by Sam Sykes
“Yes! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
My memories of Riccu the Knock were of a man alive with nerves, a man who hopped from one foot to the other, who looked around warily for the knife he always feared was waiting for him.
But the man who stood before the portal was still. He couldn’t hop on a left leg that had gone numb. He couldn’t wring hands with a right arm that hung limp. He couldn’t look around with a neck that had gone stiff with paralysis.
I had worried I’d lost him during my encounter with Jindu. Lucky for me, Riccu was both a cruel man and a cowardly man—too eager to hurt to think clearly, too afraid to die to think quickly. He had used too much of his magic, paid too much of a price. He was slow, hobbled.
And my gun was so heavy in my hand.
I could have killed him so easily. I wouldn’t even have to run. I could have just walked up, put the gun to his head, and painted the walls with him. And I admit, the thought appealed.
But then, that big portal he had just opened would close. And whoever was on the other side would go without a bullet in their brains.
And that thought did not appeal.
I watched as he slipped through the portal, hurrying as fast as his limp gait would allow. He vanished into the bright light and disappeared. I came out from behind the corner, rushing toward the portal before it closed.
But, as I did, something caught my eye, barely illuminated by the portal’s light. At the edge of the circle, I could see alien letters etched into the stone and painted with red ink. Anchor sigils, commissioned by a wright to keep a portal open longer than intended.
And they looked exceedingly familiar to the sigils I had found on the letter I had plucked from Daiga’s corpse. It was the same wright. Which meant…
This portal led to Vraki.
And so I had to step through it.
So I drew the Cacophony, felt him seethe reassuringly in my hand. I held the image of their faces in my head, the people who had to die. I closed my eyes. I held my breath.
I stepped through.
No blades. No traps. No darkness.
Whatever I had been expecting, it hadn’t been this.
I emerged in a room of stone bathed in a nightmare-pale light. Ancient bricks and rotting timber alike groaned, burdened by my sudden presence. They sighed clouds of splinters and dust, descending from the shattered ceiling in cloaks to settle upon the splintering floor under my feet. The entire structure—whatever it was—let out the sort of weary sound of homes that have seen a lot of blood or a lot of sorrows.
Unnerving as it was, it wasn’t the most eerie sound I heard.
That honor belonged to the screaming.
Distant, loud enough to be heard through a hundred holes punched through a hundred walls. And yet so incredibly close and soft as to feel like an old woman right in my ear. Not a human noise. Nor even a mortal one. I couldn’t tell you what it was. I didn’t even want to guess.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
That, though? That was a human noise. One very close and even more familiar.
I crept across the chamber, wincing at every creak of the floor beneath my feet, to the splintered door at the other edge. I glimpsed through, into a hallway of shattered floors and shredded tapestries, shafts of pale light punched through scars gouged in the walls. In silhouette, I could make them out: Riccu’s shadow, quivering and hunched before Galta’s thorn-blossomed figure.
“You were supposed to bring back the Hardrock,” she growled. “So are you hiding him in your pants or were you stupid enough to come back alone?”
“T-there was trouble,” Riccu whimpered. “A fight broke out in Lastlight. The Imperium and the Revolution started battling in the streets and—”
“And what?” She drummed her fingers on the hilt of a sword—my sword, still hanging around her waist, a match for my scarf, which she wore around her neck. “Where’s Jindu? He was sent to help you, wasn’t he?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” Riccu whined. “The Cacophony was there!”
“Sal?” Galta asked, her voice plunging into the pit of her belly.
“S-she was,” he said. “I w-wasn’t followed, but I know she was—”
The thorny protrusions on her knuckles clicked as she tightened her hands into fists.
“Of course,” Galta growled. “She’s still alive. She should be dead, but Jindu had to be sentimental. It must be my fault, right? I’m the one who assumed we’re all trying to get something done here whereas, apparently, everyone else assumed we were holding our cocks until the Cacophony came to kill us.”
“But you don’t have a—” Riccu began.
“Metaphor. Metaphor, you imbecile.” She scratched at a thorny protrusion. “Can’t assume Jindu killed her. He’s too weak. Always was. He’ll find his way back through the portal eventually.”
I glanced over my shoulder. Its light was fainter, but the portal still swirled, active. I noticed the sigils etched around its circle, identical to the ones I had seen in the tunnel.
Portal magic was a chaotic thing, burning out if a Doormage didn’t keep it open. But a skilled wright could stabilize it, leaving it open for anyone to use for situations like, say, bringing reinforcements out of Lastlight. It was a tricky technique, known to only clever mages.
Fortunately, two of the very cleverest—and soon to be shot to death—were right here in front of me.
I muffled the sound of the Cacophony’s hammer as I cocked the gun, aimed his dragon’s grin of a barrel. They stood like stark black targets against the light, their heads big and round and begging for a bullet. I couldn’t miss at this range. Just two bullets and they’d both be dead. Two of the worst Vagrants in the Scar. Two names off my list.
And they’d say no one got away from Sal the Cacophony. Ever.
“You think so?” Riccu asked. “What if the Cacophony—”
“Worrying about her is what turned you into this.” Galta plucked up Riccu’s right arm, let it fall limp against his side. “You got scared and used too much magic, didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t scared,” he protested. “I was sensible. The entire city was burning down around me!”
“It’s weird that you say ‘sensible’ and I hear ‘useless.’ You come back without the Hardrock, without Jindu, without anything. We can’t have fuck-ups at this point, Riccu. Vraki’s already begun.”
If my heart had frozen in my chest before, it all but shattered with those words.
She threw them out so casually, just an afterthought. Vraki had already begun. He was going to summon another Scrath. He was going to kill his hostages. The children might already be dead.
I’m too late.
My hands trembled as they held the gun. My finger froze—with fear, with rage, I couldn’t tell. Suddenly, shooting didn’t seem adequate. Suddenly, nothing I could do did.
“Fuck.” Riccu’s voice was breathless. “Then… the kids?”
Galta’s only reply was a long, pregnant silence for a long, lonely moment. Then she looked down at her feet.
“Not yet.”
And the blood returned to flowing to my veins. My breath came out so fast it almost sounded like sobbing.
“But soon.” She hesitated for a moment. “Listen, you… you don’t have to be there. When it happens.”
“Yeah… thanks.” Riccu stared down at his limp leg. “Do you think it’s right, Galta? I mean… kids.” He shook his head. “We used to be soldiers. We used to be the best in the Imperium.”
“A lot of things used to be,” Galta replied. “The Imperium used to be for mages.” She turned away from him. “It will be again. We’ve come too far to back down, Riccu.” She waved a thorn-encrusted hand. “Go. Rest. It won’t be long now.”
I could still do it.
I could even see it in my head.
One shell in Galta—Hoarfrost, to keep it quiet. Riccu spooks, runs, doesn’t get far with his body being what it is. He falls as I
pull my sword from Galta’s hip. He wouldn’t even feel it when I put the blade through his skull.
Or even easier: I put one shell through Galta’s face. Riccu, curious and alarmed, looks up and gets another one through his face. Both dead. Two more names off my list.
I thought of a dozen scenarios: them begging for mercy, them strangled to death with my bare hands, them quietly apologizing, admitting they deserved it and bowing their heads and waiting for the click of the hammer.
And yet, in all of them, I could only think of one end.
They both died. Vraki knows I’m here, speeds up his plot, makes a mistake, and kills the children. Or they’re hidden elsewhere and I never find them. Or they were locked behind a warded door that couldn’t be opened without Galta. There were a dozen ways it could happen, but in all of them, I ended up with more corpses than I wanted.
I sighed. I lowered my weapon. I watched Galta stalk off, Riccu limp away; both of them disappear.
Whatever else they say, they’ll say Sal the Cacophony did the right thing. Now and again, at least.
I couldn’t kill them until I knew where the children were and how to get them out. And before I could figure out where they were, I had to figure out where I was.
I counted the shambling steps of Riccu until I couldn’t hear them anymore. I stepped out of the chamber and into the halls.
The walls were sagging beneath their own weight, but the stone wasn’t old, however cracked it might have been. The tapestries and crests that lined the walls were shredded, burned, melted beyond recognition. Through gouges in the wall, I could hear the sound of distant wailing, like what I heard in the Husks, except…
Terrified.
The wind had wailed with a sort of melancholy back in Vigil, the weary sigh of a world that had seen too much suffering and had too few ideas how to stop it. But here, the whispered moans that seeped through the walls carried a note of panic, a shrieking scream of someone who stared at that same suffering and hadn’t looked away in years.
I was back in the Husks, then. Even deeper than Vigil, where the battles had been fought the fiercest and the wounds left by years of magical warfare hadn’t even begun to heal.
Why here? How much magic did Vraki need for his plot?
I followed the shrieking wind. I had come here prepared for something bad.
But I wasn’t prepared for just how bad it was.
I rounded the corner of the hall, came out atop a battlement. The wind struck me with a screaming gale, forcing me to shield my face and cling to the stone for purchase. My eyes squinted against the harshness of the light, the kind of offensive pale you only see in your nightmares. And through them, I could see the bowed shapes of towers sagging, the flayed flesh of banners whipping in a wind that wouldn’t cease, the shadows of figures frozen in a death that had brought no peace.
And I knew where I was.
There was nothing that had ever made Fort Dogsjaw special. It had never been crucial for defense, never a hub for trade, it hadn’t even been named for anything special—the commander just liked the sound of it. It lived its whole life a regular, boring Imperial fort on the edge of the Husks.
It only got important at the time of its death.
Over three hundred mages and a few thousand regulars had assembled here in one day—some to receive assignments, some to man the garrison, some to head back to Cathama on leave. They had been laughing, cursing, drinking when the news came that the new Emperor of Cathama was a nul, born with no magic.
And then there had been a moment of silence.
And then the Imperium, as we knew it, died.
I hadn’t been there on the day it happened, but I heard the tales. It started as arguments—loyalists calling for continued devotion to the Imperium, dissidents wondering how any mage could follow a nul, let alone serve one. It had escalated to name-calling. Then a punch was thrown. Then someone had cast a spell.
And the rebellion began.
And by day’s end, Fort Dogsjaw saw its halls and yards empty of life.
It didn’t end there. The dissent spread across the Scar, and within the week, several hundred of the Imperium’s best mages had abandoned their liege and become the first Vagrants. In the mass desertion that followed, the Imperium simply forgot Dogsjaw, the humble little fortress that became the biggest graveyard for mages in the world.
I saw its legacy in the ruin. In the towers that had been bent low and sundered by Siegemages fighting. In the jagged crystals of Frostmages’ ice that hadn’t melted after all these years. In the countless standing corpses of the courtyard, forever frozen in their last moments as blackened husks that had gazed upon power that should not have been unleashed all at once.
Anyone else might not have noticed the tiny figure standing at the center of the courtyard, the gaunt man with the unruly hair with his hands cast to the clouds, speaking to a bright halo of light in the darkened skies above.
Among the wreckage, Vraki the Gate looked like just another carcass who hadn’t realized he was dead yet.
But I couldn’t see anything else.
And I couldn’t even look at him without remembering that dark place, that cold stone, that bright light. And though the wind screamed and the dead sighed, I couldn’t hear anything but that voice whispering in my ear.
“I’m sorry.”
Part of me wasn’t ready for this. That part of me always thought of revenge as a fantasy, something I’d nurture in my darker thoughts. That part of me looked upon the person who took my flight and wanted to curl into a ball and cry.
But I wasn’t listening to that part of me. Because another part of me was talking—it spoke through a mouthful of blood and bent iron, spat page-long curses in a language that burned scholars’ ears off just to hear. That part of me spoke from a dark and empty place inside me, where its words echoed until they filled every last part of me. And they told me.
“End him.”
A groaning sound cut through the shrieking of the wind, the sound of air unraveling before a storm hits and the sigh of dead trees before they become husks. Vraki extended his arms to the sky above like a lover reaching out for a romance he could never have. And, as if it also reached out, a great halo of light yawned a little wider.
Its light was dim, a pale purple that grew deeper each time it expanded. The winds whirled around it in a shrieking harmony, pleading for it to stop. Yet the sound of creation groaning was louder still, as if the sky itself cried out in agony for what horror was soon to be torn out of it.
The summoning had begun.
And, from the looks of the things crawling around in the courtyard, it had begun ages ago. A collection of human parts attached to underfed, four-legged bodies—nith hounds. Some walked on human hands instead of paws. Some bayed through mouths that struggled to sound, like pleas for help. Some bore human faces, locked in the last moments of terror before the hounds had taken them for their own use.
They paced, they growled, they occasionally stopped and howled. But their eyes were locked onto that great light, as though they awaited what would come from it.
But nothing had, so far as I could see. No Scraths summoned. No children to be turned into vessels for it. I still had time to save them. How much, I didn’t know. But I didn’t have the luxury of figuring it out.
My eyes searched the courtyard as my mind searched my thoughts. Imperial forts tended to follow a common layout and I doubted Vraki would have used somewhere else to hide his sacrifices when he had a perfectly good prison right here. I squinted at a shadowy corner at the edge of the courtyard, barely making out a barred slit of a window at the base of a tower.
There.
All I had to do was reach the other side of the courtyard without being seen by one of the homicidal mages inside here, hope that the children were actually there, and find some way to kill said homicidal mages, get said children out, and escape through a magical portal to a dank sewer, all before a horrific monstrosity from beyond the stars was
torn out of another existence and arrived in ours with a powerful urge to kill or cause an explosion that would kill everything within six miles.
It’s a good thing I didn’t say that aloud; otherwise it might sound absolutely psychotic.
I crossed the battlements, keeping low. Vraki didn’t look up to see me—every ounce of his concentration was on that portal. But I couldn’t be sure where Riccu and Galta might be—or Taltho or Zanze, for that matter. I made it across without being killed, though, so I considered that a good sign.
Down the steps to the tower, through the decrepit halls of the garrison, I found the tale of Dogsjaw’s rebellion painted on its walls. The Husks had already been rife with unstable magic and a battle between three hundred mages hadn’t helped anything. Here, stray sparks of a lightning blast long cast still danced across the floor. There, the shadows of soldiers who had been disintegrated were forever stained across the stone floor, their arms raised in futile defense of the spell that had taken every last inch of them. Shattered shields and broken crossbows drifted lazily through the air, carried by unseen hands long severed.
I plucked one such floating weapon—the only sword I could find that looked like it might actually cut someone without breaking—out of the air as it drifted past me. The sword’s hilt pulsed with a life not its own, an agonized life of a thing that shouldn’t be.
I had no idea how well the sword would hold up after so many years and all the magic it had seen, but it was better than nothing.
The suffering suffused everything here: the stone, the steel, the very air. Occasionally, I could hear voices, final words torn from throats and forever preserved in the echoes of the dead. Some were angry, hurling curses and accusations at rebels or loyalists who hadn’t survived. More were sorrowful, weeping in horror at the violence or begging for help that would never come. And a few were…
“No.”
I froze. I knew that voice. And it was no ghost.
I reached for the Cacophony, eyes scanning the hallway, trying to remember where everything was before Taltho’s hallucination swept over me and took me somewhere else. But nothing happened—no shadows stirring, no song of the Lady. Just the sound of the wind.