Ten Arrows of Iron, page 15
“I told you not to let him out of your sight.”
“And I told you that my dedication to your cause ended at watching a man take a wine-piss.”
Jero’s face screwed up. “You never told me that.”
“I make it a point of assuming that I don’t have to.” Agne took a sip of her wine, completely unbothered. “Don’t worry. He’ll be right back and then we can continue.” She paused, considering. “Well, maybe not right back—he had an awful lot to drink.”
“He won’t be back, you idiot,” Jero hissed. “He’s on to us.”
“That’s impossible.” Agne shook her head. “I’ve been the vision of loveliness.”
“He recognized…” Jero caught himself, shot me a look. “Someone.”
I didn’t bother acknowledging the accusation lurking behind that look. My response was the brass sliding into my hand, the turn of my heel, and the tug of my scarf over my face as I started heading for the back.
If this was going to be my fault for sending this operation to hell, I might as well make sure I sent it there in a flaming coffin.
I pushed my way toward the back where Meticulous had disappeared into. In a cozy little hall at the back of the bar, a single door marked with an old Imperium sigil for something indelicate squatted.
Indoor plumbing, along with the voccaphone and several centuries of unpaid labor, was one of the few Revolutionary innovations that the Imperium had adopted from their former thralls. Imperial sensibilities being what they were, it was rare to find a tavern that didn’t have a nice, private chamber to piss in.
Nice, private, and inescapable.
Meticulous wouldn’t be the first man I’d gunned down on a toilet. And, being completely honest with myself, he wasn’t likely going to be the last.
I pulled a shell out of my satchel—Hoarfrost, as clean a spell as something named the Cacophony could manage—and slid it into the gun’s chamber. I took him in both hands, felt his heat in my palms.
“Shall we?” I asked.
“Let’s,” he answered.
I kicked the door in, leveled the gun into the washroom. And as ready as I had been to pull the trigger, I hesitated. I felt the Cacophony’s seethe of displeasure at not being able to kill, but how could he blame me?
We’d have both looked pretty stupid if I wasted a shell on a toilet.
“Fuck.” I scanned the empty washroom, found nothing but a bowl reeking of urine, an empty wineglass, and a distinct lack of Revolutionary spymasters to kill. More puzzling, though, was a lack of any way out. “Where the hell did he—”
“Sal.”
Jero stood behind me. In the dim light of the hall, the wrinkles on his face stretched like black scars.
“Come on.”
He swept out of the tavern and into the streets, me following close behind. We came out into a black-and-white world, snow falling in sheets. I glanced down the road, to where the street branched into a spiderweb of alleys and side avenues. It was the best place to lose a pursuer, I wagered.
But I hadn’t taken two steps in that direction before I felt Jero’s hand on my shoulder.
“No,” he said. “This way.”
“You sure?” I asked, following him all the same as we hurried down the other direction.
“Positive,” he replied. “He knows we’re hunting him.”
I glanced back toward the winding alleys we were quickly putting behind us. “The other way looks like a place I’d go if I was being hunted.”
“Because you’re used to hunting beasts, outlaws, Vagrants,” he said. “Meticulous has lived and worked in a city full of his enemies for years. We’re hunting a spy. And spies…”
We rounded a corner. A cringe painted Jero’s face.
“Seek the light.”
Moths of a hundred different hues fluttered on hand-sized wings over the heads of lovers embracing. Opera singers long-dead stood in ornate Imperial masks, singing ballads in tongues forgotten to all but the elders who watched them. Great cats with two heads prowled the streets, snarling at girls who giggled and fled.
A riot of ghosts exploded in the sprawling avenue. Spectral images in purple and green, red and yellow, danced through the falling snow or prowled across the street, gliding intangible through tightly packed crowds, their ethereal shapes disappearing into peoples’ bodies, only to elicit applause and laughter as they emerged out their backsides.
Seated upon pedestals lining the avenue, men and women in elaborate costumes and indecipherable masks controlled the ghosts, the glowing fingertips of their gloves weaving commands to be carried out by the spectral creatures, eliciting delight and proffered money from the crowds for every caper of ghostly beast or note from ethereal singer.
“Marionettes,” I muttered.
Illusory magic was considered by most Imperial scholars to be not a true art—given that it wasn’t particularly useful in killing people—and at best was considered the prettier, less successful cousin of a Nightmage’s powerful hallucinations. Still, “puppeteers,” as they were commonly called, found ample work, delighting and eliciting donations from crowds of people who didn’t know how many corpses magic tended to pile up. I’d loved seeing them when I was a little girl in Cathama.
Of course, if I had been tracking a man with the intent of bludgeoning information out of him back then, I might have had a different opinion.
“Night market,” Jero said, scanning the crowd. “The rich shits up on the cliffs come down to amuse themselves with the commoners, drinking cheap wine, indulging cheap tricks, and buying cheap company.”
In the shadows cast by the glow of the illusory puppets, I could see what he meant. Clouds of thesha smoke filled the air from giggling nobles puffing on ornate pipes. Men and women in various provocative outfits—some delighted, some not—negotiated prices with clients before disappearing behind velvet curtains. Merchants hawked illicit wines, illicit wares, illicit flesh for the pleasure of the drug-addled, drunken fops.
Earlier today, Terassus had seemed so strange, so normal. Gazing upon it now, reeking of wine and weed, it felt a little more familiar.
And so did the promise of violence lingering in the air.
“Meticulous would have gone in here,” Jero said, “tried to disappear into the crowd.” He searched the heads of people and frowned. “And we aren’t going to find him—”
“Unless someone goes in after him.” I sniffed. “Well. Good thing you brought muscle, then, isn’t it?”
Jero nodded. “Agne is right behind us. She’ll keep him from coming out this way. I’ll circle around in case he emerges out the other side.” He looked at me, the wrinkles on his face deep as emptied graves. “Sure you’re up for finding him?”
I wasn’t.
I hadn’t been sure of much ever since I saw Darrish in the tavern. I wasn’t sure what was real and what was another ghost come crawling out of that dark part in my skull where I had made the list. But I was sure of three things.
First, I wasn’t going to finish my list without Two Lonely Old Men’s help. Second, I wasn’t going to get that help without finding Meticulous. And third?
“I’m sure,” I said.
I was a damn fine liar, when I needed.
“Watch your back,” Jero called after me as we set off in separate ways. “You don’t get to be a spy without learning some tricks.”
The bodies of the night market pressed in upon me immediately. Vapid nobles pushed past me on their way to see some new excitement. Drunken revelers shoved into me, cackling as wine sloshed out of their cups and onto the streets. The occasional client who couldn’t wait for more private circumstances fell into my path, half naked and wrapped in the arms and lips of a pretty stranger they’d just met and paid a moment ago.
I gently pushed past them, gingerly stepped over them, kindly encouraged the handsier ones away from me with a very polite punch to the kidneys. But even as I cleared a path through the crowds, there was no escaping the marionettes.
A miasma of brightly colored specters descended upon me. Illusionary koi fish swam lazily over my head, shifting between nauseating shades of lime green, lemon yellow, and beet red. The disembodied melodies of spectral opera singers permeated the crowd, punching through the din. Shimmering nightcats pursued the quavering shapes of hounds, disappearing in and out of walls and the very stones of the street.
I had thought, among the crowd of generally attractive, well-dressed nobility, a paunchy man in a dirty coat would be easy to spot. But it was hard to see beyond the glow of the specters, hard to hear beyond the roar of the market, hard to move, hard to think, hard to—
“Answer to my steel, knave!”
I saw the blade before I saw the figure holding it, the tip of a longsword aimed at my chest as a looming body came leaping out of the crowd at me. I had barely wrapped fingers around the black hilt beneath my cloak when I saw the blade punch through my shirt and sink into my chest. My breath caught. My eyes went wide.
And that’s when I noticed the sword was bright pink.
As was the figure holding it.
“Parry! Thrust! Ho ho! Ha ha!”
The spectral fighter danced back and forth on ghostly feet, cutting through me with his blade, the blade shimmering and disappearing as it touched my skin. Each touch was painless, except for a faint tingling sensation. At the very least, it wasn’t nearly as excruciating as the smug grin the puppeteer mage sitting nearby shot me from beneath his gaudy ballroom mask.
“It seems the stylings of Lord Fyzzyl were too swift for you, my dear.” He bowed low, holding up a hand in expectation of fiscal generosity. “Perhaps you’ll get him next—”
He didn’t get around to finishing that thought. But he did find the time to let out a scream as I grabbed him by his collar and shoved him ungently against a wall. Anger and agony pulsed through my body with every heartbeat, each one of them demanding I vent them on this poor dope. He must have realized that, because there wasn’t a mask made gaudy enough to hide the terror in his eyes.
With one hand pressing him against the wall, my other slid down to my waist and pulled out something shiny and metal. He watched, too breathless to scream, as I took his hand, slid a pair of copper knuckles into it, and closed his fingers around it before shoving my way back into the press of bodies.
I wasn’t going to have it said that Sal the Cacophony didn’t support the arts.
Idiot, I chastised myself. Don’t blame him just because you didn’t see that attack coming. How the fuck did you not see a hot-pink sword coming at you? What’s wrong with you tonight?
I didn’t give myself an answer, even though I already knew it.
I couldn’t shake the feeling from the tavern, that feeling of color and sound draining out of the world. Even now, it seemed to come back muted—voices distant, colors faded, like they weren’t really there, like I wasn’t really sure what was.
Because of Darrish.
Because I had seen her. Because I thought I had seen her. Because I didn’t know if I had and I didn’t know if I hadn’t and I didn’t know what was real or what was an illusion or what the fuck I was seeing anymore.
My breath came slow, ragged, like I had just walked thirty miles instead of thirty feet. Something was wrong with me. More than I first realized. The faces and illusions and laughter around me all blurred into one vomiting stream of noise and light—I couldn’t make out people anymore, let alone the one I was looking for.
Turn back, I told myself. Find Jero, send him in here instead. You can’t do this. Not while you’re seeing ghosts. Not while you’re seeing…
“Darrish.”
My voice tumbled numbly out of my lips at the sight of her hood, bobbing through the crowd. There she was, just like she had been in the tavern.
Darrish the Flint. Or… a ghost that looked like Darrish. Or another illusion? I couldn’t think. I could barely see as I saw her glance over her shoulder and lock eyes with me.
I didn’t know what played behind that wide-eyed stare. Was it fear? Recognition? Or was it something else she had never shown me as her lips formed two words I couldn’t hear?
Hello, Sal.
No… no, wait. That wasn’t it. I squinted. It was…
Look out.
I heard the hiss of steel leaving a sheath.
I felt the looming bulk of someone rising up behind me.
I turned.
And Meticulous’s blade found my flesh.
I snarled instead of screamed and I bled instead of died as his knife punched into me. It had only been because I had turned at the last possible moment that his blade had found my side and not my spine. And the realization of his error was in the fear painted on his face.
“Fuck,” he whispered as he jerked the blade free and turned to go before anyone noticed him.
Good plan. Get out, escape, leave me to either break off the chase to seek help or risk bleeding out. If I had more brains than scars, it probably would have worked, too.
His bad fucking luck.
I grabbed his wrist as he turned, pain fueling my grip as my fingers dug into his skin, refusing to release. He tried to pull away as discreetly as he could, trying desperately to avoid attracting the notice of the people around us.
They didn’t notice my blood.
And he didn’t notice my blade.
Not until I had jammed it into him.
The steel punched past his coat, past his clothes, into his flesh. But the telltale quiver you feel in the hilt when you’ve punched something vital was missing. He took the blow with gritted teeth and a muffled growl—old soldier like him knew how to take a hit like that without keeling over from pain—and shot out with an elbow that caught me in the jaw. He tore free from my grip and my steel alike, pushing between a pair of laughing lovers and ignoring the curses they hurled at his back.
I moved to follow, winced at the pain lancing white-hot through my side. I pressed my hand against the wound in my flank, drew in a sharp breath to bite back the agony.
That was all he needed to lose me.
I searched the crowd. Darkness tinged the riot of color assaulting my senses. Pain made the world seem shaky, the spectral marionettes even more twisted than they had been. One by one, the colors sank into a nauseous blend of black and red.
I’d had a hard time hunting him before. Now, with pain clouding my senses, it would be impossible.
Impossible for me, that is.
I slid my knife back into my cloak, ran my hand across its blade. Meticulous’s life was still warm on my palm as I slid it down to the black hilt at my hip, as I wrapped blood-slick fingers around it, as I felt a delighted burn coursing through my hand.
No more lying senses. No more seeing ghosts. No more games.
Now was the time to let him work.
The acrid smell of cooking blood filled my nose. Thin trails of steam wafted out my cloak as Meticulous’s blood sizzled upon the Cacophony’s hilt. Through his burning brass, he drank. And with a burning voice, he purred in my ear.
“This way.”
And I listened.
I kept my eyes on the ground, focusing only on each step. It was all I could manage—agony shot through me with every stride and I couldn’t hear the noise of the night market through my own labored breathing. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. But I didn’t need to.
“There.”
He told me everything.
Maybe, listening to me, you might think that he was just a weapon. Sure, he might talk and make loud noises—but he’s still a gun with a barrel and sights and a trigger, right? To hear me talk, you might think I can control him.
I don’t blame you. Sometimes, when he goes quiet, I almost think that, too.
But that’s what he wants. Because it’s when he’s quiet that I realize he’s not a weapon. He’s listening, hungering, thinking. And when he tastes blood like this—when he tastes a man and knows his fears and his dreams and the steps he’s taken and the things he’s seen—I realize I don’t truly know what the Cacophony is.
But by then, like now, it’s too late.
I let him guide me. His voice was in my ears, telling me where to step, who would move when I pushed, and who would flee when I threatened them. All the while, my eyes were on my feet, watching every step, until the noise of the crowds faded and I was left with just the ragged sound of my breathing and the feel of snow melting as it struck my blood-slick skin.
Only then did I look up.
I wasn’t sure where he had led me. Some cold, empty part of the city where the windows of houses were dark and the streets were empty of people and everything was so cold and quiet that I could hear the patter of my blood weeping onto the snow gathering at my feet.
“I don’t see him,” I whispered.
“He is close,” the Cacophony answered. “Be ready.”
I slid a hand into my pocket, found a shell. Jero had told me not to bring too many—said there was a fine line between preparing for trouble and looking for it—but I’d be fucked if I was going anywhere without Hellfire. I quietly loaded the shell into the chamber, clicked the hammer back as I listened.
Nothing. Nothing but snow falling. Nothing but wind blowing. Nothing but the hot cloud of my breath against the black sky and my heart pumping in my chest and my blood oozing down my side and the snow shifting behind me and the—
“THERE!”
I heard his warning. I felt it. I whirled.
Meticulous was right behind me—how had he gotten so close? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I didn’t think. I raised the Cacophony in both hands, leveled it at him as he leapt at me.
I pulled the trigger.
Snow erupted. Wood splintered. Glass shattered. The night died in a bright, glorious instant as Hellfire’s flames gaped wide to swallow it all. Snow melted under its lashing tongues, sending walls of steam rising from the road like a misty garden as the flaming wreckage of doors and windows and crates fell in cinders and smoldering chunks.
I shouldered the Cacophony, waiting for the steam to dissipate.
Admittedly, that might have been rash. Jero had said that we needed whatever Meticulous was carrying and that wasn’t too likely to have survived a blast of unholy flame. But then again, Jero had also said that we needed to catch Meticulous.
