Seven Blades in Black

by Sam Sykes

  One horror was replaced with another upon his face as I saw the realization come creeping in. He had seen the town square. He knew what had happened to the townspeople.

  “That’s… that’s right. They’re…”

  Revolutionaries typically don’t find themselves at a loss for words—years of propaganda training sees to that. Revolutionaries also don’t typically look like they’re about to shed tears over a bunch of dead townsfolk. Cavric, I gathered, was not your typical Revolutionary.

  Probably why he was just a low sergeant.

  “And…” He glanced from me toward Liette. “And what were you two doing here?”

  “Stopping by,” I replied.

  “Whilst pursuing stupidity,” Liette muttered.

  “What’d she say about pursuing?” Cavric asked.

  “Knowledge. Pursuing knowledge. You know how scholars are.”

  “It sounded like she said stupidity—”

  “Stark’s Mutter was on our way to the next freehold,” I hastily interrupted. “Wandered in, found this mess, then…” I gestured toward the blood. “Well, you know.”

  “And you just decided to stick around?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to act surprised that a woman who shoots people for money went looking for trouble.”

  Lies didn’t always come so easy for me. I was raised with the same values as all good little girls: don’t lie, sit pretty, don’t shoot people. But this was the Scar—not like a bird is going to stop from clawing your guts out to comment on how well-mannered you are.

  Still, the suspicion melted from Cavric’s face, replaced by a weary sigh. He trusted easily, this man. He hadn’t been lied to enough to tell the difference between an honest person and someone like me. And part of me felt just a little worse for having lent him the impression I was someone he could trust.

  Sometimes I think I did that a little too easily.

  “Yeah, fair enough,” he said. He sighed. “If Relentless were here and alive, he’d have come out by now. And if he’s here and dead, I’ll need more people to move him.” He tried to rise again, this time with more success and a little help from me. “I’ll have to let Cadre Command know about this, anyway. I’ll come back with more soldiers and we’ll give this place a proper look-through.”

  “Proper, huh?” I steadied him on his feet as he swayed.

  “You sound skeptical.”

  “For Revolutionaries, ‘proper’ typically means a firing squad and vigorous mortar fire,” Liette said, voice souring.

  “I… That’s not…” He sighed, shook his head, gave up. “We’re not all that… zealous. And yeah, this township will probably be burnt to the ground for mercy’s sake. But the people here deserve to be put to rest after what they were put through. I promise that they’ll have that at least.”

  “Ah, Revolutionary mercy,” Liette muttered. “Can we expect the full Revolutionary blessing and have you urinate on the ashes?”

  I shot her a glare, looked over to him. “Can you walk?”

  “I think so.” He began with a stagger, but his pace soon steadied and we made our way back toward the town gates. “You could come with me, you know. Both of you. Sergeant Courageous would reward you for—”

  “Courageous would find a reason to suspect my complicity and have me tortured for information he knew I didn’t have.”

  “He wouldn’t…” Cavric’s face fell. “Yeah… he would.”

  We walked the remaining length in silence until we came to the gates. The Iron Boar stood, idle and silent in the afternoon sun. Without its engines belching smoke and fire, it looked like just another hunk of metal.

  “What will you do now?” Cavric asked me as he made his way toward the machine’s door.

  “Get out of here before your comrades show up and burn the place down,” Liette said, glancing over at the township. “Whatever could be learned here will be smothered beneath small-minded terror.”

  “Not that I don’t appreciate the assistance”—Cavric glanced over the sigils on his hand, wiped them on his coat as he glared at Liette—“but there’s no need for snideness. The Revolution is here to help.” He glanced toward me, nodded. “Like you.”

  I bit back a cringe when he said that. The smile he shot me was uncomfortably honest.

  I gestured toward the Iron Boar with my chin. “You can drive this thing?”

  “I’ve been trained, yeah.” He patted the engine’s iron hide, smiled at the resonant sound. “She’ll bring my soldiers home for the rest they deserve.” He looked over his shoulder at me with a smile he should have saved for a better person than I was. “And it’s all thanks to you, Sal. Whatever Courageous might write down in the official report, I’m going to make it known that you did the right thing. If the Revolution can ever make it up to you for…”

  His voice died as he slid the door open and beheld a hold empty of his comrades’ corpses.

  Like I said, Cavric had a nice smile. All honest men have that smile. It’s a rare thing in any part of the world, let alone the Scar. Rare and worth protecting.

  Damn near broke my heart when I saw it melt off his face as he turned around and stared down the barrel of the Cacophony.

  “As a matter of fact,” I said as I pulled the hammer back, “there is a little favor I’ve been meaning to ask.”

  EIGHTEEN

  HIGHTOWER

  He’s dead, then?”

  Tretta spat the question, her hands following, fists slamming down on the table as she all but lunged over the table toward her prisoner. The water cup, freshly refilled, went flying from the impact, dousing Sal as it did.

  “So, two things,” Sal said as she calmly wiped water from her face. “First of all, I didn’t say he was dead. Second, can we perhaps work on the whole ‘screaming and throwing things whenever I hear something I don’t like’ thing you do?”

  “And Haven is involved with this entire mess?” Tretta snarled, though Sal didn’t seem to notice.

  “Maybe we could do a substitution method. Like the next time you feel like slamming your hands down and making a mess, just reach for a nice apple instead. That way, you’ll get a positive outcome and a healthy snack for—”

  “Do not toy with me, woman,” Tretta growled as she leaned over the table, narrowing her eyes. “It’s you who’s charged for the atrocities at Stark’s Mutter, not rogue Vagrants. Why should I believe anything that comes out of your mouth?”

  “First of all, ‘rogue Vagrant’ is an unnecessary qualifier, since all Vagrants are rogues by way of having broken their oaths to the Imperium. Secondly”—Sal shrugged—“why would I lie? You’re already going to kill me.”

  “And if you don’t tell me what really happened, I’ll—”

  “You’ll what? Kill me even deader?” Sal yawned as she reclined in her chair. “You’re already going to execute me, honey.”

  Tretta had the thought, not for the first time, that she would be well within her rights to reach for the hand cannon at her belt and shoot her dead right there, on principle, at least. Cadre Command would forgive her, she knew. They might even overlook the loss of a Revolutionary soldier if it meant disposing of a hated Vagrant, especially one this aggravating.

  Without quite realizing it, her hand had slid down to her belt. And, without quite realizing why, she took a deep breath, pulled her hand away from the grip of the gun, and sat back down.

  Cadre Command probably would overlook the loss of a soldier. It had been speeches, birthright, and favors that had gotten them their place. And it had been soldiers who had gotten her hers. Soldiers who had sworn to follow her and who she had sworn to protect. Soldiers like Cavric.

  And whether it was him, his body, or just his fate that was uncovered by listening to this annoying—profoundly annoying—woman, then that was an agony she could suffer.

  For now.

  “There we are,” Sal said, her smile wedging itself into a small, angry space between Tretta’s brows. “Now, just keep
breathing deeply and listen to the soothing sound of my voice.”

  No breath could come deep enough for Tretta to accomplish that. She growled at Sal to keep herself from strangling that soothing voice out of her prisoner’s mouth.

  “So Cavric is not dead,” she said.

  “I didn’t say that, either.”

  “Does this sort of thing come naturally to you or do you actually sit down and think of reasons for people to shoot you in the face?”

  “Well, talent can only get you so far.” With infuriating comfort, Sal stretched her manacled hands high above her head and yawned. The scar across her chest stretched with the effort. “But, at that point, Cavric was alive and well. He did, after all, help me out against the Haveners. It’d have been a touch rude to kill him then, wouldn’t it?”

  “Haven’s complicity in this complicates things,” Tretta muttered. “The presence of Vagrant criminals was a foregone conclusion and I would have laid odds that Imperial swine were also involved, but we are not officially at war with the Seeing God.”

  “Last month, I heard an entire squadron of Revolution spies turned up burning on their Kindling Wall. Or had you just sent them out to deliver a fruit basket?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “The methods of the fanatics are a subject of persistent interest to the Great General. This object you spoke of, the focusing crystal—”

  “What makes you think it was a crystal?”

  Tretta blinked, unsure. “I… merely assumed… the facets would be more conducive to…”

  Sal waved a hand. “You can just say you think crystals sound more magicky. Everyone does.” She chuckled. “Haven’s magic is unstable, at best. They don’t follow the laws of the Lady Merchant, so their trinkets pick up the slack. Sometimes they’re idols, symbols, but they all serve the same purpose.”

  “And if summoning is as dangerous as you say, it would behoove Vraki the Gate to have one on hand.”

  “Careful,” Sal said, winking. “You’re starting to sound a little rational, miss. Why, what would your comrades say if they heard—”

  “Where is it?” Tretta snapped, pointedly biting the head off the rest of that quip. “What happened to it?”

  “If I knew where it was still, I’d have it,” Sal replied. “And if I had it, I’d have sold it. And if I’d sold it, I’d be neck-deep in a throng of whiskey-soaked naked bodies.” She glanced over Tretta, hummed. “Since neither of us appears to be in a hurry to take our clothes off, it’s safe to assume I don’t know where it is.”

  “If it amplifies magic, why would Vraki leave it behind?”

  “Why not?” Sal shrugged. “So long as he held it, Haven would have been able to track him. And it’s not like he needed it. He is a Prodigy, you know.”

  She hadn’t said the word with any particular malice, nor even with any of her infuriating smugness. Yet, all the same, it sank into Tretta’s ear, traveled down her spine to bore into the base of her neck, and sent a hot flash of anger through her limbs that made her want to shoot someone.

  That word.

  “Prodigy,” she would have spat the word, had it seemed sufficient. As it stood, it would have seemed more fitting to cut her hand open and bleed the word out onto the table.

  Sal, to her credit, seemed to notice the change. The smile dissipated from her face, replaced by a cool, even stare and a soft, gentle whisper.

  “You know of them,” she said.

  “Every son and daughter of the Revolution knows of the hated Prodigies,” Tretta muttered. “Every honest Scarfolk, cowering bandit, and insect crawling across a pile of birdshit baking in the sun knows the Prodigies. Your Imperium, in its infinite decadence, already profanes the natural order with its magic. And despite your ability to wreak havoc with a thought, the Prodigies are yet insistent on further depravity.

  “They cast magic without cost,” Tretta snarled, her fingers struggling to carve furrows into the table. “As the rest of the Imperium defies mortal limitations, the Prodigies defy even those flimsy laws. They are without limits, without conscience, and what does the Imperium do with these abominations?

  “THEY PROMOTE THEM!” She slammed a fist onto the table. “They give them armies! They give them riches! They heap honor upon these mass murderers and hail them as heroes, coddling them even as they kill without discrimination, slaughtering soldier and civilian alike. To call them murderers would be to say they have thought. To call them animals would be to say they act on instinct. They are abominations. Monsters. Demons.”

  She didn’t notice that she had started breathing heavily. Nor did she notice the heat burning behind her face. She only barely noticed her prisoner when she looked up and saw Sal staring, wide-eyed, across the table at her.

  “Uh, all right…” Sal blinked. “You, uh, feel better now that you’ve got all that out?”

  Tretta didn’t dignify that with a shout or a slap or a shot. She curled her lip in a disgusted sneer at the woman.

  “Do you deny it? Any of it?”

  Sal stared at her and said nothing.

  “The annals of the Revolution are rife with the crimes of the Imperium,” she continued. “The Great General led us to unite to liberate ourselves from your Imperialist yoke. And rather than leave us to our newfound freedom, they sent the Prodigies. They sent Vraki; they sent Torle of the Void; they sent the Ashbreather’s Three, they sent Red Cloud.”

  Only after the name was spoken did she feel the breath returning to her. Only after it hung between them, a profanity etched into the air, did she feel the heat begin to seep out of her face. But it wasn’t the cleansing breath of a burden lifted that filled her lungs, nor was the heat replaced by something cool and comforting.

  Speaking the name was like opening a wound.

  She hadn’t been there the day it happened. The day Red Cloud had appeared over the skies of a Revolutionary garrison and set them ablaze with a thought. She hadn’t been given the honor of dying with her comrades. But she had been there when it was over. She had been given the opportunity to see the aftermath.

  The people—the soldiers, the merchants, the civilians—all entangled in a mass of molten flesh. The luckiest of them nothing but blackened skeletons that turned to dust in a strong breeze, any memory of them lost on the wind. But the lucky had been few. Everyone else had been half-charred, flesh seared from sinew, sinew melted from bone, but never wholly, never completely, never enough to give them merciful deaths.

  In their last moments, they had reached for the gates or the doors of the barracks, trying to escape. They had fallen to their knees and prayed to gods they had forsaken, begged for mercy from masters they had walked away from. They had clung together, hoping to shield each other from the worst of it and being spared nothing.

  Tretta remembered their eyes, still seeping smoke where the stares accusing her of failing them should have been.

  Red Cloud didn’t even give her the chance to feel ashamed.

  The Revolution had failed those people. As she had failed the Revolution. As she had failed everyone. She, who had been sworn to protect them—the merchants, the soldiers, the families—hadn’t even been there to fire a single, impotent shot.

  There had been more battles. More sightings. More of Red Cloud, the murderer, the monster, the Prodigy. Tretta had never been there to fight, though, to die with her comrades. Always, Red Cloud had appeared like a bad dream and disappeared just as suddenly, leaving ash and molten skin in her wake.

  To think about it did not fill Tretta with fury. Somehow, it always seemed so inadequate, so inconsequential. Rather, when she thought of Red Cloud, as she did then, her body shook not with anger, but with the force of holding back her tears, with the effort of trying to block out the memories.

  She always succeeded at one of those.

  “I don’t.”

  Tretta turned toward Sal, careful not to let the prisoner see the moisture in her eyes.

  “I don’t deny any of it,” Sal said. “It’s been a long ti
me since I was with the Imperium, but I knew the Prodigies enough to know what they were capable of. When Vraki went Vagrant, only then did the Imperium learn what they had in their ranks.” She sighed, looked down at her manacles. “Didn’t do much good, though, did it? It’s never the people outside your house you should worry about. They can only kill you. It’s the people inside that can hurt you.”

  “And is that,” Tretta whispered, “what Cavric felt when you betrayed him?”

  Sal looked up. That slow grin returned to her, the dimmest white light in the shadow that had fallen across her face. Tretta hated to see it, hated more that looking at it made blocking out the memories a little easier.

  “I was just getting to that,” Sal said, reaching for another cup of water. “If you’re done interrupting, that is…”

  Tretta’s hand shot out, seized Sal by her manacled wrist. It brought her the smallest, most spiteful smile to hear the prisoner gasp in alarm when she did. Firmly, she took the cup in one hand and raised Sal’s wrists in the other. Her eyes raced across the woman’s tattoos, taking in the lengths of winged birds, thundering clouds, and twisting dragons running up the length of her arms to terminate upon the skin of her neck.

  They twisted in a pattern known only to their bearer, yet even there, Tretta could see the scars. Knots of pale flesh broke the whites and blues that her inked skin nobly tried to hide.

  “The Imperium wouldn’t have let you wear these, I assume,” Tretta hummed. Her eyes drifted down to the expanse of scarred skin left bare by the woman’s garish outfit. “Am I to assume you went Vagrant because you found their uniforms too stifling?”

  “I went Vagrant for the same reasons as anyone,” Sal replied. “I liked bleeding for my own name better than bleeding for someone else’s.” Her face screwed up in puzzlement. “Or… was that you flirting with me? It’s hard to tell with you.”

  Tretta sneered, shoved her backward in her seat. “I merely wanted to know what I should write down when I turn in my report of your execution. The eccentricities of Vagrants are impossible to keep up with. Ridiculous costumery, bizarre tattoos, and that weird thing you keep saying… what is it? Eres… aris…”