Ten Arrows of Iron, page 3
In it, she held the bottle of whiskey he packed.
“Avonin.” Her eyes widened a little. “Damn, kid. What do you use this for?”
“Disinfecting wounds,” he replied.
She looked at him like he had just insulted her mother, then gestured at the unconscious woman with her chin.
“How much of this do you need to treat her?”
“I… I don’t know. Half, I think?”
“You sure?”
“No.”
“Get sure.”
He looked over the woman on the ground, nodded. “Half.”
Sal the Cacophony nodded back. Then she pried the cork out with her teeth, spat it out, and upended the bottle into her mouth and did not stop to breathe until she had drained exactly half the bottle.
She handed it back to him, licked her lips, and spat on the ground.
“I’ll tell you,” she said, “but you have to promise me something.”
He stared at her as she looked over the wreckage. “All right.”
“I won’t ask you to promise to forgive me,” she said. “But when I’m done…”
She closed her eyes, sheathed her weapon, and let a black breeze blow over her.
“Promise me you’ll try.”
TWO
THE VALLEY
Anyway, what was I talking about?
Oh, right.
The massacre.
It took me a second to notice through the blood weeping down into my eye, but his guard had dropped. Weary arms could no longer hold his blade quite so high, the tip of it dragging in the earth as he charged toward me, a scream tearing out of his throat, dust rising in a cloud behind him.
“DIE, CACOPHONY!”
He roared, swinging his sword up as he came within spitting distance. I stepped around the blade, into his path, bringing my own blade up. Steel flashed. A splash of red stained the air. His sword rushed past me, biting into my cheek and drawing blood.
As for my sword…
His body stiffened on my blade. His eyes were frozen in unblinking horror, yet he couldn’t look down to see the four inches of steel thrust into his belly. His lips trembled, struggling to find his last words, to make them meaningful. I have no idea if they were or not. When he spoke them, they came out on a bubbling river of blood that spilled out of his mouth and onto the dirt.
Where he fell, three seconds later, after I pulled my weapon free.
And there he lay, unmoving. Another dark stain on another patch of dark earth.
Just like the other four.
Once the air stopped ringing with steel and screams, I let my blade lower. My breath came out hot and my saliva came out red. My spittle fell and lay on the cheek of a woman’s body, but I didn’t think she’d mind—after all, it wasn’t the worst thing I had done to her. To any of them.
I’d given them every opportunity. I came wandering into their valley, my blade naked in my hand and my arms open and waiting. I came screaming my own name and cursing theirs. I came with no surprises, no stealth, no subtlety—just a sword and harsh language. And they were dead.
And I was still alive.
Assholes.
Credit where it’s due, they’d given it their best shot. My body was littered with cuts—grazes, a few gashes, one good gouge that I thought might have ended it—but the blood drying in the cold mountain air on my chest was mostly not my own. My breath was coming harsh in my lungs. My scars ached, my bones ached, my body ached. But it wasn’t ready to quit.
Which meant I still had a mage to kill.
I heard the click of a trigger, the thrum of a crossbow string, and the shriek of a bolt. I glanced up. A bolt as long as my arm flew past my head, jamming itself into a dead tree ten feet away.
I stared down a long stretch of dark earth. The young man holding an empty arbalest far too big for him stared back at me, dumbfounded. I sniffed, wiped blood from my cheek.
“Shit, kid,” I said. “I was standing still. I didn’t even see you. And you still missed.” I gestured to my body, spattered with the drying life of his comrades. “Do you need me to get closer?”
I started walking toward him, my sword hanging heavy in my hand. Then I started jogging. Only once I saw him grab a bolt did I start running.
He ceased to be a person and became a series of fumbles—fumbling lips struggling to find a word, fumbling hands struggling to load the arbalest. If I had waited long enough, he might have killed me.
But I wasn’t going to have it said that Sal the Cacophony was killed by some shithead who couldn’t even shoot straight.
The sound of dry earth cracking under my boots filled my ears. My sword sang in the air as I raised it high. All my aches and cuts were lost in the feel of my legs pumping, my heart beating, and the weapon in my hands screaming for more.
He fired again. The shot went even wider than before. He gave up, dropping the arbalest and reaching with shaking hands for his belt. I thought he was going to pull out that sword that was too big for him at his hip. Instead he pulled out a dented brass bugle and pressed it to his lips.
He let out two and a half blasts that echoed across the valley. The last half fell flat, just as the bugle fell from his hands as I brought the sword down across his chest. His life spattered the sky. He crumpled to his knees, along with his bugle and his crossbow, just another useless thing that hadn’t been able to kill me.
I watched him collapse, facedown, in the dirt. I felt a passing urge to flip him over, to give him the dignity of dying with his face up. But I couldn’t.
I didn’t want to know how young he was.
He’d died too quickly for me to get a good look at him, but I could tell from how he had fought that he wasn’t cut out for bandit life. Probably some peasant shithead, terrified of settling down and dying in whatever backwater township he’d been recruited from. I didn’t have to kill him, I knew. I could have disarmed him, broken his wrist, beat him savagely enough that he would have to crawl back to whatever life he’d had before.
Then again, he could have killed me. And we wouldn’t have been in this mess.
So, if you think about it, it’s really his fault.
A cold wind blew across the valley, sending my scarf whipping about my face. I pulled it up tighter over my head, stared down at his body, and wondered if he knew he was going to die like this when Cassa the Sorrow had pulled him into her gang.
My eyes were drawn to the great manor looming over the kingdom of cracked earth and dead trees that was the valley. Well, once-great manor. Long ago, some aristocratic Imperial fop had made it his vacation home among gentle brooks and rolling forests. War with the Revolution had found its way here, dried up the brooks, set fire to the forests, and the dilapidated estate had been left for whatever human scavengers could claim it.
Which, today, was a Vagrant whose name I had written down on a list long ago.
I’d tell you what she did to end up on that list, just like I’d tell you what that list was for. But given that I had just killed five people, I’m guessing you can probably figure it out.
I left the corpses in the dust as I walked toward the manor. My eyes drifted toward the boarded-up windows, searching for crossbows poking through the slats. But all that greeted me were shadows. Shadows and a big-ass pair of doors.
I stared at them for a moment, smacked my lips. I reached into my belt, pulled a flask free. I took a long swig and let the whiskey burn its way down my throat.
“No snipers,” I grunted. “They must have heard the bugle, though. So you figure that Cassa either doesn’t have enough weapons to go around or not enough thugs to use them. She hasn’t had time to recruit and arm herself. She came here in a hurry.”
I stared up at the crumbling, decaying manor.
“She’s scared,” I muttered.
In the cold, I could feel his warmth even more sharply than I normally could. Something burned at my hip, seething in his leather sheath. In a rattling brass laugh, the creature that always accompanied me spoke on a voice of smoke and flame.
“She should be.”
“Right.” I sniffed. “Still, she’s heard us coming. I’ll bet she’s waiting for us behind those doors, with whoever she’s got left, right?”
I reached into the sheath, pulled him free.
The Cacophony stared back at me through brass eyes.
“What do you say we knock?”
You’d call him a gun to look at him—a black hilt, a brass chamber and hammer and trigger, a barrel carved in the shape of a grinning dragon. But that’s only because you didn’t know him. He wasn’t like the crude hand cannons and gunpikes you see in the hands of fallen soldiers who thought too much and outlaws who thought too little.
The Cacophony was more than a weapon—particular in his tastes, elegant in his sensibilities, and absolute in his destruction.
“Let’s,” he hissed.
Also he talked.
So, that’s pretty weird.
I nodded, flipped his chamber open. I reached into my satchel and found a silver shell of a bullet. I ran my finger over the script on its surface.
Discordance.
Sloppy. Noisy. Perfect.
I slid the shell in. I slammed the chamber shut. I felt the Cacophony burning in my hand as I raised him and aimed him at the door.
And I pulled the trigger.
I know you’ve heard the tales about him—about the lone Vagrant’s grinning gun that shoots magic. Maybe you’ve heard the bullets that fly from him are enchanted, sorcerous, spellwritten. Maybe you’ve heard stories about what happens when that lone Vagrant pulls his trigger—laughing fires light up the sky, freezing ice blossoms in patches, walls of sound erupt and drown the screams of those people they sweep away like human trash every time the Cacophony fires.
They’re good stories.
But nothing like seeing it in action.
The shell flew from his barrel and struck the doors. Discordance erupted an instant later. The air rippled, wailing wind and cracking earth going silent in the wake of the percussive force that erupted to thunderous life. The force sent my scarf whipping about my face as a symphony was born into shrieking life. The Discordance shell tore earth apart, split timbers into splinters, sent shards of wood and rock flying as it punched a hole through the doors.
The stories you’ve heard are mostly true.
Mostly.
Loud as it was, I could still hear the screams.
The wall of sound dissipated after a moment, leaving behind a faint ringing in my ears and shattered timbers falling from the jagged hole torn through the doors. I waited a moment—for outlaws to come out with brandished blades or for a flurry of crossbow bolts to answer me—before I was convinced no one in there could kill me.
I sniffed, flipped the Cacophony’s chamber open, and fished three more shells out of my satchel: Hoarfrost, Hellfire, and… Steel Python?
I shook my head.
Not Steel Python. Just because we were trying to kill each other was no reason to get desperate.
I exchanged it for a Sunflare shell and slipped it into the chamber, slamming it shut and sliding the Cacophony back into his sheath. Sword in hand, I walked through the jagged hole, through a veil of rising dust, and into the manor-turned-fortress.
Scattered ancient opulence greeted me: overstuffed chairs that had been broken down into kindling, tables once used for decadent feasts repurposed as barricades, various portraits of various Imperial ancestors torn and turned into bedding. On either side of an extravagantly large living room, staircases rose to a balcony overlooking me. Once, before age and necessity had taken their toll, this manor must have been quite stately.
And, you know, before it was littered with bodies.
Cassa’s boys and girls lay scattered across the floor. Discordance had flung them, their weapons, and their makeshift barricade all over the room. Some lay groaning with twitching limbs, reaching for fallen swords and gunpikes. Others lay screaming, shards of wood lodged in legs or ribs from landing on a shattered banister or jagged plank. Some simply lay, motionless, soundless.
I paid them only as much attention as it took to find the least injured.
I wasn’t here for them.
I found him, a grizzled-looking older fellow, inching across the floor, using the only limb that still worked. His trembling hand reached out for the heavy arbalest lying nearby, fingers shaking. He let out a scream as my sword came down, punching through his hand.
I’d have felt bad about that.
You know, if he hadn’t been reaching for a weapon to shoot me with.
I waited for the screaming to abate to a whimper before I squatted down beside him. He looked up at me, his face mapped by a respectable amount of scars and wrinkles—no wide-eyed youth taken in with the romance of banditry. I was dealing with a veteran. Hopefully that meant this would be easy.
“Where’s Cassa the Sorrow?” I asked.
“Fuck… you…,” he spat.
But you know what they say about hope in the Scar.
It’s about as much use as a hand with a sword through it.
“He’s feeling pugnacious, isn’t he?” the Cacophony giggled from his sheath. “Draw me. Let us show him our diplomatic skill.”
I refrained from taking that advice. While I had no doubt that the Cacophony was indeed skilled in diplomacy, I also knew that his definition of diplomacy usually involved shooting people until the ones left alive gave him what he wanted. And while that was occasionally tempting, I knew a better way.
I sighed, laying my hand on the hilt of the sword, and leaned closer to him. He flinched away, anticipating a fist in his face or worse.
“What’s your name?”
He hadn’t anticipated that.
“W-what?” he gasped.
“Your name,” I said. “Either the one you were born with or the one you took when you started working for her. I know Vagrants like their henchmen to have fancy names.”
His eyes hardened as he sucked back pain through his teeth.
“Rishas,” he answered.
I kept his eyes in mine as I nodded slowly, weighing the name on my tongue.
“How old are you, Rishas?”
“Fuck y—”
He hadn’t been anticipating my fist that time, but it found his cheek all the same.
“There’s no need to be uncivilized about this,” I said, as soft as my blow hadn’t been. I glanced at my sword. “Any more than we already have been, anyway. I’d hate for your last impression of me to be unmerciful, so let’s just make this easy, shall we? How old are you?”
He hesitated, whether through pride or pain, I didn’t know. He eventually answered, all the same.
“Forty-four,” he grunted.
“Forty-four,” I repeated. “That’s old for an outlaw. You didn’t get that old by being stupid, did you?”
He said nothing. The silence drew out between us for a long moment before I broke it.
“You know my name?”
He stared at me, opened his mouth like he wanted to curse. Instead, a thin dribble of blood came out as he pursed his lips and nodded.
“She tell it to you?” I asked.
Again, he nodded.
“You know who I am, then,” I said. “And you know that I didn’t come all the way to this valley to kill old outlaws.” I glanced over my shoulder at his companions—the ones who were still moving and the ones who had stopped. “Your friends might think that loyalty will be rewarded, that they’ll get rich or favored if they keep fighting. But it’s not going to make their bones any less broken.” I looked back at him. “Is it?”
He shut his eyes tight.
“I’ll bet Cassa isn’t the first Vagrant you’ve fought under,” I said. “You’ve probably served with dozens of renegade mages, am I right? You know what they’re like—they see you as tools, like their magic, except less impressive and more disposable. You know that they wouldn’t die for a nul like you.”
I drummed my fingers upon the hilt of the blade.
“I’m ready to kill you to get to her, Rishas,” I said. “Are you ready to die to keep her from me?”
Rishas drew in a breath and held it. He shuddered with whatever pain wracked his body. He looked away from me, down to the pool of blood that had formed beneath his hand.
“Joined with her six days ago,” he grunted. “She told me that a Vagrant was after her. When I heard it was you, I damn near turned right around. Thought, after what I’d heard you and that fucking gun of yours had done in Lastlight, there’d be no sense in fighting a legend like you.”
I was grateful my face was hidden behind my scarf. After I’d put a sword through his hand, it would have just seemed cruel to show him the shit-eating grin on my face.
“Of course, you look beat to fucking hell right now,” he grunted, looking back at me. “So you can’t be as legendary as she thinks you are.”
And then I was decidedly less pleased that my face was hidden, because I would have really liked him to see on my face what I was about to do next.
I twisted the blade, drawing a scream out of him. Not that it served any purpose, really. Regardless of what you’ve been led to believe, torture doesn’t actually do anything other than get someone to tell you a bunch of lies you want to hear. Maybe I did it out of spite.
Or maybe I just didn’t like being reminded that, for all my best efforts and theirs, I was still alive.
“FUCK,” he squealed.
“Did she tell you I’d do that?” I asked. “Did she tell you everything else I’d do if you don’t tell me where the fuck she is? She can’t be worth it, Rishas.”
“Yeah… I used to think so…,” he rasped. “Had a thought that I wouldn’t be much more than a distraction to someone like you.”
“You should have listened to it.”
“As it turns out…”
He looked at me. He smiled a grin full of blood and laughed.
“Sometimes that’s enough.”
I’d have asked him what he meant, but I didn’t have to.
Not once I heard the Lady Merchant’s song.
