Seven Blades in Black

by Sam Sykes

  “Imperial swine,” the pilot growled from inside. “You always resort to treachery.”

  Coming from someone inside a giant suit of armor, that seemed a mite unfair. I was more concerned with its repeating gun humming to life, though. Nowhere to run, no cover to take, and I was out of anything that would even slow this fucker down.

  Not now, my thoughts came on desperate breath. I was so close! I WAS SO CLOSE!

  I shut my eyes tight, braced myself.

  Please.

  Like I said, I don’t believe in gods. But I do believe that the universe is out to fuck you. And occasionally, when the universe gets just greedy enough to send two things to fuck you at once, you can turn it to your favor.

  Such as when I felt the earth shuddering beneath me, heard a voice bellow behind me, saw a shadow growing above me.

  I leapt away.

  Calto came hammering down.

  He roared, hurling himself into the Paladin. The armor’s guns blazed, tearing bright blossoms of blood out of his skin. Yet he didn’t care. He struck the Paladin like a boulder, the Lady’s song rising, giving him strength to push against its roaring engines. He brought it to the ground, eyes alight with a violet glow.

  “Well done,” he growled. “Well done, indeed. I am angry. I had thought myself beyond that. Yet you have inspired me.”

  His fingers sank through metal like it was warm cake. The iron shrieked as he tore the visor free from its shoulders. Inside, a young Revolutionary pilot, gasping and sweating and scrambling for a tiny pistol, was torn from the cockpit. Calto hoisted him above his head, taking his neck in one hand, his ankle in the other.

  “I dedicate this,” Calto growled, “to you.”

  He pulled. Red life splattered. Two pieces of flesh and bone fell to the ground.

  I would tell you more, but I was already gone. There was no way I was going to stick around for that.

  Certainly not after I heard the cannons begin firing.

  From very far away, I heard their sounds—as though something had simply taken the air and broken it. I felt a great rush of wind. And, high in the sky, I saw a dozen red stars born into the skies.

  The cannon fire arced over the walls, great red charges descending like meteors to fall upon the city. In great gouts of flame, in bursts of rubble, in thunderous gasps of air that drank the screams of the people. One by one, they fell and tore the city apart.

  And I kept running.

  I rushed to the edge of the bridge, down the staircase to the tunnel’s mouth. I could hear rasping breath, a body dragging itself through the darkness. Riccu had spent too much power—he was slowing down.

  He was mine.

  The Cacophony knew it as well as I did, burning in my hand, begging to get started. I wasn’t about to deny him after all this.

  “SAL!”

  A voice in the dark. Two eyes on my back. I turned and looked up to the canal. The carnage raging behind him like the backdrop of a macabre opera, Cavric stood, staring at me pleadingly, hands open and impotent. His lips mouthed a word I couldn’t hear over the bloodshed.

  But one I knew all the same.

  “Please.”

  And I simply stared at him.

  And turned away.

  And disappeared.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  SEWERS OF LASTLIGHT

  My footsteps splashing in the water. My breath echoing off the tunnel’s walls. My gun rattling in his holster.

  If I closed my eyes, I could pretend that was all I heard. If I tried very hard, I could pretend I couldn’t hear the battle raging on the streets above, the sounds of cannon shells falling. If I was just a little better at lying, I could pretend I didn’t hear the sound of a building collapsing, of people screaming.

  I was good.

  But not that good.

  I kept going. Through the darkness closing in, I kept going. Until I saw a bright purple light blossom in the darkness, illuminating a pale figure.

  Riccu looked thinner than the last time I had seen him. He had never been a big man to begin with, but now his skin clung to his skull and he hunched over, clutching himself with withered limbs, like a dead tree curling in on itself. The portal, a bright doorway of violet light, illuminated the fear in his dark-circled eyes as he looked around the tunnel.

  I pressed myself against the tunnel wall. But even if I weren’t shrouded in darkness, he’d never see me. Riccu was a terrified man. And like all terrified men, he only ever saw enemies in his head. Never the ones right in front of him.

  He pulled his hood up closer around his face, slipped through his portal, and disappeared.

  I stalked forward, drawing the Cacophony. The portal loomed large before me, a swirling vortex of light and soft music. I hated these things—always have, even when they were conjured up by people I didn’t want to kill. The only guarantee you had that they wouldn’t dump you out over a cliff or at the bottom of a river was the Doormage’s word.

  And Riccu’s was not one I trusted.

  I heard a faint scurrying, glanced down to see a fat black rat near my foot. It peered at the portal, twitching its whiskers. Curious, it slipped forward, vanishing in a flash of light.

  Well, there you go, I told myself. You can’t have it said that rats would go where Sal the Cacophony wouldn’t. Besides…

  In the distance, through the walls, I heard the sound of something exploding.

  What’s left here that you haven’t already fucked up?

  I forced that thought out of my head. Forced everything out but the truth. Whether it had been smart or whether I would die regretting it, I had done it. I’d made my choices to get to this point. And now Riccu was going to die for it.

  I took in a deep breath. I closed my eyes. I stepped through.

  It’s a weird sensation, using a portal. No matter how often you’ve done it, it feels the same way each time. Once you step over the threshold, you cease to be a person and become a liquid. It feels like your skin, your hair, all parts of you turn into a thick paste and disappear down a gullet of light and sound. You want to scream, but you have no voice. You want to fight, but you have no body. You fall forever.

  Until you don’t.

  I came out the other side gasping for breath and with the feeling of my skin on fire—I was uncomfortably aware of my organs resettling inside my body and my blood figuring out how to circulate again.

  I held the Cacophony up, searching for anyone in need of a bullet to the face who might have been waiting for me. Nothing but darkness and a rat greeted me. The latter squeaked once, scurried off, and disappeared into the gloom, water splashing as it did.

  Still in the sewers.

  Riccu wasn’t an idiot. He wouldn’t make a portal leading directly to Vraki. In the event he was pursued, he’d have set up multiple doors to throw people off before heading back to rejoin whoever’s boot he was licking.

  He was an intelligent person. But he was scared. And everyone’s only as ever smart as they are brave. Give a smart man reason to doubt, he falls to pieces.

  Or, in this case, he stops covering his tracks.

  The air was rank and still down here. I could hear the sound of him splashing and gasping as he made his way through the tunnels ahead of me. I crept carefully up to the corner of the tunnel and peered around.

  Riccu’s desperate retreat had devolved into a haggard, shambling mess. He was breathing heavily, gasping as he hobbled forward on one foot, dragging a left leg that no longer worked behind him.

  Personally, I always thought Doormages got a raw deal. Their magic wasn’t flashy and they were largely seen as useful tools by the Imperium they served. And in exchange for their useful-but-not-impressive powers?

  The Lady Merchant took their bodies.

  At first, it’s not too bad: the creeping numbness that follows the use of Doormagic. Eventually, a Doormage can’t teleport without limbs becoming paralyzed. And soon, if they’re not careful, they become completely paralyzed. Those most dedicated to
the Imperium were confined to beds, utterly helpless to move as they struggled to cast spells by blinking. Until the Lady took that, too, and left them as husks to be discarded by the Emperor they loyally served.

  It wasn’t hard to see why Riccu might have joined Vraki in conspiring against the Imperium. And I wouldn’t have blamed him at all, if not for one thing.

  He was on my list.

  I followed him through the darkness as he shambled, splashed, and whispered sobbing curses under his breath. All his carefully laid plans were forgotten in the stress of battle. He was simply trying to escape now. He would lead me right to Vraki. He was slow, desperate, and terrified.

  So you might be wondering how the hell I managed to lose him.

  It happened quickly. One second he was there, hurrying around a corner. The next, he had vanished completely.

  I whispered a curse. The fucker teleported. Stupid move—he’d only invite more paralysis into his limbs, slow himself down. But, for the moment, he was gone and I was left with nothing but silence and darkness.

  Well, and a fat fucking rat.

  The little rodent sat atop a pipe protruding from the wall, whiskers twitching as it canted its head at me curiously. I shot him a glare.

  “And what the fuck are you looking at?” I muttered, pointing the Cacophony at him. “If I find out you had something to do with this, I’ll…”

  I was spared the embarrassment of wasting one of my best curses on a rodent by the sound of splashing. Faint, but I heard it. Ahead and to the right, down another corner. He was moving even slower.

  I hurried to catch up, following the sound of splashing as it turned to boots on stone. Soon, the drowned tunnel of the sewer gave way to dry floor. I emerged in a vast cistern, pipes groaning as they pushed water through the walls. The faintest hint of starlight poked through a grate far overhead. And beneath it, I could see him.

  He appeared as a shadow in the gloom, but I could see him standing at the center of the cistern. His back was straight. His poise was relaxed. And he was looking right at me.

  “No more running?” I called out as I approached. “You always were sensible. I liked that about you.”

  He said nothing to me. It was a coward’s tongue in that skull, rehearsing how he would plead for his life. I shouldered the Cacophony as I walked toward him.

  “I won’t tell you this ends with you walking away,” I said. “We can do it quick, if you want. You can do the right thing and give me what you owe me. Or you can put up a fight you’ll lose, make this hard for me, and die down here, just another piece of shit floating in the river.”

  I paused. He said nothing. He didn’t move.

  “If I have to,” I spoke softly, “I’ll make it hurt.”

  “I know you will.”

  That wasn’t his voice.

  “You don’t lie.”

  That wasn’t his stride as he came walking forward. That wasn’t his body that stepped into the light, wasn’t his long fingers resting on the pommel of a sword, wasn’t his eyes regarding me.

  That wasn’t his perfect smile, soft and sad and tender as a knife in my back, looking at me.

  “No one ever said,” Jindu whispered, “that Sal the Cacophony was a liar.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  SEWERS OF LASTLIGHT

  I’ve stared down beasts with the blood of my best friends glistening on their fangs. I’ve walked battlefields where soldiers halfway into the earth still drew breath as birds pulled out their innards. I’ve sat at the table of men and women who walked from one end of the Scar to the other and left a corpse in their wake for every step they took.

  Never before did my blood run cold like it did when I looked into his eyes.

  No malice. No spite. After all this time, all those bodies, all these scars, he looked at me without an ounce of hatred in his stare. And for a moment, I forgot how things were between us.

  For a moment, I wanted to forget.

  “It’s good to see you, Salazanca.” He took a step forward.

  I had thought of this moment—dreamed of it. In my head, I had a thousand replies for them, each one sharpened over weeks to a fine tip that I would have used to push right through his heart and kill him where he stood.

  But when he took that step forward, when he kept meeting my eyes, when he smiled like all that had happened had never happened… I forgot all of them. Every retort, every curse, every word I could say just drained out of me. I couldn’t remember how to do anything but take a step back and hold my gun up.

  My arm was shaking.

  “Ah.” He stopped, held his hands up as if in surrender, as if that could set me at ease. “All right.” He nodded slowly. “I suppose I can’t blame you for that.”

  For a long time we stood there. My shaking arm with the gun pointed at his face. His mouth trembling, looking for the words to say. The sound of water rushing and pipes groaning and the distant sound of people dying.

  Had he always been that tall? I wondered.

  In the silence between us, without words to distract me, I looked at him. He was shaped like a thin, cold knife, slender shoulders and chest tapering down to a thin waist and feet poised like he was about to come moving at me. His face was all sharp angles and hard edges, every bit like the black sword hanging at his waist.

  His namesake.

  Jindu the Blade.

  “I’ve thought about it a lot, you know.”

  I didn’t know what I expected him to say the next time I saw him. Maybe it was that. Maybe I had the perfect retort for that, somewhere in all those words I couldn’t remember. As it was, I just stood there, staring down my trembling arm at him.

  “That night,” he said, looking away from me. “In my dreams, when I wake up in the morning, anytime I close my eyes, I keep thinking about it.” He stared at the damp stones under his feet. “And in my head, it always looks like someone else who was there. Someone else who did that, someone else who walked with you, someone else who…”

  He held his hands out. Empty. Like the answer was supposed to be there. Like it was just supposed to fall into his lap.

  “But it was me. I know.” He sighed; he closed those perfect eyes. “And no matter how much I can’t take it back, I know that I…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry is what I’m trying to say. I’m sorry and I just—”

  “Jindu.”

  That barely sounded like my voice. It had come out of my mouth without me knowing. And it barely felt like my thumb drawing the Cacophony’s hammer back. But the sound of it clicking filled the room.

  “Did you ever really think you’d have words that would make me not want to kill you?”

  He breathed in a sharp breath. He straightened, drawn up like a blade quivering in flesh. His eyes were as soft now as they were when I first met him—but there was a hardness there, creeping in at the edges, like someone had filed off the softness and left something jagged behind.

  “Salazanca.”

  He took a step forward.

  “Don’t.”

  My voice came out trembling. Sal the Cacophony wasn’t supposed to tremble. My arm shook. Sal the Cacophony was supposed to aim true.

  “Don’t come any closer,” I said. “Don’t ever say my name again.” I thrust the gun at him. “Answer me.”

  He stopped. I wanted him to keep coming. He frowned. I wanted him to sneer. I wanted him to give me a reason. I wanted something to make me pull the trigger. I wanted to not feel like I couldn’t. I didn’t know why I couldn’t. I didn’t know why I was wanting him to start cursing and shrieking like any other scum I’ve put in their graves, why I wanted him to say anything, anything…

  “No. I never did.”

  But that.

  “I thought I had them once,” he said. “I believed if I thought long enough, spent enough time, I’d find the right ones. But… they don’t exist.” He shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything.”

  “Then why are you here?” I narrowed my eyes. “Tell me. Tell me wh
y the fuck, with all the fucking Scar for you to die in, I found you here?”

  He steadied his gaze, spoke softly.

  “You know why.”

  My arm tensed, steadied. “You’re here for Riccu. To protect him. Because you’re still working for Vraki.”

  “I don’t work for anyone. I’m still dedicated to restoring the Imperium, to the cause of—”

  “You work for Vraki. Knowing what he’s done, what he’ll do, what he did to me, you come and talk about words like they mean a fucking thing?”

  “I know, I know, and I said I didn’t have them. But it’s not as simple as that. This is bigger than you or me. It’s bigger than—”

  “Than what?” I snarled. “That’s it, then? Something’s big enough and everything else doesn’t matter? You and Vraki and all those fuckers want something bad enough, you don’t give a shit who gets hurt to have it?”

  “It was the Imperium,” he shot back. “It was everything we fought for, died for. We couldn’t leave it to the Nul Emperor. It had to be rebuilt, even if that meant sacrifice, even if—”

  “IT WAS ME.”

  My scream echoed through the cistern, ran down a hundred tunnels, drowned in a thousand waters. If Riccu was still here, he’d have heard me, but I didn’t fucking care. I didn’t fucking care that I was screaming, I didn’t fucking care that there were tears in my eyes, and I didn’t fucking care if either of us got out of here alive anymore.

  “It was me, Jindunamalar.” My voice wracked, hurt to get out of my throat, but I didn’t care about that, either. “You sacrificed me. You swore an oath to me. You looked me in the eyes and you said… you said…”

  I couldn’t think about it.

  Not that night when he had looked at me with that perfect smile and said those three words and I had believed him. I couldn’t think about it without collapsing, breaking down into a miserable heap. I wasn’t that. Sal the Cacophony wasn’t that.

  “I know. I know.” How the fuck did he sound like he was about to cry, too? How the fuck did he manage to do that? “I said it. I broke it. I did it. I know. But it was you and I against the entire Imperium. Was I supposed to let the entire world burn down?”