Seven Blades in Black

by Sam Sykes

  And it was his voice I heard.

  I wish I could have told you it was Taltho, some lingering nightmare from his magic. That’s not how it works, though. Nightmages can see what’s in your head, but not your heart. They can toy with your fears but they can only guess at what really hurts you. The real pain, the ones hidden under all the scars and bad dreams…

  The only person who can hurt you that way is you.

  I could see him all around me, fading in and out of the nightmare he had followed me out of. He was a shattered mirror of a man. I could see him only in fragments: his eyes bright and cheerful, his hands expert and powerful, his lips always moving, always whispering, always trying to tell me something. And if I listened, I could have figured out what.

  But, at that moment, something else called to me. And he spoke louder.

  I felt a flash of pain, older and closer than any of my scars. It began small at first—an itch in my palm I couldn’t scratch. But every breath I took, it stoked itself, a fire spreading through my fingers, my wrists, up my arm. With each step I took, it got worse, an inferno that ate all my lesser pains for fuel. By the time I fell to my knees, it was burning inside me.

  And I reached into the darkness. And I felt my fingers wrap around a wooden grip. The burning dissipated in an instant. And in the wake of that terrible pain, I could feel the Cacophony’s smile, as if to say…

  “What kept you?”

  I didn’t smile back as I picked him up. I didn’t need to. We’d done this before, he and I. Separated, be it by darkness or miles or worlds, we always found each other the same way. And we’d keep on finding each other until every last name was crossed off my list.

  So I figured we’d better get to it.

  I walked forward, hand outstretched until I found the rough stone of a wall and began to follow it out. The Cacophony’s call burned away the lesser pains: the bumps and aches and bloodied scratches Galta had left me. Not that it felt good, mind you, but at least I could think about something other than how beat up I felt.

  Something like Vraki.

  But even thinking about him made me hurt.

  I was so close. Everything had made sense. Summoning a Scrath is a complex thing: it needs a ritual, a host, and a lot of fucking power. Vraki had everything but that last bit. He was going to find it in the Husks, surely. He was going to revisit the site of his greatest victory, the day he walked beneath a sky full of red clouds and bloodied the Revolution’s nose with a single wave of his hand.

  It all sounded so intelligent when I thought it out. How the fuck did it go awry?

  Vraki wasn’t there. What’s more, he knew I was coming. He knew where I was. He had sent Kresh to kill me, after all. How did he know where I was? How did he know I was tracking him?

  And where had he fled?

  Had to get back to the surface. Had to find the others. Had to find Congeniality, Cavric, Liette…

  Liette.

  Liette, with those shy eyes behind those big spectacles. Liette, with that too-rare smile I had fought to see so many times. Liette…

  Cold and on the ground with a hole in her throat.

  Stop that. I shook my head. I gritted my teeth. That was Taltho. Not her. Not you. Not real. You didn’t kill her.

  And, again, that little thought that I wished to hell I could say wasn’t mine, whispered to me.

  Yet.

  I wanted to tell myself that wasn’t true, that I’d never hurt her. But then I thought back to how she looked at me when she turned around and disappeared without saying a word. How broken I must have been in her eyes, how jagged and sharp I must have been for her to cut herself on me.

  I wanted to tell myself that I had a list. I wanted to tell myself that only the names on the list were the ones who were going to get hurt. But I’d been doing this long enough to know that was a lie.

  So did she.

  And my thoughts broke like a dam with too many leaks.

  “What am I doing wrong?”

  Liette.

  “What did he do to you?”

  Cavric.

  “For you, I would give everything.”

  Jindu.

  And I felt like I was choking on my own blood again. I felt like I was drowning on dry land. I felt like I wanted to tear my throat out so I could breathe again. I felt like I wanted to take out my gun and start shooting until things made sense. Failing all that, I did the only other thing I could think of.

  “WILL EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP?”

  I screamed.

  “… will everyone…”

  And something screamed back.

  “… shut up fuck shut up the shut…”

  Every part of me froze. My blood went cold in my veins. My muscles went rigid. My eyes refused to blink. Even my heart fell quiet, too afraid to beat lest something out there hear it.

  In the vast and empty darkness before me, I could hear something. Talking. Whining. Whimpering.

  “… everyoneeveryoneEVERYONEeveryoneeveryone…”

  Taltho’s magic, maybe, something he left behind when he messed with my head. Maybe an errant thought that finally leaked out of a hole in my head. Maybe just my imagination, the pain making me hear things.

  Or maybe I wasn’t alone down here.

  Given the fact that I held the Cacophony a little tighter, I’ll let you decide which one I was leaning toward.

  I picked my steps carefully as I made my way along the rough wall. I held my breath, made my footfalls as silent as I could. In the long dark, I couldn’t hear anything else but the empty air and the old rocks. And neither of them said a word.

  A light blossomed in the distance, pale and cold. I held myself steady as I moved toward it, kept my breathing shallow and my finger ready. It grew with every step until I emerged from the darkness.

  Into what, I didn’t know.

  A vast cavern sprawled out before me. High overhead, silvery rays of moonlight pierced through gaps in a rocky cavern ceiling. They reached into the gloom, and from the stones, something reached back.

  Violet. Pale and beautiful and veined with white, like the color of lilacs holding their breath just before winter kills them. They mapped the cavern walls, stretched across the stones in delicate spiderwebbing patterns, veins of ore that glowed with a faint, crystalline light. It almost looked alive, straining to escape the rocks that held it prisoner, sighing ethereal light when it realized it couldn’t.

  Severium.

  The ore that turned the Revolution from an unruly pack of nuls to a war machine; it webbed the cavern’s floor in untapped veins, its glow pulsating like the beating of a metal heart.

  It illuminated a great pit below, ridden with the remains of what had been left behind: half-collapsed scaffoldings, abandoned tools and carts, the occasional body left cold in the dark. But hidden in the stones, I could see more lights, colder and crueler and far more familiar.

  Relics. I saw their woven stone shapes, impossibly wrought from a material older and darker than the stone they were embedded in. Engines, weapons, great suits of armor and things I’d never seen before in Revolutionary hands—at least a dozen of the glowing things jutted out, trapped in the stone and so close to freedom, like reaching hands.

  This, then, was why the Imperium had sent their best to Vigil.

  Did the people above know? I wondered. Did they know that this was all beneath their feet? Did they know they had been given a death sentence?

  I tried not to think about it. I tried to keep my eyes on the path ahead of me.

  But even with all the light, I could see the shadows: the stalagmites and stalactites jutting from the rocks like teeth in the maw of a great beast, the lurching shapes of buried Relics, the long black cloaks cast by the pale light. And, in any one of them, something could be waiting to kill me.

  Not that that stopped me—I wouldn’t get a lot done if I hesitated every time someone meant to murder me.

  From the tunnel where I had emerged, the floor gave out into a
long, stone slope. I took a step onto it, trying to pick out footholds in the dim light. I realized what a bad idea that was right about the time I slipped and fell on my ass. I bit back a cry as I slid, uncontrollably, down the slope and landed hard on the cavern floor below.

  I rolled to my knees, held the Cacophony up in both hands, pointed out into the dark.

  No movement. No voices. Nothing.

  Maybe it had been magic. Or maybe I was just going insane. Either would have been preferable.

  I lowered my gun as I rose to my feet. I squinted into the dark, peering among the rocks. Weaving its way in a jagged, haphazard path was an old miners’ trail with no obvious route or end.

  Still, it wasn’t like I could go back the way I came. With no other choice and my gun held close, I started to pick my way along the trails.

  I winced every time my boots hit the stone. In the silence of the cavern, even the softest fall of my feet sounded deafening. The darkness swallowed sound here—no murmur of wind or grumble of errant stones. You would think I’d have found that comforting.

  But my body was held so tense it felt I’d squeeze my skeleton out of my mouth. Between each step, I was listening. For the sound of something following behind me, of something stalking the stones above me, of something muttering in the dark—I didn’t know.

  Do this sort of thing long enough, a lot of things stop scaring you. Magic, weapons, even the beasts of the Scar—the big man-eating sons of bitches that can rip a body in two pieces and swallow one before the other hits the ground—don’t scare you if you know how they work.

  Forgive the cliché, but if I’m afraid of anything, it’s the unknown.

  Not the grand, cosmic “Where do we go when we die?” unknown—I know where I’m headed. No, it’s the cold-knife-in-the-belly unknown I fear. The feeling that wrenches your guts when you know something’s wrong, but your head and your heart conspire to trick you into thinking that everything’s all right. That unknown, the knowledge that something bad is going to happen, you just don’t know what it is…

  Or who’s going to do it.

  That I fear.

  I fought it the best I could. I kept a steady heart and a clear head. And both of them told me what my gut already knew: I couldn’t keep picking down this trail and hope I’d find a way out before something else found me. I had to take a chance.

  And I found it the minute I looked up.

  Beneath a shaft of soft silver light, at the center of a clearing in the cavern, a rock loomed tall above the rest of his gray, silent brothers. Center of the cavern, good visibility, with a command of the surroundings—it would be a great vantage to get an idea of where I was.

  Or a great point to be spotted by whatever was lurking down here, then stalked, killed, and summarily dismembered, disemboweled, and/or devoured, depending on your point of view.

  But hey, you know me. I’m an optimistic woman.

  I slunk to the rock, found it pocked enough for me to climb. I scrambled up the face of the rock, uncomfortably aware of how clear a target I was beneath this light. But when I reached the top, it was hard to say that it wasn’t worth it.

  From up here, I could see the cavern entwined. The metal glittered beneath the light, reaching out invitingly to the shadows with silver, delicate fingers. And the shadows, shy and unassuming, reached back to wrap black hands around those sparkling lights in a tender embrace.

  Even with the threat of death looming over me, I admitted it was beautiful.

  But not half as beautiful as the sight I saw at the far edge of the cavern.

  I wouldn’t have noticed it if not for this little dance between the light and the dark. There, against the wall of the cavern, was a deeper sort of shadow than the ones painting the cavern floor. And as I squinted, I could see that it wasn’t just a shadow, but a hole carved into the rock.

  A way out. Or a way to nowhere. But it was a way. And the only way I had left to me.

  I bit back my glee as I slid down the rock, but I couldn’t help feeling at least a little excited. I was almost out of here. And from there, it wouldn’t be hard to track down Galta, put a bullet in her head, get my list back, and cross one name off.

  Things were starting to look up.

  Which would explain why, as I hit the bottom of the rock, I saw a shadow emerging into the clearing.

  Tall and thin and twisted like a withered tree, it staggered forward on unsteady legs. It turned a pendulous head toward the shaft of light and, with a voice that tore itself from a pair of rasping lips, croaked:

  “Hello…”

  THIRTY-SIX

  MINES OF VIGIL

  I want to tell you it was a man.

  It was about the right height, about the right build, stood on two legs. I want to tell you it was something normal, just another guy with a grudge I would have to take down. I could handle a man.

  I’ve gotten quite good at killing them.

  Men didn’t make my blood go cold when I looked at them.

  I don’t know how else to describe it. It stood at the perimeter of the light, just a withered and frail shadow. But even without seeing it, I could feel ice freeze in my veins. That cold knife in my belly twisted, sent that frigid chill coursing through my bowels, my muscles, every part of me until I couldn’t move.

  It would see me if I moved.

  It swung its head back and forth and the movement was… wrong. It twitched and bobbed in an unnatural way, like a teakettle on a stick. Was it looking for something? Was that just how it moved? Or was it simply trying to make up its mind on how best to kill me?

  “HeeeellloooOOOOO…”

  If my blood ran cold at the sight of it, my heart damn near stopped at the sound of it. Its voice came out all wrong, like a bleating sheep trying to figure out how to speak. I couldn’t tell if it was asking a question, making a greeting, or just screaming.

  It swiveled again, turned its back to me. I took another chance.

  I found the last shred of warmth inside me, forced it to carry me behind the rock. I held the Cacophony close to my chest, like a child holding her doll. I could feel him burning in my hand; I’d be scared of that sensation again someday. But not now.

  Now, I needed him.

  I shut my eyes. I couldn’t bear to look at that dead-tree shape again, couldn’t bear the thought of it. But when I heard that shuffling step, like big feet dragged across the stones, I couldn’t think of anything else. I heard it walking. I heard its voice.

  “GLORY.”

  It shrieked a single word out of that bleating, croaking mouth. But the sound didn’t echo. The entire cavern stood quiet, afraid to contradict the thing.

  “… glory… glory to… gloryglorygloryGLORYglorygloryglory… to the Rev… Revo… glory to the…”

  Was it speaking? Screaming? Muttering? I couldn’t tell. The words came out hesitant, like it was trying to figure out what they meant, tasting them for significance.

  “… tenth morning… emergency. EMERGENCY. Scourge. Scourgescourgescourge… identity. Glory to… tell wife… wife… wifewifewifewife… tell wife… Long life. Wifelifelonglifewife.”

  I couldn’t tell you how I understood what it was saying. I couldn’t tell you how I picked out the words from that mad, bleating gibber coming out of its mouth. But I knew the words it spoke.

  And I recognized them.

  “… glory… to… the… Revolution…”

  Where my blood had been cold before, it now burned hot. I could feel that rush of panic, that old animal fear we never left behind when we built our cities, surging through my veins, begging me to run, to scream, to fall down and cry.

  Fuck me, I knew what that thing was.

  Maybe it was instinct that made me dare to peer out around the corner, the desire to see my foe. Maybe it was that fear, telling me to know where it was so I could flee it. But I think, in my heart, it was a morbid curiosity.

  I had never seen a Scrath up close.

  It stood at the center of th
e clearing, beneath the silver light. And it was a man.

  Or it had been, once. It was tall and dark of skin, naked but for a tattered blue jacket hanging around its torso. It had a head, two arms, two legs. But that was all of its humanity that remained.

  Its limbs were withered and twisted, bent at wrong angles and possessing extra joints. Its body trembled and shuddered as it staggered from foot to foot, as though it couldn’t quite get the hang of standing up. Its head was… backward, like someone had grabbed its jaw in one hand and its nose in the other and pulled them in opposite directions. Its mouth hung open as a barely discernible mass of broken teeth and writhing tongue. Its eyes bulged out of its sockets and rotated around, unblinking.

  The thing looked like it had simply taken a man, put him on as a suit, and found it couldn’t quite figure out how he was supposed to fit.

  “Tell my… my wife… wifewifewife… Long Life… to the General… tenth morning.”

  It spoke without moving its lips. It forced the words out of its throat, its tongue lolling as it did. And I winced.

  Nothing about summoning a Scrath is easy, but pulling it into our world is as close as it gets. Once it’s out, it has a good chance of simply exploding, killing everything within a mile. If it doesn’t do that, it sometimes goes haywire and starts killing, shrieking, eating everything it can get its hands on. But if, by some miracle, it doesn’t do either of those things, it can’t survive in our world.

  It needs a host.

  A host like Agent Relentless.

  The man Cavric had come to Stark’s Mutter to find. The man who had the bad fucking luck to run into Vraki the Gate. The man who wasn’t a man. Not anymore. Now he was just a sack of misshapen meat that the Scrath rode around in.

  I’d feel sorry for the poor bastard if I wasn’t sure the damn thing would kill me in an instant.

  To look at it, you’d be unnerved, maybe even disgusted, but you wouldn’t know what it could do. Though it might look frail, a Scrath wasn’t of this world. Things like bullets or blades didn’t bother it. It could leap higher and run faster than any human and tear boulders apart and trees from the earth without blinking…

  “Glory… glory to… glory to… General… my wife?”