Seven Blades in Black

by Sam Sykes

  I woke up.

  Being flung out of a seat will do that to you.

  I scrambled in a half-terrified fog, groping around the floor through hazy vision and the sound of a bird’s alarmed shrieks as I searched for my gun. Old instinct. Like I said, I don’t sleep well.

  I found it, my fingers wrapping around a grip that was warmer than metal had a right to be. I lifted the Cacophony, pulled the hammer back, and pointed it in the direction I thought Cavric was, certain that he had finally found his spine and was ready to kill me.

  My breathing slowed. My vision cleared. Liette lay groaning on the floor before me. Congeniality’s squawking quieted. And once I had the chance to see what I was aiming at, I could see that Cavric wasn’t looking at me. And I could see that we were no longer moving.

  He pressed the control lever forward. The engines roared. I heard earth being chewed up and spat out by the wheels underneath. But the Iron Boar didn’t move an inch. Cavric muttered a curse, tried it again, to a similar result.

  “What’s the matter?” Liette asked, pulling herself up from the floor.

  “We’ve stopped,” he growled in reply.

  “I can see that. I’m not stupid.”

  “Then why’d you ask?” He shot a glare at me and then turned his gaze back down to the control panel. “We must have hit something.”

  “Like a rock?” I muttered.

  “Yes, like a rock. Or a fallen tree. Or something else that’s big and heavy and might also stop a several-ton slab of iron powered by a Relic.”

  I sniffed, clicked my tongue. “You know, you are very cranky when you’ve been abducted.”

  “I don’t know what the hell it is.” He let out an exasperated sigh, rose to his feet. “I can’t see a damn thing out there. I’ll have to get out and—”

  I placed my hand on his shoulder, pointedly letting the other hand guide the Cacophony back into his sheath, where my fingers lingered on his grip. I offered Cavric as warm a smile as a woman who had threatened to blow his brains out could.

  “I’ll get out and have a look,” I said. “You stay here.” I glanced at Liette. “And you with him.”

  “You don’t know how the machine works,” Liette said. “You could—”

  “Pretty sure the point of a Relic is that no one knows how it works. If I need you, I’ll call for you.” I released Cavric, pulled the door open. Cold air blew in.

  “What if there’s trouble?” he called after me.

  “Golly, what if? I hope I have a nice big fuck-off gun to deal with it.” I paused, glanced back at him. “Speaking of… if this is a trick and you try to drive off and leave me…”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I can’t lie; I was a little offended at how he rolled his eyes. “You’ll shoot me.”

  “If you’re lucky,” I said. “If you’re not, you’ll have to deal with her on your own.”

  I gestured with my chin. Cavric followed and locked eyes with the beady orange scowl of Congeniality. The bird’s feathers ruffled as she let out a low rasping sound. Whatever defiance had been lurking in Cavric’s eyes died, though when he looked back to me, I could see he was still full of regular old pissed off.

  That was fine, though. I had plenty of people pissed off at me. Some of them could spit fire. And until Cavric could either spit something worse or shoot fire from somewhere more impressive, I didn’t see a need to dwell on it.

  I took a step toward the door. Five small fingers clamped around my wrist. I glanced down, saw Liette looking intently at me.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “I always am.”

  She eyed the scars across my skin. “Your body is positively littered with evidence to the contrary.”

  “Yes.” I pried her fingers off. “They’re scars from how careful I am.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” she began to protest.

  But I was already out the door.

  The night air greeted me cold and damp. The moon hung high, just a few hours before midnight. I had slept longer than I thought, which bothered me. Felt like wasting time somehow.

  The broken badlands that had surrounded Stark’s Mutter were gone here, as was the crisp, dry air. The closer you got to the Yental, the more verdant the land became. Dry earth became damp grasslands and the air grew thick with moisture.

  Which made it a damn mystery how we could have hit anything out here. There weren’t any trees or rocks in sight. And a vehicle that can plow through a trenched field and bash down gates shouldn’t have trouble with this soft earth at all.

  This is why I hated machines. The Revolution loved them, of course, touting their fucking engines and wheels as the future beyond birds. But birds, at least, were easy to understand. You give them food, they go. If they don’t go, you give them a smack. How do you make an engine do that?

  Give it a smack and it just explodes.

  I wandered around the exterior of the Iron Boar, looking for anything I might have missed. The thing’s metal hide glistened in the moonlight, showing me no scar or dent, not so much as a scratch that might have slowed it down. I scratched my head, reached for my gun. Admittedly, I had no real reason to think that shooting it would improve the situation any, but it was how I solved most of my problems, so…

  But I stopped once I saw it. It was impossible to make out the details in the dark, but I could see a shadowy mess of something lodged in the thing’s front wheel. Mud, maybe. Or maybe we had driven through a bird pile somewhere. It’d be pretty fitting if I was stopped by a bunch of shit.

  I squatted down next to it, reached in. Something wet and sticky greeted me, which was about what I was expecting. I didn’t really start worrying until I noticed how warm it felt. That’s right about the time I felt fingers reach for me, too.

  I jerked my hand back with a shout. Something limp and wet tumbled out from the wheel and flopped down in front of me like a dead fish. I fell back, reaching for my gun again, but held off. It wasn’t moving.

  Severed arms tended not to.

  I squinted. I could see the rest of him now. Or what I assumed was a him. A shattered jaw, a twisted arm, a single eyeball wide open in horror and the other pulped into a ground-up mess, all of him jammed up in the wheel. That’d do it, I supposed.

  There’s no real rule that says “When you find a dead body, go the opposite direction,” but it’s just good sense. Given that you’ve known me this long, though, I don’t need to tell you why I ignored it. And you wouldn’t need to know why I regretted looking up and over the field as the clouds broke and the moon shone down.

  Corpses.

  Somehow, everything I do ends up with corpses.

  Twenty? Thirty? It was hard to tell in the dark. But if I squinted hard enough, I could just make out a few key details. A fine red coat here, emblazed with the sigil of the royal flame and chalice. A thick blue coat there, its plait bearing pins of two sabers crossed over a cog. Black scars across the land from magic. Freshly spent shells and fallen gunpikes.

  Imperials.

  Revolutionaries.

  And a hell of a lot of scavenger birds.

  Something about this stretch of grass, I guessed, they had thought was worth killing each other over. And they had done so with gusto, if the body count was any estimation. But the battle was long over. The steam had long cleared. Carrion fliers flitted down to peck at the corpses, only to fly away when the striding Badlanders came sauntering up to pluck out the good pieces.

  The first time you see something like this, you vomit and spend the next three days wide awake. The second time, you scream and you weep. By the third time, and every other time, you just get a few words.

  “Ah, shit.”

  Like those.

  When you see the aftermath of a battle, you want to imagine something dramatic. You want to see corpses strewn about, tossed from where the massive explosions ripped apart the land. You want to see the lone carcass on the hill, his cold hands still wrapped around the banner he died trying to
plant in the soil. You want to see some kind of meaning to it.

  But you only ever get that in opera.

  Here, all I could see were poor bastards. There was a poor bastard who died clutching his gun to his chest like it would protect him. There was a red streak where a poor bastard had pulled his bleeding self away before dying. And right in front of me was a poor bastard who died with a look of surprise on his face like he tried to figure out what he was supposed to be killing for right at the end.

  In opera, you get drama. Here, the corpses just fell wherever they did. No reason. No meaning. Just coins that had once been humans: dropped idly and forgotten.

  “FUCK.”

  His scream echoed across the field. Smaller birds scattered. The Badlanders didn’t even look up. I glanced over my shoulder, saw Cavric slumped against the frame of the door. His eyes glistened in the moonlight, wide and full of horror.

  “I thought I told you to wait,” I said.

  He wasn’t listening to me. I do believe he couldn’t hear anything at that point. He staggered out of the door, legs numb, and missed the first step, toppling onto the earth. He clambered back up, walked past me, and stared out over the carnage.

  “Fuck…” he whispered again. “Fuck.”

  “Yes, very dramatic.” I glanced around, wary. “Keep your voice down, would you?”

  Not that I expected an ambush—the birds certainly weren’t about to look up from their feast at his outburst—but it always pays to be quiet if you don’t know who might be listening.

  “I just… What the… How…” Cavric’s mouth hung open, searching for the right word to convey the right outrage and found the one that never stopped working. “Fuck…”

  “Something like that,” I said. Not that I intended to sound callous, but… well, you saw back at Stark’s Mutter. This wasn’t even the goriest thing I had done today.

  Cavric, however, stared out over the corpses, searching them like he expected them to get back up at any moment and tell him what had happened. His eyes were wide, his mouth open, his hands helpless and empty.

  “Curious,” Liette said as she stepped out of the Boar and adjusted her glasses. “We’re miles from any designated combat area. What were they fighting over?”

  “Nothing,” Cavric snapped. “There’s nothing here. There’s nothing within miles of here. No forts, no locations, no… nothing. Nothing to fight over.” He shook a little, unsteady. “Why would they do this?”

  “I don’t know.” I slicked my hair back. “This close to the Yental, they could have been two scouting regiments looking for cargo drops and found each other instead.” I shrugged. “Or maybe they just didn’t like each other very much. Who knows?”

  He looked at me, mouth agog, like what I had just said was worse than when I had put my gun in his face.

  “How could you?” he almost whimpered.

  “This can’t be the first time you’ve seen a dead body.”

  “It isn’t,” he said. “It’s… I just haven’t seen anything like this.” He stared back out over them and swallowed. “Not like this.”

  He was a Low Sergeant, a commander of soldiers. There was no reason he shouldn’t have seen something like this. But then, the Revolution throws around ranks based on loyalty to the General, not experience.

  Hell of a thing, I guessed, to see something like this, to look at what you’ve been fighting for, what you’ve been killing for, without the glorious operas and the marching songs and the tapestries. Hell of a thing to look at it and just see the blood and the bodies.

  I remember the first time I ever did.

  Somehow, back then, I thought that was the worst thing I’d ever do in my life.

  And somehow, right now, looking at Cavric and knowing he’d one day stop seeing people and start seeing just blood and bone… that felt worse.

  At least, until he clambered to his feet and stormed back into the Boar. I reached for my gun, ready to fire in case he tried to flee. I wasn’t ready, however, when he emerged with a canister in his arms.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Oil,” he said.

  “For the Boar’s wheels?” Liette asked.

  “For them,” he replied.

  He waved away a pair of birds, who squawked in indignation as he began to pour a thick liquid over the corpse they had been feasting on. The realization hit me in one second. The anger in the next.

  “Oh, fuck no,” I growled. “We have to reach the Yental River by dawn. We don’t have time for theatrics like this.”

  “They’re not theatrics,” he said, moving to the next body and dousing it with oil. “They’re people.”

  “They’re corpses,” I spat. “And if you don’t want to be one, too, you’ll…”

  I had a number of good ways to finish that threat. I’d made a lot of them during my time in the Scar, after all. Of course, they weren’t very effective when the subject wasn’t listening. Cavric simply moved from corpse to corpse, Imperial and Revolutionary, dousing them with oil, heedless of the very angry woman in a hurry and her big, fuck-off gun.

  “Come on,” I muttered to my side. “You’re driving.”

  Liette looked at me quizzically, as though I had just uttered a riddle and not a command. I growled, gestured back toward the Boar with my chin.

  “I know you’ve already figured out how to make that thing work,” I said. “You probably knew the minute you touched it.” I glanced back toward Cavric. “If he wants to stay, let him. We have business.”

  She opened her mouth as if to say something, but only a sigh came out. She pulled a paper from her scroll case, a quill from her hair, daubed the latter in ink, and scrawled on the former. The paper lit up into a quiet flame a moment later and she followed in Cavric’s wake, toward the nearest corpse.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I all but screamed. The Cacophony grew cold in my grip, decidedly displeased by this display of sentimentality.

  “Helping,” Liette said.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, they’re just bodies.”

  “They’re people.” She looked over her shoulder at me. “So are we.”

  “This isn’t the fucking time.” I reached out, snatched her by the arm. I forced my words through clenched teeth. “Do you not fucking get it? Every minute we waste, they get farther away. If we delay much longer, they’ll—”

  “They’ll draw breath for a few moments longer,” Liette said, her voice a cold contrast to the fire in her hand. “You’ll still kill them, won’t you?”

  There was a snide tone to her voice that made my jaw clench and fever burn behind my eyes.

  “They have to die.”

  “Do they have to die?” she asked softly. “Or do you have to kill them?”

  Liette wasn’t talented with words. She didn’t watch opera—said it was pointless and manipulative. She didn’t read poetry—not when she could read a nice, meaty treatise or manual. Her skill was with machines, ink, sigils, not language.

  I had no idea why what she said hit me like a fist in the belly.

  I dropped her arm. I pulled my scarf tight around my face. I stalked away. Behind me, fires began to blossom as she set the corpses ablaze. I kept walking through the cold night until my feet found stone instead of dirt and trees thinned out, giving way to ruined pillars and destroyed walls.

  You found these ruins now and again in isolated places. We weren’t the first people in the Scar and only a few Freemakers had bothered investigating who’d lived here before. I, for one, wasn’t looking for any historical enlightenment, just a dark place I could hide until I stopped hearing her voice and my scars stopped aching. I didn’t think much of the ruined roof I stepped beneath or the desolate pillars rising around me.

  Not until I saw the corpses.

  They weren’t like the others. I wouldn’t have stopped dead in my tracks for a body killed by bullet or blade or spell. But there was a quiet tranquility about the corpses of slain Revolutionaries and Imperials that l
ay about the ruins—there were no signs of battle, no great pools of blood; it was as though they had simply grown tired and stopped.

  I edged my way toward one of the bodies, lying facedown in the dirt, one arm draped over his head, as though he were trying to take a nap. I leaned down, nudged him onto his back, hoping to see what had killed him painted on his face.

  Only, he didn’t have one.

  A smooth plain of skin, polished to featurelessness, stood where a nose, eyes, mouth, and ears should be. I dropped the corpse and recoiled, reaching for my weapon instinctively. But as I looked around, I saw he wasn’t the only one.

  Smooth stumps where limbs should be, empty expanses of skin where eyes should be, clean holes from which organs had been taken out—it was like someone had simply plucked out parts of the soldiers to add to their own.

  And I found the cause of it at the center of the morbid scene.

  Another corpse, but not quite human. To glance at it, you’d have called it a very large hairless dog, and if you were lucky at all, you’d never do more than glance at it. It lay on its side, unmoving, four limbs splayed out from an emaciated body wrapped in withered flesh. Its hind legs were bestial, but its forelegs ended in a pair of human hands. One of its ears was long and pointed like a hound’s, but the other was a rounded human ear. And its face…

  I stared at it. And the terrified face of the human the beast had stolen it from stared back at me.

  There are only two ways humans ever encounter nith hounds: the way I did—with it dead and bled out from a hundred wounds—and the way these poor bastards had.

  Scholars call it a hound only because they have no other way to describe these flesh-taking atrocities. They hunger for flesh, but not in the good old honest way of other beasts. Nith hounds take pieces of people—hands, feet, hearts, faces—and graft them onto themselves. Perhaps out of hunger. Or anxiety. Or whatever the fuck drives a beast to do that—no one knows because nith hounds, like Scraths, come from somewhere else, somewhere not of this world.

  Somewhere dark and far away that only a few people know the name of and fewer still know how to call from. And one of those people was at the top of my list.