by Sam Sykes
“You and I,” he said. “I am your blade. Use me and I will do what I must.”
Something wet and hot blossomed on my belly.
“Now, then,” he whispered.
My blood seeped out between his fingers.
“Would you forsake me for magic?”
Hot breath in my face. A voice in my ears. A long, wet beak brushing against my cheek.
I cracked one eye open. Congeniality stared back at me, made an irritable squawk. Behind her, a bolus of fur and bones from her meal lay in a glistening pool of saliva.
“Already?” I asked, yawning. I pushed her away, leaned up against the tree I had fallen asleep beneath. “A lady would wait for supper.”
Congeniality, with a ruffle of feathers and an ugly hissing sound, indicated she would not. I sighed, got to my feet, and plucked up my cloak that I had been using as a pillow. I gave it a flick and it instantly contracted to a scarf I tied around my neck. Not the most impressive enchantment, but it saves on storage.
I found another carcass in Congeniality’s saddlebags. I tossed it toward her and left her to the business of devouring it as I walked past the man I had just killed and went about the ugly business of rifling through his shit.
In Cathama, the scholars call it art. In Weiless, the propagandists call it oppression. In Haven, the zealots call it witchcraft.
But out here in the Scar, it takes a Vagrant to understand what magic really is: a trade.
And like any trade, the power lies in your Barter.
It’d be too noble to call it a “sacrifice.” Vagrants aren’t so selfless a people. And the Lady Merchant, for as much reverence as we speak her name with, isn’t that kind of patron. You want the power; she asks a price. You give her the Barter; you get what you pay for.
Daiga knew this.
I held up his necklace of trinkets, sifting through them. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might think it junk. A lock of golden hair, a tattered red ribbon, a bent spoon; these were the treasures of a beggar, not a mage.
But strung through the necklace were a number of folded-up papers. I plucked one off at random, flipped it open. A family stared back at me: a somber child, a woman with a sad smile, and the man I had just killed. He was younger in the picture, with a head of fuller, darker hair, and his long nose and chin not quite so marred with wrinkles.
I’d have been in real trouble if he had decided to Barter this. Perhaps it meant too much to him to part with.
Memories are what the Lady Merchant asks for in exchange for the power of Graspmages. Mementos, specifically—treasured trinkets, little odds and ends that mean something to the mage. It makes sense, if you think about it: to have the ability to grasp, you need to be able to let things go. And the greater their meaning, the greater their power.
Daiga knew that, too.
But Daiga didn’t know me.
And that’s why his carcass was cooling in the morning sun.
Not that there was much to go through. Daiga had seen fit to leave me with a whole lot of crap I couldn’t carry back. The weapons were of good stock, but I’d only ever be able to carry two at a time and it’d take days to reach a freehold big enough to buy them at a good price. Good luck to whatever bandit found them, I suppose, and better luck to whatever poor souls he decided to use them against.
And so that left me, Sal the Cacophony, Scourge of a Hundred Vagrants, rifling through an old man’s underthings in his tent.
They were nice underthings, at least; Daiga had class. Daiga also had a lot of useless stuff I had to go through to find the thing I was looking for. I sighed, slammed his trunk shut, and turned toward the shelf he had beside a rather impractically plush bed. I flipped idly through the books he had collected in his time out here: mostly operas, a romance novel or two, a few military treatises. A red leather-bound copy caught my eye.
“Eduarme’s Third Study of the Natural Laws and Counter-Complexities of the Scar.”
Just saying it aloud made me want to blow my brains out to relieve the boredom. So, naturally, I took it and slid it into my satchel. Working as I do, I’d learned a few rules about the Scar and one of them was that there was always some rich asshole who would pay by the title length for something as thick as this.
I sighed, glanced out the tent at Daiga’s corpse. It had been two hours since I cut him open and laid him out upon his robes. Congeniality was digesting by the ruined wall of the fort. The morning sun would be an afternoon sun in another two hours.
It wouldn’t be long now.
I pried up the mattress of the bed, found a stack of papers, and pulled them up. But it was what lay beneath them, the glint of amber, that made me grin. From the little space he had carved in the bed frame, I pulled out a bottle of whiskey—the good stuff, Avonin before he became Avonin & Sons; the old man must have been saving it for a special occasion. Dying seemed as special as any.
I leaned back on the bed, took a swig, and unfolded the first paper.
For the regarded eyes of Professor ki Yanturi,
Consider this our final offer of clemency. It is only through the infinite wisdom of Empress Athura, Fourteenth of Her Name, and the considerable mercies of her son, Impending Emperor Althoun, Third of His Name, that we are even extending an invitation to a Vagrant such as yourself.
Your concerns regarding Althoun’s magical capabilities have been noted, but his bloodline remains pure and his claim legitimate. We urge you to reconsider your treasonous acts and return to the capital.
Keep in mind that nothing like this has been offered to other Vagrants. And even among others of your deplorable calling, your crimes of sedition, extortion, misuse of Imperial knowledge and more, have been especially heinous. Yet the Empress still recalls the counsel you provided and the wisdom you offered and is willing to offer you this final chance to redeem yourself, denounce the actions of the Dogsjaw Rebellion, take the Oath, and return to Imperial service.
I hope, for your sake, that you consider this and return to Cathama.
Not what I had come to find.
It was signed by a suitably lengthy and pompous title and branded with the Imperial seal. I had pulled a dozen or more of these letters from the bodies of Vagrants I had killed. It’s true that Vagrants aren’t loved in the Scar and that no one has a hatred for her former subjects like the Imperium does. But it’s also true that they hate nuls more than they hate traitors, so there were always letters like this tossed out to Vagrants in the hopes of tempting them back to fight the Revolution.
I crumpled it up, tossed it, flipped open the next one.
Darling,
How shall I compare you,
Eyes wide and pure and so cruelly given,
To witness a world unfit,
Mouth so pure and voice so soft,
To speak the unkindness of…
… fuck.
I’ve spent hours trying to figure out the next verse. But it all sounds so… banal, so wretched. You loved poetry. It was how we met, remember? Together, in Professor ki Malchai’s class. Do you still love it, I wonder? Or does it just make you sick, like everything else you used to love about me?
I’m not going to beg your forgiveness. I am an oathbreaker. I’ve done terrible things out here in this barbarous realm. But I shall beg you, for the sake of Mathenica, take the money I’ve sent. My name has brought you undeserved shame, I know. But she’s so frail and the Imperium isn’t helping so
Not that one, either.
I crumpled the page up and threw it away, too. With much more urgency than the first.
I had pulled a few letters like that from Vagrants, too. Much fewer and most of them weren’t that well written. But reading them always made a cold, sick feeling rise up in my gut. I didn’t like knowing these sorts of things about them, their families, their troubles.
Made it harder to kill them.
I took another swig of whiskey—much deeper—and unfurled the last letter.
And that cold, sic
k feeling went away.
And a feeling much colder, much sicker, much more painful replaced it.
I had found what I was looking for.
Daiga—
Last chance. Meet us.
—Jindu
Jindu.
I couldn’t hear my heart, my breath, the sounds of starving birds in the dead trees or the cold wind through ruins. I could hear nothing but that name, carving itself inside my head.
I forced my eyes away, down the page. The letter went on in a series of numbers and letters and symbols that made me sick just to look at. A code, obviously. I didn’t want to read it. I didn’t even want to touch it.
So you might have thought it was crazy to fold it neatly up and slide it back into my satchel. I wouldn’t have blamed you.
But I wouldn’t have told you why, either.
Not until I had drunk the rest of this whiskey. And maybe one or two more bottles for good measure.
And I was on my way to doing just that when I heard it. Coming from far away, a faint sound like a whistle dying on a breeze that didn’t exist. It grew in my ears and led me out of the tent. I heard it like a child hears music for the first time, strange and weird and wonderful. I heard it like the moment I finally understood all those sappy, romantic operas I used to hate. I heard it like the moment my mother first said my name.
Everyone has their own way of describing how the Lady Merchant’s song sounds.
It had already begun by the time I emerged. Daiga’s corpse was stiff as a blade and hovering a good three feet over the robes I had laid him out on. He hung there for a moment before his eyes snapped wide open. His mouth gaped in a soundless scream. All that came out was a great bright flash of purple. It poured out of his mouth, out of his eyes, lighting up the daylight with an eerie glow.
And then his skin curled and withered away just like that burned paper. Slowly, his limbs and his torso and his head all seemed to bend and wrinkle up until he simply disintegrated. He fell, unceremoniously, upon the robes, a mess of purple powder. All that remained of him when she took him.
The price for magic is steep. And in the end, when you’re finally called back, she takes everything.
And all that’s left behind is the Dust.
There are theories on where the mages go when she takes them back, what she does with them. I don’t read them. Whatever use she has for them is hers. But the Dust she leaves behind? Well, there are plenty of uses for that. Bleakbrews, luckweaves, any number of things dirty people would pay clean money for.
I pulled a jar, carefully wrapped in burlap, from my satchel. And, slowly, carefully, folding the edges of the robe to make a funnel, I emptied the Dust into it. In the end, the jar was just big enough for what Daiga’s body left behind. A poor funeral, I know, to end up in a jar instead of a family tomb, but tombs were ostentatious wastes of spaces. Out here in the Scar, everything’s in demand and there’s no such thing as a senseless death.
I wrapped the jar back in the burlap, careful to make sure it was layered enough not to crack on the way back. And when it was done, I rifled through his clothes until I found it. My fingers grazed upon something sharp and came back bleeding. I reached back in and found a hilt.
For everything else Vagrants cast off when they turned traitor—their old names, their old loyalties, their old friendships—this is the one thing from their service to the Imperium that they keep. The Imperial Dagger, the first thing they were given when they enlisted and all they really leave behind when the Lady Merchant takes them.
So, yeah, if you thought I’d be an asshole for planning to hock this for a lot of money, I wouldn’t hold it against you.
SIX
LOWSTAFF
No one’s really sure what the Imperial blades are made of. It’s a secret that their wrights take to the grave. Some say they’re made out of Dust, layered and hammered together. Others say they’re the carved and fire-hardened bones of mages, the few that the Lady Merchant leaves behind. Some, still, think it’s a raw form of severium.
Whatever they’re made of, they make a very unique sound when you drop them. And even though they’re roughly half the size of a man’s palm, they sound like a two-ton weight when they fall to the ground. It’s a sound that immediately commands attention.
The kind of attention that Staff Sergeant Revo Courageous paid me when I burst into the offices of his Cadre Command, brushed off his Revolutionary guards, and impaled the Dagger right on his desk.
Then he looked up at me and lofted a hairy, irritated brow.
“I specifically recalled instructing the recruits to empty the trash today. Yet, here it seems to have walked right back in.”
The Cadre’s offices were sparsely furnished, poorly lit, and sweltering from windows too small to let in light and doors too thick to let breeze in. And Sergeant Courageous was the sort of man who thrived in those conditions. Brawny, thick in ways that his blue officer’s coat had trouble containing, and possessed of a mustache that was more insect than facial hair, Courageous had given the best years of his life fighting Imperials and Vagrants across the Scar and had been amply rewarded by the Revolution with an uncomfortable chair and a nice sea of menial paperwork to slowly suffocate under.
I made it a point not to stop in freeholds too often, let alone freeholds on the ass end of civilization like Lowstaff. But there were certain things you could only get done in a city like this, which meant you occasionally ran into people like Courageous.
As I had.
Several times.
And if you’ve been paying attention to what I’ve been telling you, that should explain why he was looking at me like he was mentally fitting me for a noose.
“Yeah, well.” I reached into my cloak. “I was in the neighborhood.”
Courageous stiffened. The two guards flanking his desk—a tall fellow with short-cropped hair and a nice face and a short woman with a scowl—readied their gunpikes. I held up my free hand for peace as I withdrew a folded-up slip of paper and slid it across the desk.
“And I know how you love surprises,” I said with a grin.
“I hate surprises,” Courageous muttered, but he took the paper anyway. He unfurled it, ran his eyes over the big letters reading DEATH WARRANT at the top, and snorted. “So. The Phantom is dead.”
“You make it sound so mundane, Courageous.” I leaned forward on his desk with one hand, painted a headline across the air with the other. “Daiga the Phantom, Vagrant and Murderer, Bandit and Outlaw, Foe of the Revolution, the Imperium and Haven alike, took his seat at the black table after being heroically hunted down in a vicious battle with local heroine and incredibly brilliant and attractive manhunter, Sal the Cacophony.” I shot him a grin fit for eating shit. “Now, doesn’t that sound more dramatic?”
“Ostentatious. And you used ‘hunted’ and ‘manhunter’ in the same sentence. Repetitive.”
Courageous read a lot of books. That’s probably why he was so angry all the time.
“A more appropriate headline would be: ‘Local miscreant is annoying, decides to interrupt important Revolutionary business, gets paid, and then leaves and hopefully gets run over by a passing carriage and/or drinks herself to death somewhere where I don’t have to deal with the corpse.’”
“Hmm.” I scratched my chin, considering. “It doesn’t mention how pretty I am, but it’s got the important part covered.”
“Did you notice the way I gave you a variety of ways to die? I thought that was a nice touch.”
“Yeah, you’ve always been straightforward, Courageous.” I plucked the Dagger off the desk, flipped it across my knuckles like a coin. “Which is why I know that Daiga wasn’t just some common outlaw you could have sent a patrol after.” I leaned forward, held it up in front of him. “Even if he hadn’t killed dozens of your soldiers and robbed your stores, he was still an Imperial. One of their very best, in fact. Even if he did go Vagrant, his very existence in your domain was an insult, a stain on your record you just coul
dn’t scrub clean.”
Courageous was the kind of man who had a face great for killing and bad for playing cards. His mouth twisted into a scar beneath his mustache. His brows furrowed at my every word. And this little vein on his forehead that seemed to show up whenever I was around looked like it was about to pop.
“Fortunately, you’ve got a nice lady like me to go take care of all that for you.” I flipped the Dagger up, caught it by its hilt. “So why don’t you just pay me what I’m owed for doing your dirty work and you can go tell Weiless whatever the hell you want about how he got killed in your big official report.”
I know all about the Revolution’s precious ethics. They’ve got a thousand rules handed down from their Great General on what to plant, what to eat, how to fuck, whatever. And right up at the top, just below “kill all counterrevolutionaries” is “do not consort with Vagrants,” like me. But you don’t get to live through as many battles as Courageous had without being a practical man.
And a practical man doesn’t have ethics; he has jobs. And somehow, they’ve got to get done.
And so it was that he took a deep breath. His mouth straightened out. His brows relaxed. An icy professionalism settled over his face. That vein in his head stayed just as big, though, which is how I knew I still had the upper hand here.
“For the elimination of an enemy of the Glorious Revolution of the Fist and Flame”—he forced the words out like they took a tooth with each syllable—“hereby witnessed and sanctioned by an officer of the Cadre, I am authorized to offer the sum of twenty thousand notes.”
“Notes?” Given that I was surrounded by men and women who all had more steel than I did and fewer compunctions about turning it on me, I probably shouldn’t have laughed quite as loud as I did. “As kind as you are to offer me your Revolution’s paper money, I’m afraid I have no particular need to wipe my ass at the moment. Hence”—I clicked my tongue—“I’m going to have to insist on metal.”
Courageous’s mustache twitched. “How much?”
