by Sam Sykes
The question I desperately struggled to avoid asking myself was different.
If everyone else can just decide to stop, I wanted to wonder, what the fuck am I doing wrong?
I got an answer.
Not the one I was looking for. An answer on a voice of flame and a smile of cinders, in a surge of pain through my arm and a heat so deep and angry it put the worries to the flame and I felt them burn away to nothing inside me.
The Cacophony, sheathed at my hip, urged me not to think too hard about it.
And maybe that was the right choice. Or the wrong one. I doubt I’d ever know that, either.
I clambered to my feet. My leg felt better—whatever weird shit they’d given me at Fleatown worked, apparently. Another thing not to think too hard about. I found Congeniality pecking half-interestedly for mice in some tall grasses, collected her reins. Together we started off down the ledge.
Most of the time, I don’t mind traveling alone. Easier to get around, less worry. But then, most of the time, there’s usually something chasing me so I don’t have to think too loudly. On nights like these, nights when there’s no danger to think about and the sound of the ground crunching under my feet is too soft to drown out the noise in my own head… well…
They don’t tell you about these nights in the stories, do they?
That must have been how she snuck up on me. I wasn’t listening to the sounds around me, just the questions and troubles rattling around inside my skull. I wasn’t even aware of her until I heard the groan of her crossbow string as she drew it back and leveled it at the center of my spine.
I stopped in my tracks. I didn’t look behind me. I didn’t let Congeniality off her reins. I didn’t try to stop her.
I tell myself sometimes that I didn’t try because I didn’t want to deny her revenge. It’s a hard thing to stare down someone who took something from you, even if they have it coming. I didn’t want to put her through that, I told myself, and maybe some of that was true.
But not as true as the fact that I didn’t want to turn around and see the same look in her eyes that I had.
“Hey,” I said, without turning around.
Virian didn’t answer.
I was content with that. Content with this being my last word, this being my last moment—or so I told myself. But that couldn’t have been true, either.
“My leg got better.”
Since I just kept talking.
“Listen…” I sighed. “What happened in the town—”
“You killed him.” She hurled the words at my back, a thrown knife. When I didn’t bleed as she wanted me to, she spat them at my feet. “You’re here and he’s not, right? You killed him.”
“I did,” I replied.
I heard the rattle of her crossbow. She took a step forward. Hatred was in her voice.
“You murdered him.”
“I didn’t.”
“Birdshit you didn’t. You fucking killed him, didn’t you? How did he die? What did you do to him? Who…” She swallowed something hard and sharp. “What did he say before he died?”
I didn’t move. I didn’t answer.
“Did he cry out? Did he beg? What did he say?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied.
“Like fuck it doesn’t! What are you trying to do, protect me? You fucking killed—”
“Yes, I killed your father,” I shouted back. “I killed your father because he gave me scars that hurt like hell every fucking morning. I killed him because he took what was mine. I put him on the ground and put a sword in his chest and stood there until everything bled out and there was nothing left of him but glass. And nothing I said or he said or ever would say will change that. And that’s why it doesn’t fucking matter.”
She didn’t shoot me. Which was bad, because for some reason I just couldn’t shut the fuck up.
“It was always going to be this way,” I said. “He was always going to die. I was always going to kill him. He and I both knew that the day he, and all the others, didn’t kill me. You weren’t going to change that. A new name and a new city weren’t going to change that. You can’t take back the shit that we did.” I paused. “He and I both knew that. Every Vagrant does.”
A pause, timid and wary, before a whisper. “What was he like?”
“Huh?”
“My… him. What was he like? Was he a good man?”
Another pause. Colder. Angrier. “I don’t know.”
“What? What do you mean you don’t know?”
“What I said.”
“But… you knew him. You were—”
“I knew a blade in the dark. I knew my blood on his hands. And little more. Whoever he was after, whatever he did…” I traced a long line of knotted flesh across my chest. “They don’t make these things hurt any less.”
Silence. The loudest kind. The kind that only comes before mistakes. I could feel her hand on the trigger, her eyes full of tears, the great and bitter thing rising in her throat that would decide whether she was going to shoot me or not.
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have said anything.
“Listen, kid,” I said, “if you’re going to do that, stop and ask yourself—”
“Don’t,” she snapped. “Don’t you dare fucking ask me if this is what he would want.”
“I don’t know what he’d want and I don’t fucking care, either,” I growled, “but before you hit that trigger, I want you to ask yourself if this is what you want. Maybe you want to be the woman who killed Sal the Cacophony, maybe you even deserve to be her, but do you want to remember the weight of that bow in your hands your entire life?”
No answer.
“Do you want to remember how easy it was? How satisfying it was? How it still didn’t make anything hurt less? Do you want to know all the things you’ll kill trying to make it go away?”
No answer.
“And when you wake up in the morning, and when you go to sleep at night,” I whispered, “do you want to know how much time you’ll spend going down every name of every person who ever hurt you and wonder which ones you’d have to kill to make it stop?”
Nothing. No words. No breath.
I held my hands out.
“You want to be the woman who kills me, I won’t stop you. But you sure as shit don’t deserve that.”
I waited.
Waited for the click of the trigger. Waited for the sound of her wailing. Waited for her to curse or to shout or to keep talking. I would have accepted any of them.
When I finally turned around to look at her, though, she wasn’t there. I hadn’t even heard her leave. Nothing remained but a few messy footprints.
The sound of wheels turning hit me. I peered out over the ledge. Far below, I saw a single wagon pulled by a weary bird rolling down a lonely road. In its bed, the glistening metal of machinery rattled alongside a complicated crossbow. At the reins, Olio and Virian sat in silence and stared ahead.
Two kids, a bird and a printing press. The only things to make it out of that city intact.
Not a good story, I thought as I mounted Congeniality and spurred her ahead into a tired walk. No moral. No heroes. Not even very good villains. And a shitty resolution—what had been the fucking point of it all?
I reached into my pocket, pulled out a folded-up scrap of paper and a pencil. I unfolded it, looked down the list of names in black until I found the one I was looking for, and drew a line through it.
Rogo the Dervish.
I stared at that line, waiting for the moment it would make me feel like it had all been worth it.
I’m still waiting.
Not a good story, is it? Not now, anyway. In the months and years to follow that day, the Day of the Beast they started calling it, it would change to something better. Bards and poets would tell of it in taverns and courts. Old men would bicker and bet over how things really happened. Parents would tell their children a tale to keep them in line.
And every so often, someone might ask
me what I thought about what happened on that day. And one person in particular would ask me if it had all been worth it, or at least, if I could be satisfied with what I got from it.
And I’d tell them what I’ll tell you.
It doesn’t matter.
Rogo was dead. Paarl’s Hollow was gone. However I wanted things to go, however they should have gone, wasn’t going to change any of that. No one would still have their homes. No one would walk away from this with new ideas.
It wasn’t a good story. It wasn’t a good ending. But we don’t tell stories to remember the past. Sometimes not even to forget the past. Sometimes we tell stories to survive. And sometimes surviving is all we get.
And sometimes, that has to be enough to keep doing it.
Acknowledgments
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Meet the Author
Photo Credit: Libbi Rich
SAM SYKES—author, citizen, mammal—has written extensively over the years, penning An Affinity for Steel, the Bring Down Heaven trilogy, Brave Chef Brianna, and now the Grave of Empires trilogy. At the time of this writing, no one has been able to definitively prove or disprove that he has fought a bear.
Find out more about Sam Sykes and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at orbitbooks.net.
If you enjoyed
THE IRON DIRGE
look out for
TEN ARROWS OF IRON
Book Two of the Grave of Empires
by
Sam Sykes
An outcast mage caught between two warring empires must either save the world or destroy everything she loves in the second novel of “an unforgettable epic fantasy” trilogy (Publishers Weekly).
Sal the Cacophony—outlaw, outcast, outnumbered—destroys all that she loves. Her lover lost and cities burned in her wake, all she has left is her magical gun and her all-consuming quest for revenge against those who stole her power and took the sky from her.
When the roguish agent of a mysterious patron offers her the chance to participate in a heist to steal an incredible power from the famed airship fleet, the Ten Arrows, she finds a new purpose. But a plot to save the world by bringing down empires swiftly escalates into a conspiracy of magic and vengeance that threatens to burn everything to ash, including herself.
ONE
LITTLEBARROW
The day the sky rained fire began like any other.
Meret awoke before the dawn, as he always did, to grind the herbs he had dried last week into tinctures and salves that would cure by next week. He gathered the medicines he needed to, as he always did—balm for Rodic’s burn that he had gotten at the smithy, salve for old man Erton’s bad knee, and as always, a bottle of Avonin whiskey for whatever might arise in the day—put them into his bag, and set out. He made his rounds, as he always did, and visited the same patients he always had since he had arrived in Littlebarrow three months ago.
The name was a little unfair, he thought. After all, it was a long time ago that a woman had built a shack to live in beside the cairn she had constructed for her only child. Since then, enough people had found it a good place to stop on sojourns into the Valley that it had grown to a township worthier of a name that matched its thriving circumstances. But as it wasn’t his township, he thought it not his place to protest the name, no matter how much he had grown attached to the place.
While it was nowhere near as big as Terassus or even the larger towns in the Valley, and it still had its share of problems, Littlebarrow was one of the better places his training had taken him. The people were nice, the winter was relatively gentle, and the surrounding forest was thick enough for game but not so much that larger beasts would come sniffing around.
Littlebarrow was a fine place. And Meret liked to think he had helped.
“Fuck me, boy, you missed your true calling as a torturer.”
Not everyone agreed.
He glanced up from Sindra’s knee, now wrapped in fresh antiseptic-soaked bandages, to Sindra’s face, contorted in pain, with keen distaste that he hoped his glasses magnified enough to demonstrate how tired he was of that joke.
“And you apparently misheard yours,” he said to his newest patient. “I would have thought a soldier would be made of sterner stuff.”
“If my name were Sindra Stern, I’d agree,” the woman growled. “As the Great General saw fit to call me Sindra Honest, I’ll do you the courtesy of pointing out that this shit”—she gestured to the bandages—“fucking hurts.”
“It hurts much less than the infection the salve keeps out, I assure you,” Meret replied, cinching the bandage tight. He dared to flash a wry grin at the woman. “And you were warned about the importance of keeping the joint clean, so in the interests of honesty, I believe I could say I told you so?”
Sindra’s glare loitered on him for an uncomfortable second before she lowered her gaze to her knee. And as her eyes followed the length of her leg, her glare turned to a frown.
The bandages marked the end of her flesh and the beginning of the metal-and-wood prosthetic that had been attached months ago. She rolled its ankle, as if still unconvinced that it was real, and a small series of sigils let off a faint glow in response.
“Fucking magic,” she said with a sneer. “Still not sure that I wouldn’t be better off with just one leg.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t be able to help as many people without it,” Meret added. “And the spellwrighting that made it possible isn’t technically magic.”
“I was a Revolutionary, boy,” Sindra said with a sneer as she pulled her trouser leg over the prosthesis. “I know fucking magic when I fucking see it.”
“I thought that the soldiers of the Grand Revolution of the Fist and Flame were so pure of ideal that vulgar language never crossed their lips.”
Sindra’s face, dark-skinned and bearing the stress wrinkles of a woman much older than she actually was, was marred by a sour frown. It matched the rest of her body at least. Broad shoulders and thick arms that her old military shirt had long given up trying to hide were corded with the thick muscle that comes from hard labor, hard battles, and harder foes. Her hair was prematurely gray, her boot was prematurely thin, and her heart was prematurely disillusioned. The only part of her that wasn’t falling apart was the sword hanging from her hip.
That, she kept as sharp as her tongue.
“It’s the Glorious Revolution, you little shit,” she muttered, “and it’s a good thing I’m not in it anymore, isn’t it?”
“True,” Meret hummed. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to treat you.”
“Yeah, lucky fucking me,” Sindra grumbled. “I wouldn’t mind a couple of alchemics our cadre medics used to have, though. A hit of those and I could fight all night.”
“I am but a humble apothecary, madam,” he replied. “And while herbs and bandages take longer, they heal just as good.”
Sindra sighed as she winced and hauled herself to her feet, her prosthesis creaking as she did. “You’re just lucky that it’s a choice between keeping you around and keeping soldiers around. If it were a choice between a smart-mouthed apothecary who couldn’t heal for shit and, say, a Hornbrow who hadn’t eaten in days, I’d slather myself in sauce and pry its jaws open myself.”
He agreed, but kept it to himself.
Littlebarrow had been fortunate enough to escape most of the battles between the Revolution and its inveterate foes, the Imperium, which had raged through the rest of the Valley. The wilderness surrounding it had seen battle, he had been told, and there was the incident with farmer Renson’s barn that was turned into kindling by stray cannon fire. But by and large, the two nations kept their fighting focused on the cities and resources. A township like Littlebarrow was worthy only of a few scuffles between Revolutionary cadres and Im
perial mages.
One such scuffle had deposited Sindra here two years ago. After a savage battle that saw her grievously wounded after bringing down an Imperial Graspmage, she had been left for dead by both her comrades and her foes. The people of the township had taken her in, nursed her back to health, and begged her to put her sword and strength to the defense of their township, which she, in possession of a generous heart that nonetheless burned relentlessly for justice, reluctantly agreed to.
At least, that’s the way Sindra told it.
Meret suspected the true story was perhaps less dramatic, but he let her have her stories. It was true enough that she had the injuries that came from defending the town against the occasional monster that came wandering out of the woods or outlaws that came searching for an easy hit. But if the war ever came back to this part of the Valley, a middle-aged woman with a sword wouldn’t do much to stop it.
Hell, neither would a hundred.
He’d been to the rest of the Valley. He’d seen the tanks smashed into the earth by magic, their crews buried alive inside them. He’d seen the towns and cities reduced to blackened skeletons by cannon fire. He’d seen the big graveyards and the little graveyards and the places where they just hadn’t bothered to bury the bodies and had left the bird-gnawed bones to rot where they lay.
It hadn’t put him off. After all, the wounds inflicted by that terrible war were the whole reason he had come to the Valley once the Imperium claimed victory and started settling it again. But part of him wondered if the reason he hadn’t lingered so long in Littlebarrow was because, deep down, he knew that he’d never come close to mending even a fraction of those wounds.
“I can’t pay you, you know.”
He snapped out of his reverie to see Sindra leaning over the small table—an accompaniment to the small chair, small cabinet, and small bed that were the only furnishings of her small house. Though she stared at her hands, he could see the shame on her face all the same.