Seven Blades in Black

by Sam Sykes

  My scars ached. The Cacophony burned. The wind howled. I chose to focus on only one of those, pulling my scarf up around my face.

  I took Congeniality by her reins, gave her a tug. She moved easy enough. With a gesture of my chin, I led my party into the dust, toward that looming shadow.

  “Wait a minute,” Cavric said as he hurried to catch up. “I should have a weapon.”

  “Nah,” I replied.

  “I wouldn’t stab you in the back. You have my word.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it.”

  “Then why not?”

  “Because she only trusts weapons in her own hands,” Liette muttered.

  “Or,” I snapped over my shoulder, “it’s because if you run into any creature out here, the only thing a weapon will be good for is turning it on yourself before it has a chance to eat you.” I sniffed. “And if it ate you, it’d eat the weapon, too, and then how would I kill myself?”

  That answer didn’t satisfy anyone. But no one was talking anymore. So hey.

  The sound of crunching beneath our feet was drowned out by the wind. I could hear Cavric jump every time it spoke, every time it whispered in his ear. I could see Liette pull her arms around her, put her head low, trying to ignore them. I kept my calm, though. But only because I was listening to something different.

  Ask a nul what the difference was between himself and a mage and he’ll tell you it’s power: mages lord their magic over the nuls, look down on them because they can’t move shit with their mind or whatever. Ask a mage, though, and he’ll say it’s that nuls have no sense of music.

  They can’t hear the Lady Merchant.

  And neither could Cavric. He only heard the wind carrying all the agonies and pains it had seen. Liette, too, would only have heard a hysteria of empty noises—wrighting was an art, but not a true art.

  But me? I heard music. Weaving between the moans and whispers, I could hear her song. Sometimes far away, like an echo without a source. Sometimes close, like she was walking right beside me. Her voice wandered the wastes of the Husks, carried on the wind in search of a Barter she had forgotten to collect. It was horrifying. It made a cold snake coil around my spine. And I hoped it would never end.

  “SHIT!”

  Cavric’s voice? I could have done without.

  I whirled at the sound of his cry, Cacophony leaping to my hand and pointing at where his terrified eyes stared. And immediately, I saw it.

  You could say it looked human. It walked on two legs, had two arms, a torso, and a head all loosely clinging together. But it didn’t have a body—not the kind you’re thinking of. Rather, it was formed from the dust and the grit and the wind, all of it whipped into coils that vaguely resembled limbs. It staggered across the wastes with an awkward gait, its body trembling as it tried to stay together. It reminded me unpleasantly of a toddler learning how to walk.

  And like a toddler, it had one hell of a scream.

  The cloud of dust that had been a vague face swirled, formed a vague mouth out of rocks and grime. That mouth craned open and it loosed a great, keening wail that carried farther and louder than any wind could hope to.

  “What the fuck?” I became aware of Cavric huddled defensively behind Congeniality. “What the fuck is that?”

  “Echo,” I replied, holstering the Cacophony.

  “What?”

  “An Echo.” Liette stepped precariously close to the thing, as though she were simply studying a peculiar insect and not, say, a walking collection of screams. “Also known as windwraiths. They’re common to this area of the Husks. Harmless.”

  “Harmless?” Cavric looked at her, almost offended. “Harmless? You look on some kind of… of ghost and you think it’s harmless? Harmless?”

  “An Echo isn’t a ghost,” Liette scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s simply the remains of a coagulated, formless memory born from intense pain or fear and given shape and noise by latent magical essence lingering in the environment. Simple.”

  Cavric blinked. “Oh. But…”

  “SIMPLE,” she snapped.

  The Echo turned toward us, began staggering forward. I didn’t look at it, didn’t acknowledge it, and most importantly, didn’t think about it. Cavric, on the other hand, was staring at it, wide-eyed and slack-jawed.

  And soon enough, the Echo was staring back at him.

  The dust that made up its face began to take shape, the wind whipping a nose, a mouth, a pair of eyes and ears out of the shapeless grime. The body followed, turning from coils of dust into a shapely woman’s figure swaddled by a heavy military coat. Her hair was close-shorn, her body tall and rigid, her features fair. She would have been fairly attractive, had her eyes not been alive with anguish and her mouth not gaping open in a scream.

  “HOLY SHIT!” Cavric’s shout came out of him so loud it knocked him on his ass. He scrambled away on hands and feet. “HOLY SHIT, HOLY SHIT, HOLY SHIT!”

  “Recognize someone?” I asked.

  “That’s… that’s Sabritha,” Cavric found the breath to gasp. “My cousin. She… she took the officer’s exam—tried to take the officer’s exam. She… she didn’t… The physical, it killed…” He stared at me. “How?”

  “Cavric, please.” Liette sighed. “It’s drawn to your memories, psychically feeding off whatever trauma you’re projecting or have buried inside you and taking its shape from those. How much easier can I make this?”

  “But why’s it getting closer?”

  I drew Jeff, stepped forward, and brought it up through the Echo’s gritty neck. A spray of gravel and dust burst out, a crude facsimile of blood, and the rest of it followed, collapsing into a heap of debris. Cavric watched it, eyes agape.

  “How… how did you…”

  I shrugged. “It died because you remembered that blades should kill people.”

  He stared at me with eyes vacant of everything but fear. But at least he got to his feet. And so I simply sighed and looked out over the wastelands.

  “Look,” I sighed. “You know the Husks didn’t always look like this, right?”

  “Of course,” he said, finally finding his words. “The first military history lessons in the officer’s academy regards the horrors the Imperium inflicted on this region and the brave sacrifices of the Revolutionaries who fought to defend it.”

  “Not the best of defenses they did, was it?” Liette asked, staring out over the wastes.

  I shook my head. “Yeah, Revolutionaries died out here. But so did mages. At the peak of the fighting, it was thousands who fell here. They littered the land, more corpses than anyone could collect. Their bodies shriveled and dissipated. Their Dust was cast onto the wind, seeped into the earth, drained into the streams.”

  I gestured about to the swirling tempests, the scorched earth.

  “Magic did this, sure. Some of it, anyway. Skymages tore the winds apart. Fire and frost turned the earth to dust.” I cleared my throat. “Regular dust, not capital d Dust. Usually, magic like that lasts only as long as the mage who cast it. But so much magic combined with so much Dust meant you’ve got…”

  “The perfect place,” Cavric muttered. “I see. This is why the Vagrants came here. For what Vraki’s planning, he needs a lot of magic.”

  “And it’s in the very fucking air here,” I replied. “You’re probably breathing some dead bastard now.”

  I heard the rustle of cloth as he pulled his collar up around his nose and mouth. I’d have taken longer to smile at that, but I didn’t have time. I heard the Lady’s song grow in my ears. The wind kicked up; the dust grew heavy. Congeniality pulled at her reins, squawking.

  And suddenly, they were all around me. Forming out of the winds, rising out of the dirt, building first as legs and then torsos, sprouting arms and forming skulls out of nothingness. The dirt gave them eyes that couldn’t blink, mouths that couldn’t close. But the voices, they had those.

  And they were screaming.

  The howls of the Echoes filled the skies, louder th
an the wind or even the Lady’s song. They shambled forward on legs that dissipated beneath them, reaching out with arms that twisted and turned to dust in the wind. Their eyes of dust were turned upon me. Their mouths gaped open and they spoke a language only I knew.

  Whispers. Accusations. But above all else, pleas. Pleas for mercy. Pleas for life. Pleas for loved ones to be spared.

  My heart dropped. My blood went cold. I heard every word they spoke.

  And I ran.

  “Come on!” I snapped, tugging on Congeniality’s reins and hurrying toward the distant fort. “Keep moving! Don’t look back! Don’t listen to them!”

  “What’s happening?” Cavric asked, hurrying to catch up. “I didn’t remember any of this! Is it one of you they’re remembering?”

  “Latent memories, maybe,” Liette shouted as she followed. “The Husks are a mystery.”

  “But you said they were harmless!” Cavric shouted as their screams filled the sky.

  “I said one was harmless!” she screamed back as she pushed past him and we fled into the maelstrom.

  The Echoes didn’t pursue us. They were fleeting things, insubstantial as the wind and dust that made them, incapable of focusing on much. When we neared the fort, they dissipated and were lost on the wind, their screams with them.

  Their voices still rang in my ears, though. Their whispers, their screams, their pleas—I could hear them over my ragged breath, a breath I couldn’t control anymore. They clung to me, as close as my scars, until I gritted my teeth and shut my eyes and shut them out.

  And the silence set in, leaving me only the sound of my own breath, echoing.

  I couldn’t stop it. I’d stared killers in the eye and seen townships so rife with suffering that they’d be kinder as graveyards and not blinked. Yet I couldn’t find the strength to close my mouth, to stop my heart from thundering and gulping down grimy air.

  Not after they loomed before me.

  I saw the gates first. The walls, seared with flame and pockmarked by impacts, held proudly enough, but it was the gates that put up the greatest effort. Their hinges torn and bars slashed, they still tried to cling mightily upright and defend their charge. Good, thick wood, banded with iron, rotted and rusted but still standing after all these years, thick enough to repel cannon fire.

  Yet… they hadn’t done anything against what brought them down.

  “Are you all right?”

  I looked down. Liette’s fingers were on my arm. “Fine,” I lied, pushing her away.

  “You don’t look fine,” she said, watching me as I stalked away to catch up to Cavric ahead.

  “This place,” Cavric whispered, almost reverently. “I’ve seen these gates before.”

  He had. In a painting or a treatise. These gates were well known. Impenetrable, some had once called them. There were legends of the waves of soldiers they had repelled, of the cannon fire they had shrugged off. I had heard them all by the time I first laid eyes on them.

  And when they were torn apart in an instant, I forgot them all. Same as everyone else did.

  Even for all the gashes and holes rent in them, the walls kept most of the wind out. Sturdy design, built to last forever. Thick brown clouds of dust swirled overhead, loosing petulant moans and muttered complaints at being denied entry.

  I wouldn’t have come to this place unless I needed to. Unlike Vraki, this place held no good memories for me.

  The buildings were right where I remembered them. The barracks were at the north end, close to the gates. Houses for the families of soldiers and workers laid out in the east, parallel to the tracks that led into the mine carved into the mountain. Furnaces and forges were set in the low valley near the southern wall, overseen by a lonely spire with a lonely banner.

  That had once been the Cadre Command. That had once been a tower from which the Revolutionary guard had once looked over a land that was once called something other than the Husks. A land they had once believed would be their new paradise, free from masters, from mages.

  One evening, that had all changed.

  On the evening they saw a small Imperial regiment approaching, they didn’t say shit. No siren. No warning. No evacuation orders for the miners and the steelworkers and their families. They didn’t do anything more than muster a Revolutionary detachment with a few gunpikes to go out and rout them.

  Why wouldn’t they? It had just been a few Imperials, after all: a tall, skinny boy with a sword; a handsome man in a nice coat; and just a handful of Imperial troopers with them, including a young girl with white hair.

  Business proceeded as usual that night. No one thought it odd that the Revolutionaries sent out to fight were taking long in returning. The miners were concerned with food rations and new uniforms for the winter, not with Imperial posturing. Amid the smoke being belched out by the furnaces, no one even noticed the flames at first.

  Not until the gates were blown wide open.

  “Vigil.”

  My scars burned at the name. The Cacophony rattled, like he was amused—or the wind, I didn’t know. I glanced over and saw Cavric, gawping up at the tower. The wind and dust had cleared just enough that the sigil atop that tattered banner was just visible enough to make out the crossed pickax and hammer. A worn and ragged symbol, but to see the light in Cavric’s eyes, you would have thought he was looking upon the Seeing God himself.

  “I knew it,” he whispered. “I knew it! We covered this in the academy! This was Vigil!” He looked to me, smiling broadly. “The ring on the finger of the Revolution’s reach! The forge of the vanguard! The birthplace of the Boar, the Rattler, the Dragoon!”

  “Never heard of it,” I muttered in a voice too weak from a mouth too dry for that lie to be believed.

  “A collection of houses near a merely impressive mountain,” Liette said. “That warrants importance to the Revolution, one supposes.”

  “Important?” He let out an incredulous laugh. “This was one of the earliest fortresses of the Revolution, established right after we freed ourselves from the Imperium!” He gestured to the mountain as though he were introducing me to a large, stony girlfriend. “This mine alone put thousands of people to work and produced more weapons for the army than we had ever known! The farmlands surrounding this place fed entire cities! It withheld against countless Imperial attacks!”

  “Oh? What happened to it?” I almost choked on the words.

  Cavric’s face didn’t just fall. The guy looked at the ground like he was searching for a gun to put in his mouth. His voice got real low and his hands hung limp at his sides.

  “It fell…” he said. He shook his head, found his composure. “Obviously, it fell. Imperial attack. Treachery.”

  He stared somewhere far away, some distant memory of what Vigil used to be, some story of what it used to mean. There had been stories about how it had gone from the Revolution’s shining city to its biggest graveyard. Some of them even got a lot of details right. But…

  It hadn’t been treachery that night.

  There hadn’t been any sneaking or subterfuge. The Imperials had strolled up to the smoldering gates like they were arriving for a dinner party, in their nicest suits and brightest colors. They walked right up to the Revolutionaries sent to stop them. They walked right through them.

  No one opened the gates for them; they simply knocked very hard. The guards who came rushing up to defend it met with the skinny boy with the sword and then they died. And then people came out to see what was happening. Fathers picked up their pickaxes from work. Mothers tried to hide the excited children who ran out to see what the noise was about. Children pushed past them, ran out anyway. They all looked out to see the tall man in the fancy suit who looked back at them and smiled gently and said a few quiet words and he heard a very quiet song.

  Then everyone had looked to the sky. And they had seen it go red.

  And, three hours later when their bodies lay twisted into coils of ash, Vraki the Gate had his name.

  “The reco
rds never said what happened here,” Cavric said. I didn’t like the excitement in his voice. It didn’t belong in a place like this. “Or what we left behind.”

  I reached out as he started to hurry off, but he was too quick. “Wait!”

  “This was the pride of the Revolution once!” he cried back as he hurried off into the ruins. “There might be something here that we can use to stop those people!”

  “Damn it, Cavric!” Anger leapt into my voice, unbidden. “Isn’t it fucking obvious? There’s nothing here!”

  The wind howled, drowning the screams I hurled after him. He just kept hurrying, disappearing behind a blackened skeleton of a building.

  “Are you listening?” Anger turned to fear, panic making my voice hoarse. “There’s nothing here! Come back!” I started after him. “COME BACK!”

  My foot struck something. There was the sound of breaking, like a burned-out tree crumbling to ash. The reek of something old and seared filled my nostrils.

  Don’t look down.

  I told myself this. In my head, over and over.

  Don’t look down.

  I tried to hammer it into my skull, make it a spike that would stiffen my spine, make it impossible to look.

  Don’t look down.

  But that thought became a lead weight settling behind my brow, dragging my eyes toward the earth. The wind shifted the sand under my boot. Fragments of ashen bone were revealed, a black stain on the earth, as a skull peered out from beneath the earth. And with its mouth gaping wide open, the wind seemed to whisper in my ear.

  “I don’t want to die.”

  I don’t remember when my breath left me. I don’t remember when my blood followed. I don’t know how I fell to my hands and knees, breathing hard and gasping for air, my limbs numb. Except for my fingers. My fingers could feel the earth beneath me, coarse and gritty.