked the cylinder out, frowned. “And three chambers? This thing is barely a weapon. Ridiculous.”
She suddenly realized how soft her voice had gotten. Somewhere, she had stopped talking to her prisoner and started talking to herself.
“Lighter than he looks, isn’t he?”
Sal leaned over the table, something mischievous and a little cruel in her smile.
“Tell me honestly, Governor-Militant… did you try to fire him?”
Tretta shot her a puzzled and slightly offended look. “Him? It’s just a gun.”
“The Cacophony’s got a name,” Sal replied. “Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Perhaps. But why do you call it a man?”
Sal humored her with a half-grin. “What else would he be?”
“Our engineers studied it.” Tretta placed the Cacophony back in the box. “We could not find any ammunition that fits its chambers. Whatever name you call it by, this is just another Vagrant abomination: impractical, ridiculous, and grotesque.”
“Wouldn’t fire for you, would he?” Sal chuckled. “No need to pretend to me, darling. The Cacophony is a
fickle thing. He has to be inspired.”
“But you command it, do you not?”
“You don’t date much, do you, Governor-Militant?”
Tretta’s left eye twitched as she wondered if it might not spare her a lot of grief to simply shoot the Vagrant in the head right now.
“Commands are fine for an army.” Sal grinned. “But a relationship is built on cooperation.” She gestured to the weapon. “I choose the spells that go into the bullets. I choose the bullets that go in the chamber. I choose where to point him. But it’s his job, and a point of personal pride, to shape the magic.”
“That’s insane.”
“That’s the Cacophony.”
“The Cacophony.” Tretta removed another weapon from the box—an old, if well-tended-to, blade wrapped in worn leather. She slid it halfway out, inspected it. “What manner of odious title does this weapon possess, then?”
Sal shrugged. “I don’t know. Jeff?”
“What?”
“It’s just a sword.” Sal leaned back in her chair. “Not even my best one.”
“An Imperial sword,” she noted, studying the blade. The steel was forged well enough to be honed, despite clearly having been sharpened far too rarely. A slight blue tint accompanied the edge, causing her brow to furrow. “An officer’s weapon.”
“You recognize it, then?” Sal sounded impressed.
“The Cadre is very familiar with the Imperium’s perverse hierarchies. Their service to their depraved Empress is rewarded with hued blades like this.” She held the weapon up for inspection. “From lowest to highest, each officer is granted a blade. Copper, bronze, silver, gold, blue, red, and the very highest in her service being granted a black blade.”
“I always did appreciate a woman who knows her blades,” Sal said, grinning. “Granted, the allure is diminished with you about to kill me and all.”
“But why do you need a sword, when you have something like the Cacophony?”
“Two reasons.” Sal held up a finger, pointed it at the Cacophony. “One, that thing doesn’t really do ‘nuance.’ Not exactly good for everyday shooting.” She held up a second finger. “Two, it shoots fireballs and giant fucking walls of sound. Ammo isn’t fucking cheap.”
Tretta’s voice went low and threatening as she leaned over the table. “Is that how Cavric met his end, Vagrant? Will we be picking pieces of him out of the dirt?”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic.” Sal waved a flippant hand as she leaned back again. “The Cacophony is for hunting Vagrants, bringing down big beasts, or on rare occasion, impressing someone with a nice set on them. But, like, really nice, you know? Like, kill-a-man nice, not just regular—”
“You are trying my patience.”
“Anyway, the Cacophony’s too proud to be used for killing your average Revolutionary goon. I’ve got Jeff for that.” She yawned—a gesture Tretta found even more infuriating. “And in the case of your soldier Cavric, I used neither.”
“And you expect me to believe that?” Tretta snarled.
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“Because nothing in your story makes sense!” Tretta threw up her hands. “You expect me to believe you approached Daiga the Phantom casually, had a pleasant conversation with him, and then fought him? Why wouldn’t you just put a bullet in his head from a hundred feet?”
Sal’s mirth seeped away.
“Because that’s not the code.”
“Again with this ‘code.’” Tretta rolled her eyes, sneering. “Has anyone else heard of it when they speak of Vagrants? Because I’ve only heard the sobbing pleas of the people you’ve robbed and the wailing screams of the people you’ve hunted and the tired sighs of the people burying the ones you killed. This ‘code,’ to me, seems like something you use to pretend you’re not animals. Why would I ever believe a bunch of common outlaw scum would abide by even that?”
“Now, I just told you a story about a gun that shoots icicles and a man who moves things with his mind. What the fuck about that suggests we’re common?” Sal shook her head. “The code is by Vagrants for Vagrants. A holdover from before the Dogsjaw Rebellion sent them fleeing into the Scar.” She shrugged. “Some traditions die hard.”
“And that’s where that ridiculous language comes from, is it? That… what’d you call it? Ocu… occa…”
“Ocumani oth rethar,” Sal finished.
“What is that? Some magical incantation?”
“The magic comes from the Barter, not the word.” Sal leaned forward, cradling her chin in one hand as she grinned lazily. “You don’t see a lot of opera in the Revolution, do you?”
“The Renowned Weiless Speakers of Indisputable Truth are some of the finest performers in all the Revolution,” Tretta replied defensively.
“No, no. Not the bullshit propaganda and sermons you nuls pretend is opera. I mean real opera. Stories about love, about loss, about a single human being raising their hand to the sky and cursing the heavens.”
Tretta sneered. “Flippant wastes of time for decadent Imperial fops.”
“Now, if you had seen real opera, you’d know those words. ‘Ocumani oth rethar’ is Old Imperial, what they spoke back when the first Emperor was crowned. It’s the line spoken at the beginning and the ending of every opera in Cathama, by tradition and by law.”
Tretta sneered. “And what does it mean?”
Sal met her with a smile. “Roughly, it means ‘look upon me and tremble.’ Like ‘Here I am.’ It’s a proclamation of presence, to let everyone know you’re arrived. And it’s how you get her attention.”
Tretta leaned forward on her hands, scowling daggers at the woman. “Whose attention?”
“Same person every Vagrant wants the attention of,” Sal said. “The Lady Mer—”
There was a sudden knock at the door to the cell. Tretta whirled upon it, eyes narrowed; she had left specific instructions not to be disturbed during the interrogation.
“Enter,” she said through clenched teeth.
The door creaked open. A meek, mustachioed face beneath a thinning top of black hair peeked around the corner. A soft, almost whimpering voice spoke from behind.
“Governor-Militant?” he asked. “Is this a bad time?”
“Clerk Inspire,” Tretta replied. “This is a very bad time.”
“Oh.”
Heedless of the harshness in her voice, he came shuffling out from behind the door. Fit only to sit behind a desk, Inspire looked even less imposing standing up. His uniform hung off his skinny body. His glasses slid down his long nose.
“It’s just that I have a request to return the weapon.” He glanced emphatically to the box holding the Cacophony. “Cadre Command is keen to hear it’s in safekeeping.”
“There are no hands safer than mine, Clerk,” Tretta snapped. “We will return the weapon when we’re done here.”
“Yes. Of course, Governor-Militant.” Inspire turned to leave, but hesitated. He turned around again. “It’s just that they’re very insistent. It’s my revolutionary duty to make sure that—”
“Any inquiries the Cadre has about it, you may direct to me, Clerk. And should one of them arrive to deliver said inquiries, only then may you disturb me again. Am I understood?”
His head bobbed in meek nodding. “Y-yes, Governor-Militant. Sorry, Governor-Militant.” He slipped behind the door and whispered, pulling it shut. “Just… you know… let me know when I should return it.”
He closed the door. There was the clicking of a lock behind it. Sal watched him disappear, eyes lingering on the door as it pressed shut. She yawned, turning her attentions back to Tretta.
“Clerk Inspire, huh?” she asked. “Do you get to choose your own names in the Revolution? I always wondered.”
“Enough.” Her words were punctuated by her fists slamming on the table, sending the box shaking. Tretta leaned forward, all but spitting as she barked at her prisoner. “I have had it with your delays!” she snarled. “You will tell us what became of Cavri
c right this minute or I swear I will be extremely happy to help you see just how many inches of red-hot steel can fit in a human.”
Sal blinked. She opened her mouth, as if to inquire how one came about that knowledge. But, in the first intelligent move she had made all day, she opted to say something else.
“As it happens,” Sal said, “I was just getting to that part…”
FIVE
THE SCAR
I wasn’t sure when I had dozed off, but when I heard his voice, I knew I was dreaming.
“And what are you laughing at?”
His eyes smiled when the rest of him didn’t. His face was composed of angles, each one as sharpened and perfected as the blade he polished in his lap, his body as straight and as hard. And even though he tried to look stern when he looked at me, he couldn’t hide the laughter in his eyes.
I didn’t bother trying to hide mine. My laugh was long and loud back then and the only scar on my face was my smile.
“Just answer me this,” I said. “Why a sword? What do you expect it to do that magic can’t?”
He held up the weapon in both hands, studying it, considering it, as though—like all answers—this one also lay somewhere along its killing edge.
“There is an honesty in a sword that there isn’t in magic,” he replied. “Magic requires a Barter. It asks you to give up something of yourself to use it and you never know what it is you’ve given up until it’s gone. A sword, though? That’s a partnership.”
“That’s weird.”
“Like this.”
He was behind me. The sword was in my hand; his fingers were wrapped around mine. One arm slid around my waist, pulling me closer. With the other, he guided my hand through cuts, parries, thrusts, killing imaginary foes.
“See? It asks that you use it. And in exchange, it does what it must.” His lips drifted close to my neck, his hot breath on my ear. “Just like us.”
“Like us,” I whispered, closing my eyes.
