Ten Arrows of Iron, page 27
“I am.” This time, he did stop. He paused, putting his hands on the table. His body shook, so hard that he seemed to shrink to someone more broken. “My brother isn’t.”
Ah. I winced. That’d do it.
He shook his head, tried to find his composure, failed. “He was older than me. When he went into the Revolution, I went with him. We fought. We killed. He died. Our sergeant wouldn’t let me go retrieve his body. We gave the Revolution years of service, years of fighting, my brother’s life.” Bitterness crept into his voice. “The Revolution didn’t even give him a grave.”
I stared at the back of his head as he shook, quiet. I wanted to tell myself it was out of respect—Jero and I were fighters, silence was our way. We spoke with weapons and actions, not with words. I told myself that…
But I wasn’t a good enough liar to believe that.
But it was easier to believe than the truth. Because I’d seen so much death, lost so many people, walked so many miles with so many scars weighing me down that something like dying somewhere with no one to mourn me, no one to bury me, was just something that I had always expected to happen. The truth was that all I could feel for Jero’s words, cold and bitter and trembling as they were, was… nothing.
And that truth cut me deeper than any blade.
“What was his name?” I asked.
“Jandi,” Jero replied.
“No,” I said, “the name they gave him. The name they gave you.”
Jero stiffened up. Over his shoulder, he looked at me cautiously.
“Erstwhile,” he said. “Jandi and Jero Erstwhile.”
That explained more than I thought.
A Revolutionary name was such a tangle of logic, meaning, and adjectives, but I had figured out the basics of it. Whenever a family entered the Revolution, they were given a name by the Great General, based on how loyal or valuable they were to his Revolution. Some names—Proud, Stern, Relentless, Graceful—were honorable.
Some names were not.
“Does Two Lonely Old Men know?” I asked.
“It’s the whole reason he hired me,” Jero said. “But the others don’t.” He shot me a look. “And they don’t need to.”
I nodded. “Where did your brother die?”
“Who’s Liette?”
I recoiled, as if struck. And, as if struck, my first instinct was to punch that name out of his mouth. Instead, I settled for glaring at him.
“What?”
“You spoke her name in your sleep,” he said. “I don’t give away secrets without getting them back. I’ll tell you where Jandi died… so long as you tell me who that person is.”
How many other people knew Jero Erstwhile? Maybe a few. Or maybe just me now. I knew it hadn’t been easy for him to tell me that. Secrets are like knives buried into your own heart—they hurt to carry, but they hurt more to move. I knew from the way he stood—still shaking, still small—that his had been buried deep.
Still.
Not as deep as mine.
“Right,” he said, after a very long moment of me pointedly not answering. “That’s enough banter. We’ve got to finish your disguise.”
I glanced down at my forearms, my tattoos hidden beneath layers of makeup, and frowned. His work was impressive, don’t get me wrong—but so was the collection of cramps I had accumulated sitting still for this long. I understood the delicacy of this operation, but I was also beginning to suspect I could have just shot my way to these fucking birds by now.
Jero didn’t seem to notice, though, as he flung open the doors of his wardrobe and started sorting through the collection of clothes with the enthusiasm of a dog in heat.
“My skill with cosmetics, impressive as you and I might know it to be, isn’t quite enough to carry this through.” He poked through an assembly of outfits, disguises, and hats—he had a lot of hats. “But while you might look like a woman who can’t belch the first six verses to ‘My Adoring Mother,’ we both know that’s not true.”
“Impressed you enough at the time,” I cast a mutter at his back.
“And while I have every faith in your ability to be presentable,” he continued, ignoring me, “it’s a pious corpse that operates on faith alone.” He paused, smiled as he found something in the wardrobe and pulled it free. “My job…”
He turned to face me, holding up a garment in both hands, his smile bright behind it.
“Is to give you every advantage.”
A long piece of shimmering silk, the color of amethyst, hung from his hands. Cut in the Imperial style—loose from the hips down, tight from the waist up, cinched together with a thick sash in the middle—it made me feel like I should be charged just to look at it.
“Well?” he asked, shooting me a glance that was half expectant and half incontinent.
“It’s a dress,” I observed.
The look he gave me suggested that punching him in the face and force-feeding him his own dog would have been kinder than what I had said.
“It’s a dress painstakingly made to the very pinnacle of Cathama fashion,” he continued. “This will allow you to blend seamlessly into the elite of the Imperium. Wearing this, you could shoot a man in the middle of that banquet and everyone would simply assume that was the latest trend.” He held up a hand, considering. “For the record, though, don’t shoot a man in the middle of that banquet.”
“Yeah, it’s nice and all, but”—I gestured to my leggings, somehow still dirty from the road despite repeated washings—“I’m really more of a”—my eyes lingered on that very long, very nice skirt—“pants kind of girl.”
“You’re going to a fancy banquet for fancy people,” Jero replied. “Fancy people don’t wear pants.” He stepped toward me. “Look, you’ll see what I mean once you try it on.”
I took a step backward as though he’d pulled a weapon on me. “How do we know it even fits me?”
“Please. Madame Fist tailored this especially for you.”
“How does she have my measurements?”
“I gave them to her.”
My eyes went wide. “How… how do you have my measurements?”
I stared into the mirror.
“Well? What do you think?”
I didn’t know who I was looking at.
To hear the stories, Sal the Cacophony was a woman whose very appearance made the wind hold its breath and birds flee from the sky. They spoke of a woman hard as the blade she carried who came out of the dark and carried fire in her hands, wearing her Vagrant tattoos like they were armor and her scars like trophies, striding across the land and leaving ashes and screams in her wake.
“Understand, without Fist actually having you on hand, there’s some guesswork. But we didn’t have time for that.”
The woman in the mirror was not that.
She was someone small and slight in a purple dress that clung too tightly to her chest and too loose around her legs. She wore silk instead of leather. Her hair was done up in elegant braids rather than whipping around her face. And instead of scars and tattoos, she had… nothing. No wounds. No blood. No dirt.
I stared at her. And she stared back.
“It’ll limit your movement, to be sure,” Jero said. “But the skirt opens up along the thigh, good enough to do what you need to do if things go wrong. Which they won’t, obviously, but no plot to overthrow empires ever goes flawlessly.”
And neither of us recognized the other.
“You’re hesitant,” he said, sighing. “I understand. It’s a difficult adjustment, but I assure you that—”
“I look normal.”
It was my lips moving, but it didn’t seem like my voice. It was the woman in the mirror who spoke. That woman who wasn’t injured, wasn’t inked, wasn’t… broken.
She could go anywhere, this woman. She could go to a market to shop instead of hunting people down. She could go into a tavern without knowing someone might be waiting to kill her. She could go home, to a house without swords or guns in it, to someone who wasn’t a ghost, and they’d drink together to enjoy their time together instead of to forget it.
She hadn’t killed anyone, this woman who was under all my scars, all my ink, all my stories.
I didn’t know her. But I envied her.
Jero stood beside me. No reassurances, no condolences, no words at all. He stared at the woman in the mirror alongside me and I knew he saw what I did.
“Yes,” he said softly. “You do.”
I knew he envied her, too.
I slid my hands down the dress. It felt weird, this silk without bloodstains or dirt on it.
“Can I keep this?” I asked. “After we’re done?”
He nodded. I smiled softly.
“I guess I just want to… look normal. Even if I can’t be—”
“You can.”
For the first time, I looked at him in the mirror. He stood behind me—I hadn’t realized when he had gotten so close. I hadn’t realized how tall he was or how deep his wrinkles went or when his hands had found my shoulders.
“When we’re done,” he said, “there’s going to be a place without the Imperium, without the Revolution, without soldiers or killers or hunters. Two Lonely Old Men is going to build it with that Relic. And we’re going to help him. Once it’s all done, we can be heroes.”
He gave my shoulders a squeeze. His hands were delicate. Warm.
“Or we can just be nobody special at all.”
He sighed. His face sank in the mirror. His hands slid from my shoulders. He didn’t say it—he didn’t have to. I already knew.
That was a nice dream. But it was just a dream. For now, we were still killers, him and I. For now, we were going to steal and lie and cheat. For now, we were going to make that place out of bloodshed and thievery and the death of empires.
We weren’t normal.
For now.
“I guess it’s fine.” I walked—or did my best while in these shoes—across the room. The silk hugged me tighter than I was used to and I don’t think I’d ever really get used to the feeling of so much makeup on my skin, but I could bear it. “Only one problem.”
I turned around, trying to see my own ass.
“Where am I supposed to hide the Cacophony in this thing?”
Jero gave me that wincing smile that told me I was going to hit him in the testicles before this night was over.
“Yeah,” he said, “about that…”
TWENTY
YUN ATTORO ESTATE
Wine is a drink for assholes.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I know many fine wine drinkers. I count them among some of my oldest and dearest friends. That doesn’t mean they aren’t assholes, though.
Not that whiskey isn’t a drink for assholes, too, but whiskey is for honest assholes. Whiskey is a drink that doesn’t lie—within one sip of it, you know where it came from, how much it’s worth, and whether or not you’re going to survive the night with it. Wine is for an entirely different kind of asshole.
With whiskey, you fight and, if the company is nice, you make up. With wine, you mostly spend a lot of time talking.
“It’s not that I hate the nuls.”
Like this asshole.
“If anything, I have great respect for what they’re able to achieve within their limitations.” Keltithan yun Attoro paused to drain the last sip of wine and hummed. “Nuls build our bridges. Nuls pave our roads. Nuls make the Imperium what it is.”
He waved a hand. A servant, toting a silver tray brimming with glasses, responded to his summons and walked over promptly. Empty eyes to match an empty smile were offered, along with the tray, as Keltithan took another glass and waved the servant away. The servant made a deep bow, accompanied by a crinkling sound, before wandering off to join the other dozen identical servants toting trays to bring treats and desserts to the other well-dressed guests.
I had to say, the quality of Keltithan’s servants was impressive. They responded promptly, didn’t drop anything, had very little tearing. Really, if it weren’t for their empty eyes, the crinkling noises they made when they moved, and the fact that they were all identical, you couldn’t tell at all that they were paper golems.
“But do they fight for it?” Keltithan mused, stroking his beard. “Do they know what it is to use the art? To pay the Lady Merchant her Barter so that the savages may be settled and civilization may continue? Of course not. How would you even describe it to them? How can you describe music to the deaf, or beauty to the blind?”
His gray hair and deep-set wrinkles spoke of his age, but his rigid posture and the numerous commendations he wore on his purple-and-black robes told me that Keltithan had never truly left the Imperial army. The blade he wore at his hip, though it hadn’t seen combat in ages, was still polished and sharpened to a high sheen. Here was a military man, through and through.
“Nor would you trust them to lead,” Keltithan continued. “Hence why this whole ‘Revolution’ business is utter tripe.”
Which meant he actually believed the shit coming out of his mouth.
I suppose I could have been more understanding. The Imperium had given him quite a bit, after all, including the massive manor we currently stood in.
Bigger than any other house looming upon the cliffs, the Attoro Estate spanned almost three miles of sprawling gardens of plants kept alive by warming spells, corrals for riding birds, barracks for house guards, and wine cellars big enough to keep his many, many guests good and drunk.
In shades of purple and bronze, they milled about the immense banquet halls, their hair done up in Imperial styles, the more elite of them wearing Imperial masks, laughing and joking and singing along to ghostwritten instruments playing old opera tunes. Marionette specters of pink and purple warriors reenacted famous battles in ghoulishly vivid detail, illusionary though it may be, to the delighted applause of onlookers.
And looming over everything were the birds.
Oyakai. Ten of them. Each one twice as tall as a man. Legs long and thin like spears, ending in sharp talons. Beaks broad and shoe-shaped. Eyes bright and intelligent and surveying the party from their perches on high. Their plumage was soft, in black and white and red and blue, and occasionally on full display when one of them would extend their great wings and let out a keening cry, silencing the festivities as every eye looked up in awe at them.
Including mine.
My breath left me each time I looked at them. To ride just one of them for an hour, to feel the wind in my face again, I would have killed a hundred men.
“Now, if they wanted peace and to return to their old lives, we’d let them, surely.”
Which meant I could stomach this shithead for another few hours, I guess.
He continued droning on, seeming oblivious to the fact that my eyes were wandering the hall. Somewhere, hidden in this sea of assholes, must be a room that would suit our purposes. All we needed was a forgotten quarters, a neglected storeroom, even a shit-filled stable—anywhere no one would notice a portal being erected.
Between the marionette illusionists, the spectral band, and the occasional besotted boast that turned into an impromptu duel between visiting mages with too much wine and too little self-esteem, no one would sense the magic. But a giant swirling purple door from nothingness tends to attract attention we specifically did not need. However, we weren’t going to get the Oyakai we did need unless we found a place for Yria to portal in.
Though, as my eyes drifted up toward the ceiling, I couldn’t help but wonder how even a Doormage, even one so criminally famous as Yria the Cell, would help us steal monstrous birds ten feet tall and brimming with claws.
Especially when said monstrous birds were situated in the middle of a banquet positively teeming with mages who can and would bring all their powers to bear in stopping us, including—but not limited to—summoning fire from nothingness, conjuring ghosts from one’s darkest fears, and maybe spitting bees… and the bees are made of lightning or some shit like that, I don’t know.
I didn’t know what these sparkly fucks could do.
But I know they can kill me a lot fucking quicker than they could if I was armed, I thought, taking an especially spiteful sip of wine. Fucking thank fucking you, fucking Jero.
I could see the logic, of course. Missions relying on subtlety typically didn’t benefit from the presence of a weapon called the Cacophony, after all. But without that weight at my hip, that heat from his brass, that knowledge that I could kill anyone…
I felt cold. Colder than I should.
I had an old fart droning in my ear and no whiskey to drown him out and no gun to bash his face in. So, I wasn’t in the best of moods.
Still, that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to be a professional.
“Hey,” I said, interrupting whatever he was blithering about—taxes or some shit, I think. “Is there a room around here that no one’s using?”
Keltithan furrowed his manicured brows at me. “Beg pardon, my lady?”
“Like a… toilet?” I scratched the side of my head, drained the last of my wine. “Or a storeroom or something? I don’t know.”
I would have cringed at the entirely inappropriate blush that colored his cheeks, if I hadn’t already been internally screaming when the much-worse-than-entirely-inappropriate smirk crossed his face.
“My lady,” he said, “I… admit, it’s been some time since the lady of the manor passed, but I don’t know if…” He was positively beaming as he cleared his throat and straightened up. “May I ask what for?”
I rolled my eyes. “Because I’m just gagging for your wrinkled cock, obviously.”
After that, he turned an entirely different shade of red. “What did you just—”
“Darling! There you are!”
A charming voice interjected, followed by a charming six and a half feet of muscle wrapped up in silk. Agne, her hair elegantly styled and her dress flattering, imposed her prestigious self between the Judge and I. She took me by the arm—just hard enough to let me know she could break it, if she wanted to.
