by Sam Sykes
“He was carrying a message,” I said. “Coded. I can’t read a word of it.”
“That’s usually the purpose of a code, yes,” Liette replied in an I’ve-never-been-punched-in-the-face tone of voice. “If it were a Revolutionary or Imperial letter, I assume you’d be busy extorting them right now.”
“Right, but since I’m hoping to extort you, it’s Vagrant business,” I replied. “If it were any normal code, I’d have gone to any normal thug. But it’s magic.” I extended the paper to her. “And I need a wright.”
Her mouth pursed into a thin line, eyes widening at the word I had just uttered. Being a Freemaker had earned her the ire of every faction, but being a Spellwright marked her for death. The art was blasphemous to Haven, profane to the Revolution, and high treason to the Imperium. A Freemaker in town, one might simply ignore as a harmless eccentric. Someone who practiced wrighting was a criminal.
And yet…
She stared at the paper for a good long moment, unable to take her eyes away from it. Anyone else would have seen it as just cause for throwing me out. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She had sworn an oath to collect all the knowledge in the world she could.
And I always knew she couldn’t resist a challenge.
She took the paper, held it between her hands, and eyed it with hungry intent. Her hands shook; then the rest of her followed as she let out a sigh that pulled her stare down.
“Sal…”
She spoke my name. Not cursed it, not screamed it, just… said it. And I almost didn’t hear what she said next.
“I… I don’t know.”
I would have asked why. I would have begged or pleaded or tried to trick her. I’m pretty good at some of those things.
“We know how this starts,” she whispered, looking away from me. “And I know how it ends. It’s never just Vagrant business or any kind of business, favor or not. I just don’t…” She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
But I couldn’t trick someone as smart as her. I couldn’t beg or plead with someone who would give me what I wanted if I did. And I couldn’t have asked why. Because she just might have told me the answer.
And so I just nodded. And I slid the paper back into my belt and adjusted my scarf around my neck. And I looked toward the stairs and thought about how many steps I would have to force myself to walk without looking back before I could pretend I hadn’t ever thought this would have been a good idea.
And that’s when she grabbed my wrist.
I looked back, but she wasn’t looking at me. Not at my face, anyway. Her eyes went lower, past my shirt and vest and down to my midsection. And they went wide.
“What the hell happened?” she demanded.
“With what?” I glanced down toward the expanse of bare and scarred skin. “My shirt? I guess it’s a little tacky, but it’s fucking hot out there.”
“Not that, you dumbshit.”
She pulled my scarf away, exposing my side and the purple-black bruise blossoming across it like a dead flower. She thrust an accusing finger at it.
“That.”
“Oh. That.”
I meant to say something more clever, but the truth is I hadn’t even noticed. Luckwritten material can keep an arrow—even one shot from a thunderbow—from going through your lungs, but it still hurts like hell when it hits you. It’s not the first time I’ve been bruised by a blow that would have otherwise killed me. Hell, I walk out of the Scar with worse than that almost every day.
Which was why I thought it slightly odd when Liette looked up at me with absolute fury in her eyes.
“If that shot had hit you, you’d be dead,” she growled in a voice patently unused to growling.
“Most shots do that, yeah. But it was only an arrow. The scarf’s magic held out and—”
“I didn’t fucking give that scarf to you so you could go treating it like a fucking suit of armor, you shit.” She thrust a hand toward me. “Hand it over.”
My eyebrows shot up. There were only two things I could ever do to make Liette curse and one of them was mistreating her work. All the same, I slipped it off and handed it over.
She held it up, looked it over with a gaze that was less scrutinizing and more obsessed. She flipped it over in her hands, searching every thread for weakness.
“It’s perfect,” she muttered. “Nothing out of place, no holes, no rips. It shouldn’t leave a mark like that.”
“I mean, it kept me from dying. That’s something.”
“It’s supposed to keep you from getting hurt, dumbass.” She whirled on me with a snarl that turned to a wince as she looked down at my midriff and beheld the full extent of the bruise. “Fuck me, that’s bad.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
“Who’s the fucking doctor here?”
I blinked. “Neither of us?”
“Well, if I was a little dumber, I would be one, so hold the fuck still.”
True, I sometimes forgot she was a lady. But in fairness, she rarely bothered to remind anyone. But she was also a Freemaker—any perceived flaw with one of her creations was an insult deeper than the human language had words for. How I’d forgotten that, I’ll never know. But she was quick to remind me as she knelt down before me and placed her hands on my skin.
I bit back the shudder that ran through me. I’ve been shot, stabbed, strangled, and one time, beaten with a fish. I wouldn’t let it be said that Sal the Cacophony trembled when a girl touched her.
“Look at this fucking mess,” she muttered, delicately running hands around my bruise, inspecting it. In another moment, though, I didn’t tremble at all. My body remembered these hands, these delicate fingers sliding across my skin. And for the first time in a long time, I felt my muscles relax, felt the tension slide off me like a weight.
I felt safe.
“How do you manage to do that, Sal?” Her voice trailed softer as her hand trailed lower. She found a scar at my hip, a great gash that had healed badly, traced its edge with careful fingers. “How the hell…”
She looked up at me. I looked down at her.
And what I saw was empty of anger or spite or all the things she had been pretending not to feel. What I saw was the girl with the coy smile she never showed anyone else and the big eyes that no one ever had the nerve to look into.
And she was looking at me.
And smiling softer than anyone I’d ever seen.
“How does someone as clever as you manage to hurt yourself this much?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I didn’t have any words for her then. I’m sure they were there somewhere, hidden away in some rehearsed place I had planned to bring them out of when I met her, but I just… couldn’t remember them. I couldn’t remember how to do much of anything except slide my hands down to meet hers.
I took her fingers in mine, pulled her gently to her feet. Her eyes met mine, staring up at me just as much as she needed to as one of her hands slipped away, slid down my side, and found the scars painted there. They didn’t hurt, not when she touched them. Not even when her other hand slid up to my cheek, traced fingers across the jagged line crossing my eye and…
If you’re lucky, you meet a lot of people you like enough to touch them. If you’re really lucky, you meet a few who you like enough to let them touch you back. But if you’re very lucky, you meet that one person who touches you in a way that makes you feel like you’re standing up a little straighter, like you’re breathing a little clearer, like you were walking hunched over your whole life and you didn’t even know it.
And if you’re smart, you’ll hold on to that for as long as you can.
But if you’re me, you know that’s not very long at all.
Just like I knew it had been a mistake when she drew away from me and smiled. Just like I knew that I’d do it again, just like I always would, for as long as I could. Just like I knew I was going to regret this.
She buried that smile in my shoulder, pulled close to me, whispered in my ear.
/>
“You smell terrible.”
NINE
LOWSTAFF
Now, it’s true that the Freemakers have invented the world’s deadliest weapons of destruction that have, in turn, been directly responsible for the millions of gallons of blood that have watered this cold land and the carpet of corpses it wears like a cloak.
But it’s also true that one of them invented the shower, so it kind of evens out, right?
Don’t get me wrong, killing is bad and all. But fuck, there’s just something about the shiver of nerves as the bronze pipes rattle and the first drops come out to wash off all the dust and the blood and the grime that I’ve worn like a second and then a third skin.
Once I get the water on my scars and my fingers in my hair, I stop feeling like a Vagrant for just a few minutes and I get to feel like a person again.
But nothing good lasts, does it? Whiskey runs out. Blood runs dry. Lovers fall asleep before you do. And, sure as birds eat rabbits, water turns cold.
I’ve walked through rainstorms and sleet and not felt a thing, but fuck me if the first cold drops after the hot water’s run out don’t send me leaping. I damn near broke my neck as I fumbled around for the bronze chain that turns the thing off. The pipes stopped rattling. The hiss of steam fell silent.
Liette didn’t have to let me use her facilities—though I suspect she would rather have me do that than hang around whatever smells I had picked up. The tiny, tiled room had a bronze spigot and a bronze chain up top, separated by a wooden wall on one side and a vanity and toilet on the other. There were freehold barons with money to burn who didn’t have rooms like this in their homes. While the invention of toilets had been shared—mostly out of concern for public hygiene—the Freemakers still hoarded the showers for themselves.
And their friends, of course.
My feet slapped across the wet tile as I went to the vanity. I looked myself over long enough to press my hair into place with my palms and make sure I wasn’t bleeding from anywhere I hadn’t noticed. But I didn’t see any blood in my reflection. I didn’t see anything except long stretches of skin, the tattoos of birds and clouds and thunder racing up my arms and shoulders.
And my scars.
I tried not to look at them, but it didn’t matter. Even without looking, I could feel them: knotted flesh mapping my sides, clawing their way down my legs, and the biggest one slithering from my collarbone down to my belly. No matter how I tried to hide them beneath my tattoos, they were always there. They were like living things; sometimes they felt like they were crawling across my body.
I watched my body in the mirror, the scars moving with each breath. They were harder to look at when I was clean. Under a layer of dirt and blood, they felt like just more grime from the road. Clean as they were now, they felt new, freshly carved.
My eyes settled on one crawling across my side. And if I stared at it long enough, I could almost see the blade bursting through my body again.
My hand shot out without me realizing it, sending the vanity spinning as I stalked away from it and back to my pile of clothes.
I was almost reluctant to put them back on, my shirt and trousers and vest still reeking of grime. But as nice as this was, I had a lot to do that day.
And as soon as I knew exactly what it was I needed to do, I intended to get right to it.
I eased the bath door open. Far and away from either the organized carnage of her workshop or the haphazard knowledge of her parlor, Liette’s bedroom was a quiet, modest affair. Just a reclining sofa, a few treasured pieces of art hanging on the wall, a few nice clothes in a nice dresser, and a large, silk-sheeted bed that I tried to avoid looking at.
Even here, though, there were books.
I did my time in Cathama, so I’m literate, of course. But like most sane people, I only read sane things: operas, gazettes, trashy action novels, and so forth. Liette, though, saved her best books for her bedroom. The thickest, most polished ones lay neatly organized on tables, on sofas, and on the dresser was one particularly hefty one bound in black leather.
The Emperor’s Last Whisper, I recognized.
Because I had given it to her.
Just one more thing to avoid looking at, I supposed. Seemed her home was full of them.
I fell silent as I approached the parlor, stopping in the doorway as I saw her standing there. In the middle of the chaos of pages and leather, she stood, unaware of me watching. Unaware of what she was looking at.
In her hands, she held my scarf, staring at its threads. She raised it hesitantly, like it was made of harsh edges instead of cotton. Slowly, she wrapped it around her shoulders, drew in a deep breath, and smiled.
I remembered the first time she did that. I remember she had asked me what kind of woman I was that I would need such protection. I remember I told her I was an honest woman who ran into a bit of trouble now and again.
The very first lie I told her.
Not the last.
And, if there was going to be any solace about what happened next today, I told myself that at least it wouldn’t be the worst lie I had ever told her.
I eased the door shut, then cleared my throat loudly, gave her plenty of time to know I was coming. And when I opened the door again and strode into her parlor, my scarf was draped over the chair across from her and her eyes were on a book laid out upon the table.
And next to it, a simple scrap of paper I had plucked out of a dead man’s belongings.
“It’s too much to hope that you didn’t use all my hot water, I take it?” Liette asked without looking up.
“There’s a lot of ways I could disappoint you,” I said as I plucked up my scarf and took a seat. “And since I’m not dragging dead men to your door or using your house for a shootout, I’d say using your hot water is doing pretty good.”
“Mmm.” She regarded me over the rim of her spectacles. “You always were considerate like that.”
“Well, I’m pretty, too, but let’s not get distracted.” I leaned forward, glancing at the paper on the table. “Have you figured it out?”
Her answer was a thoughtful hum. Daiga’s missive, the one signed by Jindu, sprawled out as a list of indecipherable gibberish surrounded by a small circle of inkwells, pouches, and quills. One of Liette’s dainty fingers traveled down it, sigil by sigil, tapping at the end of it.
“It’s by a Freemaker. Another wright,” she said. “The sigils belong to A Frustrated Author Burns His House at Midnight.”
I raised my brows, impressed. “That’s a long name. He must be pretty important.”
“I can’t tell if you’re sarcastic or ignorant.”
“Me neither.” I gestured to the inkwells. “Those are his, too, then?”
“No,” Liette replied. “These were a gift.”
I stiffened up in the chair without realizing it. “From who?”
She glanced at me. That ghost of a smile tugged at her lips. “Not important,” she said, knowing damn well it was. “You were right, though. It’s not a code. It’s magic, only readable by those it’s meant for.” She plucked out a handful of dust from one of her pouches, scattered it over the letters. “Or by those smarter than the wright who made it.”
One by one, the letters winked to life, alight with a dim glow. The paper twitched, as if alive, as a faint humming noise drifted out of it. She tapped one sigil with a finger and it let out a single, dulcet tone that sang out a word.
“Come…”
“Singing script,” I muttered. “I thought that was a lost art.”
“It is,” Liette replied. “To everyone outside the Imperium, that is. And me, of course. And whoever wrote this. And possibly one or two other spellwrights I don’t know about but, beyond that, it is absolutely a lost art.”
She rapped her fingers across the other sigils. In a melodic song, they rang out a quiet tune.
“Come to us. We will be at Stark’s Mutter, Sixth Harvest. You were spurned from the Imperium, hunted by the dogs of the false
Emperor. We grant you the opportunity to take it all back. Your art. Your life. Your Imperium. Come to us. We shall be waiting.”
“Curious,” Liette hummed. “Stark’s Mutter is only ten miles from here. And Sixth Harvest was two days ago. I hadn’t heard of anything coming out of there, but…”
Her voice drifted off as she realized I wasn’t listening. My eyes were locked on the paper. My ears were full of the letter’s voice. A voice I hadn’t thought I’d hear ever again.
Until I put a blade through the mouth that spoke it.
Two days ago. I had missed him by just two days. If I had been a little faster in tracking down Daiga, if I had broken a few more skulls, burned a few more houses. Fuck what they’d say about me.
But I had missed the date. And there was no changing that. I tried telling myself that, tried to remain calm. It didn’t work.
“Does it say for what?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Just the date, the location, and the—”
She didn’t fall silent. Normal people fall silent; they go quiet when they’re scared of what they’ll say next. Liette’s not a normal person. When she goes silent, she puts both boots down and doesn’t fucking move.
“And what?”
Unless someone moves her.
“And what, Liette?”
“Sal…” Her voice was soft as petals falling from a dead flower. “Why did you come to me?”
“To find out what was in the letter and—”
“No, why did you come to me?”
I paused, stared at her. “Because you’re the best.”
“I am not just the best.” She stared at her dainty little hands on the table. “I am brilliant. Brilliant enough to know that nothing else in this letter will make you happy. Let me tell you to take your gun and your bullets and send you on your way. Go on shooting, killing, drinking, gambling. Come back when you’re out of money, out of whiskey, out of luck, whatever. I’ll give you more bullets and we can go on pretending that’s all we do to each other.”
She had a way with words, Liette. You’d expect as much from a woman with a name as long as hers. And she was as smart as you’d expect from a woman with as many books as she had. And I knew that, if I were even half as smart as she was, I’d have taken her advice, taken my bullets, and gone on my merry way.
