by Sam Sykes
“Tretta?”
She turned around just in time to see a pair of heavy iron manacles smash into her face. She collapsed to the ground, stunned as a pair of hands rifled through her coat. Blood cloyed her nostrils, darkness ringed her vision. Her senses returned in time to see a pair of empty manacles thud to the floor, a key bouncing off of them.
And then she looked up into the barrel of her own hand cannon. And behind it, a pair of blue eyes shining brightly over a broad, scar-framed grin.
“Turns out,” Sal the Cacophony said, “I actually was plotting something.”
Fear fought pain for control of Tretta’s body and both of them sent her scrambling across the floor, struggling to get away. Half blind from the pain, blood spilling down her face, she found the table completely by accident. Her hands groped around until she found the lid of a box, flipped it open, and wrapped her hands around a grip inside.
She didn’t even know what she was holding until she felt it grow warm in her hands.
She whirled around, holding the Cacophony up against Sal. The Vagrant stared back at her, tense. She held up a hand, as if to ask for calm. And that’s when Tretta pulled the trigger.
It wouldn’t budge.
She tried again, pulling as hard as she could on it. But the trigger was frozen in place. She slammed the heel of her palm against it, as though she could simply beat it into working for her. And when the barrel stared back at her, grinning and empty, she let out a scream.
“Won’t shoot for you?”
She looked up, expecting to see Sal smiling that insufferable smile. Instead, the Vagrant wore a look of concern as she stared down at the gun.
“For a second there, I thought he might,” she said. “He wasn’t happy about this plan. But I managed to convince him. We made a deal, after all.”
Sal raised the gun. Tretta’s body went tense as she felt her own metal pressed against her brow. And only then did Sal smile.
“You want to see how it ends, don’t you?”
Whatever he had done to earn the name, Clerk Inspire did not. Nor was he concerned with that, nor anything else but the distant wail of warning sirens through the city. Plumes of smoke wafted through the windows of the cadre, filling his lungs as the distant cries of soldiers filled his ears, each sending his flight through the cadre halls into a frenzy.
Somehow, a very long list of things had gone to shit in a very short amount of time.
And exactly how much time that left him to get the fuck out of here, he did not know and wasn’t inclined to stick around to find out. He rushed down the halls of the cadre, past the offices of the commanders and down the stairs. The cadre quarters were empty of soldiers, all of them having gone to check on the explosions. Inspire sighed with relief and began to rush toward the exit when the only thing that had gone right also went wrong.
The doors of the cadre burst open, flinging him aside as a quartet of soldiers emerged from outside, gunpikes drawn. The one in the lead, a young fellow whose name he hadn’t bothered to learn, looked at him with a mixture of shock and resentment.
“Inspire?” he asked. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“Getting out of here, obviously.” Inspire paused before realizing that had sounded a little too confident. He coughed, made a show of cowering, and whimpered, “Th-the explosions are so frightening…”
“There’s no enemy behind them,” the soldier grunted. “We’ve searched the city and seen no invasion. They didn’t even hit any occupied buildings. That’s when we figured it might be a distraction for—”
“Sergeant!” one of the others soldiers barked.
The gunpikes clicked as they went up, drawn upon the doorway leading down to the cells. Inspire shrank away from his now-rather-inconveniently-blocked doorway—he could still slip out, he thought, once they were distracted by…
“Let’s all settle down, shall we?”
And that’s when things got worse.
Inspire glanced toward the doorway where the Governor-Militant emerged, her steps staggered and a furious glare painted across her face. The manacles securing her wrists behind her back clinked over the sound of her growling as one tattooed arm wrapped around her throat and the other raised a hand cannon to Tretta’s temple. From behind, a single blue eye looked out and a single white eyebrow cocked.
“This situation doesn’t look like it’ll be helped by anyone getting excited.” Sal the Cacophony’s voice lilted as she hoisted Tretta forward. “Does it?”
“Do not do anything to aid this scum, soldier,” Tretta snarled, struggling against her captor. “That is an order.”
“Release the Governor-Militant, filth,” the lead soldier growled.
“I’m hurt.” Sal clicked her tongue. “You were so eager for us to spend time together and now you’re pointing a gun at me. I’m so insulted, I might just have to leave.” The pistol’s hammer clicked. “Be so kind as to fetch my things, won’t you?”
Inspire’s heart hammered. His breath went short. He had hoped to escape before something like this happened. He had hoped not to be in this spot at all. How had he thought this was a good idea? How?
It was supposed to be so simple. Get in. Grab the gun. Get out. But when was anything with her ever simple?
He glanced toward the door. The soldiers were all focused on the Vagrant and her hostage, but were standing so packed together he didn’t have a chance of pushing through them. They simply stood there, eyes locked, fingers pointedly off their triggers.
They weren’t going to shoot.
“Those are your demands?” the lead soldier asked.
“More like a request,” Sal replied. “Just return what’s owed to me and I’ll make sure only one person dies here.” She glanced toward a nearby desk, gestured with her chin. “I believe they were put there when you first brought me here.”
“Do not listen to her, soldier,” Tretta snarled. “You take orders from me, not her, and I am commanding you to disregard her. Shoot through me, if you must, but do not let this filth escape.”
The soldiers stood, hands shaking, eyes darting, as if they could find an answer somewhere in the room. Tretta snarled, tried to lunge forward as Sal held her back.
“That is an order!” she barked.
Inspire swallowed hard. No way out down here. He had to get to a window, had to find a new shape. A flyer, something light—that would do it. He edged back toward the stairs, trembling. He had to get out of here, had to get free and warn…
“Inspire.”
The lead soldier gestured with his chin toward the desk.
“Do what she says.”
“SOLDIER!” Tretta snarled.
Further protests were muffled as Sal clamped a gloved hand over her mouth. “Your hospitality knows no limits, kind soldiers of the Revolution.” She glanced toward Inspire. “If you’d kindly hurry, though? I suspect the fires must be growing. Every man is needed in the city, yes?”
Inspire gulped down the urge to run. The lead soldier had his gunpike trained on him. If he fled now, he’d be shot quicker than he could flee, quicker than he could change. He nodded weakly, shuffled to the desk—he knew where her effects were, already having rifled through them in his search for anything useful. Quietly, he collected them: a dirty scarf, a satchel rattling with bullets, and a bottle of whiskey.
“Take them to her,” the lead soldier grunted.
Meekly, he toted the small burden toward Sal and began to set them at her feet.
“Ah, ah.”
He looked up. Sal extended a hand from Tretta’s mouth.
“Hand them to me, won’t you?”
He held her effects in trembling hands, fighting back the urge to flee. Quietly, he reached out and she took her gear back in one hand. He tried to keep his eyes low, but in a moment of nervous instinct, he glanced up and saw her looking back at him. And that’s when he realized…
She knows.
He had to get out of here. They had what they
wanted now. He could run as soon as it was over. He could still escape. He could still…
“I know you guys don’t have any good taste in opera,” Sal said. “So, when your Great General asks you what happened here today, let me suggest a plausible explanation.” Her voice went cold. “You tell them that you did your duty. You tell them that you made your choices. You tell them that you did your best, but you got in my fucking way.”
Inspire started shuffling toward the stairs, heart hammering. Her eyes tracked him as he went, narrowing.
“And you tell them no one…”
His skin twitched. His body trembled.
“No one…”
He called his magic. He heard the Lady’s song.
“No one gets away from Sal the Cacophony.”
Gunfire cracked. A red blossom erupted from the lead soldier’s thigh. He went down screaming. The other soldiers immediately turned toward him, away from Sal’s smoking hand cannon and from the Governor-Militant, whom she had grabbed by the shoulder and shoved toward them.
With a cry, Tretta bowled into the pack of soldiers and went down in a tangled heap. A stray soldier lashed out, struck Inspire, and sent him sprawling to the ground. He glanced up, caught a glimpse of Sal reaching into her satchel, pulling out a shell, and drawing the Cacophony from the waist of her trousers. There was writing on the shell, writing he had seen before. A spell. What had it been?
He didn’t remember until he saw her draw the Cacophony on him and stared down its grinning barrel as she pulled the trigger.
Ah, right.
The world exploded in a bright flash of light.
Sunflare.
The soldiers screamed as the bright light burst across their eyes, blinding them. From the sound of it, there was a lot of thrashing and struggling as well. He couldn’t tell, of course. His vision pitched into an empty white light, he blindly groped about for the stairs, breathing hard. He reached a hand out, expecting to find a step.
And instead found another gloved hand.
His vision cleared just enough to look up into her grin.
“You didn’t think I’d forget about you, did you?” Sal the Cacophony asked.
As she brought her namesake up over her head.
And then down upon his face.
And the empty whiteness turned black.
SIXTY-TWO
THE SCAR
From atop the ridge, Sal stared out over the city of Hightower in flames and wondered how many more times she was going to see this sight.
Even here, so high up on the city’s outskirts, she could still see the fires. Great columns of flame rose twisting into the predawn sky, smoky, sated sighs escaping them as they glutted themselves on wood and mortar.
How many buildings had been lost to the flame? she wondered. How many homes? How many shops? Would these fires die out? Or would she just keep setting new ones until they devoured everything?
“They were empty.”
His voice sounded more haggard than it used to, his breath sounded more tired, but she knew it all the same. And though the man standing behind her wore a dirty brown coat and days of stubble instead of the nice blue and clean shave he once he did, she recognized Cavric when he came up beside her.
“One’s an armory.” He pointed to one column of flame, then to another. “The other, a derelict prison. Once executions became the norm, it was abandoned.” He lowered his hand, watched the fires eat. “I made sure no one was in them.”
Sal sniffed. “Is that what took so long?”
“It was the last of the Righteous Fires. I had to be careful.” Cavric regarded her through exhausted eyes. “I didn’t have to do this, you know.”
She nodded. It had been some small fortune that he had been the only blue coat to emerge from Lowstaff. Some small fortune that, after all that had happened, he would listen to her and agree to this plot.
It hadn’t been particularly intelligent, after all, to be taken into Revolutionary custody intentionally. They could have shot her on the spot once she surrendered; Tretta could have lost her temper and shot her at any moment—really, there were a hundred things that could have gone wrong and at least eighty-two of them ended with her brains splattered on the floor.
Why Cavric had agreed to it at all, she still had a hard time understanding.
“Was anyone…” he began to ask before he seemed to realize he was afraid of the answer. “I mean, did you—”
“I had to shoot someone, yeah.” She felt his eyes widen and sighed. “In the leg. No one got killed.”
His sigh was a stale, wasted breath.
“So, do they know, then?”
When she looked at him, his eyes were intent on hers. The weariness burned away, revealing a spark of that fear, that anger, that passion that she had gotten to know during their time together.
“Do they know what happened to me?” he asked.
For the last time he ever would, he still looked like a Revolutionary.
Sal shook her head. “I told them you had vanished. Probably dead. I don’t think they’ll be looking for you anymore.”
That spark died. The same fervor that had carried him through his military life vanished, buried beneath something hard. Not unfeeling, Sal noted—the same concern flashed in those eyes as ever, but gone was the Revolutionary zeal and the common man’s doubt. All that remained was another dirty, tired soul in the Scar.
“Should I ask why?” she asked.
“You shouldn’t.” A moment of silence passed before he closed his eyes and sighed. “Are you going to anyway?”
“I mean, I was definitely thinking it.”
“I was Revolutionary from birth,” Cavric said. “I saw the same operas, I heard the same speeches, attended the same schools as everyone else. And for a long time, I thought the same thing: that we were there to help people, to make things better.” His lips twisted into a frown. “Then Lastlight happened. Then Lowstaff happened. Then you happened.”
Sal looked away from him, back over the flames.
“I’m not going to apologize for what I did.”
“I didn’t ask you to,” Cavric said. “You just showed me that we could build the biggest guns to make the biggest mountain of corpses we could… and people would still suffer. Because there would still be people like you.”
“You mean killers.”
“I mean people who don’t hear the same thing,” he said. “People who see every rule of every city and act like it’s just not there.” He shook his head. “I don’t think you’re a killer, Sal. You kill people, but it’s not the same. You’re just a… a…” He sighed. “You can tear down the nasty shit in this world. But someone’s going to have to build something better back up.”
A long moment of silence passed before he glowered at her.
“I’m not going to thank you.”
“I didn’t ask you to,” she said, though she had certainly been thinking he should. Instead, she simply glanced back at him. “Where are you going now?”
“Same place you are, I suppose,” he said as he turned away from her. “Somewhere I need to be.” He raised a hand in a weary wave. “See you around, Sal. Maybe.”
There was a small part of her that wanted to stop him. A small part of her that wasn’t willing to let go of what they’d had on the road, to let go of someone who had looked at her like she could do anything, even put down the gun. There was a small part of her, a savage little knife of her that lodged itself in her neck, that wanted to reach out and grab him and pull him close and…
And do what? she wondered.
Tell him it was all worth it, in the end? Or tell him the opposite, that trading all those lives for seven on a list wasn’t a good trade? Or maybe just collapse and hope he caught her?
Maybe there was a good answer to that question. Maybe she could even think of one. But by the time she had thought of one, he had already disappeared over the ridge.
And so she sighed and laid a hand on the gun at her hip
. Through her glove, she could feel him seething. And though he had no voice that she would ever want to hear, she could almost imagine the grin of his barrel whispering to her.
Let’s finish it, then.
She turned and trudged down the other side of the ridge. Behind a pair of large rocks, she found her campsite. Congeniality glanced up from a rabbit carcass Cavric had so kindly left her when he brought her here for as long as it took her to realize she wasn’t interested in what Sal had to do and returned to her feast. It wasn’t a particularly big rabbit. She’d be done soon.
Just as well, Sal thought.
This wouldn’t take long.
She found Clerk Inspire’s unconscious body where she had left it, pressed up against the stone. He still drew breath, though he did not stir. And so she took Jeff out of his sheath, checked his edge, stared at the clerk…
And waited to hear the Lady’s song.
His magic stirred before he did. The distant note of her song lit up Sal’s ears as Inspire’s skin trembled, rippled like water struck by a stone. His body twisted, changed, arms vanishing into his sides and body becoming elongated.
His eyes snapped open.
His jaws followed.
The great serpent that had been Inspire lunged at her, scales black as pitch and mouth gaping. As though this were just a brief nuisance—as, indeed, it was—her hand shot out and seized the beast by its throat.
“Oh, come on.” She met its fanged maw with a sneer. “I take all the trouble to track you down and you give me a fucking snake?”
She brought up the hilt of her sword, smashed it against the animal’s jaw, and sent it writhing to the ground. Its skin shimmered as the Lady’s song rose once again, and in another second, a great black bird with wide white eyes scrambled to its feet and flapped its wings in a desperate frenzy.
“Why not a wolf?” Sal’s hand shot out, seized the bird’s tail as it clumsily tried to flap away. “Why not a rothac? A giant crab with a spiky shell or maybe a really big ape? I don’t know, something better than this.”