The Gallows Black

by Sam Sykes

  Just romantic, I guess.

  The cannon exploded. I felt the light hot on my back. I felt the rush of air being swallowed up in a burst of flame. I felt the pulverized stones and wood and glass raking against my back as they were swept away by the force of the blast. Just as I felt us carried away, too.

  I hit the earth hard. Harder than I’d thought I could.

  And I fell into somewhere dark.

  Breath came back to me first, crawling into my lungs after having been blasted out. Sensation followed, the feel of my cuts and aches protesting as my body was dragged across the street. Vision came last, showing me a half-blind scene of a still and dark tower.

  Tatha was at the top, screaming things I couldn’t understand. Revolutionaries scrambled around the tower, a new firing team swarming in. The cannon began to groan to life as they aimed it toward us again.

  Liette was behind me, grunting with the effort of dragging me across the street. I’d have gotten up, but my legs didn’t work. I’d have apologized, but I couldn’t feel my lips. The only part of me with any life was the hand that held him by his burning hilt.

  The Cacophony wouldn’t let go.

  And it was him who told me what to do.

  I fumbled with numb fingers in my satchel. Money and trinkets came spilling out as I found the shell. Bloodless hands loaded it into his chamber, raised it high, aimed it.

  The cannon began to hiss as it prepared to fire. Tatha raised his sword above his head. He let out a cry I couldn’t hear. But I knew what he had just said.

  I fired first.

  Hoarfrost streaked across the sky. It struck the cannon’s maw in a flash of bright blue. Ice blossomed in an instant, fingers of cold reaching out to cover the cannon’s gaping hole in a thick sheet of ice. By its blue light, I saw realization dawn on the Revolutionaries’ faces as they cried to the firing crew not to shoot.

  But I guess they couldn’t hear, either.

  The cannon fired.

  And everything went to hell.

  Trapped behind the ice, the severium charge exploded in the cannon. Its barrel warped and blew out, an explosion tearing it apart. First the metal. Then the flesh. Then the stone.

  In a shower of rock and bodies, the tower erupted. A gaping crown of smoke stood where the cannon had been as the ruins of the tower fell from the heavens. It punched through roofs, through windows, through the very street. People who had been watching screamed. I could see their mouths moving, even if I couldn’t hear their cries.

  By this time tomorrow, they’d be telling the tale of how Sal the Cacophony blew apart the Revolution’s greatest weapon. It would be one hell of a story.

  It’d be nice if I lived to hear it. But if not, that was fine, too.

  My breath left me. My vision went dark. The sensation ebbed out of my body and left me numb, with no other feeling than the burning in my hand. I went back to a cold, dark place I’d been too many times.

  And through it all, he still did not let go.

  SIX

  When I dream, I dream of blades.

  Sometimes in forests of reaching, jagged tips. Sometimes in fields of glistening steel. Sometimes just one single edge catching the very last light in a dark and dismal place. Sometimes they’re in my hands, sometimes they’re in his…

  But whenever I dream of blades, I dream of him.

  And he was there this time.

  He was a blade himself: long and slender and honed and polished. His features were sharp, his black hair swept back and clean, his clothes wrapped around him like leather on a hilt. The only soft part of him was his eyes as he looked at me, both of us walking down a street I didn’t recognize, hand in hand.

  “Trust me,” he whispered.

  And I did. As he took me down another street. As he took me somewhere darker. As he took me into a place with thirty-three pairs of eyes, thirty-three blades clenched in hands, all of them meant for me.

  I felt them pierce me, those blades. They tore my skin open, made me spatter onto the floor. One was his. One was Vraki’s. One was Galta’s. One was Zanze’s.

  I fell onto a cold stone. I stared up into the darkness. It vanished in an explosion of light. Something bright tore itself out of me, out of all the cuts and wounds littering my body, and rose above me. I reached out with trembling fingers, trying to grab it, to pull it back inside me. But it disappeared. And I was left with those wounds.

  My body was left limp, lifeless, lightless. The darkness closed in around me. One by one I saw the eyes vanish. I saw the blades disappear. And before the darkness swept over me, I saw a smile.

  As Zanze’s face split open in a broad grin.

  As someone whispered to me.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I awoke with a burning breath that tore my lungs as I drank it in.

  But I awoke. I was alive.

  And I told myself that, over and over, with every breath that came a little cleaner.

  I’m alive. I placed a hand against my chest, feeling the breath inside me. I’m alive. I’m still here. My blood is still inside me. My hand came back warm and sticky. Mostly, anyway.

  The bandage had been shoddily applied, the cut across my chest hastily cleaned. But I suppose I couldn’t blame whoever had done it.

  There had been, after all, a lot to clean up.

  The smaller cuts and scrapes had been cleaned and left bare, bright-red punctuations across my body. The larger gashes had been wrapped as best they could. But I gathered from how the bandages had been applied—and from how much pain crept up on me now that I was awake—that whoever had done them had done so in a hurry.

  Everything except the sigil.

  I felt it like a knife wedged into my chest, every curl and point of ink applied with all the painstaking precision that the dressings hadn’t been. It sat, emblazoned on my chest and glowing with a faint light, the ink feeling like a lead weight.

  I growled, wiping it away. The pain that had been creeping up on me now came flooding back, every aching bone and bleeding cut that had been silenced now free to complain. I gripped the edge of the table, clenching my teeth until the pain faded.

  Once I was sure I wouldn’t go blind from agony, I looked around for who to thank for this horror.

  I found a corpse.

  My eyes adjusted to the dim light of a candle that burned blue in the corner. I was in a cramped box masquerading as a room, the ceiling a scant two feet above my head as I sat up on a table. Papers, quills, puddles of inks and alchemics littered the floor around me, shoved off and left to pool on the floor in an ugly brown mixture.

  Some of that might have also been my blood, considering how many dirty cloths and stray bandages littered the floor.

  Still, I was at least in better shape than the other guy.

  He lay, cold and still, upon the table next to mine. While he showed some evidence of decay in the paling of his skin and the black map of veins across his flesh, he was still fresh enough for me to know he was a he. And a young he, at that—the rot hadn’t yet taken his youthful features or lean body. There was plenty of still-firm flesh.

  And every inch of it bore ink.

  Running up and down his arms, his torso, his legs. Across his brow and nose and lips. Sigils that hurt my eyes to see had been scrawled across in painstaking detail, not a corner or curl out of place. I’d seen a lot of bodies in my time, and this was the first I felt like turning away from. But I couldn’t afford to look away.

  Not while he was twitching like that.

  I had thought he was dead. And yet he moved. Muscles twitched under his inked skin. His fingers curled, his toes trembled. His eyelids fluttered, like they might come open at any moment.

  And yet…

  Without realizing it, my hand reached out and brushed against his cheek.

  And he came back to life.

  I leapt backward, reaching for a sword that wasn’t there. But he didn’t make a move toward me. He simply shot up on the table, his eyes snapping open t
o reveal pale pools and his mouth twisted into a smile that was too wide.

  “Hello, Mother,” he said with a voice from a dark and breathless place. “The battle goes well, I am pleased to report. This ‘Revolution’ is but peasants playing, playing, playing…” He blinked. One eye. Then the other. “For the Imperium, I shall rout them. For you, I shall… I shall…”

  His voice trailed off, his eyes staring at something I couldn’t see. His mouth hung open, lips forming mechanically around words without sound. He didn’t look at me, didn’t speak to me, didn’t realize where he was.

  And how could he?

  He was extremely dead.

  Fucking corpsewrighting.

  I don’t blink away from corpses. I’ve made too many to do that. I can’t even say that every body I’ve put in the ground deserved it. But once they’ve gone, I’ve let them stay gone.

  You come into this world with nothing. You’re torn into a place that doesn’t need you, doesn’t want you, doesn’t care how you go. And when you’re gone, it takes everything you’ve earned.

  Everything but your name.

  The people who whisper it, the tears that are shed over it, the scars it carves across the world—that’s all you get to keep when you go. And that’s how it should end.

  To come back corpsewritten, as plodding labor or servant, that’s your name. But that’s not you.

  Over the protests of my aching body, I hurried out the door of the room. A black hallway stretched out in front of me, lit by the blue light of a single ever-burning candle. I walked over dark stains splattered on the floor, some still wet. My blood, I imagined, leading to a door whose seven locks now hung loose and open.

  I pushed it open into a room that was slightly nicer, if only because of the lack of a corpse inside it.

  I noticed my clothes—my vest, trousers, shirt and boots—scattered in a heap over my sword and belt. A plate of food lingered upon a table, heaped next to other half-eaten dishes and half-full glasses of water. A table loomed at the center of the room.

  The rest of it had been claimed by paper.

  Books were scattered in various spots. All opened to various pages. Diagrams were pinned to the walls, to the ceiling, illustrating the corpse I had just seen back there. Sigils patterned the paper in various half-finished formulae, some of them angrily crossed off with black ink. Scalpels, quills, inkwells, and small saws adorned the rest of the room, an infirmary of metal and paper for a patient who was never going to get better.

  Amid the towering stacks of books and heaps of metal, I almost didn’t notice the small girl at the center of it. I wouldn’t have, truly, if she hadn’t immediately popped up at the sight of me emerging from the hallway.

  “You’re alive!” Liette smothered her cry with her hands. “I mean… not that I didn’t expect you to be. The sigil, I was fairly certain, would do its job to stabilize you and—”

  “This is your work, then,” I muttered, gesturing to the smeared ink on my chest.

  “Well, it was.” Liette adjusted her glasses, frowning. “Really, ruining it like that seems unnecessary. I worked rather hard on that sigil.”

  “Swords get written, scarves get written,” I muttered, “capes and wands and boots and cloaks get written…”

  “Normally, yes. But the principle behind it is the same as—”

  “Not. People.”

  My words came punctuated by my fist pounding against the door frame. A nearby stack of books began to tilt. Liette screamed—louder than she had when I had emerged—and rushed to prop it up. Once it was out of danger, she sighed and forced her words from clenched teeth.

  “I acknowledge that the risks inherent in wrighting on human flesh are great,” she said, each word deliberate. “But I’ve researched the topic enough to be comfortable in my mastery of it, and my skill is unsurpassed amongst wrights.”

  “And have you tried it before?”

  She paused. “I haven’t.”

  “But you thought you could just do that to me? Without asking? Without me knowing?”

  “I COULDN’T LET YOU DIE!”

  She screamed loud enough to make the books tilt again. This time, she let them collapse to the floor. Her hands were balled into trembling fists, and her eyes were furious behind her spectacles and locked on me.

  “Your injuries were too great for me to treat with what I had,” she said. “And I couldn’t very well have dragged you to a proper healer in a city crawling with people that want to kill you. So I took you to my workshop.”

  “I blew up your workshop.”

  “My other workshop,” she replied, snide. “I’m a Freemaker, imbecile. Why would I keep all my research in one place?” She let out a hot breath. “But I don’t keep enough here to handle what had happened to your body. So when conventional methods ran out and you were still bleeding and your breath slowed and I thought you might have killed yourself for me, I… I…”

  Her voice became heated, her deliberate composure shattering. She turned away from me, rubbing at her eyes with one hand as she removed her glasses with the other.

  “I knew the risks,” she said. “I know why fleshwrighting is forbidden. But I had no other choice but to let you die.”

  “And then what?” I grunted. “I’d have been another toy for you to experiment on? Like that poor bastard back there?”

  She straightened up. “You saw him.”

  “You left me in the same fucking room with him, so yeah. I saw him. I heard him, too.”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “I don’t think anything. I know he’s corpsewritten. I know you took a person and turned him into a dancing sack of meat and bones.”

  “He doesn’t dance. He can’t do anything but get up and say those words, over and over. He wasn’t written to do anything else yet.”

  “Listen to yourself,” I snarled through a disgusted sneer. “You’re fucking talking about him like he’s a sword.”

  “You’re one to talk.”

  She turned to face me. She reached into her pocket and produced a single metal shell, a spell script scrawled across its surface. One of the Cacophony’s shells. She gave it a twist, pried it apart, and emptied its contents onto the floor.

  A fine powder emptied out in a perfect puddle. It caught the light as it fell, sparkling purple, and as it pooled together, it rang out with a faint harmony. You might have called it just extremely weird dirt, if you didn’t know better.

  But the look on her face told me she knew that she was looking at a dead mage.

  “Dust,” she said. “Your weapon uses dead mages to work.”

  “You had no right,” I growled.

  “I saved your life,” she said. “And while you were healing, I got curious. I opened it up and found this.” She gestured to the Dust at her feet. “How many mages died for you to fire a single shot?”

  The answer was one. One mage, upon death, would leave behind enough Dust to make about thirty shells. Which would then be used to kill more mages, to make more Dust, to make more shells for the Cacophony to fire. But I wasn’t about to tell her that.

  “That’s different,” I growled.

  “How?”

  “Dust is just… Dust. It’s not a person. Not a body. Not anymore.”

  “But a dead person is? What’s the difference between you and me using dead people for our own ends? Save that you just make more dead people with them?”

  “I use it to hurt people who deserve it,” I snarled back.

  “And they all deserved it? What you gave them?” She stepped toward me, defiant.

  “They did.” I met her step, approached her.

  “All of them?”

  “ALL OF THEM!” I roared.

  “And were all of them on your list?” she screamed back.

  And I stepped away, eyes wide, breath gone. She might as well have punched me. But it hurt worse, somehow, to see her reach into her pocket and pull free a worn, folded-up paper. She unfolded it delicatel
y and held it out in front of me like an indictment.

  I suppose, in many ways, it was.

  Thirty-three names stared back at me, etched in ink. My eyes drifted over them, drinking them in.

  Rogro the Dervish. Galta the Thorn. Rin the Vendetta.

  Their names rang out clear and resonant in my head, each one scarring itself across my mind as I read them.

  Mandra the Banner. Jindu the Blade. Vraki the Gate.

  Each one as painful as the day I had written them down.

  Zanze the Beast.

  “They’re Vagrants, aren’t they?” she asked. “You’re out to kill other Vagrants.”

  “It doesn’t concern you,” I said.

  I took a step toward her and felt a pain lance through my body. Not the pain of my cuts and bruises. This pain was older, more intimate.

  “Do they deserve it, too?” she asked. “Are you going to kill all of them?”

  “Stop talking,” I growled.

  Another step. The pain grew worse. It burned through my scars, a fiery pain that coursed over my eye, across my cheek, down my shoulders, until it settled into a seething, angry pain in the scar across my chest.

  “Did they do something?” The scorn and indignity were gone from her eyes when she looked at me, all but limping toward her. I stood over her, breath hot and angry. Her hand drifted up toward my face, fingers trembling as they drifted near the scar over my eye. “Are they why you have those scars?”

  “SHUT UP!”

  She was against the wall, her back pressed to it, her hands flat at her sides. My fists came down, precariously close to her head. She shuddered as I struck the wall, but I didn’t care. I leaned close, hot breath coming out through clenched teeth, let her get a good look at these scars she was so interested in.

  Let her look upon me, the wielder of the Mad Emperor’s Legacy. Let her look upon the woman who carved a bloody path through the Scar and left in her wake people weeping over the ruins of what she had wrought. Let her look upon me, Sal the Cacophony, the killer, the Vagrant, the destroyer, and feel the same cold fear that Zanze would when he looked upon me.