Seven Blades in Black

by Sam Sykes

  Just like they had before.

  I’d never cross their names off the list.

  I’d never dream and see something other than their faces.

  I’d never be able to hear Liette tell me never to come back and tell myself it was worth it.

  I wasn’t that good a liar.

  I wasn’t that good a shot.

  I wasn’t that…

  Stop. I became aware of my breath flowing out of me in short gasps, my heart hammering against my ribs. Close your eyes. I forced them shut, forced everything to go quiet. Breathe.

  I did.

  Or I tried, anyway.

  If this wasn’t the right drop-off point, I’d find it. If I couldn’t find it, I’d find someone who knew and make them tell me. If I couldn’t find that, I’d just start shooting until it sorted itself out. I’d make Cavric drive me all over creation if need be.

  My hand wrapped around the Cacophony at my hip. He grew warm in my grasp.

  I’d find Vraki.

  We’ll end him. All of them.

  “Hello?”

  I glanced up at the sound of Cavric’s voice. I couldn’t see him through the mist. But I heard him.

  “Hello…”

  And someone else.

  “Are you…” There was confusion in his voice. “Are you all right, madam?”

  “All right… madam… are you?”

  The voice that spoke back was soft, delicate, beautifully feminine.

  And I was off my ass.

  I hopped off the crate, headed toward the sound of his voice as he spoke uncertainly into the fog.

  “You seem distressed.”

  “Dis… tress…” The voice purred back to him. “Seem?”

  I picked up speed, reaching for Jeff at my hip as I rushed down the sandy shore of the cove. I picked out his form through the fog, staring down into the surf of the lake. And, shortly thereafter, picked out the form staring back at him from the river.

  She was beautiful: a perfect, porcelain face framed by ebon silk hair that spilled down her body. She was perfectly slender, skin completely flawless, and if you’ll forgive me some coarseness, her tits and ass were the sort of thing you’d end up killing a man over if she asked you to. She was flawless, a perfectly formed woman.

  Which was, after all, the point.

  “I’m Cavric Proud,” he said, stepping forward. “Low Sergeant of the Revolution. Is there any way I can help you, madam?”

  “Low… Sergeant…” She spoke each word hesitantly, tasting them through a soft smile. And she raised her slender arms to him, approached him as she rose out of the water. “Help.”

  He waded into the water toward her. I couldn’t say I blamed him. If I was a little dumber, I probably would have, too. But I didn’t have time to chastise him for that. I had barely gotten close enough to draw when she leapt at him.

  That lilting, soft voice became a screech. Those arms grew long, fingers sprouting talons. And that beautiful, porcelain face split in half with a broad smile brimming with sharp, twisted teeth.

  “By the General!” Cavric screamed, falling backward.

  “By, by, by,” she cackled, lunging at him again.

  Her claws caught him by the lapels of his coat, dragged him forward. Her mouth gaped wide, a black stalk of a tongue lashing out toward his face, barbs glistening out of it with a sheen of viscous saliva. She hauled him forward as he struggled against her, eyes bulging from her head with anticipation.

  For the few seconds it took to carve them out, anyway.

  A blade flashed. A bright line creased across her face, running from her brow through her jaw. She paused, blinking her remaining eye, unsure what to make of this. She turned toward me, saw my blade glistening.

  And jamming into her throat.

  She staggered backward as I tore a hole in her throat, spraying viscous scum from her flesh. She turned to flee back into the water, leaking from her wounds. I leapt, ramming my sword through her spine. She froze there for a single breath.

  Then she dissipated, her body collapsing into a mess of green leaves, vines, and thorns that settled upon the river before disappearing beneath the water, leaving me calmly wiping off my blade as Cavric stared at the ripples that had almost killed him.

  “What…” he gasped, turning horrified eyes to me. “What the fuck was that?”

  “Kelpbride,” I said, sheathing Jeff. “Try not to talk to them too much.”

  He stared at me. “What?”

  “They remember every word they hear,” a voice chimed from behind us.

  Liette appeared from a nearby willow copse, a bundle of picked plants in one hand, the other adjusting her glasses. She observed the plants dissipating into the water, sinking beneath the surface.

  “Quite fascinating, really. They’re mimic hunters, taking pleasing shapes to lure their victims into the water where they can be dragged away and later devoured,” she said. “They aren’t born knowing language, though, so each new word they learn makes their disguise more effective, you know.” She glanced at Cavric’s terrified expression. “I mean, obviously you know now.”

  Cavric glanced from Liette to me, unblinking, mouth agape. I rolled my eyes.

  “Oh, come on, that isn’t even the weirdest thing you’ve seen this week.” I glared at Liette. “And I thought I told you two to stay together.”

  “I saw some samples I needed nearby,” Liette replied. “I trusted he would be fine on his own.”

  “Well, he wasn’t. He could have been killed.”

  “Well, he wasn’t,” Liette repeated dryly. “I doubt he minds as much as—”

  “SHUT UP!”

  There’s a moment in opera called the raisu ath naccori. Roughly translated from Old Imperial, it means “reason for fury.” It’s the moment the character snaps, when their moral thresholds have been crossed and left in tatters, when they’re finally motivated to shriek into the night and set out to change the course of events. It’s characterized by screaming, breaking stuff, and if it’s any good, at least one angry sexual overture.

  Cavric stared at me, the horror and shock drained from his face and replaced with numb emptiness.

  “Fuck this,” he muttered, throwing up his hands.

  I had expected something more dramatic. But then, they do have shitty opera in Weiless.

  “Fuck this,” he repeated, clambering to his feet and crawling out of the river. “Fuck this river, fuck these plant-women, fuck this world.” He paused as he stalked away to struggle with kicking a wet reed off his boot. “Fuck this plant in particular.”

  “Hey,” I called after him as he stalked past me, raising the Cacophony for emphasis. “Hey! Where are you going? I need you to—”

  “And fuck you, Sal.” He whirled, leveling a finger at me. “Fuck your plan, fuck your gun, and fuck helping you.” He whirled back about, started walking off into the gloom of the Scar. “I could have breathed my last gasp, rasping for air as my own blood filled my lungs and the Haveners force-fed me my own eyes and I’d still be luckier than I would be ending up alive and with you.”

  I blinked. I’d like to have taken the time to curse him out after that, but really, I was rather impressed by that outburst. Maybe the opera wasn’t as bad as I thought. Also, I still needed him.

  “Where are you going?” I said. “Congeniality’s watching the Iron Boar. You aren’t getting in without me and you aren’t getting past her.”

  Congeniality glanced up at the sound of her name and, rather unhelpfully to my threat, didn’t so much as glance at Cavric as he pushed past her. Not that it mattered, though. Cavric didn’t notice her, either.

  “Keep it. I don’t care.”

  “What? That’s Revolutionary property, man! Don’t you care about it?”

  “It’s a chunk of metal.” He scowled over his shoulder. “The Revolution isn’t about machines or metal. It’s about men. Women. People. It’s about protecting those who can’t protect themselves and doing the right thing for the
m. It’s not about escorting a Vagrant and her smelly bird to commit evil fuckery with plant… women… things!” He threw up his hands. “Do whatever the fuck you want. I’ve got duties to attend to.”

  I watched him go. It would have been easy to shoot him in the back. But what I threw at him wasn’t a bullet. What I threw at him was much worse.

  “Do those duties include leaving kids to die?”

  He froze with such swiftness, he almost buckled over. I might as well have kicked him in the business. And I’m not saying it wasn’t a cheap shot. But I’m not saying I was wrong, either.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You came to Stark’s Mutter to find your soldiers, right?”

  “Agents Relentless and Vindictive,” Cavric said. “We were given information regarding Vagrants of particular interest to Cadre Command. Our men were after them.”

  “And did your men know what those Vagrants were after?”

  Cavric shook his head. I stared out over the Yental.

  “But you did,” I said. “Or you do now anyway.”

  “What?” he asked, breathless.

  “You saw their work in the town square, in the black earth, in the corpses.” I glanced sidelong at Cavric. “Did your Cadre Command ever teach you about Scraths?”

  Cavric’s mouth hung open. He stiffened. “Of course. They’re monsters. Like all things magical.”

  “Not like all things magical,” Liette countered softly. “Knowledge on the Scraths is… limited. Even to the Freemakers. They come from elsewhere, capable of being called only by a select few mages and only at great cost. They do not belong in this world, and thus aren’t bound by its laws. But by the same token, they cannot exist outside a native host.”

  Cavric swallowed hard. “Meaning…”

  “Meaning,” I said, “a Scrath needs a body. Sometimes, it needs many bodies, in case the first one doesn’t fit.” Without realizing it, I ran a finger down the long scar on my chest. “Younger ones fight less, live longer.” I closed my eyes. “Stretch more.”

  I didn’t see the terror in his stare. I didn’t need to. I could feel it—the same raw, unbelieving horror that every nul experienced when they realized just how vast the gulf was between what made them and what made a mage. I could feel him searching for an answer to this, mouth fumbling for the words to express whatever fear and fury battled inside his mouth.

  “Why do they want a Scrath in this world?” Cavric’s voice shattered the silence. “Do you know?”

  I opened my eyes and saw a man desperate for an answer, for a reason why anyone would do something so heinous. I’d seen this stare before, in widows waiting for news of their husbands and grandfathers sitting at their doors awaiting the return of their children, this desperate need to believe that something good could come from something so vile.

  Hardest thing in the world to lie to a stare like that.

  “No,” I said. “But I’m going to find out. And I’m going to stop it.” I pulled my scarf up a little tighter around my face. “You can go if you want. You’ve taken us far enough. But if you want to help someone… well, here’s your chance.”

  His voice fell silent as his eyes fell to his feet. I wish he had cursed at me, disbelieved me, or maybe just started screaming. Anything to break the silence. Because in the silence, I could feel Liette’s stare like a blade in my neck.

  She hadn’t said anything, but I could see the anger burning behind her glasses. She knew I was chasing names, Vagrants, murderers. But somehow I think she thought it was just one more little whimsy of mine, like I’d go out, kill a few people, and we’d go back and sip wine and pretend we could be normal.

  Maybe she hadn’t known until now that I was chasing monsters. Or maybe she always had and just wanted to pretend otherwise. Maybe…

  Maybe she just wanted to pretend I wasn’t so broken.

  I could feel the wind beginning to blow. I turned and saw black clouds rolling across the sky, lazily following the river and creeping toward us. A cloud of mist, thick and dense as a wall, came slithering across the surface of the river and I was all too happy to see it.

  “Took them long enough,” I muttered.

  At that, Cavric started. Liette gasped, dropping her plants. And in the time it took them to do that, the mist had all but enveloped us. It swept over the river, across the bank, and over our heads in a matter of seconds. By the time he had reached for a gunpike that wasn’t there—what he thought it would do against mist was anyone’s guess—we were drowned in a thick gray cloud.

  “What kind of profane magic is this?” he whispered.

  I didn’t bother answering. Revolutionaries have minds like machines. They like their operas straightforward, their food unseasoned, and their marriages arranged. All indiscretion, no imagination, and precious little perception, otherwise he might have noticed that the mist, thick and dense and rife with the smell of water as it was, wasn’t actually leaving condensation anywhere.

  I suppose I could have explained the magic that created it, if I felt so inclined. But in another few seconds, I heard the dull growl of an engine. And by that point, I figured he’d understand, assuming we weren’t shot.

  The boat came sliding out of the mist, a heavy thing of metal and timber with a broad, flat bow, propelled by waterwheels on either side of it. Its engine, far unlike that noisy thing in the Iron Boar, murmured quietly as it propelled the boat to the shore. Its bow slid down, forming a metal ramp. And as black shadows formed in the mist and skulked down the ramp toward us, I laid a hand on the Cacophony.

  Guns won’t do anything against mist, to be sure. But against the scrawny little shit that made them?

  It’d do, if he didn’t feel like playing nice.

  I wagered there were about six of them in total, even though I could count only three; Ashmouths prefer to leave about half their numbers out of sight. I couldn’t tell their genders behind the black coats that obscured their bodies and the black masks they wore, carved to resemble crows, but it wasn’t like that mattered. After all, the black bows they had drawn upon me didn’t give a shit whether a man or woman loosed the arrow.

  Still, they hadn’t shot me yet, so that was a good sign.

  Unless they wanted to take me alive and torture me to reveal how I found their drop site, which was a bad sign.

  Or they knew me by sight and realized I might be of use to them and could make a deal with them, which was a good sign.

  Or they knew me by sight and remembered all the shit I’ve pulled that’s ruined their myriad of operations and were busy thinking of the perfect way to force-feed me my own entrails while I was still alive, which was a bad sign.

  So, you get what I mean when I say it’s hard to deal with the Ashmouths.

  “My, my…” a shrill, nasally voice said from the shadows of the boat. “Can you imagine my luck? Coming out to a forsaken shoreline in the middle of nowhere and finding the famous Sal the Cacophony waiting for me?”

  Boots polished to a high sheen clicked on the metal ramp. Delicate fingers pulled black gloves over lily-white hands. Brass buttons on the finest black coat I had ever seen glistened in the dark. From beneath a head of coiffed black hair, a pair of eyes with dark circles under them, and a long, pointed nose, I was given a glimpse of a sneer so mean and ugly that it would make a pregnant woman miscarry just to look at.

  One of the many talents of Necla the Shroud.

  “I wonder which Scion I pissed off to make this happen,” he said, making a face like he had just stepped in something.

  “Oh, kitten,” I said, making a mock pout, “if any of the Scions paid attention to you, you’d have been struck by lightning the second you crawled out the snatch.”

  Necla’s eyes narrowed that way where you just know they’ve already decided to kill you and are just fantasizing about where they’ll mount your head. But I wasn’t worried. A Nightmage’s power isn’t as straightforward as throwing fire or shitting lightning. Theirs is an art of patience, foreth
ought, and surprise.

  Or, in Necla’s case, laziness, apathy, and not-wanting-to-expend-effort-on-cleaning-up-the-mess.

  “Don’t let me catch any arrows flying,” he said to the Ashmouths. “She’ll only make this a big pain in my ass if you try to fight.” He cocked a brow at me. “Unless you came here to get shot up, in which case—”

  I made a show of easing my hand off the Cacophony. “Would you hate me if I said I didn’t come here to fight?”

  “No more than I already do.” Necla looked over my head to Cavric, his lip curling up in distaste at the sight of his uniform. “And what about them? The Ashmouths don’t care for Revolutionaries.” His eyes narrowed on Liette. “Or misers.”

  “The Freemakers pursue knowledge for its own sake.” Liette glanced at him over the top of her glasses. “And it is not for sale.”

  “The Ashmouths don’t care for anyone who doesn’t come with a lot of metal.” I grunted toward Cavric. “They’re both with me. I’m happy to be peaceable, but if anyone wants to make a problem out of them…”

  I laid my hand on the Cacophony.

  “I’m even happier to talk it over.”

  I won’t lie, I got just the teensiest bit excited at the way Necla’s eyes went wide.

  “Put up your weapons,” he whispered to the Ashmouths. “Grab the cargo and we’ll be on our way.”

  As I predicted, three more black-clad thugs emerged from the shadows of the boat and joined their friends in moving down and hooking up ropes to the giant cargo box to drag it back up the ramp.

  Necla sniffed toward me. “A pleasure seeing you again, Sal. Let’s do it again when one of us is dead.”

  “I’ll be more than happy to,” I said, “if you can do a favor for me.” I met the despair creasing his face with deadly seriousness. “I need to speak with the Three.”

  “No,” he replied tersely.

  “It’s an emergency.”

  “No.”

  “I’m tracking someone down. They’ll know where to find them.”

  “What happened, Sal?” he asked. “Someone skip out on you before they could buy you breakfast?”