Ten Arrows of Iron, page 21
She nodded, let out a long, nervous breath. “Right. Good. No stories that say the Cacophony breaks her promises.” She found a chair, settled into it. “I’ll be around.”
I returned the nod before hurrying off to join Jero and Urda, my stride uneasier than I would have liked. It was always uncomfortable, seeing that kind of emotion coming from that kind of person. It turned them from monsters to people in a world where monsters survived and people didn’t. What I needed right now was a monster, a remorseless Vagrant, not a worried sister. A Vagrant I could let down and not be bothered. A sister, staying up all night and staring at the empty spot where her brother should be…
Enough. I shook those thoughts out of my head. Don’t fucking look like this in front of the Ashmouths. Don’t worry about her. Besides… A cold cringe crept across my face. If Urda’s not getting out of this alive, you sure as shit aren’t either.
It’s not always true, but—in my experience, at least—if you find yourself in a lightless basement, far away from anyone who might hear you, staring down a door behind which near-certain doom lies, you might be making some poor choices in your life.
“This is it?”
Also, you probably need to stop hanging around with assholes.
“What were you expecting?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. Something more mysterious?” Urda squinted over the door—a thick, ironbound barrier that had no business being in the basement of a teahouse. “I’ve heard stories about the Ashmouths and their… markets.” He cringed so hard I could see the outline of his skull. “Filthy, terrible rumors of bodies being harvested for ingredients and elixirs that grant you six seconds of total knowledge before they make your humors burst out of your orifices and—You know what, why don’t we just figure something else out?”
“Yeah, thieves always sound better in stories,” I sighed. “Then you meet a few of them and you find out they’re just assholes with money working for bigger assholes with money.”
“So, the stories aren’t true?” Urda offered a hopeful smile. “About the harvesting and… orifices?”
“No, those are completely true.” Jero pushed him aside as he stepped up to the door. “The Ashmouths would tear out our livers if they thought they could make a copper knuckle off of them.” He glanced over to me and Urda. “And if they didn’t have stolen Revolutionary technology, we wouldn’t be here. We go in, find what we need, get out. Agreed?”
A stiff nod from me. A fervent nod from Urda. Jero cleared his throat, turned back to the door, and raised his fist. Two swift knocks, a pause, then three slow ones, a longer pause, and six more quick ones. Then, with a satisfied smile, he stepped back and waited.
For a very long, awkward moment.
“The fuck was that?” I asked.
“Secret knock,” he replied. “Just wait.”
I opened my mouth to point out the stupidity of having a secret knock when we were already in a secret room in a secret teahouse that we were led to by a secret fucking crow, but at that moment, a wooden panel in the door slid open. A pair of weary eyes, rimmed with red, peered out and a voice that sounded like a six-day drunk with a mouthful of gravel rasped out.
“The fuck was that?”
Jero stepped forward, clearing his throat. “Friends. In search of something specific.”
“Friends?” The red eyes squinted. “Huh. That’s odd. All I see here is a bunch of stupid twats. But hey, if you see the dumbshit that was just knocking on the door, could you kindly tell him, her, or them that we don’t do that shit anymore? Great. Thanks. Fuck along now.”
“Wait, I—”
Jero’s protest was cut short as the panel slid shut. His jaw clenched angrily for a moment before he closed his eyes, let out a breath, and rubbed his temples. Fury gave way to contemplation, the wheels of his mind creaking audibly as he began to formulate another plan to get in.
And I’m sure he would have come up with something great. But it had been a long night and I was very tired.
So I went with my plan.
I pushed him aside, walked up to the door, slammed my fist against it three times. The panel slid open, the same pair of red-rimmed eyes staring out.
“Okay, that knock was fine,” the voice rasped from behind the door, “but I believe I told you to… to…”
The voice fell silent as the eyes fell upon me. I reached up, pulled my scarf back, and, with blood spattering my face and the long scar running over my eye, stared back. I’m not going to lie, the way those eyes widened as he realized who had come knocking?
“Ah, fuck… it’s you.”
Not better than sex. But close.
“You know me?” I asked.
Silence. Then the eyes bobbed up and down in a nod.
“You know I need in?”
A longer silence. A slower nod.
“You know how I’m going to get in?”
A lick of dry lips. “How?”
I shrugged. “I thought I’d let you decide. You can let us in.” I slid my scarf back, rested a hand atop the Cacophony’s black hilt, and drummed my fingers thoughtfully. “Or I can knock again.”
A third silence—deeper, longer, and taut enough to strangle someone with—fell over the room. The red-rimmed eyes stared at me, twitching in appraisal, trying to figure out how many ways this could end and, of those, how many ended with someone painting the walls.
The panel snapped shut again. I sighed.
“I tried.”
The Cacophony had barely left his sheath before there was the sound of something heavy and metallic clicking open. Then a pause. And then, the acrid stink of chemicals, dust, and money as the heavy door creaked open and a weary man stepped out.
Short, lean, and draped in loose, baggy clothing stained with food, he wore a shaggy mop of hair tied back in a topknot, his jaw coated in stubble and a long pipe dangling from his lips. One hand rested on a wooden sword thrust through his sash, his sleeve falling back to reveal a tattoo of a thick tree running the length of his forearm.
He was dirty. He was tired. He reeked of cheap silkgrass. And if you didn’t know how many people Rudu the Cudgel had killed, you’d swear he was just another beggar.
Fuck, I knew and I still wasn’t convinced he wasn’t. But it didn’t matter how filthy he looked or how much of a pain it had been to get down here—I couldn’t help but smile.
“Well,” he said as he stepped aside and gestured to the door, “welcome to the Crow Market, I guess.”
Call me materialistic if you will, but shopping always put me in a good mood.
FIFTEEN
THE CROW MARKET
The first lie we’re ever told is that we’re better than beasts.
Imperium or Revolutionary, it doesn’t matter—every society has a wealth of poems, propaganda, opera, and war songs extolling the grand causes of humanity. Our causes are nobler than the base instincts of the creatures that prowl these lands, we tell ourselves. We don’t fight for food, territory, and sex. We fight for ideal, principle, and romance—which is like sex but with more talking.
Call me a cynic, but I long ago disabused myself of that notion. Countless battles, plenty of struggles, and a few choice scars had given me the clarity to appreciate that, when you get down to it, there’s not a whole lot of room between humans and beasts. Sure, we’re better at killing and we figured out how to make food better and relationships worse, but if you look close enough, you’ll see we’re governed by the same natures as they are.
Instead of predators, we have armies and warlords and Vagrants. Instead of prey, we have peasants and merchants and any number of unlucky fucks who run afoul of the former armies, warlords, and Vagrants. And instead of scavengers…
“WHO WILL BUY THIS MONSTER COCK?”
We have Crow Markets.
“Trouble in bed? Dissatisfied mistress? No respect from your offspring?” the woman in a stained apron waving a cleaver in one hand and an unnervingly large and greasy phallus in the other bellowed. Her voice echoed through the dank aqueduct corridors, over the sound of rattling pipes and a hundred other voices. “This beast’s organ, when properly cured, has the power to make your grandpa fuck for two nights straight! Put vigor in your step, spice up your bedroom, or sell it to someone else. I don’t fucking care, just buy it, this thing smells terrible!”
If you were surprised at her sales pitch, you would probably have also been surprised at the small horde of well-dressed men who waved satchels clinking with money at her as they clamored for the monstrous member. And you definitely would have been surprised at the carcass of a monstrous feline Cacuarl, bristling with quills, being hacked from eyeballs to regular balls by three other industrious ladies behind her, who carefully placed each organ in a jar.
You’d have been alone, though.
No one has time for modesty in a Crow Market.
You won’t find them in civilized places, the gentle and well-mannered cities with guards and primitive notions of the rule of law. But on the fringes of the world, where the air is thick with suffering and wars are met with the same weary indifference as bad weather, Crow Markets are as common as corpses.
They pop up after great battles, in the wake of devastating plagues and other places of misery—quiet people in quiet costumes show up on battlefields and in ravaged towns and efficiently pick them clean. Nothing is left behind, from the greatest fallen weapons and technology to the rings prized right off the fingers of the dead. The Ashmouths take everything and find a dark place to sell it.
Word spreads like rot to everyone but the law. And like flies to a carcass, the buyers come. Some are benign: collectors of exotic wares and hard-to-find antiques, Freemakers looking for wartime technology they haven’t been able to steal. Some are less benign: warlords looking for weapons to give their boys an edge in the coming raids, Vagrants eager to find new toys to wreak havoc with. The Ashmouths don’t mind. The Ashmouths don’t ask questions.
So long as you have loose purse strings and tight lips, you’re welcome in the Crow Market, no matter whether you’re a collector, a criminal, or, say, an extremely good-looking and charming Vagrant embroiled in a plot to destroy two empires.
“Remind me what you’re looking for again?”
Rudu the Cudgel did not seem particularly bothered by the grisly scene behind us. Nor did he seem particularly bothered by the pair of alchemists in a nearby alcove huddled over a cauldron from which a pale smoke billowed and carried the distant sound of screaming; or the goggles-wearing maniac in another alcove sitting atop a pile of bronze explosives and holding up a sign that read BOMBS. CHEAP. GUARANTEED KILL; or any of the other dozens of morbid, malicious, or malevolent tradesmen lining the aqueduct alcoves, each of them peddling something more horrific than the last, each of them with no less than a dozen buyers clamoring for their deadly wares.
Possibly because, as a Vagrant, he’d seen more than his share of horror already.
Or possibly because he was high as hell.
“Schematics.” Jero shouted to be heard over the sound of something exploding behind us as Rudu led us through the labyrinthine aqueducts. “We’re looking for schematics. Or Revolutionary technology. Same as we were the last six times you asked us.”
To be fair, it was pretty easy to get distracted in a Crow Market. Who knew how long ago the Ashmouths had hijacked Terassus’s underground aqueducts that twisted beneath the city, but they’d certainly made good use of the space since then. Not a single inch of the sewers that wasn’t underwater or occupied by piping was without a seller hawking the obscene and macabre.
“I got you,” Rudu said. Though the fact that he did not look up as he said it, as he was too busy focusing on packing his pipe full of more silkgrass, suggested that he did not, in fact, got us. “Sorry, it’s so hard to keep track of stuff here. Especially when I’m three bowls deep into the grass.”
“Maybe you could stop smoking so much?” I offered.
“Maybe you could stop being a pain in my ass.” He struck a tindertwig off the wall and lit his pipe, taking a deep drag and exhaling a cloud of pink smoke. “Guess we’ve got a real paradox here, huh?”
“That’s not what ‘paradox’ means,” Jero said.
“No kidding? Well, maybe if I smoke a little more, I’ll figure it out. Or I’ll stop listening to you. Let’s find out.”
Needless to say, I liked Rudu.
We’d had our differences in the past, of course, but show me a pair of friends who hadn’t set each other on fire at least once. Since then, we’d come to terms.
And by “terms,” I mean he was more or less legally obligated to do what I said.
As you might have guessed by now, what with all the explosions and killing, we Vagrants aren’t a law-abiding bunch. The only real justice we recognize is the Redfavor: a single trinket, stained crimson, given from one Vagrant to another by their own free will. It entitles the bearer to the only thing a Vagrant has to give: a single favor.
A task, a payment, it doesn’t matter. A Vagrant can call in their Redfavor for anything, from buying the next round to killing the Empress of Cathama. When the favor is called, it cannot be refused. When it’s completed, it cannot be dishonored.
It happens, from time to time, that someone fails these rules. Sometimes someone refuses the favor. Sometimes someone doesn’t honor the task. Whatever their reason for doing so, it doesn’t matter, the result is the same.
A Vagrant who turns their back on the favor is a Vagrant who’s fair game. No one will intervene on their behalf, no one shall offer them any comfort besides a knife in the dark.
We don’t give it lightly. We don’t spend it lightly. And as tempting as it was to call in Rudu’s so he could find us what we needed, I wasn’t about to waste it on this. Especially since it was his job to show us around anyway.
“Should, uh…” Urda glanced over his shoulder at the growing inferno raging in the alcove behind us. “Should you be concerned about that? Aren’t you, uh, the security here?”
“I’m more like a consultant,” Rudu replied through a cloud of smoke. “In that I am consulted on how they would like me to kill any Imperial mages that venture down here. Past that, I have strict orders not to interfere with business.” He made a vague gesture. “Besides, those guys will take care of it.”
It took me a moment to realize he wasn’t just pointing to empty space. Lurking in the shadows between the stalls, the Ashmouths stood vigilant. Their bodies were hidden beneath their black uniforms, their faces obscured by the crow-shaped masks they wore. The only thing on display was the small arsenal of bows, blades, and flasks they carried, ready to be deployed on anyone they deemed necessary.
Somehow, this didn’t soothe Urda.
If he’d been nervous before, he was falling to pieces with every step now. His eyes kept darting between the sellers, the buyers, and the Ashmouths, uncertain of which to be more terrified of. And every time he did, his hand went down to his pocket, fingering something inside that I only barely got glimpses of.
Something metal… silver. I squinted.
Was that… a whistle?
“Anyway, it shouldn’t be too hard to find Revolutionary tech down here,” Rudu said, pointedly ignoring the screams rising from behind. “The war left enough of it lying around, anyway. Tanks, cannons, those weird stabby-shooty-things…”
“Gunpikes?”
“Sure, whatever. All of it eventually ends up in the Ashmouths’ hands, which means it eventually ends up here. Normally, they don’t care who buys it from them.”
“Normally?”
“Yeah, normally. And normally, I don’t ask questions.” Rudu came to a sudden halt, all of us stopping short just behind him. Slowly, he turned and cast a red-rimmed stare over his shoulder. “But then, normally I don’t see Sal the Cacophony come sniffing after Revolutionary tech. So, I can’t help but wonder if the Ashmouths would want to know if things weren’t normal.”
I didn’t blink, didn’t flinch, didn’t move—I knew the eyes fixed on me from the shadows, the ears that lingered nearby, listening. I could feel Jero tense up beside me, his hand drifting toward a hidden blade. Without realizing it, my hand slid out to catch his.
Without realizing it, it stayed there.
It felt nice, almost. Holding something that wasn’t a sword or a gun.
“I bet if they paid me enough to give a shit, I might ask.” Rudu grinned, smoke leaking out between his teeth. “But you don’t see me walking around in a rich man’s clothes, do you?” He glanced up through the haze. “Oh, hey, here we are.”
A nearby alcove, lit by pale alchemic lanterns, loomed before us. And out of the shadows cast by them, the Ashmouths emerged. The glass eyes of their masks swept over us, their crossbows held tightly.
“The Three don’t want anyone near here they don’t approve of,” one of them grunted. “Move along.”
“She’s with me,” Rudu replied. “Don’t worry about it.”
Their glassy stares lingered on him for a moment before drifting to Urda, like they could smell the fear coming off him.
“He looks familiar,” the other one said. “Are those a wright’s tools?” They stepped forward. Urda cringed behind me. “Let’s have a talk, you and I, and then we can—”
He was stopped by my hands: one held up in front of the Ashmouth, the other resting on the Cacophony’s hilt.
“He’s with me,” I replied. “No one touches him.”
“And no one threatens the Ashmouths,” they snarled in response.
“I’m not threatening anyone,” I replied coolly. “I’m just saying, if you want to have a talk, you can talk to us.” I patted the Cacophony’s hilt. “Him and I.”
I could feel their gazes on me: Rudu’s irritated glare, Urda’s terrified stare, the Ashmouths’ glassy-eyed resentment. All of them knew this was stupid, what I was doing. If I offended the Ashmouths here, the only thing we’d leave with was the eternal enmity of an organization that could kill us all in our sleep. That was bad.
But not as bad as having it be said that Sal the Cacophony broke her word.
