by Sam Sykes
You might have wondered why I was grinning at that statement. That is, if you knew her like I knew her.
Of course, you probably did know her. Or know of her anyway.
You probably heard about the time the Magnificently Impenetrable Vaults of Weiless were melted open with the aid of a potent acid. That was hers. Maybe you heard when the freehold Riverwild held off an Imperial squadron with arrows that exploded with the force of cannons. That was hers, too. And I know you haven’t heard of the freehold Chatterwise, on account of it disintegrating to nothingness in the span of half an hour one fine spring morning, but that was her work as well.
The Revolutionary, the Imperial, and the common dope alike have all heard of the Freemaker whose concoctions have caused so much disaster across the Scar. She had many names. You probably knew her professional one.
They called her Twenty-Two Dead Roses in a Chipped Porcelain Vase.
Fancy, right? All the Freemakers have names like that. But when I first met her, she gave me a different one.
“Liette.” I still liked the sound of it better. “I missed you, too.”
I shot her a wink. And, by the look on her face, she would have preferred I shot her with a gun. She turned her glowering attentions to the work on her bench.
“If that were true, you would have had the decency to walk into more than one of my traps on your way down here,” she grumbled.
“I doubt that,” I replied.
“And when have I ever been dishonest?”
“Frequently.”
“I meant dishonest with you.”
“Frequently.” She glared at me over the rims of her glasses. “I have no doubts that you missed my expertise, Sal. Whether you missed my company, I have concerns.”
“Can’t it be both?” I dared to lay a hand on her bench, my fingers brushing hers. “No one can do for me what you can.”
They were permitted to linger there, under a wistful stare, for just a moment before she pulled them away.
“Any Freemaker can tend to the needs of your firearm, no matter how exotic you consider it to be.”
“Well, sure, but no one cares as much as you do.” I leaned an elbow on the workbench. She pointedly pushed my elbow off the workbench. I put my bag on it instead and ignored the death glare she gave me. “The Cacophony likes you. He always aims better after you take care of him.”
At that, she flashed me a look. Not a smile. Liette didn’t have a lot of smiles to spare in the first place, and she had wasted many of them on me a long time ago. But there was the barest tremble of her lips, the ghost of a grin I had once known very well before I killed it.
“Weapons don’t have emotions,” she said.
“They do when you’re done with them.”
“And I don’t have time to spare. What do you want, Sal?”
“I need some help with something.”
“Many people do. Such as the people who meet you. Though, typically, that help consists of medical aid or compensation for property damage.” She continued scribing that peculiar script along the dagger, narrowing her eyes. “As I have no intent of indulging either, I must insist you depart before—”
“Third law.”
That got her attention. She shot bolt upright, fingers clenching around her quill so tightly it snapped, and the angry look she shot me was the sort of thing you usually save for men talented enough to urinate across the gravestones of your mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all at the same time.
She always hated when I invoked the Laws of the Freemakers.
While they were strictly independent, managing a collective of the most brilliant and least inhibited creators in the Scar did require some order. And while their beloved Laws were labyrinthine and indecipherable enough to be created by a group of renegade alchemists, machinists, and wrights, the first seven were easy enough to remember.
Like my personal favorite, the third.
“All debts between a Freemaker and anyone providing assistance to the Cause must be honored by the Freemaker,” I said, leaning forward with a smile even I would punch off my face. “I’m sure I’ve done enough for you to warrant that. Remember when I obtained that forbidden tome of Imperial script for you?”
“Stole,” she corrected. “You stole it. And that was repaid by me providing you with enough ammunition for your weapon to decimate a small township. Which you did.”
“What about the time I killed those bandits who burned down your last workshop?”
“Repaid by me healing your heat-induced injuries after you burned down their hideout, along with my research they stole.”
“What about that one baron’s carcass you wanted?”
She looked wounded. “You said that was a gift.”
“Well,” I sighed. “I suppose it’s a good thing I brought you something, then, isn’t it?”
“Not an apology, I would wager.”
I would have been insulted. But, in fairness, I was an asshole.
“Something better,” I said.
I peeled back the leather flap of the satchel. She glanced up as soon as she saw the glint of glass. I grinned, took my time in revealing it. I couldn’t resist a dramatic reveal. Still, once I pulled out that thick glass jar brimming with fine purple powder, I knew by the look on her face that it had been worth it.
See, there’s only two things in this world that a Freemaker loves more than secrecy: something she doesn’t understand and something that can be turned into an explosive. And there’s only one thing in the world that can give her both, and Liette, slack-jawed, wide-eyed, and fumbling for words she had long forgotten, was looking at a whole jar of it.
There’s good money in finding ingredients for Freemakers. But most scavengers are too smart or too scared to kill Vagrants. The amount of Dust I set in front of Liette could easily bring in twenty femurs, minimum, from any other Freemaker. After all we’d been through, she’d throw a fit if I asked for that much.
Of course, when she found out what I was after, she’d throw something worse. Probably at my head.
But that was a problem for later. Right now, I was watching her little hands pick up the jar, the need for delicacy fighting the need for discovery. Right now, I was watching her awe magnified behind her glasses as she looked over the jar, mentally weighing how much Dust was in there, how many wondrous things she could make with it. Right now, she was the timid little thing that I had met so long ago, the girl with the coy smile who had asked me for the most expensive drink in the tavern after I had tracked mud on her skirts.
I couldn’t help but smile.
And once she saw that, she couldn’t help but frown. She plucked up the jar of Dust and carried it over to a nearby footlocker. It looked almost too big for her. She had always been slight, but her clothes—her oil-stained trousers and high-necked, long-sleeved shirt—hung a little looser off her than I remembered. She hadn’t been eating enough. Or sleeping enough. Or both.
I probably had something to do with one of those.
But if I asked which, there’d be trouble. So I kept my mouth shut as she set the jar inside her locker and produced a small leather case, rattling with the telltale ring of metal as she set it down in front of me. I lifted the flap, smiled at the three dozen silver slugs that smiled back at me. Across their casings, I could see the spells written: Hoarfrost, Hellfire, Sunflare, Shockgrasp, all my favorites.
“Three dozen,” I said, glancing up at her. “You like me, don’t you?”
“I was going to keep some in reserve for the next time you decided to trouble me,” she said. “But I consider that adequate payment for what you’ve just given me.” She sat herself back down at the workbench, cast me a final glance, returned to her work. “If that’s all, you can go. Try to stumble into one of the traps on your way out.”
“Oh, that’s not all.” I held up a finger. “I said I had something for you, didn’t I?”
“But you just—”
“That was for busine
ss,” I said, sliding the bullets into my satchel and pulling something else out instead. “This is for you.”
Now, it’s certainly not true for every woman, but the ones I have had the good fortune to know in my life have all followed this rule.
If you need a favor, you bring her flowers.
If you need her forgiveness, you bring her jewelry.
And if you need both, you bring her a book.
And if that sounds stupid to you, then you’ve never seen someone’s face light up as Liette’s did when I pulled out Eduarme’s Third Study of the Natural Laws and Counter-Complexities of the Scar and laid it before her. Her eyes went big, but her mouth went small. When I showed her the Dust, she had been alive with wonder and intrigue. But when I gave her the book?
She was hungry.
“That’s…” She paused, visibly resisted the urge to lick her lips. “That’s a very rare text.” She looked up at me, scorn gone and replaced with that hungry stare. “Where did you get it?”
“Found it,” I said.
A lie, and she knew it. But not the biggest lie I had ever told her. Not even the biggest lie I would tell her today, and she knew that, too. But she also knew that if I had brought her a book, it meant I had a big problem. And so she took it, held it tightly to her chest, and asked me once more, with a weary sigh that had broken my heart the first time I had heard it.
“What do you want, Sal?”
And I smiled. And I leaned over the workbench. And I tried not to think about what an asshole I was.
And I told her.
EIGHT
LOWSTAFF
I haven’t had a place to call my own in many years. There’s a lot I miss from it—my own bed, a door I could close, baths—but what I miss most was having walls to decorate.
That might sound odd, I guess, but there’s something satisfyingly… apparent about hanging yourself on a wall. Be it a trophy taken from war, a great beast, or just a really nice picture, what you put on your walls is your declaration to the world, the words you speak to whoever can hear you.
In Liette’s case, those words were probably something like: If it were possible to make love to books, I would.
Downstairs, Liette’s shop was neatly organized and pleasingly sparse. Upstairs, Liette’s parlor was a madwoman’s design.
Every wall was lined with shelves and every shelf was positively bursting with books. Some of them were crammed to the breaking point, some of them sagged in the middle from the weight of heavy tomes, some of them just gave the fuck up. Books grew in piles and columns across the carpeted floor, a forest of paper and leather that seemed to blossom out of the floor. Books, opened and pages marked, lay in a haphazard spread across the table in the middle of the room and upon the armrests of the sofa facing it.
There was probably some order to it—there always was, with Freemakers—but I couldn’t even begin to fathom it. Absently, I reached down to the nearest precarious tower of books and plucked off the top volume and flipped it open to a random word on a random page.
“What the fuck is a”—I squinted, trying to sound it out—“duo… duode…”
“Duodenum,” a voice spoke from the next room. “It’s the first part of the intestines in most creatures, immediately after the stomach. Prone to ulcers, it’s where the principal digestive process begins.” I could feel her smirk through the walls. “Are you reading Agarne’s Intermediate Anatomy?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I know what arrests your attention,” she replied. “And that one has naked people on the cover.”
“Maybe I wanted to brush up on my…” I glanced at the cover. A man in the midst of dissection stared back at me. “Dead… guys.” I cringed. “Are you going to be much longer in there?”
“You requested a drink.”
“I thought you’d have finally gotten around to putting a liquor cabinet in here,” I said. “It’d be nicer for guests anyway. You could make it fit if you took out one of these bookshelves.”
A deathly silence rose from the other room.
“If I preferred people to books, I suppose I could,” Liette replied, voice cold as a knife in the back.
The Freemakers assembled out of a desire to collect and share knowledge away from the prying eyes of factions who might use it for primitive means. As it was, they tended to value privacy and knowledge above most else.
Liette, as you might have guessed from a woman who keeps a killsaw in her basement, tended to value them above all else. She always preferred paper to people. People were noisome, demanding, judgmental. Books gave everything and asked nothing more than to be taken care of.
I found her priorities charming.
“But, as I am not completely fucking insane, I’ll keep the shelves, thank you.”
Others did not.
It probably would have been smarter to find another Freemaker. I knew a few—a few cheaper, a few less hostile, a few who might even be trusted not to betray me. But I wasn’t going to find anyone better.
Not for what I needed.
But it would have been smarter. Wiser. Kinder. This wasn’t the first time I had come to her, gift in my hand and smile on my lips. And it wouldn’t be the last time I left her, tears in her eyes and empty words in my mouth. People like us, we weren’t made for happy endings. Not with the sort of things we did.
It’s not too late, I told myself.
I ran through it in my head: don’t say another word, grab my belt, walk out the door, never look back. She wouldn’t take offense. Hell, she’d be grateful that I spared her the trouble of throwing me out. She wouldn’t curse my name; she wouldn’t mind me leaving without a word; she wouldn’t…
She wouldn’t go looking for me.
Not again.
It would be smarter to go. It would be wiser to find someone else to help me. It would be kinder to pretend this never happened.
And if you’ve ever met someone who makes you ignore the wise thing, the smart thing, and the kind thing to do, you’d know why I came to her.
“Pardon the wait.”
I turned. And I barely recognized the woman standing in the doorway.
It was Liette, of course. Same dark hair, same dark eyes, same pale skin, and same flat features. But the oil-stained clothes were replaced by an elegant, high-necked dress with skirt cut just above the tops of her black boots. The big glasses were gone, a pair of daintier spectacles resting on the bridge of her small nose. And the work gloves had been discarded, revealing the careful, delicate hands I tried hard not to look at.
She looked like a lady.
And I guess that sounds dumb when I say it, but fuck me, I sometimes forget she was one.
“I had to dig this one out of my dresser.” She approached with a pair of glasses in her hand, passed me one. “I don’t typically have cause to drink.”
“Then you don’t typically have cause to live,” I replied, taking the glass. I took a sip. My cheeks bulged with the taste of sweet tang as I looked down at the dark liquid within. I swallowed. “What kind of whiskey is this?”
She stared at me, blinked. “It’s wine.”
“Wine.” I paused, swirled my glass, sniffed. “So, do I just look like I’ve given up on life or was that an educated guess on your part?”
“It won’t kill you to experience a little culture.” She stared at me from over the edge of her glass as she sipped. “Given the swill you drink, I’d be astonished if anything could kill you.”
“If everyone thought like you, my life would be easier.”
“If everyone thought like me, the world would smell nicer, run better, and have significantly fewer morons in it.” She reached out for the glass. “If you don’t like it, though…”
I pulled it away, sipped it with greedy spite. It might be wine, but I’d not have it said that Sal the Cacophony ever refused a drink.
Liette rolled her eyes. “I take it, then,” she said, “your appearance here is related to someone believing they ca
n and should kill you. Daiga the Phantom, was it?”
I furrowed my brow. “How could you tell?”
“I hear things.”
I didn’t bother asking. I didn’t have to. All I had to do was wait, take a long sip of wine, and…
“Specifically, the clerk at Cadre Command is under my employ via a system of blackmail and carefully orchestrated incentive-based guidance.”
There it was.
“Of course, he suspected he could threaten me into coercion first,” she continued. “I insisted on rectifying the error in his thought and suspected it would be a better use of both of our time if he did so through providing me with information on the Revolution’s movements.”
I hid my smile behind my wineglass. Some people, I supposed, would find this sort of boasting distasteful. Personally, I had a certain professional admiration for anyone possessed of the kind of planning that could make the unbreakable Revolution bend to her will.
Also, when she brags, her voice gets all high-pitched and excited and it’s adorable.
“Well, shit,” I said, “look at you and your fancy little spies.”
“I could have used spies,” she replied, her voice sliding back to its usual careful flatness. “Or I could have just listened to literally anyone talking about the woman with the tattoos and scars who came in carrying a giant gun.”
And here I thought this was the kind of town that didn’t gossip.
“When you brought the Dust, that sealed it.” She folded her arms, swirled her glass as she looked me over. “You found something among Daiga’s possessions that you can’t drink, smoke, break, or sell, but not something you want to leave behind; hence you brought it to me.”
You might think, to listen to her, that Liette is exceptionally clever. And that’s true, but it’s also true that she happens to know me particularly well and also that she’s kind of an asshole. I wasn’t going to hold any of that against her now, though.
I drained the rest of my wine, set the glass aside as I pulled my scarf away and reached for my belt. I tugged a folded scrap of paper free, held it up between two fingers.
