Mercurial

by Naomi Hughes

  She had thought before that Tal had a claim on her soul. It was true, but her sister had a claim on it too. Sarai had done terrible things to her but she had done them in the name of a sister’s love, and it was that same love that drove Elodie to take a step away from Tal and toward the bridge now. “You’re lying.”

  “I am not.”

  She twisted quickly to look at the palace. The sun had begun to set. Hues of orange and pink laved the buildings on the other side of the river, gilding the roof tiles and glazing even the gutters in bright, hopeful stains, but none of it could touch Elodie through the mist. She could just make out the palace crouched like a dragon above the river, and the rust-and-cobalt shape that was slowly rising above its crenellations. The zeppelin was floating up to the level of the docking tower, where the empress and her soldiers would board.

  If Sarai was dead and Tal was gone, what would be left for Elodie? She would be the magicless ruler of a palace full of her enemies, and the only two people in the world who she loved would be dead.

  Love, she thought again. The realization was a fire. It burned through the shed skin of her past self, burned through her confusion, her anger, her fear, her helplessness. She loved Tal. Not merely cared about him. Not simply felt safe near him. This was the claim he had on her soul, and now that she finally recognized it, she wasn’t shocked at its presence, but was instead shocked at just how deeply its roots had had to wind into her heart before she registered its presence. What a fool she had been, to miss it before. And what a fool she was now, to think it made any difference.

  She could not save Tal. He did not wish to be saved. Even now he was already half-faded from the world: skin pale, sweat and mist mingled on his brow, eyes like glass marbles—fragile and unnatural in the way they caught too much of the light. He had brought her back to life when he had no reason to. Had she any right to ask this from him, too? To care for a person he should rightfully despise, just because she had finally realized she loved him? To save himself for her sake, when all of the despicable acts he’d committed over the last two years had been for her sake?

  He wanted freedom. And even if it meant the ruination of them both, she wasn’t sure she could deny him that any longer.

  “Please,” she said softly, trying one last time, even though she had resolved earlier that she wouldn’t lower herself to beg. “Please don’t leave me.”

  He reached into the pack he’d slung over his shoulders and withdrew something that shone blackly, catching all the shades of the sunset as the mist beaded on it: her crown. It was a delicate, twisted thing, its sharp angles too brittle to last, and yet somehow it had survived the arduous journey intact.

  Tal held it out to her. “Goodbye, Elodie,” he said, but the sound of her name was not enough to soften the sight of him holding her crown. She reached for it, and when she had gripped it, a memory surged through the metal like a spark of static electricity: the two of them standing at the palace docks not far from this spot, his hands on her crown as he swore to protect her. The metal was inert now, empty of any such promise.

  She accepted the crown. He released it. Her hands dropped heavily to her sides. The roots he’d wrapped around her heart stretched and broke away, one by one.

  The zeppelin was rising higher. She would have to run if she wanted to reach someone who could stop it in time. She looked back to Tal and lifted her free hand toward him in a helpless gesture, trying to think of what else she could possibly say that might change his mind—but he flinched away and his own hand raised slightly as if to shield himself. An old habit, one that he would never be rid of no matter how long she was magicless.

  She let her hand drop. She took a long step backwards, river reeds brushing against her calves. She raised the crown and set it on her brow. “Goodbye, Tal,” she answered at last, and then she turned and ran.

  TAL STOOD IN THE REEDS, THE SKY BLEEDING SUNSET ACROSS THE HORIZON, river mist hanging over the shore like a funeral shroud, and counted to one hundred. Beyond the bridge, a line of sailboats and small merchant steamships bobbed at the royal docks. By the time he reached a count of twenty Elodie had disappeared behind them. At the count of fifty, the sound of shouts and distant running feet drifted over the water. She had been spotted. He finished his count. When he reached one hundred—when he was certain that all the patrolling soldiers within earshot had run to her, eager to assist the unexpectedly returned Lady of Mercury—he drew his twin swords and started over the bridge.

  He had lied to Elodie. There was something that could make him return to the palace. Not a way to live, but a way to spend the coin of his death on something that might begin to make up for his choices.

  He avoided the route Elodie had taken. He didn’t want her to see him. He didn’t want her to try to stop him. There was too high a possibility that, given one more chance, she might succeed. He had seen the bloom of realization in her eyes—a bloom not like a flower, but like the plume of smoke that rises up from a catastrophe—and had felt the pull of it in his own soul. He knew what she had realized, but he also could not afford to know it, so as he walked, he let himself drift away from his own mind. Free of worry and choice, he watched himself walk over the bridge. The cobbled roads here twinkled and blinked with bronze flecks like a carpet of stars unrolled beneath his feet. To his left were the palace docks: long lines of jetties and wharfs where ships flew under the Alloyed Empire flag as well as the colorful pennants of several neighboring countries. Ambassadors and courtiers, flocking to the scent of weakness. They would flee soon. Likely the moment the Destroyer got her magic back.

  Silver eyes beneath an iron crown. Such a simple vision to have such an effect on him. He had known all along that the Destroyer would eventually return to herself, would swallow up the strange girl he’d met in the Skyteeth. Elodie had been a mirage. A deception, even if it was one that had briefly fooled her as well as him. And now the deception was over. He should not grieve what was not a true loss.

  He turned left. The starry flecks in the road vanished. No one who walked this lane needed the travel-smoothing enchantment that was Smithed into the cobblestones of the main streets. To his left, a smaller branch of the Entengre vanished into the dark maw of a tunnel, where it would be carried into the aquifers below the city. There it would sink through the silt and be filtered and cleansed before it flowed back into the main Entengre downstream. The reason it needed to be cleansed first was because this was the spot where the palace dumped its sewage, and also its dead bodies.

  There was a door just in front of the tunnel. It was set into the side of the plated metal palace, although here the man-sized scales were all dull tin, Smithed sensibly for defense rather than beauty and intimidation. On the other side of this door were the dungeons. Thanks to the tin’s enchantments, the cells beyond could not be breached by cannonballs or fire, nor by any enemy army. They could, however, be breached by a lone soldier, if he was foolish enough to set himself against an entire regiment of the Iron Empress’s guards.

  The two men stationed at the door stood up quickly when they spotted Tal. One of them kicked the dice they’d been playing with behind the steps, out of his line of vision, and then relaxed when Tal stepped out of the evening shadows and revealed himself to be no one important. Neither of them took any action to conceal the two dead women whose bodies slouched against the wall. One of the bodies had a blue and purple complexion from the blood that had pooled beneath her skin when her heart was no longer beating to circulate it. The arms of the other twisted across her body at a stiff angle. They had been dead for a while, carried to this door and then stacked like firewood to await the completion of the guards’ dice game, when they would be carried to the river and disposed of.

  Tal recognized one of the bodies. She had pale porcelain skin, even paler now in death, and red hair that she had always kept in a frizzy braid. She’d been a friend of Saasha’s. She used to watch over Tal and Nyx when they were young, right after their father’s execution, w
hen Saasha was mired too deep in grief to see to the needs of her daughter and newly-acquired stepson.

  Tal wondered which of the two dead women had given up the location of the Saints base to the empress, and how much torture they’d undergone before that. These two would have been among the number who’d volunteered themselves for Nyx’s mission, had been imprisoned on the train with her, and before that had saved the lives of innocent townsfolk by taking their place in the mining town when the Destroyer came to make their reckoning. Nyx had told him, in an unbreaking voice that was all the more awful for its bravado, the names of the Saints who had been in the prison car with her. Nyx had managed to escape. They had not. Instead they had been teleported along with the rest of the train to the palace, where they had been taken prisoner and, judging by the marks on these two bodies, interrogated without mercy.

  “Halt,” one of the guards called, then squinted, recognizing Tal. “God’s hammer,” he swore, “you live? Does that mean the Destroyer does as well?”

  Tal didn’t answer. He kept coming.

  The guard’s gaze shifted to the swords held loosely at Tal’s sides. His eyes narrowed and his hand went to the falchion sword strapped to his own waist. The other guard caught both the movement and his friend’s wariness, and drew his falchion.

  “He said, halt,” the second guard repeated, his tone steelier than the other’s. “Bodyguards are only to come through secondary entrances if accompanied by their charges. You’ll have to go through the main gates.”

  Tal had no plans to enter through any gate other than this one. Neither slowing nor stopping, he continued his steady approach. One guard cursed and turned, twisting the knob of the door at his back, raising his voice to shout for reinforcements. By the time he got the first syllable of his shout out, Tal’s sword was already a blur of silver arcing toward his chest, and the second syllable ended in a warbling gurgle.

  The other guard lunged forward in defense of his partner. One of his hands thrust his falchion forward while the other reached for the parrying dagger sheathed at his waist. Tal withdrew the sword that had been planted in the first guard’s chest—the man’s sternum making a cracking sound in the process—and spun sideways to avoid the dagger’s blow. The second guard stumbled, off-balance, and Tal’s left sword flashed downward after him. The man dropped both his falchion and his dagger, though the latter action was involuntary, as his left hand had been sheared off at the wrist. The inert limb landed at Tal’s feet and he wasted no time in kicking the dagger into the river.

  Rage and terror battled in the stiff lines of the second guard’s body but he was too well-trained to give in to either, and stooped quickly to reach toward his falchion with his remaining arm. The weapon was out of his reach but it flew of its own accord toward the man’s hand anyway. Tal brought both swords around and, in one clean movement, severed most of the man’s head while he was bent over. White bone gleamed with bluish-silver blood—a zinc Smith, with telekinetic powers—as the man tumbled forward. Tal stepped aside to allow the body to stumble past him and then turned and kicked him square in the spine, propelling him the last few steps to the river. The body splashed loudly as it fell in and then was swept downstream to reunite with its dagger.

  Tal turned back to the palace. He stepped over the body of the first guard, who was still gurgling weakly, and entered the dungeons.

  The narrow hallway stank of defecation and death. The smell slipped into him like a thief in the darkness, and a forgotten memory rose up at his side. A sixteen-year-old girl whose graceful gait carried her through the door, boots snapping on the stained tile, each step a sharp announcement. The prisoners had wept and screamed to see her approach. I do not care for the smell, whispered the ghost of the Destroyer. Then why don’t you ask for incense, my lady? Tal had replied caustically. He had still been new then, and outraged, and hopeful. Those emotions had brought all the sharp parts of him to the outside, where they could cut both himself and others.

  Because it would be a lie, she’d replied. I will give them pain. I will not give them false hope.

  Tal tried to force the memory away. It would not go. That was the power of this place: to resurrect all of the horrors he had somehow managed to dull over the last few days, to make him into the shade of who he used to be. This was why he had refused to let Elodie bring him back to the palace in search of a cure. Not because of what could happen after that, but because of what had already happened.

  He would not have to withstand the ghosts and memories for long, though. Just for long enough to do what he needed to.

  His god touched him then, a feather-light reassurance. He would be with Tal at the end. In the dreaming place. In the space between the end of life and the beginning of death. Tal wanted to be bitter, but discovered to his surprise that his old bitterness had changed—slowly but undeniably, the way copper turns green with time—to a tired sort of acceptance. If this was the end that the Unforged God had charted for him, then at least it was the same end Tal had charted for himself, too. He could allow himself to take comfort in that.

  The hall opened into a wider area with a drain set into the floor and a desk at the far end. A burly, middle-aged woman was standing behind it, one hand lifted to yank on a thick cord dangling from the ceiling. The cord would trigger an alarm that would bring reinforcements from the nearby courtyard and mess halls.

  Tal threw his right sword. It thudded into the wall behind the woman, pinning her forearm to the wood in the process. She didn’t scream, only whirled around and put her hand to the hilt to yank it out, but Tal let her get no further than that before he took three long steps forward and drove his left sword into her chest. She spat blood at him and it splattered on his shirt and over her own cobalt uniform before she slid down the wall, dead, her impaled arm still held above her.

  Tal tugged his swords free. The dead woman slumped the rest of the way to the ground. He bent down and retrieved a ring of keys from her waist.

  Why keys? Tal had asked during his second trip to the dungeons, when he was angry with no good outlet and not enough sense yet to hide his emotions. Why not Smith the cells to open at your touch, as they do on the train? It would save time.

  The Destroyer had raised an eyebrow, then lifted the key ring and shook it. It gave a sweet tinkling sound like perverse wind chimes. The anticipation of torture is often as effective as the torture itself, she deigned to tell him. They will hear me coming, and they will have time to peruse all possible plans for escape, realize there are none that will succeed, and give me the information my sister needs before I even have to open the cell. Keys are quite practical as time-saving mechanisms.

  Running footsteps stomped down the hall at his back, pulling Tal from his memories. He clamped a hand around the bloodied key ring to stop their jingling and then dropped them into a pocket, freeing his hands for his weapons again.

  “You there—” started one braying voice from the far corridor, but it cut off when Tal ducked sideways, and the kick that had been aimed at his knee hid the solid wooden desk instead. Converting the momentum of his movement into a roll, Tal dove beneath the oncoming guard’s outstretched leg and swung a sword upward in the process, slicing deeply across the inside of his thigh and severing the vital artery there. Blood—tinted gold this time—sprayed across the floor and ran in rivulets toward the drain. Tal came out of the roll to drive his elbow into the jaw of the second guard who was behind him, and kneed a third hard in the stomach. These would be the guards who had already been stationed in the dungeons. If he was lucky, the guard at the desk hadn’t had time to pull the cord, and further reinforcements would be far enough behind for him to achieve his objective.

  Without warning, a heavy tiredness dropped over Tal like a net, and he stumbled. The gold-blooded guard was not yet dead, and was using his power over sleep and dreams to try to render Tal unconscious. Tal sheathed one of his swords, snatched a fallen dagger from the floor, and hurled it at the gold Smith. It lodged in the m
an’s throat and the veil of exhaustion lifted instantly.

  The ploy had given one of the guards enough time to recover from the knee Tal had planted in her gut, though, and she lashed out quickly with her falchion to catch Tal on the arm. Her weapon came back stained silver and speckled with tiny orange crystals. The sight of his forbidden blood tinted with rust phage caught her off-guard and she hesitated for half a second too long, giving Tal enough time to kick her hard in the knee. When she buckled and fell forward, he caught her in one arm and used the other to drive his blade through the slot of her ribs. She shuddered once and then went limp. He dropped her corpse and looked around.

  There was still one guard left, the one Tal whose jaw Tal had broken. He was young, only a year or two older than Tal, probably a recent recruit on his first tour of duty in the dungeon. His eyes were wide, the skin around his cheekbones bloodless and taut with terror. He turned and ran.

  Tal had had more than his fill of killing, but if he let this man go, he would alert the nearest soldiers and endanger Tal’s mission. Coming to a quick compromise, Tal swept up a fallen falchion from one of the guards and sent it flying after the man, taking him across the ankle and likely severing his hamstring. The man howled and fell to the ground. He would live, but he wouldn’t be moving quickly enough to summon any more guards than were already headed this way.

  Tal turned to examine the cells before him. The prisoners who were under active interrogation were kept on the second level down. He strode past the stinking cells on the first level, brushing past their grasping hands, closing his ears to their shouted pleas, promising himself that if he lived long enough, he would return to free them after he had found the people he was here for.

  The steps downward were slick and stained, and the smell of the dungeons soured with the scent of vomit. It was a common enough smell down here. On Tal’s fifth trip to the dungeons, he had made it only a little further than this point before he himself had thrown up. That was the day Sarai had accompanied them. She’d made Tal hold the prisoner down.