“You’re not unintelligent, in your own way,” Sicarii acknowledged.
“Truth is, Eld and I haven’t been all that close these past few seasons. I’m sure you know that,” I added, the smile frozen on my face. Inside, I was a violent inferno, a volcano of epic proportions, waiting to explode and rain molten revenge down on the lot of them. These were merely the tremors before the eruption.
“The Company’s seen firsthand that we aren’t close now. The Gods?” I shrugged. “If they wished us dead, they’ve had the opportunity more than once. I admit, your trap had me flummoxed.” I took a breath and steadied my shoulders. Now. It was time.
“The only other two who saw Eld and me close enough to know the depths of our friendship died last summer. One’s a rotting skeleton on a Godsforsaken flyspeck of an island and the other washed out to sea.
“But the drowned rise … don’t they, Chan Sha?”
Chan Sha recoiled as if struck. She swept an arm out and pointed at me. “I could have killed you a dozen times over, but you’ve something you stole from me. A gift you never deserved, one you squandered to be rich and noble, to be one of them. I came to Servenza to take what was taken from me, from all of you! The Empire, the Company, the Gods, Eld, and you.” Her voice broke. “I’ll have my revenge,” she growled.
She tossed off her hooded jacket and sank into a crouch. Lightning rent the night sky, showing her hair, shorn tight against her skull, and gearwork rising over her back. She flung her arms out and metal limbs shot out from the gearwork, scything blades hanging over her like spiders’ fangs.
“But first I’ll pry Sin from your mind with my own hands!”
Thunder rolled across her words and as the skies opened above us, she thrust her arms up into the air.
“Make her bleed!”
59
The gangs of Servenza rushed across the Lighthouse, howling their battle cries, lightning flashes glinting off scores of weapons. All pointed at me. They’d been fanning out while Sicarii and I spoke and now sprinted toward me in a semicircle. Right into the trip wires I’d set. Number 219. Pyrotechnomancy, Maestros of Powder and Flame was a book I’d read a few years back, though luckily I’d recently procured a copy for my library at my palazzo. I’d never had a chance to put it to use … until tonight.
The face of the sundial erupted in hissing flames that leapt up in gouts, turning the front rank of my enemies into a screaming, writhing mass of human torchwood. Their charge faltered, howls lost in the thunder above. The flames caught the match cord I’d interlaced around some of the time markings, and the floor exploded in a violent burst of gunpowder that sent bodies flying.
I saw all of this in my peripheral vision; my focus remained on Chan Sha. Her glowing eye shifted down, likely marking the smoking match cord at her feet. One of the brutes beside her tackled her just as the nail-filled keg exploded. Damn it. The Lighthouse shuddered; I lost my footing on the rain-swept tile and smacked my head off the gilded gnomon. Blinking back tears, I saw the other brute disappear in a blast of flame and iron—what was left fell to the ground in ragged, smoking pieces. All around the sundial explosions rent the air as the first waves were eviscerated.
A pause in the storm above gave way to an eerie silence atop the Lighthouse—the first wave of traps were spent and the gangs were still gathering themselves back together. Howls, snarls, and gunfire rose from the streets below and a lookout shouted from the stairwell.
“Sicarii—mages are fighting in the streets! Veneficus and Sin Eaters. They’re surrounding the Lighthouse!”
“Well, that didn’t go according to plan,” I muttered. I’d sent letters to both the Sin Eaters and the Dead Gods, hoping that one side or the other would show up and I could use the knowledge they wanted as a bargaining chip to get them to fight Sicarii’s crew for me. Apparently both groups had arrived and were now busy killing themselves below rather than up here. Damn it.
“You’ve started a holy war,” Sin said, his voice loud in mind.
“How the fuck did you get free?”
“Bumped your head and I slipped out,” he said. “Buc, what have you done?”
“The war was going on since Ciris woke.”
“Not like this. Always proxies before.”
“Sicarii set this in motion when the Veneficus killed those Sin Eaters.”
“Do you know what this means?” he asked, ignoring me. “Open warfare will push the whole world into blood and flame.”
“You always knew my plans,” I reminded him. “Hush now, I don’t have time to lock you back up. I don’t want your magic.”
“Buc—”
The gangs were more cautious this time, a few of the Sharp Eagles leveling muskets with impossibly long scopes, and here and there I saw versions of the Artificer’s crossbow pointed at me. The rest walked forward, watching where they put their feet. A muzzle erupted in flame, a bullet whined past my ear, and I didn’t stick around to see the rest. Flinging myself backward, I vaulted over the edge of the sundial as more gunfire rang out. Bolts caromed off the metal and ran screeching into the storm.
I tore around the side, hands going for my own crossbow. I hadn’t dared plant more explosives this close to the dial, not unless I wanted to take the entire roof down, and me with it. My breath was in my throat as I came around the backside of the dial just in time to see the first gang members, running now, hit the wires I’d rigged with razors and oil. A woman went down with a scream and another behind her went arse over heels, her screams cut off when the ones running behind her trampled her.
It was chaos.
Rain and thunder providing a ragged chorus, lightning illuminated everything in flashes: men and women sliding on the oil-slick roof, breaking arms and ankles as their compatriots ran them over; others found their limbs flayed by razors strung across their path. In moments half the sundial was covered in blood and oil. I jumped on top of one of the hour markers and leveled my crossbow.
“You want me? Come and take me!”
The weapon jerked in my arms and a tall man with a ragged patchwork cloak flapping in the wind twisted and fell. The woman behind him, in a bright-white jacket and trousers, clasped her face as if she’d been bitten. A man’s head snapped back in a spurt of blood and motion. My fingers worked the trigger, finding a rhythm: tat-draw string-load bolt-tat-draw string-load bolt-tat. The gears whistled with sharp puffs of air as I poured bolts into the attackers. Click click click. I plucked the now-empty cylinder from beneath the bow and flung it at the mob, now only a score of paces away. I grabbed another cylinder from my belt and snapped it into place.
I worked the trigger as fast my fingers would go, and the dead and wounded began to pile up in front of me, funneled together by the sundial’s arm on one side and the lip of the roof on the other. As fast as I shot, more came running, urged on by Chan Sha’s hoarse, maniacal shouts. I dropped another cylinder and loaded my last one. These weren’t soldiers and I’d hoped they would break, but I was just a lone woman and they were fool enough to think they could kill me. I hadn’t wagered on their fear of Chan Sha–Sicarii either. They weren’t going to stop unless I was dead or they were.
Or Sicarii was.
Lightning hit the jutting rod above the stairs, returning the world to daylight in a hissing crack of electricity, and a moment later the Lighthouse shook violently. My world flipped and I lost my grip on the crossbow as I fell, slamming off the sundial’s face. The hilt of my sword buried itself in my side and I felt something crack. Pushing myself back up, I saw Serpent’s Flame leap into the night from across the roof, telling me that the match cord I’d wound around the lightning rod and down the far staircase had finally reached the bombs there. With luck, the rubble would block the landing and cut off further reinforcements.
“Artificer!”
Chan Sha came to her feet, shoving aside the dead henchman who’d shielded her from the earlier blast, screaming the Artificer’s name again and again the whole way up. She wobbled on h
er feet, then shook her arms, flexing gloved fingers that glinted with burnished alloys. The gearwork mechanism on her back hissed as the metallic arms rose around her, blades spinning in the storm light once again.
“It seems I need a word with my inventor,” she growled. “What are you lot waiting for?” Her spiders’ fangs waved them forward. “Kill the bitch!”
“Hey! That’s my line!” I shouted.
Chest heaving, I sprinted around the sundial and ran right into a mob waving cudgels and cutlasses, spears and stilettos. A pistole went off in my face, the heat and light blinding me, and I felt something rip at my jacket. A familiar burn coursed through my eyes and time began to slow.
NO!
“You don’t get to control me anymore,” I growled, pushing Sin away.
Time leapt back and with it came a man and woman charging ahead of the rest. I drew my short, thick-bladed sword without thinking. Even without Sin’s magic, I had muscle memory to fall back on and if I didn’t move as swiftly as I did with him, I moved fast enough to bury the blade in the man’s chest, riding him down to the ground so the woman’s wild swing cut only air above me. Grasping her boot, I pulled hard, throwing myself back to make up for my lack of strength. Her head slapped off the ground like a rotted melon and she sat up slowly with a moan. I was already up, pulling my sword free, and I buried it in her neck, blinking at the sudden warm blood that peppered my face. She fell back, pulling my sword out of my hands, and I had no chance to recover it because another dozen were racing toward me.
“Gods—damn—it,” I gasped, my limbs on fire. I couldn’t keep this up. There were too many of them. Have to get to Sicarii. Shedding my jacket, I pulled a knotted rope and the half-dozen pistoles I’d tied against my side swung loose, hanging on cords that attached to the Artificer’s gearwork machine on my back. Thanks for the idea, Chan Sha.
I caught one and leveled it, hesitating until a woman in a sleeveless vest filled the front sight, then squeezed, closing my left eye to protect some of my vision. The pistole leapt in my fist and her head disappeared in flame and smoke. The barrels whizzed, whipping over, and I fired again. Dropping the empty pistole, I caught up another and fired. Again. And again. And again until they broke, leaving me, for a brief moment, in command of the field.
Wheezing, I drew twin stilettos, blades a palm longer than I normally used, but razor thin; they wouldn’t tire my arms like my sword had and they’d give me the reach I needed to keep from getting stabbed to death while going for the wench. At least that was the plan. Drawing a deep breath that made my injured ribs scream, I took off in pursuit of the ones who had fled.
In pursuit of Chan Sha.
60
The storm unleashed its full fury as I ran, thumb-sized hail pelting down, wind lashing at everyone atop the Lighthouse, lightning the only illumination. Thanks to the remaining trip wires, which were still being sprung, and the havoc I’d already caused, Chan Sha’s gangs had lost all cohesion. I was just another shadow in the chaos—but one with steel teeth—and I danced amongst the gearwork and markers, ducking and weaving in a pattern I’d created for this occasion.
The problem was, my dance partners were too many.
I slammed into a man who was more a boy and he grunted, trying to scream, but I already had a stiletto in each lung and all that came out was a blood-filled, frothy gurgle. I stepped back and he collapsed, leaving me just enough time to reverse my grip and rip off half of a woman’s face with one slash before she tripped over the boy’s body and her head met my knee. I leapt over them, knee clicking as I ran, taking a wide loop around the sundial to try to come at Chan Sha from the side, if not behind. In the next minutes I took a slashing wound to the leg, had a woman bury a small knife in my calf before I killed her with it, plugged both wounds with pistole patches and scraps of linen, took another cut to the forearm, and nearly lost the gearwork on my back to a pair of ax-wielding women who, in a lightning flash, looked enough alike to be sisters.
Here and there gunfire blasted through the hail and rain, but how anyone could see more than a few paces in front of them to aim, I didn’t know. With all the different gangs involved, old enmities ran deep and if Chan Sha wasn’t careful, she was going to have a civil war on her hands. She seemed to have the same realization at nearly the same moment because I heard a change in the tone of her screamed orders, but she’d have to have the Gods’ luck to be understood over the maelstrom. My hair was plastered to the side of my face, my eyes reduced to slits to keep some modicum of vision, and my oil-treated leather garments were soaked through and clung to me like a diver’s suit.
A tall woman with only one pant leg appeared out of the storm and plowed right into me. I went down and her weight drove the breath from me as my ribs screamed. I managed to drive a boot into her crotch so hard that I heard her yelp above the wind and rain. She rose, sword in hand, but before she could strike, something hit her in the head and she fell in a heap. I took a breath and the pain was exquisite. Spots flecked my vision, the world around me growing hazy.
“Buc!” Sin’s voice snapped me back to reality. A reality filled with lancing pain in my leg and fiery tendrils down my arm. “Buc, get up or you’re as good as dead!”
“I told you to shut the fuck up,” I growled, stumbling to my feet. I drew in a ragged gasp, then bent and collected the blades I’d dropped in the collision. The dead woman had a hole in her head but I didn’t have time to thank whomever shot her instead of me. Another dance like that one and I’d be out of the fight. I had to find Chan Sha now.
“If you didn’t have me trying to stitch you back together from the inside out, you wouldn’t be able to stand right now, let alone fight Chan Sha. Let me help!”
“No.” I shook my head. “I’d rather die my own woman than live as an unwitting servant to you.”
“That’s not how it works,” he protested. “You never gave me a chance to explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain,” I told him. “You have your nature, I have mine. Now. Fuck. Off.”
“Stupid, stubborn, silly woman—you’re going to get us both killed!”
“Aye, likely,” I agreed, taking off at a lurching run. “But first I’mma kill Chan Sha. Let’s dance!”
I cut down another group, with sigils of tridents I didn’t recognize, collecting another slash across my arm, higher up and deep enough to expose muscle. I lost one stiletto to a fat bastard’s prodigious stomach and snatched up a boarding cutlass as a quick replacement. It weighed a ton but once I got it started, the weight of the blade took care of things. Thrice when someone got the drop on me, someone else got the drop on them, leaving them lying in crumpled heaps with holes through their heads. The first two times I thought it an accident, but after that, I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps someone was using the battle to settle their own scores. S-so long as it’s not me, I don’t care. My breathing howled in my ears like a wild beast beset by hounds; my chest was fire, my leg fire, my arms bloody with stinging cuts. All was pain and I used it to deliver the message of the streets: when someone hurts you, spread the pain.
61
A woman punched me in the side; I had been focused on finding Chan Sha and hadn’t even tried to shield myself from the blow. I couldn’t keep the cry behind my lips when my abused ribs cracked again. Her wicked grin disappeared as the cutlass she hadn’t seen coming crashed through her skull and I laughed as she fell, because if I didn’t, I’d have cried from the pain. There was something warm on my lips and when I scrubbed at my mouth with the back of my hand, it came away bloody. Breathing was suddenly a real effort.
“She wore brass knuckles and broke your ribs. You’ve got a pierced lung,” Sin whispered. “Please let me help.”
“Fuck off,” I said mindlessly. “I need to find Chan Sha!”
“Find her you have!”
Chan Sha leapt down from the gnomon’s tip, her followers scattering to give her room to land. When she stood up, she spread her arms, and the mechanical limb
s sprouting from her back spread with them, scything blades bright in the flashes of lightning. She looked wilder than she had when this all started and blood dripped from her clothes, but I didn’t dare hope it was all her own. The entire roof was a charnel house, blood, oil, and water coating everything in a thousand tones of crimson.
“No more words, Buc. Blades only.”
She swept toward me and I leapt to meet her, sending a stiletto at her face with an underhanded toss that she deflected with one of her mechanical arms without breaking stride. I drew my longer stiletto with my left hand, steadied the heavy cutlass in my right, and did the only thing I could do: attack.
Muscle memory is an underrated thing. In the months with Sin I’d practiced for hours—it was, truth be told, rather easy. Muscles that never tired, bones that didn’t break, and a mind that remembered everything. I could learn entire books of fighting techniques in half a fortnight, committing them to memory with Sin. Despite Sin having returned, he couldn’t do anything but seethe without my permission. I was going to fail on my own terms rather than win on his. I didn’t have a God’s strength and speed, but I had the memories, in muscle and mind, and in the first moments that was almost enough.
Sliding around one of Chan Sha’s gearwork arms and its questing blade, I sent another reverberating back toward her face and followed in low, blades flashing. I tried first one pattern, then another, seeking the soft flesh behind her metallic spiders’ fangs. Sparks flew up, hissing in the rain, but now that I was in close, I didn’t have just the gearwork to deal with. Chan Sha’s twin dirks punched toward me and it was all I could do to keep from being run through. If I had memories, she had memories, too.
The Justice in Revenge Page 42