by Sam Sykes
“It’s quiet,” Liette whispered, six paces behind me.
“It was,” I muttered in response.
“That can’t be a good sign, can it?” she said. “The world goes quiet before a Vagrant attacks.”
“Says who?”
“I read it in a book.”
“Uh-huh. Did the book feature prominent use of the word throbbing?”
Her mouth dropped open in indignant anger. I could feel her lips trembling, trying to formulate a voice for her outrage. I held up a hand for silence, not knowing if she heeded it or not. In another second, I couldn’t hear her over the sound filling my ears.
A distant wailing with no earthly source. An echo of the Lady Merchant’s song. A lot of magic had been expended very recently, traces of it could still be around. Not knowing what to expect would have been bad. But I knew the names on that list. I knew what to expect.
And that was worse.
Galta the Thorn.
Mendmage. My eyes drifted over the streets, onto the walls, up onto overhangs, anywhere that a nigh-invincible killer might lurk.
Zanze the Beast.
Maskmage. I tried to feel the still in the air that preceded a great panther pouncing, a great hawk swooping, a great serpent striking—he could be any of those.
Riccu the Knock.
Doormage. My ears were open for the sound—that faint ripping that would tell me a portal was opening behind me, above me, anywhere I wouldn’t expect.
Taltho the Scourge.
Nightmage. I glanced at the shadows, peering close to see which ones were darker than the others, which ones could blossom into a forest of nightmares around me.
Jindu the Blade.
Him…
Well, there was no preparing for Jindu.
But the steps dragged out, mine and Liette’s feet crunching on sand, until close to half an hour had passed without either of us being flung around, blown apart, or eviscerated. Which I was thankful for, don’t get me wrong, but it was unexpected.
I knew the names on that list and those names knew mine. I had expected to be either murdered or well into murdering by now.
But aside from that distant echo of the Lady’s song and the cold breeze and the weight of the Cacophony hanging from my hip? I was without foes.
Or so I thought.
Movement at the corner of my right eye. Every thinking part of me shut down; my body knew how to do what my head couldn’t. My hand went down to my belt. The Cacophony leapt up, I could feel his hot eagerness in my hand. I swept him up, turned him toward the right. My eyes found the sight just as my thumb found the hammer and my finger the trigger. My breath fell into the comfortable rhythm of someone ready to kill.
It was a magnificent display.
I’m sure the fat black chicken that came clucking out the door was duly impressed.
The little fat bird came strutting out from the open door like he owned the fucking place, taking umbrage at my unwelcome intrusion into his domain.
“Outstanding,” Liette muttered behind me. “He shall speak of this day and every poultry within six leagues shall know not to cross Sal the Cacophony.”
“Oh, fuck off,” I muttered.
I would have had worse words for her had a shock of pain not lanced up my arm. Bright red pain flashed behind my eyes, every inch of muscle lanced by needles. I winced, bit back a scream, not letting it out. That scream would be the difference between my arm feeling like it was on fire and it actually being on fire.
“Sal!” Liette rushed up to me.
“It’s fine,” I whispered through clenched teeth. It wasn’t. But it would pass.
I had pulled out the Cacophony for a chicken. Not a Vagrant, not even a bandit; a fucking chicken. He was understandably pissed at the waste of his skills.
If I had actually shot the damn thing, he might have taken my arm off.
“It’s the weapon, isn’t it?” Liette ran her hand along mine, her skin cold to the touch. “Why do you even have it? What good is a weapon that hurts you?”
I couldn’t answer that. First, because if I impugned his usefulness, the Cacophony would protest further. Second, because there was no such thing as a weapon that didn’t hurt its wielder eventually.
The pain subsided and I returned him to his holster. But a sharp tingling sensation lingered in my arm. His warning. The next time I drew him, the ensuing carnage had better be incredible.
Jeff, though? Jeff didn’t care what he got to stab.
He’s easygoing like that.
I pulled out my blade and stalked toward the bird. I came to a halt as Liette seized my arm. I glared at her, largely prepared for her to ask if I was really going to swordfight a chicken over annoying me and fully prepared to assure her I was. But her eyes were on something other than me. She pointed. I followed.
And I saw the corpse.
We crept in past the door into a musty room. A township like Stark’s Mutter wouldn’t have a proper tavern. This dank little room full of empty tables and chairs and dusty bottles barely qualified as one. The tiny bar was too small to conceal the corpse and a long, slender arm sprawled out from behind it.
I kept Jeff upright, held my breath. Two minutes passed and nothing shot, stabbed, or exploded me. If anyone had heard the shot, they weren’t coming. Soothed for the moment, I inched closer to the bar, peered around it.
The dead woman stared back at me with white eyes. I don’t mean they were big, I mean they were white. No pupil. No iris. Her skin was wrinkled, her body shriveled. If I didn’t know better, I’d have said she died an old woman. And if fate was kind, I wouldn’t have known better.
But what’d I say about charity?
“Scions.”
I glanced at Liette behind me. “Your contact?”
She didn’t answer as she pushed past me, leaving me to watch the door while she knelt by the dead woman. She ran a pair of fingers over skin sagging from bones, as though the meat inside the woman had simply been eaten away and left her a hollowed-out bag of skin.
“Selective consumption,” Liette hummed, apparently unperturbed by the horror in front of her. “Something devoured crucial aspects of her—organs, marrow, muscle—but left behind others. Like…” She furrowed her brow. “Have you ever seen a cloak without anyone in it?”
I didn’t answer that. She was talking more to herself anyway. “Magic, obviously. But I’ve never seen a spell that could do this.”
I had. Once.
Didn’t like it.
Fuck me, I couldn’t help but wonder what had gone through her head when it hit her. Had she thought she was safe when she hunkered down behind the bar? What did she think when she felt her muscle wasting away and the life seep out of her? Whose name did she cry out when she…
Fuck.
You get the idea.
Unfortunately, the idea I didn’t want was the only one I had. Whatever had happened here, whatever they had planned, I had been too late to stop. I had known that going in. I had been prepared for seeing whatever horror they had been concocting. But I still didn’t know what horror it had been, save that it had been painful.
I heard a creak from upstairs.
I heard the distant whisper of the Lady’s song.
I heard the Cacophony thrum in his holster.
Magic. Close.
“What is it?”
Liette’s voice came as a whisper. Wrights might have been talented, but they weren’t mages. She hadn’t heard the song, couldn’t hear it. But she noticed I had. I made a gesture for her to remain where she was.
I shifted Jeff to my left hand, kept my right on the Cacophony. I pressed myself to the wall as I made my way upstairs, eyes on the landing above where the doors to the rooms for rent began. No shadows leapt out at me. No spells assailed my senses. By the time I reached the top, nothing greeted me but a door slightly ajar at the end of the hall.
Good enough.
I made my way down, pushed it gently open, peered inside. A humb
le room greeted me: a pair of beds, a writing desk, a table in the middle with an unopened bottle upon it. A pair of heavy traveler’s coats hung off pegs on the wall. It was a cozy little room, perfectly the sort of thing you’d expect to find in a place like this.
Really, the corpse with the crushed throat lying in the center of the room only barely marred its charm.
“Another one,” Liette observed grimly, having apparently grown impatient and followed me up. I didn’t bother stopping her as she pushed past me and knelt beside the dead man, studying him. I wasn’t worried until she cringed. She never cringed. “Scions,” she whispered. “Look at his throat.” She gestured to the twisted red husk of meat masquerading as a neck. “It’s like someone crushed him.”
“Probably the other agent,” I replied.
“What other agent?” She looked up at me.
“He’s a Revolutionary,” I replied.
“That’s ridiculous. He’s not wearing a uniform.”
“Well, he’d be a shitty spy if he was, wouldn’t he?” I gestured to the beds, both immaculately made with their boots placed perfectly side by side. “A soldier can shed his uniform, but not his habits. And look.” I gestured to the bottle of wine, unopened on the table. “Revolutionaries don’t drink.”
“That’s not the most compelling evidence.”
“True. It’s more of a hunch.” I plucked one of the coats off its peg, tested it for weight. I jammed Jeff’s blade into its side and cut it open, reaching in to pluck out a sheaf of carefully folded papers. “This is evidence.”
I’d forgive you for saying that it seemed a little weird that I knew where to find them. After all, the whole point of a secret pocket is usually that someone doesn’t know where they are. And I imagined the vast majority of people would have seen these heavy coats and thought nothing of them. But for the illustrious minority of people in the Scar who have met, crossed, and been the target of Revolutionary agents before—of which I happened to be a part—we knew what to look for.
I shuffled through the papers. A mess of gibberish greeted me. Another fucking code. Not even one that could be solved as swiftly as magic. This was Revolutionary birdshit. I had read a little bit—in my line of work, you cross these assholes more than once—but my grasp was shaky at best and I could pick out only a few words.
“Two of them were dispatched here,” I muttered, looking through the papers. “They were on an observation mission. They were looking for a person of interest. A Vagrant.” I scanned the paper, squinting through the gibberish as if an answer might lie within. Seeing nothing, I threw the papers away. “It doesn’t say which.”
“Could it be… one of them? The names on your list?”
I shook my head, turned away. “Who the fuck knows?”
Liette looked down at the corpse. “He might.”
A cold pang hit me as I caught the implication in her voice. “You’re not serious.”
“My seriousness is not the issue,” Liette replied. “Yours is. And if you are intent on finding the names on your list. If…” She hesitated, then sighed. “If that will make you feel better… then there is a way.” She looked meaningfully down at the body. “He’s still fresh enough.”
Like I said, wrighting is the act of imbuing inanimate matter with a new identity. Steel can be soft as silk; silk can burn like fire. The results differ based on the skill of the wright, the application of the sigils, and the nature of the material, but theoretically, anything could be persuaded to be something else.
Even a corpse.
I didn’t like it. There were very few things I could rely on in this miserable world, but one that I had grown quite accustomed to was the fact that dead people stay dead. Or they ought to anyway. That could change, if one knew the proper wright and had reason enough to risk it. Among wrights, there were none better than Liette. And I had seven reasons.
All of them worth the risk.
I nodded reluctantly at her. Liette plucked a quill from her hair and an inkwell from her belt. She began to scrawl a few sigils across the dead man’s face, each line careful and deliberate. She knew what could happen if she fucked it up.
But she was the best. And no sooner had she finished than the man’s eyes snapped open. Blackened from blood that had pooled and rotted within, he stared at nothing. His lips trembled, speaking through a breathless voice that sounded like it came from a thousand miles away.
“Relentless,” he gasped. “Is that you?”
I didn’t know what that meant, but I wasn’t about to ask. Not like he could hear me anyway. Corpsewrighting could only reliably make a sufficiently fresh body relive its last few moments. Anything more complicated than that tended to end… messily.
“Brother,” he whispered. “What’s wrong with your face? I heard noise in the town square. What happened? The people were taken there. Did you see the target? Did you see Vraki?”
Only one thing could make my blood run colder than a talking corpse. And it was that name. That name took me back to a lightless place, a place of cold stone and soft whispers and blood dripping onto a frozen floor. That name made me want to go running from the room.
I bit it back. I kept listening.
“Relentless? You’re not… Wait, get back. GET BACK! BROTHER, IT’S… IT’S… IT’S…”
Liette hastily wiped the sigils away from his brow. He fell back to the floor, truly dead once more.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“He started to repeat himself at the end there,” she said. “That’s as far back as his corpse can recall.”
“Birdshit,” I muttered. “I’ve seen you do more with a body than that.”
“You have.” She looked at me flatly. “Do you recall how that ended?” She shook her head. “If that’s insufficient, Sal, then it should be proof that this was folly. They’re not here. And they didn’t want to be followed so badly that they did this”—she gestured at the man’s collapsed throat—“to someone. What more do you need?”
I stared at the body, running his last words through my head. She looked at me, expectant, waiting for me to concede, to say this had all been a fool’s errand, to see reason.
This wouldn’t be the first time I disappointed her.
Hell, it wouldn’t even be the worst I disappointed her today.
“What was that he said,” I asked, “about the town square?”
FOURTEEN
STARK’S MUTTER
Magic used to be mysterious.
When humanity first discovered it, the earliest mages were burned alive by terrified nuls. Eventually, they started burning the nuls back and you know how the rest of it turned out. Magic became a science: it could be measured, reproduced, predicted. Mages figured out exactly what they’d have to give to get what they wanted, and from time to time, we all convinced ourselves that we were in control of magic.
And then, from time to time, you see something that makes you realize we’re not.
And then sometimes you see what I saw on the day I walked into the town square of Stark’s Mutter. And you realize you don’t know shit. About magic. About humans. About what either of them are capable of.
I didn’t want to think about what the town square had been before the seven conspirators had come here. I didn’t want to think about the wives who had gossiped and laughed by the well. I didn’t want to think about the kids who might have played here. I didn’t want to think about the old men who grumbled about how hard life was beneath the eaves of the store.
But when I looked upon their bodies, I didn’t have a choice.
Trees. They looked like pale trees. Their emaciated arms were withered branches. Their flabby legs were gnarled trunks in blackened earth. Their torsos were bent and cracked into unnatural angles.
The air itself was effused with wrongness. The sunlight shone dimmer here in the square. The wood of houses was warped and splintered. A nearby tree, along with the bird that had been sitting upon it, was split into a perfect, bloodless sy
mmetry. There was a reek more profound than rot, like the odor of a thousand corpses in a sealed tomb turning to dust all at once as the door was opened.
And all of it—every trace of vileness, every whiff of foulness—emanated from the circle at the center.
It was carved into the earth with such impossibly even alien perfection that no human could have done it. The circle stretched to engulf the entire town square, blasting the earth a lightless black and polishing it to glossless obsidian. Inside it, the trees that had once been people were frozen, their feet sunken into the black earth, their bodies twisted as they struggled and failed to escape, even as their faces were locked onto the center, unable to look away.
Their bodies were withered. The meat of their flesh had been rotted away. They had died slowly. In pain. In fear. Leaving behind nothing but a hellscape bereft of light, bereft of sound.
Except the retching, anyway.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw Liette leaning against the nearby house, her body shuddering with each ragged breath as she vomited upon the road.
“How are we doing back there?” I asked.
“Just a…” She held up a hand without looking up. “I’ll be…” Unless the end of that sentence was “puking my last six meals up,” she was a liar. “What… what happened?”
“Summoning,” I replied. “Not a good one.”
Not that any of them were. Tearing open a wound between worlds was an inexact art at best. It was a visceral magic; even the ones that went well left a lingering injury in creation—an injury that made most decent people, including Liette, react as she did.
I didn’t mind, though. It had smelled much worse the first time anyway.
“A what?” Liette came staggering up beside me, wiping her mouth with a handkerchief. “They can do that?”
“One of them can,” I muttered, my eyes scanning the horror frozen in time. “He’s not called Vraki the Gate because he holds the door open for women.”
“And… what did he summon?”
I didn’t want to tell her. In the right hands, summoning could be a fairly benign act—or at least, as benign as tearing otherworldly creatures of destruction into ours can be. Sometimes it’s a dragonfly with stained glass wings, sometimes a cat with six legs and human eyes, sometimes a man-shaped thing that explodes.