by Sam Sykes
“The wisest Revolutionary turns into a gibbering fanatic when he hears the word Imperium. The most sagacious mage becomes a bleating, quivering sack of fear at the Lady’s name. Just words. Names. Nothing more. But they change people.” He glanced over his shoulder. “What is yours, I wonder?”
“Sal,” I gasped. “Sal the Cacophony.”
“Mmm.” He turned and stared behind him, to the distant ruin of Lastlight. “And what, do you suppose, becomes of people who hear that name?”
Cavric turned and rushed toward Liette, grabbing her by the shoulder. She snarled, lashing out with her quill like it was a dagger.
“DON’T TOUCH ME!” she screamed. “This is delicate. If I don’t do this perfectly, she could—”
“The Revolution line broke,” Cavric interrupted. “They’re in retreat. And they’re coming this way. We have to go now or else—”
“I can’t move her now! She’s not ready! I need more time!”
“We don’t have any!”
They yelled. Shouted words I couldn’t hear. Eventually, Liette bowed her head, sighed, and packed up her supplies. Together, they propped me up and began to carry me toward the Iron Boar. The man, with his flinty gaze, continued to watch the distant war. No one noticed him. I didn’t call out.
And when the door to the Boar slammed shut as the engines roared to life, he vanished.
“You’re dying, you know.”
I didn’t know how long I’d been out. Nor did I know how he’d made it back onto the Boar. But when I opened my eyes, I saw his grin burning in the darkness. But the fire had dimmed. The glitter in his eyes was going dark. It was harder to tell him from the shadows he sat in.
“Her sigils are not working. Nor will the alchemics she tries. Nor the bleakbrew she keeps in her belt that she never told you about, since she knows it unnerves you.”
I knew he was right. In the iron weight of my limbs, in the cold creeping into my skin. I had often wondered what it’d be like, to be called to the black table. Would my last moments be panicked and screaming? Or would I find the dark cold and comforting, like a thin blanket on a winter’s night?
I hadn’t ever thought that, as the darkness closed in, I just wouldn’t care.
“Dreadfully passé, isn’t it?” the man asked, as if in response to my thoughts. “Every opera has a verse about the poignancy of death, but I found it entirely boring. A few difficult breaths, a few final thoughts, and then”—he blew a wisp of smoke from his mouth—“you’re simply gone. With too much left to do.”
He was right. There was too much left to do and not enough left in me. I had taken too many hits, lost too much blood—
“Oh, it’s not the blood,” he said. “It’s something else you’ve lost. Really, I know you’re about to die and all, but that’s no excuse for not listening.”
He rose from the bench and walked over to me. The shadows clung to him, crawling across his face as he knelt over me.
“But it hardly seems the time to go rehashing it, doesn’t it? You’ve got such precious little time left.” His fingers traced across my scars. “I can feel your heart shutting down, going black inside you. I can hear the wailing of your lover when she stands over your warm corpse ten minutes from now. I can see the black earth they’ll bury you in.”
His eyes narrowed to thin slits. His smile twisted into a snarl of ash and soot. His face twisted into an ugly brass mess.
“All that we had planned,” he whispered, “the future we’d bring, the ruin we’d cause, the deal we made… all for nothing. All because you couldn’t kill when you had the chance.”
Not my fault, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t make my lips move. Taltho interfered. Galta ambushed me. I had to save the—
“And who will remember that?” he interrupted my thoughts. “We leave nothing behind when we go but our names. Mine built an Imperium. Mine discovered the Scar. Mine sowed terror in the nuls for a hundred years. But yours?”
He shook his head. Dying embers fell from his mouth.
“You will vanish beneath the dirt. Your name will disappear to all but the people in this iron casket. And whatever schemes Vraki the Gate goes on to perform, whether he succeeds or fails, lives or dies, he will never again think of Sal the Cacophony as anything but a fleeting thought, a bad dream of a failed ambition.”
I didn’t think I had enough feeling left in me for that to hurt as much as it did. But that reality, to know that the people who did this to me would never live to regret this, to see themselves staring down the barrel of the Cacophony…
Dying suddenly seemed not such a bad thing.
“Your time here is at an end,” he whispered, “nothing but a few pieces of steel and a scrap of paper. You will die and fade from this world, leaving behind not even Dust to remember you by. Your song has gone silent… unless…”
He leaned down close to me, so close I could smell the ash on his breath, so close I could hear the song in his voice. A dark and droning sound from somewhere deeper than flesh or ghosts.
“You find a reason to come back.”
Through blackening vision, I stared at him, searching that burning smile for an answer.
Liette, I thought. I have to survive. For her.
“Her name wasn’t enough to stop you from killing. Why would it stop you from dying?” The embers in his mouth faded a little more. “What else?”
I have to stop Vraki. I have to protect all the people he’ll hurt.
“If other people concerned you, you wouldn’t have the name you do.” His mouth went black, wisps of smoke trailing away as the fire died. “Do you really have nothing left?”
I gritted my teeth. I shut my eyes. It couldn’t end like this. I still had so much to do.
I still have to kill him. I have to kill them all.
And I felt a warm glow.
“Go on.”
I opened my eyes. The embers in the man’s mouth kindled themselves to burning life again. His lips twisted into a smile.
They took my magic.
“More.”
The fire filled his mouth.
They took the sky from me.
“More.”
It spread to his beard, his hair, his clothes, setting them ablaze and chasing them away.
They betrayed me, tried to kill me, took everything from me. They have to die. They have to suffer.
The flames engulfed him, engulfed Liette, engulfed me, until the inside of the Boar was awash with fire. They did not crackle, nor laugh as flame should. The fire sang, an ugly and dark song in a language no one knew. It poured out of his smile, that burning song, as he threw his head back and laughed.
“MORE!”
Eres va atali. Eres va atali!
“I USED TO FLY!”
I realized, as it tore itself free from my throat, that was my voice. That was blood returning to my limbs. That was warmth returning to my body. That was feeling in my hand as Liette took it in her own and stared into my eyes.
The man was gone. The smoke and embers had disappeared. I was left with nothing but the pain.
“She’s burning up,” I barely heard Liette say. “How far are we?”
“Not far. We’ll have to rush once we reach Lowstaff, though.”
“Well, hurry the fuck up! I can’t help her if you don’t…”
Her words faded. The warmth faded. Sight and sound and feeling faded as I slipped back into somewhere dark, somewhere cold, somewhere far away. But even as I did…
That song, his burning verse, followed me.
FIFTY-SIX
LOWSTAFF
My sleep was long, dark, and empty. In a void that closed in around me from all angles, I was buried so deep that I was deaf to the wailings of the dead and blind to their smiles of whatever horrors awaited me after my corpse was picked clean by the carrion birds and the Dust of my skeleton was cast adrift on the shrieking winds.
So things were looking up.
But all good things come to an end. And
eventually, I woke up to a bed with nice sheets, a basin full of cold water, and not a drop of whiskey in sight. So, clearly not hell, but far from heaven.
Which meant I must be alive.
A quiet burbling sound filled my ears. I glanced to my side and saw a large black bird squatting on the sill of a window, its beak rapping thoughtfully against the glass. It canted its head to the side, white eyes studying me, disappointed I hadn’t died.
Alive for less than a minute, I was already letting people down.
At least this one was content to simply turn and flap away, leaving me alone with my pain.
As my eyes adjusted to the light of a fading afternoon seeping through the shutters, I saw that I wasn’t alone in the room. Every spare inch of space had been taken up by piles of books, pages marked with various scraps of cloth and paper. The mirror of the dresser was completely obscured by a stack of tomes as high as I was tall.
Liette’s house. It felt like someone else’s life, waking up here, a tomb of happier times and dreams that never could be.
My breath came easy, my heart beat slowly, and my body had gone from waiting for death to screaming in pain. I could feel her sigils scribed across my wounds, each one wrapped tightly beneath a bandage delicately applied. And as I rose out of the bed, body creaking and wounds protesting, the scent of pungent medicinal herbs assaulted my nose.
Her skills must not have been enough, then.
Liette resented medicine. The human body, she said, was a ridiculously simple machine that perpetually refused to do what it should, hence it was neither challenging nor satisfying to maintain. Plus, medicine kept a lot of people alive and she was of the opinion that additional humans in the world was something she could do without.
Yet I could feel the care with which she had treated the wounds and applied the bandages. The muscles that had been stiff, she had massaged out. The grime and dirt and blood, she had washed clean. She had even washed my hair while I had slept.
I guess you could call that creepy. But when it’s someone you like, it’s considered sentimental.
I found my clothes on a chair, washed and folded neatly. Less out of concern for me, I suspect, and more that Liette had probably found their smell offensive. She had been industrious while I had been out.
And, in the midst of pulling my shirt on, I paused.
How long had I been out?
“Are you certain you want coffee?”
Liette’s voice lilted it from the other room. I heard the sound of a cup being set upon a table, someone picking it up and taking a long, slow sip. I could almost hear the frown in her voice.
“The way you look I think something stiffer would be more appropriate.”
“I don’t drink.” Cavric sounded like he had gargled a glass full of gravel. “Thanks, though.”
“Huh.” I could hear her appraising stare gliding over him. “You should probably consider taking it up.”
He chuckled. “And thanks for that, too. But there’s still work to be done and it needs me alert.”
“Then you probably shouldn’t have driven across the Scar for two nights straight.” A chair scraped as Liette sat down. There was a thoughtful pause, a hesitant word. “I’m… I’m glad that you did, though.”
“I’m glad you came back with the Boar,” Cavric replied.
“Yeah,” she sighed. “Sorry about that whole… leaving you to die in the Husks… thing.”
“It’s fine,” he said, then paused. “I mean, not fine, but… it’s behind us, at any rate.” He drained the last of his coffee, slid the cup back over. “Sorry to bother you for more, but I’ve got a report to file on this.”
“Mmm.” Liquid splashed against porcelain. “I trust you will be selective in what you opt to report. Don’t misconstrue it as ingratitude, but as much as I value what you did, I…”
I could almost feel her eyes drawn inexorably toward me, as though she could see right through the walls to where I stood.
“I… I can understand that,” Cavric said. “But my duties mean I have to be thorough.”
Another pause. This one less thoughtful.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Liette said after a long moment.
Now, it’s certainly not true of all women, but in my experience, one who says those five words is either about to go home or pull a knife out. And Liette was already home.
I was just about to intervene when I heard the exhaustion set into Cavric’s voice.
“I have to tell them… tell them…” I could hear him slump in his chair. “Tell them what? That I let myself be abducted by a Vagrant? That I watched Lastlight go up in flames and abandoned the battle to go chase a bird on its way to a dying woman? That I drove a Boar to its breaking point just to get back here? If I tell any officer this, I’d be executed for desertion if I was lucky, treason if I wasn’t.”
“There’s… there’s a difference?” Liette asked.
“If you desert, they get it done in one day.”
“Oh. Oh.” The tension ebbed from her voice, leaving behind something that hurt her to speak. “I… thank you, then. For what you did.”
“For failing in my duty?” he asked, scoffing.
“If it means you brought her back,” she replied, “then yes.”
Cavric, like all men with thoughts too heavy for their head, had a noisy stare. You could hear the weight of it striking when it settled upon something. Just as I could hear him staring at his cup, the weight of his eyes threatening to pull his whole head crashing onto the table.
“The official report from the Cadre,” he said, “is that the Imperium was secretly building forces in Lastlight with the intent of subverting its government and conscribing it to Imperial rule. Revolutionary forces were sent to ensure the freedom of the city and to protect its people from Imperial corruption.”
“Do you believe that?” Liette asked.
“I believe they believed it,” he said. “I believe that every soldier there thought they were doing good. I believe that the Revolution would have found a reason to occupy the city, regardless.”
Silence fell and he clung to it like a drowning man clings to a rock. But eventually, he had to let go.
“What I believed didn’t keep everyone from getting killed, though, did it?”
In operas, everyone dies loud. Villains get dying monologues, heroes lament about the futility of existence, or sometimes they just scream real loud if the writer can’t think of anything. That’s so you know their death meant something, that all the fighting and bloodshed was for some reason.
In life, though, people die quietly, meaninglessly. They’re tiny lights that flicker for a moment and get extinguished, leaving behind something cold and empty. No meaning, no resolution, just a dark stain where a person used to be.
And I wondered, when Cavric looked at that big black stain where Lastlight once was, if he thought they had died meaninglessly.
Or because of me.
“You don’t think…” Cavric’s voice came timid, afraid. “Do you believe it could have turned out different? That they could have been saved?”
“No.”
“Oh.” Cavric coughed. “Well. Shit.”
“By that, I mean…” Liette sighed. “Belief doesn’t exist. Or it doesn’t matter. Whichever. There is only what is known and what is unknown, a question and an answer. Belief is something that people use to excuse themselves when they give up finding it.”
“You sound certain,” Cavric said.
I could hear the glare in her voice. “I am a Freemaker. I am always certain.”
“So…” His words drew out like a knife. “Is that why you came back for her?”
Liette’s silence was strained, long and painful.
“It was necessary,” she said softly, “to save the children.”
“The children,” Cavric muttered. “It was never about them, was it? For you or for her.”
I expected her to deny it. I expected her to argue. I didn’t expect
her to whisper.
“I know…”
“If it was, you would have thought of something different. Something better.”
“I know.”
“And she wouldn’t have—”
“I KNOW!” Liette’s scream was accompanied by her fists smashing on the table. “Do you not think, in that tiny little grass-fed brain of yours, that I realize that? That every ounce of good she did was incidental? That it was all for… for those names on that list?”
“Then why?” he asked, voice rising. “Why did you come back?”
I heard her jaw set, her hands clench. “I don’t know yet.”
“Will you ever?”
“I don’t know that, either,” she said, sighing. “But I do know that, whatever her reasons for doing so, those kids are safe because of her. And the Scar is cleaner without those people she killed in it. Whatever else she does, she does good along with it.”
Cavric’s noisy stare settled on her. “And what happens when she doesn’t do good? What will you do then?”
Liette’s answer was a long, slow blade of silence. And it cut me deeper than I thought I could be cut.
“I don’t know what I’ll do,” she whispered. “Only that I’ll do it. For her.”
That sharp silence persisted, stuck a little deeper into my skin with each passing second. When it was broken, it was done so by an exhausted sigh, a scrape of a chair, and the weight of Cavric’s voice, falling onto the floor.
“I can leave you out of my report,” Cavric said. “But I can’t leave Lastlight out. Unless people know what happened there, we can’t help anyone.”
“And you really believe your Revolution will help them?” Liette asked, voice cold.
And Cavric was just as frigid. “It doesn’t matter what I believe.”
“Do what you have to, Low Sergeant,” she replied. “And I will do the same.”
Without realizing it, my hand had found my sword and my body stood rigid at the door. I recognized that coldness in their voices, the threat lurking beneath their words. I knew what they’d do if I didn’t stop them.
And I couldn’t let more people die because of me.
But all that came of it was a grunt and a muttered thanks for the coffee from Cavric before I heard him turn and leave down the stairs and out the door.