Seven Blades in Black

by Sam Sykes

  Sal held up a hand, as though offended she would even try to pronounce it. “Eres va atali. It’s a beautiful phrase, I’ll thank you not to butcher it.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means”—Sal paused, smiled softly—“‘I used to fly.’”

  “Another silly opera saying?”

  “Sort of.” She turned her smile up toward Tretta. “It’s only ever been uttered once, though, after a great tragedy.”

  Tretta was ashamed to realize the softness of that smile caught her off guard. She was further shamed to hear that her own voice had grown gentle in response.

  “What tragedy?”

  And, at that, Sal’s smile went from soft to extremely punchable.

  “So you are trying to flirt with me. Governor-Militant, I don’t usually go for military types, but if you did your hair a little nicer—”

  Tretta held up a hand. “You can continue with this line of commentary or you can tell me what happened to Cavric.” She narrowed her eyes. “Only one of those ends with your arms not being broken, though.”

  NINETEEN

  THE SCAR

  I’ve ridden in an Iron Boar twice before—once when I was trying to steal one and once when I was trying to blow one up. It’s an unpleasant affair. The thing is designed to plow through the Scar’s untamed badlands, so it’s always bumpy and uncomfortable. The seats are hard and unpadded. The air is stifling inside. The engine makes so much noise that you can hardly hear yourself think.

  And let me tell you, the experience is not enhanced by having to point a gun at the back of someone’s head the whole time.

  I only occasionally glanced at Cavric, seated at the front of the machine, alternately glancing out its front visors and periscope. I had stopped keeping an eye on him after the first thirty minutes of our trip. Mostly, I just stared out the thin slits masquerading as windows, watching the endless dry plains of the steppe slowly transition into a lusher, greener grassland.

  The Yental River would be close now. And on it, I’d find the people who had sold Vraki the obelisk he used to draw enough power to do what he did in Stark’s Mutter. Not knowing where he’d gone after he’d summoned the Scrath, that was my sole lead.

  I’d tried to explain that to Cavric, of course, but he just kept going on about the whole “me abducting him at gunpoint” thing.

  I suppose it would have been wiser to watch him, of course, but then again, wisdom seemed like it was for people who didn’t have guns that exploded peoples’ heads with pure sound. The Cacophony, lying in my lap, would tell me if anything was amiss.

  Not that I’d really be able to tell what was amiss. Or what was going on, really. I sure as fuck didn’t know how this thing worked.

  The wheels and shell of the vehicle were mortal metal forged by honest toil, but the engine—that beating heart that made it move—was all Relic. A sphere of that same woven stone, pulsating with a hidden light as it groaned to life, hovered at the front of the vehicle, floating a few inches off a metal console. Through a complex series of cranks, levers, and muttered curses, Cavric willed it to move in a way I couldn’t comprehend, let alone tell if he was messing with me.

  I was doubly impressed.

  Once for the fact that he was able to get it to move at all and twice for the fact that he was able to do it all with Liette peering over his shoulder like a particularly inquisitive parrot.

  “Astonishing.” Her previous distaste for the man was no match for her imminent curiosity and she forgot how eager she had been to see him die as she pushed down on him, leaning over him to stare, agog, at the Relic engine. “I have never once, in all my years, been able to see one of these devices up close.”

  I rolled my eyes. I would have pointed out that she was only twenty-eight, but she did so love saying dramatic crap like “in all my years.” It made her sound smarter, she liked to think.

  “I’ve heard rumors, of course, and I’ve obtained from Revolutionary defectors through bribery, blackmail, and this one time, a jar of spiders, but still.” She adjusted her glasses, her eyes too small to take everything in. “The Revolution guards this information closer than it does their children. They always recover these things from battlefields and crashes before we can even get close to them. I might be the first Freemaker in history to see one operational and up close.”

  Don’t get me wrong, it probably would have been more polite to remind her we were technically in the middle of kidnapping this guy.

  But she just looked so happy.

  Cavric, to his immense credit, didn’t complain. He didn’t even look back at me. Possibly because the complex series of levers and wheels that were needed to steer the Iron Boar demanded close attention. Possibly because he thought I’d shoot him if he did.

  “You can stop pointing that at me,” he muttered from the seat. “If you shoot it inside here, you’ll kill us both.”

  Or possibly because he couldn’t stand to be reminded that he had once looked at me like I wasn’t a killer.

  Take your pick, they’re all fine reasons.

  “That’s a possibility, sure,” I replied, letting the Cacophony dangle lazily from my fingers. “But at least this way, you can tell your cadre you were forced to steal this thing and didn’t betray your precious Revolutionary playdate willingly.”

  “Revolutionary Mandate,” he spat, along with a curse I didn’t bother listening to. Revolutionaries didn’t know any good ones, anyway.

  That’s not to say I felt particularly good about what I was doing, but I’m a practical woman. Your average bird—like Congeniality—can cover forty miles per day, if you don’t want to kill it or piss it off so much it kills you. An Iron Boar can take a whole squadron of Revolutionary soldiers nearly quadruple that in a few hours. And where I was going was even farther than that.

  What I had seen at Stark’s Mutter continued to gnaw at me. The peoples’ faces, twisted in the last moments of horror, their mouths agape with the pleas for mercy they never got to speak. Just a bunch of dumb hicks who moved out in the middle of nowhere, completely unaware that men like Vraki even existed, let alone that he would come for them one day, that he would herd them like cattle, steal their children, fill their last waking moments with incomprehensible agony, all to summon something whose name they didn’t even know.

  But that was what men like Vraki did. They didn’t care.

  And men like Jindu… they cared. But they did it, anyway.

  Men like Jindu were worse.

  I realized it was probably Jindu who had retrieved the Havener’s focus. Cruel men, like Vraki, could never get past what they want to get what they need. Men like Vraki had wants. Men like Jindu had ways.

  Just like I had my ways.

  Only my ways involved his ways getting splattered over the wall in a gory mess, along with the rest of him.

  Just as soon as I found him. And the rest of them.

  There weren’t many ways to get in contact with the Ashmouths. Like all good criminals, they’re usually the ones who find you. But there were a few options. Very few. And they relied on getting to a very specific place in a very short amount of time.

  I’m sure if I had bothered to explain all this to Cavric, he would have understood. Or, at the very least, he wouldn’t have glowered over his shoulder at me with such hatred in his eyes.

  “I think I’ve figured it out.” Liette, oblivious to this conversation and my brooding, reached out and pointed to the Relic. “It powers the innards of the machine, that much is clear, but it does so by speaking to the vehicle, correct? This sound it makes, like…” She squinted as the engine continued to groan. “It’s almost like… language.”

  “The Relics are the great equalizers,” Cavric responded, just like he had no doubt been trained by multitudes of propaganda to do. “They were discovered by the Great General and handed down to common men and women to respond to the perversion of the mages. It is by his will they operate and by his will they deliver us victory.” Hi
s eyes widened as Liette reached out to touch the engine. “And they are not for—Hey! HEY!”

  The engine let out an agonized sound as her fingers grazed its surface. The entire vehicle shook. Liette let out a cry as she fell backward, to be caught by me. I glared at Cavric as he fought to control the metal monstrosity.

  “Eyes on the road, if you don’t mind,” I said, setting Liette back on her feet.

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “Wouldn’t want to accidentally run into all the fucking nothing out here, would I?” He snorted, scowled back out the visor. “This route leads into the middle of nowhere. If you wanted to kill me, you could have just done it back at Stark’s Mutter.”

  “If I wanted to kill you, I would have spared myself all this whining.”

  “I’m not whining,” Cavric said.

  “Fine. You’re putting up a very valiant defiance. When I recount this story, I’ll be sure to tell everyone how fiercely you resisted me every step of the way.” I sniffed. “But when I do, I’m going to give you a girl’s voice.”

  “What? Why a—” He paused, shook his head, not quite ready to follow that line of thought. “Fuck it. Where the hell do you even want to go?”

  “I told you. Yental River. Couple hundred miles due east. You’ll know it when you see it, what with it being a giant fucking lot of water.” I peered out the visor, saw the sun sinking low. “Only step on it, would you?”

  “Step on what?”

  “The… the thing that makes this thing go. That’s how it works, right?”

  “I just said it had a language, didn’t I?” Liette, undeterred, returned to Cavric’s side as she shot me a glare. “It’s like you don’t even listen to me.”

  “I listen to you when you’re not saying insane shit,” I shot back, pointing accusingly at her. “The rarity of that occasion is entirely on you.”

  “You wear ignorance like a crown as you feast upon a thickheaded fantasy of lies,” she replied—and I was pretty sure I should be insulted, even if I couldn’t quite make out what she was accusing me of. “If you bothered to listen to me more, your quality of life would improve immeasurably.”

  “Well, why don’t we ever get to talk about what I want to talk about?” I demanded.

  “Because we have already covered the conversational breadth of guns, tits, and whiskey.”

  I sniffed, a little more petulant than I would have liked to appear. “I like other stuff.”

  “IT’S SEVERIUM!” Cavric suddenly let out an exasperated shout. “The Iron Boar runs on severium, same as the ammunition we use for our gunpikes.” He pointed to the Relic. “This Relic dictates how much is burned, which is, in turn, commanded by this crank, and it goes where I want it to by me pulling this lever, so now that we all know, can we please either stop talking or just shoot me in the head right now?”

  I stared at the back of his head. “You got a girlfriend, Cavric?”

  He cast a confused look at me. “What? No.”

  “Imagine that.” I sighed. “Listen, I promise, get me where I need to go, you can take this piece of shit wherever you want. Go back to Lowstaff, make your reports, tell them the big bad Vagrant lady made you do it, whatever. Your comrades’ bodies are all in the public house at Stark’s Mutter; they’ll be safe from scavengers. Once I get to the Yental, you and I are done.” I held up my hand. “I promise.”

  “How many other people have you made a promise like that with?” he asked.

  I hadn’t expected that question. Nor had I expected to look to Liette. Nor had I expected her gaze to linger on me for a moment before she turned away.

  “Two,” I said.

  “And how many times have you kept it?”

  I scratched at a scar on my face. “Once.”

  “Yeah. Sure,” he grumbled as we rolled on. After a long moment, he took in a deep breath. “Just one more question, then.” He looked over his shoulder and over my head. “Why did you bring that thing along?”

  I followed his gaze upward. Congeniality looked down at me with her big, yellow scowl. From the back of the vehicle, she let out an irritated squawk. It had taken some coaxing, some cursing, and a lot of threatening, but once we had managed to get her into the Iron Boar, she settled down well enough. Or, at least, she had only vomited angrily once, which was pretty good for her.

  “Well, I wasn’t going to leave her behind,” I said. “She’s the best company I’ve had in all my years out here.”

  Liette coughed pointedly. I sighed, rubbed my head.

  “Uh-huh.” Cavric pulled a lever. The engines roared. “You got a boyfriend, Sal?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Imagine that,” he muttered as we rumbled off into the distance.

  TWENTY

  THE SCAR

  I don’t sleep well.

  Another perk of living out in the Scar, I guess, along with old wounds, frayed nerves, and one too many nights where I woke up to a blade at my throat. Liquor helps. So does company. Most nights, though, I don’t get more than a few hours.

  But when I do…

  I dream of a red sky.

  I knew the one I was staring at. I had seen it a hundred times in a hundred dreams before. Stretching out crimson and veined with black smoke, the sky stretched just as endlessly as it always had.

  A perfect match for the sea of fire below.

  Waves of orange flame lapped, reaching enviously toward a sky that yawned forever beyond its grasp. Within the roiling fire beneath, the shapes of humans—running and screaming, weeping and dying—were visible as man-shaped shadows that rose black against the flames and vanished beneath a fiery breeze. A city of homes and shops and walls crumbled to ash inside the inferno.

  I had seen this before, too.

  I’d have called it hell, except I felt no pain, no fear, no sorrow staring down at them. I was too high up, standing atop a spire that loomed over the city, untouched by the flame. From here, they looked like just more wisps of smoke, birthed out of the inferno and lost on a fiery breeze. And though their mouths were gaping open in fear and pain, I could hear no sound from them. I never could.

  This was how it always went, every time I closed my eyes. The red sky. The fire. The people and their screams I couldn’t hear.

  “Do you feel bad?”

  And him.

  Jindu sat, thin as the bloodied blade in his lap, beside me. His legs dangled off the ledge of the battlement, kicking idly as smoke coiled up from below. He watched the blaze, almost bored.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Liar,” he shot back.

  He always knew, back then. I hadn’t been as good at lying. I had no reason to be.

  “I suppose I’m just confused,” I said, looking back to those tiny black shapes. “They weren’t all soldiers. They didn’t even fight back. They didn’t deserve what the Empress ordered.”

  “It has nothing to do with deserve.” Jindu pointed to the shapes, rising and reaching out of the inferno. “They are nuls. Whatever grand titles their Revolution gives them, they were born nuls. We weren’t. The Lady Merchant gave us our gifts. Did we deserve them?”

  “She gave them to us for a reason,” I whispered into the smoke.

  “Which reason?” he asked. “We paid our Barters. We swore our oaths. We gave up our humanity, our freedom, our corpses to carve out the Imperium they thrived under. Did they deserve our protection?”

  “We had the power to do so,” I said. “If we didn’t protect them, who would?”

  “And after years of us sacrificing everything so they could prosper under us, they call us monsters. Oppressors. Abominations. They take up arms against us. Do we deserve that?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that. I used to, once. The traitorous Revolutionaries sought to overthrow the Imperium that had been built upon the sacrifice of mages, their Great General striving to undo all that we had worked and bled to achieve. The Empress said they were ruthless, murderous, ungrateful. The Empress said they had to be stopped. Ji
ndu said so. Vraki said so. They all did.

  So did I. It had made sense, once.

  A lot of things had made sense before I watched this city burn.

  “They didn’t fight back,” I whispered.

  “They did,” Jindu said. “They might not have had weapons, but they spat on our sacrifice; they laughed at our protection; they forsook us.”

  “They’re burning…”

  “As they would burn us, and everything we bled for, to the very ground, if we didn’t stop them.”

  I swallowed hot air and smoke. My lungs burned. Sweat fell down my brow to stain my red coat. In my ears, over the roar of flames and the cracking of smoldering wood, I could hear something.

  “They’re screaming.”

  “Sal…”

  His hand was on my wrist. His fingers punched through my skin. I looked down and saw blades where digits should be, my blood oozing out between his knuckles. I looked back at him and saw red bubbling out his mouth.

  “We had no choice.”

  I screamed.

  I leapt.

  I remembered this part. I flew from the battlements, arms spread out wide, wings of smoke rising beneath me to carry me. I closed my eyes, expecting the sky to embrace me and carry me away.

  Only, this time it didn’t.

  This time, I fell.

  I screamed. I landed hard on blackened ground, surrounded by wreaths of flame. And from within, they emerged.

  Women. Children. Men. Old. Young. Limping. Running. Sobbing. And screaming. Every last one of them.

  They were twisted and blackened, shambling out of the fire with their clothes grafted to bubbling skin. Their eyes had been seared out of their skulls and their faces burned away. Not a shred of color remained on their blackened bodies, except the hellish orange glow from their mouths as their lips parted.

  As their screams filled my ears.

  As their blackened limbs reached out for me.

  And pulled me into the fire.