by Sam Sykes
Except the boy.
“Get your hands off of her!”
He appeared beside the man, a foot shorter and a hundred pounds smaller. He appeared out of the darkness of that room and, with a tiny hand, struck the man across the cheek.
The man, much bigger than him, cringed away. He held up his arms before him, as though he expected worse from the boy, as though those skinny little arms could cleave through him. He backed away, whining apologies, until he slid into the darkness.
“Did he hurt you?” the boy asked me. His voice was softer back then.
I shook my head. He sighed.
“You can’t let the nuls touch you like that. It’s not what they’re supposed to do. Not to us.” I didn’t look up, but I knew he was smiling at me. “Don’t worry, I didn’t hurt him. We protect them, the nuls, the whole Imperium, really. And in exchange, they serve us. That’s how it’s always been. Mages protect. They must have sent you here because they knew you could protect people.”
I looked up enough to see his feet. A blade, way too big for someone so small, dragged on the floor behind him. He adjusted it, pulling his belt up around a tiny waist.
“They say I’ll grow into it,” he said. “But that it’s important to start training with it now. I guess it looks kind of silly right now, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t look up. I stared at my knees and kept crying. He shuffled his feet, adjusted his sword again.
“They don’t send you home. No matter how hard you cry. I’ve tried.”
I didn’t believe him. He hadn’t cried hard enough. I could.
“Do you… want to go get something to eat? The kitchens are closed, but they have to open up for mages.”
I shook my head.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
I nodded.
“Why don’t you want to go?”
“What if my mother and father come by when I’m gone? I have to wait here for them,” I said through tears.
“But they’re not…” He paused, drew in a breath. “Can I… wait here with you, then? Just so you’re not alone?”
I paused. I nodded. He sat down beside me. And together, we waited.
After he had sat down, but before I realized no one was coming to get me, I looked up at him. His face was soft. His eyes were bright. His smile, like his sword, was too big for him.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
I told him. And I asked him what his was.
And he reached out for my hand. And I took it. And I couldn’t remember when his fingers had turned to seven blackened blades or when they had punched through my skin or how so much blood was coming out of me. But when I looked back at him, his mouth was full of knives and his eyes were black pits and he spoke on a red river pouring down his chin.
“My name is Jindu.”
I woke up screaming. But I didn’t know that yet.
I couldn’t feel the sheets around my body, slick with my own sweat. And I couldn’t see the pale moonlight filtering in through the windows. And I didn’t know whose voice it was tearing out of my throat.
My head was still full of him. And when I woke up, I still saw those black pits where eyes should be. I still felt the seven blades embedded in my skin. I still smelled my own blood pouring out of me.
My scream became a roar as my hand became a fist. I lashed out, swinging at the shadows where he should have been. But everywhere I struck, he was still there. Still smiling with a mouth full of blood.
I swung again. A hand caught my wrist. Then the other. In the darkness, something caught a flash of light. And through my screaming, I heard a voice.
“SAL!”
I kept punching, but she didn’t flinch away. I kept screaming, but she didn’t stop crying out my name. It wasn’t until I felt a warmth other than my own fever-hot body that I finally slowed down.
She was atop me, holding my hands, her hair trailing down her face in messy strands. Her eyes still looked so big without her glasses, big enough that I could make them out in the darkness. She took my hands, trembling and shaking with every breath I took, and pressed them against her naked skin.
“Sal, it’s me,” Liette said. “It’s me. It’s me.”
She said that until her voice became a whisper and her body grew too heavy to stay up. She slowly slumped back down onto the bed beside me, one hand reaching around to pull me close, the other reaching up to stroke my hair.
She didn’t ask me what I had seen, nor tell me it wasn’t real. She did not speak anything but those two words, over and over, until my breath slowed down and the shadows stopped moving. She held me there and kissed my shoulder and pressed her brow against my body, until her breath took on a slow, slumbering rhythm.
I shut my eyes and tried to follow her. But across the room, I could feel another pair of eyes on me. Through the leather of his sheath, I could feel his brass burning, his heated scowl upon me. And though he had no tongue, I heard a voice in the darkness.
And he was laughing.
I shut that voice out best I could, along with the one that had followed me out of my head. I focused on her breathing, on the feel of her body next to mine, on that warmth that didn’t burn that radiated out of her. I held on to it as long as I could, as the night rolled on into eternity.
Day would come and bring with it ugly business. Tomorrow, I would leave her. If I was kind and she was lucky, I wouldn’t come back. If I was lucky and she was kind, she wouldn’t ask why. I had made a promise to that thing in the leather sheath, to that list with the names on it, and tomorrow I would see it fulfilled and them dead. She would live well without me.
Happy endings weren’t for people like us, her and me.
But as she pulled me closer and pressed her face into the hollow of my neck and I felt her breath on my skin…
Well, it was nice to pretend anyway.
Mercifully, I awoke to an empty bed. When the morning light filtered through the shutters of her window, there was only an empty tangle of sheets beside me. I don’t know if it was luck or some discreet deity looking over me and I couldn’t take the time to give thanks to either.
She hadn’t gone off to make breakfast, waiting for me to come out to the scent of cooking potatoes and eggs. We weren’t that kind of people. She had excused herself to some part of the house to give me an opportunity to leave without her being tempted to ask me a question, without me giving her a lie in response.
She had done me a kindness. I wouldn’t waste it.
I dressed quietly, tugging on my trousers and boots, pulling my shirt over my head and my vest around my torso. I belted my sword and satchel and snapped out my scarf until it was long enough to be a cloak and pulled it around me. For a moment, I almost pretended that I could leave without him.
But I felt him burning long before I reached the door.
I lingered there, staring at him as if I could just leave. Leave him and all the carnage we had wrought, that we still would wreak, behind. But I couldn’t do that to her. And I couldn’t break my promise.
We made a deal, he and I.
My hand trembled over his sheath, his heat bright even from here. Yet he cooled when I wrapped my fingers around his hilt and drew him free. The Cacophony stared at me through those brass eyes, his grin broad and his laughter silent. And without a word, he seemed to ask me.
Shall we?
I slid him back into his sheath. I strapped him to my waist. And together, we walked out the door to set about our black business.
I didn’t know whether it had been luck or some discreet deity that had been looking over me when I had awoken. But I was certain neither of them was around when I walked out that door and regarded the woman standing in the street before me, a dark light against the pale dawn.
Liette regarded me without a word as I shut the door to her shop. She was dressed for travel, clad in a tight vest over a long shirt, a skirt draped across leggings and boots. A belt, heavy with scrollcases and inkwells, hung from her hips. Her
hair had been pulled back in a severe bun, writing quills thrust in it and giving the illusion of a feathery halo behind her head. Gloved hands held the reins of a surly Congeniality, the bird letting out a low chirrup of displeasure at having been awoken before she could get her beauty sleep.
I didn’t look at her as I approached, stroked Congeniality’s neck, and fished out a dead rabbit from her saddlebags for her. Yet that didn’t stop Liette from looking at me.
“I awoke an hour ago,” she said. “I spent most of that time thinking about what I would say to convince you to stay, that chasing those names was insane.”
I grunted. “What’d you come up with?”
“Nothing that I had any reason to believe would work,” she replied. “After that, I briefly considered drugging you, rendering you comatose until a time when you could see reason.”
I nodded. “And?”
“And I doubted there would be such a time as you would ever see reason. Like a specialized predator, you have evolved to a point where you are immune to all forms of logic.” She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Also, given the rate and quality of your consumption, I had doubts that I had any alchemics powerful enough to subdue you.”
“Fair,” I said. “So how’d you arrive at trying to come along?”
“Sixth law,” she replied flatly.
Fuck, I thought. Is that the one where Freemakers are sworn to defend those who help them or the one where they’re sworn to kill those who wrong them?
“A contact of mine is in Stark’s Mutter,” she said. “I have to see to her safety. If that means keeping you alive while I do it, then it seems advantageous. And you will require a wright and you have no other options.”
“Not true,” I said. “I can find another wright—a wright I don’t mind getting hurt—and shoot or break them until they do what I want.”
“True,” she replied. “But not easily. And not quickly enough that those names wouldn’t get even farther away from you. You’re already two days behind them. You can’t afford to take the time to find an extra wright.” She looked at me carefully. “Nor the time it would take to fight me to the point where I couldn’t follow.”
I squinted at her, sizing her up. “I’m bigger than you.”
“You’re also wounded.”
“And I’m meaner.”
“I’m smarter.”
“I have a very large gun.”
“And if you’d like to end this right now, feel free to turn it on me.”
I stared at her for a very long time. And had I slept a little more or had at least a finger of whiskey, I’m sure I could have come up with a good retort to that. Or, at least, a better one than what I offered.
“Fucking fine,” I grumbled. I hauled myself up onto the saddle. Congeniality squawked at the sudden weight as I took the reins. “But you stay back when I tell you to stay back and when I tell you to go, you go.”
She nodded. “I will endeavor to—”
“You will,” I said. “Or you’ll stay the fuck here.”
She swallowed hard. “I will.”
I’d come up with a plan to get her far away from this mess and back to safety, I told myself. Once I had a moment to think, I could figure out how to convince her to go back to this nice town and let me ruin things without her. But I had only this moment right now, and for that moment, I had to admit she was right. I did need her. And I was running out of time.
Time that was running even slimmer as I held out my hand and she didn’t take it.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“Can you”—she cringed, gesturing to the gun—“put it away?”
“I’m going to need him before long,” I said.
“I know, it’s just…” She winced, looking away. “It always feels like it’s looking at me.”
I rolled my eyes. I didn’t have time for this. I plucked the Cacophony off my belt and slid him inside a saddlebag. He didn’t go quietly. My hand was still stinging when I released him and I could feel his heat even through the saddlebags as I hauled Liette up behind me and felt her wrap her arms around my waist.
It felt slightly unfair, really.
If he knew how much blood we’d spill that day at Stark’s Mutter, he probably wouldn’t have cared how he got there.
THIRTEEN
STARK’S MUTTER
When I arrived at the township of Stark’s Mutter atop the back of my bird, the skies were blue and clear as a dream and the early afternoon sun was beaming like a light that shined only for me.
And that was the first sign I had that things were fucked.
Have you ever seen a battle? Not the little squabbles between the various factions of the Scar, but a real battle? I haven’t. And I hope, if they’re anything like the aftermath I stumbled upon, I never do.
They called it Lethic’s Horn, an old-as-balls tower perpetually teetering over a collection of run-down barracks. Just a collection of crappy buildings on a hard rock in the ass-end of the desert that no one would ever give a shit about, normally. But because it happened to overlook a road that ran between two of the biggest freeholds in the Scar, people suddenly thought it was worth dying for.
Twenty squadrons of Revolutionary conscripts charged an Imperial garrison manned by thirteen mages and a few nul regulars, I’m told. I don’t know what happened—I’ve never had a head for strategies deeper than “shoot the hell out of it”—but I saw what was left when the fighting was over.
The birds were so thick in the sky that it looked like night. And on the ground, the scavengers ate so much dead flesh they fell to the ground, bloated, and were eaten by the other scavengers. It was like the land was alive, a teeming mass of feathers and blood and shrieking. I couldn’t even get close without a heap of them diving down on me. Nul or mage, they didn’t give a shit until it came bursting out their backsides.
In Weiless, the pigeons carry messages from fort to fort. In Cathama, the peacocks sing pretty songs for pretty girls in pretty houses. But in the Scar, no one’s quite so helpful nor quite so charming. Out here, birds do what everyone else does: survive at someone else’s expense.
I guess you might have thought that a sky clear of birds would be a good omen.
But there’s three things no one from the Scar believes in: good omens, charity, and justice.
I came up to the edge of the township and the chill set in. In the shadow of the houses—tall hardwood homes on stone foundations, typical out here where the Scar’s winters hit hard—the warmth of the sun shied away, like it had already seen what had happened in there and decided it didn’t want to look.
It wasn’t the only one.
“We’re here,” I said, which was harder than it seemed with someone’s arms clamped so hard around my ribs that I almost felt them crack.
Liette looked up at me through eyes that hadn’t blinked since we took off. I heard her knuckles popping as she forcibly unclenched them from around my middle and slid off. She plucked a grimy feather out of her hair, then stared at it, then at me. I shrugged.
“You wanted to come.”
“That thing—” she began.
“That lady,” I corrected.
“It’s too fast and it’s too rough and… did it… did it poop while we were running?”
“She had a hearty breakfast.” I patted Congeniality’s neck. “Didn’t you, madam? Yes, you did. You ate so good and—”
She cut me short with a loud squawk, bucking backward and sending me jostling in the saddle. Either she was in an especially bad mood today or something was wrong. Both were likely, neither were answered. When I tried to pull the reins, she snapped forward and hurled me off.
I hit the ground with a grunt as she fought to pull away from me. She jerked wildly at the reins, her squawks turning to shrieks as she stamped and kicked while I tried to pull her back. Either she was going to break her neck, open my belly with her claws, or attract the attention of something that could kill both of us. What cho
ice did I have?
I let the reins go, watched her tear off.
“What?” I called after her. “Did you think that was a crack about your weight?” I muttered, rubbed the sore spot where I had landed. “Useless fucking bird.”
“Are you all right?” Liette rushed to my side, reaching for my still-healing wound.
“I’m fine.” I waved her off, pulled my scarf around my face. “We’ve got bigger shit to deal with than that.”
I’ve lost Congeniality before. She’s tossed me off a few times. I once bet her on a losing hand of Triumphs, and I once chased her mostly naked through a township on fire before she vanished into the smoke. We’ve always found each other again. I wasn’t worried about that.
Worry might be a plentiful thing, but it was still a finite amount. And all mine at that moment was reserved for whatever was beyond the walls of Stark’s Mutter.
My eyes lingered on those walls. I glanced to Liette. She forced down a grimace to give me as resolute a nod as she could. I tugged my scarf up around my face. I felt the weight of Jeff at my hip, heard the jingle of shells in my pocket, and the Cacophony…
He let me know he was ready.
The gates hung wide open—another bad omen. No one who isn’t dead or soon to be dead leaves a door open in the Scar. I paused at the edge, holding up a hand to halt Liette, peering around. Unpaved streets, long shadows, and a cold breeze greeted me. No one shot or spat a curse at me, so I took a few steps in.
I didn’t die.
But that didn’t count as a good sign. That’s just luck.
I walked slowly down the streets. I’d forgive you for calling me stupid for not seeking cover. But these weren’t a bunch of punks with guns I was facing this time. Fuck, these weren’t even common mages. These people—the most powerful mages to have ever turned Vagrant—had thought they could challenge the Imperium and win.
Cover will help you against bullets. But against a man who can make a hurricane with a thought?
Well, he’s probably not going to seek cover, either.
