Seven Blades in Black

by Sam Sykes

I looked down.

  A bottle of wine, rather than whiskey, looked back up at me.

  So there was a god; he or she was just kind of an asshole.

  Good enough.

  I picked it up. I uncorked the bottle and stalked to the edge of the canal and sat down. A drop of my blood slipped off the toe of my boot and fell into the canal to stain a chunk of magical ice drifting lazily downriver. I put the bottle to my lips. I took a deep drink and tasted nothing.

  And I simply stared at the great fucking mess I had made.

  Minutes had gone by—or hours or days, I didn’t know, the bottle still wasn’t empty—when I heard the sound of footsteps. From the ruins, an old woman, bent and wrapped in a dingy shawl, emerged. She shambled toward me, politely stepping over a corpse and around a mass of rubble, before creakily taking a seat beside me.

  I didn’t bother looking at her.

  When I heard the Lady’s song and the sound of her skin shifting, I handed the bottle over to her.

  Alothenes took it.

  “You’re alive,” I noted.

  “I’m afraid I can’t say the same for you,” he replied, taking a deep swig. “You look rather like a corpse that hasn’t figured out how to sit still yet.” He glanced over the ruin of the city. “But then, I suppose you’d be in good company.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just waited for him to put the bottle back into my hand. Instead, he pointed out toward a shattered spire of a building.

  “There was a detachment of Krikai riders outside the city. They came swooping in there.” He pointed down to a stretch of street scorched black by flame and electricity. “They arrived there, driving off the Revolutionary detachment that had been firing at our mages. They were pursued into there”—he pointed to a nearby alley—“where three civilians were caught in the crossfire and…”

  He simply gestured over the ruined avenues, no more explanation to offer. I took the bottle back, took a deep swig, waited to be drunk enough that I couldn’t see straight. Maybe it’d look better, then.

  “Did you help the civilians?” I asked.

  Alothenes waited a long moment before speaking. “I tried.”

  “How many were saved?”

  “Many.”

  “How many weren’t?”

  A longer pause. “Many.”

  I sniffed, took a longer swig. “There are some children down in the sewers. I told them to wait until I got help. About twelve of them. Including a tough girl. She’s the one in charge.”

  “The battle has moved on,” Alothenes said. “I can see to it they get out safely.” I could feel his eyes settle on me. “I take it Vraki is…”

  “Still alive,” I replied, taking another drink. “Maybe, anyway. Taltho’s dead. Riccu’s dead. Galta is…” I fell silent, choked on something I forced back down. “Galta’s… I don’t fucking know.”

  “Three conspirators slain. You must feel proud.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I wouldn’t linger for much longer, Salazanca,” Alothenes said after a long moment. “Two Lonely Old Men has long vacated the city, but his forces remain and he’s very certain of the parties he has to blame for the destruction of his freehold.” He cast me a sidelong glare. “I imagine you running down the streets screaming your own name and firing a gun into the air left little to doubt.”

  Like I said, a human is a finite thing. And once you’re too tired for fear and too drunk for pain, all that’s left are the regrets. And I found mine in a breathless whisper as I put my face in my hand.

  “Fuck.”

  “Language.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Now that’s hardly—”

  “Can you just let me fucking hate myself in peace?”

  I whirled on him. His face was different than when I had seen him last. His features were less distinct, his skin a little paler, his whole face a little smoother. He had paid a tremendous Barter tonight, used too much power. To save civilians? Civilians who wouldn’t have needed saving if I hadn’t… I hadn’t…

  “They’re dead,” I said. “They’re fucking dead. Everything’s gone to shit because of me. Because I couldn’t…” I screwed up my face. “I couldn’t not kill him. And now everyone’s dead because of it.”

  Alothenes looked back out over the ruin of the city. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” There wasn’t enough room in my voice to sound hopeful.

  “Maybe this was always going to happen,” Alothenes said, sighing. “It’s not as though we were bringing scholars to Lastlight. We wanted its wealth, its trade. We sent soldiers to it with the intention of them one day killing to take it. So did the Revolution.”

  “Yeah, but I started it,” I said. “I fired the first shot.”

  “You did. Or maybe I started it when I drugged you.” A long, pregnant pause lingered where an apology might otherwise have been. “Or maybe Vrakilaith started it when he did what he did to you. Or the Empress, when her child was born. Or the Great General, when he instigated the Revolution.” He waved a hand. “And on and on, so through the ages until the first two people on this dark earth decided to kill each other.”

  “I’m not in the mood for fucking philosophy,” I growled.

  “Philosophy brings answer. And it should be clear that I have none.” He rose to his feet, dusted his clothing off. “All I have, Salazanca, is my duty.”

  I heard the Lady’s song. I heard the sickening sound of his skin rippling. When I looked up, a man in Revolutionary garb that looked disturbingly like Cavric looked back down at me.

  “Whatever you have, I hope you find it,” he said. “But you will not find it here.”

  And he walked down the stairs and into the sewers and he vanished. And I was left alone with the silent graveyard of a city and the corpses lying on the ground and in the water and the bottle of wine that wasn’t enough for what I needed it to be.

  And I picked myself up. And I stalked out of the gates. And into the Scar.

  And I just kept going.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  THE SCAR

  I can’t even remember his name.

  He was a soldier, a newly commissioned mage out to fight his first battle against the Revolution. It hadn’t gone well. Both sides wiped out, only stragglers returned for a fight over some hill somewhere. He came back to the garrison, completely unbloodied. I was going to give him hell for cowardice, but then I looked into his eyes.

  And there was just nothing there.

  He walked past me. He walked out of the garrison and into the night. And he just kept on walking until we found him cold and facedown in the dirt three days later.

  “Desertion” was the official cause, they said. They didn’t know what else to call it. Neither did I. The idea that you could go to battle, suffer not a single wound that anyone could see, and somehow still die was completely foreign to me. I saw it a few more times, enough to tell myself that it would never happen to me.

  It’s the wounds.

  And it wasn’t going to happen to me.

  You’ve just lost too much blood.

  And it wasn’t happening to me at that moment.

  You’re dying.

  I only knew I was still alive because I was still moving. Even then, I only knew because the dunes and hills and scrub continued to pass me. I couldn’t feel my feet pulling my legs out of the dirt to take step after step. I couldn’t feel the breath in my lungs or the blood in my limbs. Only the world moving around me and the voice muttering in my head.

  Took too many hits, it said. Galta cut deeper than you thought. You haven’t rested, haven’t recovered. You’ve lost too much blood and let too many wounds go untreated. You’re dying.

  I’d taken worse hits, of course. I’d bled more, of course. And maybe it was just that I had taken so many over so many years of not resting and always hunting that I felt like I did now. Like all the blood was rushing out of my limbs and into my chest, like my heart was beating too much.

 
Too fast.

  Too loud.

  That could be it. That could be why I felt like I was going to die.

  You’re dying.

  Or it could have been something else.

  Just like Lastlight died.

  Something that went so deep, no one could see it.

  And you didn’t even kill Vraki.

  Long, slow breaths that didn’t fill my lungs. Short, stuttering steps that didn’t take me any farther. My head felt like it was too full of blood to keep up, even as I felt it weeping out of me and falling on the ground around me. And still not so full that it could keep that thought out.

  You chased him that far, you made so much noise and did so much damage and so many people are dead, it said. And you couldn’t even kill him.

  The ground got closer to me and I realized my legs weren’t working anymore. I saw my scarf fall off onto the dry, dusty ground and realized I was lying in the earth.

  What was the point?

  My breath slowed down.

  You didn’t stop Vraki. You didn’t accomplish anything.

  My vision dimmed.

  What the fuck changed?

  And I watched myself ebb out onto the earth.

  You see it all the time in opera.

  The darkest moment, when everything’s lost, the hero steps up and delivers this amazing speech about how important love and life and honor are. And everyone rallies and the villain dies and then you hope someone gets to have sex after the curtain falls.

  It wasn’t like that.

  The hero never falls down like this. The hero never lies in the dirt like this. The hero is always cheated out of a fair contest, betrayed, or does something that says it’s not his fault. The hero doesn’t destroy a city and leave people dead to chase a monster he couldn’t even kill.

  And the hero doesn’t get woken by the smell of birdshit. That’s just not how it goes.

  I opened an eye more out of reflex than desire. I saw the great scaly legs of a creature approaching me, heard its guttural croaking. A scavenger of some sort, here to feast—I wanted to call it poetic, but I wasn’t quite sure how.

  Then the bird looked down at me and I recognized Congeniality’s surly glare.

  Eaten by my own bird. That was certainly poetic.

  She must have broken free when Lastlight went up, burst out of the stables. She always was clever like that.

  The hero wasn’t supposed to be eaten by a bird. The hero was supposed to be supported by someone, pulled out of the darkness by someone pretty with a musical voice.

  “Sal?”

  Yeah, kind of like that.

  “Holy shit, Sal.”

  Except with less swearing.

  I saw boots hit the earth as someone dropped off of Congeniality’s back. I couldn’t feel the hands on my shoulders, turning me over, nor the ground on my back. I could barely see Cavric’s face, fraught with concern, as he looked over me.

  “She’s bleeding out! For fuck’s sake, I…”

  His voice came and went.

  “… get her into the Boar. My supplies are in there and I can…”

  Someone else’s voice. Someone else’s hands on me. Someone else’s tears glistening behind big glasses as she looked down into my eyes and wept over me.

  “… why did you… hang on, I’m going…”

  That thought was suitably poetic so that when my eyes went dark, I didn’t really mind.

  Metal.

  Rattling.

  Moving.

  Something was happening. I opened my eyes to a cold metal tomb. Something was rumbling around me, under me. Was something moving? Was I? There was the roar of something that felt familiar in my ears. I opened my eyes and looked.

  The Iron Boar. Just like the one I had stolen. And its pilot, too, was just like the one I had stolen. Cavric sat in the chair of its helm, occasionally glancing back at me, lips moving in a language I couldn’t understand. Liette, beside him, screaming soundlessly as she fidgeted with an inkwell and quill. Congeniality, curled up in the corner, spared a single, semi-interested eye, before closing it again and drifting back into sleep.

  I looked back to Cavric before he turned his attentions back to steering. But his lips were still moving, still talking.

  “Did it feel like this?”

  That wasn’t his voice.

  “When he cut you?”

  My eyes drifted toward the bench on the Iron Boar’s walls. I didn’t recognize the man I saw there, sitting in the shadows.

  But I knew him.

  His stately garb and fine bones marked him as Imperial, a finely polished edge of a man regarding me with the kind of dispassion with which a wealthy man watches a poor man die. But in the shifting darkness of the vehicle, I could make out flaws, imperfections that ruined the façade of aristocratic displeasure.

  His eyes betrayed a flinty gleam, not so honed and not nearly so polished. There was far too much pleasure in them, no matter how hard he tried to hide them. And his grin…

  His grin was bright brass.

  “It doesn’t seem so dissimilar, when I think about it,” he said. “It’s not the wound itself that hurts, is it? Sal the Cacophony cannot be stopped by mere wounds.”

  My eyes flitted toward Liette. She did not look up from her ink. Cavric did not look away from the controls. None of them saw the man, nor noticed his burning voice.

  “It’s the knowing, I think, that hurts,” he continued. “After all, blood is so dreadfully common, isn’t it? It’s the one thing we have in abundance and part with so easily. Loss of blood kills common people. Loss of purpose… well, that kills people like us.

  “The knowledge that you failed, that for all the suffering you inflicted, for all the blood you took, you couldn’t kill him.” He chuckled. Cinders fell from his mouth. “Why, that knowledge must cut as deep as the knowledge that Jindu always loved a dream more than he loved you.”

  “The others are dead.” My voice sounded distant and dead in my ears, like an echo. “The children are safe.”

  “What?” Liette’s voice sounded even farther away, even as she leaned over me. “She’s talking. Slow it down. I need to…”

  Maybe she said more. I didn’t know. I looked right through her, to the man with the grin.

  “Common people might be satisfied with such deeds,” he said. “They might sleep well with dreams of grateful children and villains ended.” His eyes turned toward me. “But that was always just a side benefit with you, wasn’t it? Mere gilding on the true prize. Death. Blood. Revenge.”

  “No,” I rasped.

  “No?” He peered down at me. His mouth opened in a bright smile, alight with flame. “Then why are you so ready to die?”

  “Stop it! She’s bleeding out!” Liette called out. “I’m going to try something. Hold on, Sal, just hold on so I can—”

  Her voice vanished. And so did I.

  The smell of coffee.

  Of blood.

  Of birdshit.

  I opened my eyes to find a quill scratching against my skin. My wounds, my flesh, so much of me was coated in ink as Liette’s hands scrawled sigils around me. Congeniality, her beak full of dead rabbit, glanced toward me before going back to scarfing down the dead animal. A campfire burned in the shadow of the Iron Boar, a pot of coffee going over it.

  Cavric’s eyes were ringed with darkness—how long had we been driving? What day was it? He was pacing nervously, gesturing out into the darkness. Lights continued to flash on the horizon—cannon fire, spells blazing, the riotous joy of battle not far away. He spoke words I couldn’t hear, hurling them desperately at Liette. She shouted something back at him, never looking away from me. I couldn’t hear them.

  “She’s a touch clumsy, isn’t she?”

  But I heard that.

  The man with the burning grin stood over her, hands folded neatly behind his back as he looked over Liette’s shoulder, studying my wounds. His smile was seething with malice when he watched my blood drip onto her ha
nds.

  “But only around you. I suspect that’s why you infuriate her and fascinate her in equal measure,” he said. “No one else can make her act so hastily, so rashly. Everything else comes so effortlessly to her. But not you. To have such power and to have someone who can simply snatch it away…”

  He blinked. He laughed. Ashes fell from his mouth.

  “Well, of course you’d know what that’s like.”

  Liette did not so much as glance at him as he knelt down beside me. He stared at me, through me, that flint-hewn gaze of his jamming into my wounds and tearing them open, flaying me apart until he could see what lay beneath all the skin and scars and blood.

  And he was not impressed.

  “You’ve probably seen a thousand back-alley operas where masked villains cackle about some nebulous definition of power, no? Some magic, some weapon, some thing that will give them dominion. But you and I both know what power truly is, don’t we?”

  Smoke poured from his mouth as he spoke.

  “Power is a single word,” he whispered through ashes. “A word that makes a warrior live in fear of the day his weapon fails him, that makes a mage look at all she’s accomplished and realize it is nothing. It warps the mind of the scholar and makes him fear his own knowledge. It makes the farmer leave his crops to rot for fear of going outside. It makes the gentle turn cruel and the cruel run screaming into the night.”

  He raised a hand, lay it down upon my face. Somewhere inside me, something screamed at the burning touch, but that part was smothered, buried under so much numbness and pain. He traced a finger past my jawbone and down to my collar, where his digit thoughtfully pressed against my scar.

  “But again,” he whispered, “you knew that, too.”

  He rose up, folded his hands behind his back, and walked beside Cavric. Together, they stared out over the horizon. The night sky was alight with stars of war—cannons erupting, guns blazing, lightning flashing, and fires burning. Cavric bounced uneasily from foot to foot, watching the stain of battle spill farther across the land.

  The man simply stared, bored. He’d seen a thousand wars before and this one barely even topped it.