Ten Arrows of Iron, page 34
SHE’S. NOT. REAL.
“And see the ashes you left behind?”
Darrish stopped. She raised a hand and pointed over my shoulder.
I shouldn’t have turned around.
But I did.
Flames lapped the hall behind me from doorways, red tongues from black maws belching smoke. There, standing frail and delicate and fleeting as ashes on the wind, I saw another woman.
She stared at me, with big eyes behind big glasses, and terror on her face. She raised a hand to me and whispered.
“Sal…”
I raised a hand to her.
And screamed.
“LIETTE!”
The flames swallowed her. She disappeared. Only ashes were left behind.
“The fire’s getting warmer, Salazanca,” Darrish chuckled behind me.
I shouted, flicked my shield out, ready to whirl and smash it across her face. But when I turned to her, she was gone. In her place stood a charred husk of a human, blackened but for the broad smile painted across her sunken face.
“Better run.”
I blinked.
She was gone. Liette was gone. Neither had been real.
But the fire had been. And it wasn’t gone.
I kept going. Stopping had given my body a chance to realize how tired it was. Every step was punctuated by a wince, a hack, an ache that would revisit me every morning until the day I died. Assuming I made it out.
But I kept going. Pursued by fire and smoke, I kept going until the great hall gave way to a great doorway that gave way to an immense room.
Cold wind buffeted me as I stepped in, plastering the blood and sweat to my skin. Nests, perches, toys, and the grisly remains of large animals that had been the birds’ meals scattered the wooden floor. The rookery’s northern wall was completely gone, replaced by a pair of gigantic doors that had been blown off its hinges, glowing sigils etched into its edges.
A Spellwright’s sigils. But where was the Spellwright?
“Is it looking at me? Oh, Scions, I think it’s looking at me.”
Ah. There.
The Oyakai stood huddled upon the floor, unfazed by the apparent destruction of their home or the death of their previous master. They crouched around Tuteng, the Rukkokri taking a moment to press his horned brow against each of their heads, whispering words I couldn’t hear over the sound of someone screaming.
“I can’t! I can’t!” Urda stood in the grip of Jero, who was attempting to shove him toward one of the crouching birds. “It’s… it’s dangerous!”
“You just took a magical doorway from nowhere into the middle of a gigantic manor on fucking fire,” Jero snapped as he struggled with the wright. “How the hell is a bird more dangerous than that?”
“It’s unsanitary! What if it pecks me? What if it scratches me? I could get diseases! Like…” He swallowed hard. “Featherwretch.”
“That’s not a real thing!”
“You don’t know that! Nobody knows that! This is completely uncharted territory! I refuse to be the first patient to die of—”
“Fucking move it along already, Mayor Shitshoes.” Yria shoved Urda toward the bird with the only arm that still worked. The portal magic had taken too much out of her—her right arm hung dead at her side, her left leg dragging behind her as she stalked after her brother. “My arm’s fucking shot to hell, so you’re gonna have to drive this thing.”
“H-how? I’ve never even touched a bird!”
“Tuteng has handled it,” Jero replied. “Just hold the reins and get the fuck on!”
“Th-there must be another way!” Urda protested. “There has to—”
Yria’s hand shot out as she took her brother by the collar and forced him to look at her.
“What’d I tell you after Mom died?” she asked.
He stared at her, eyes quivering. He swallowed hard, nodded. She nodded back, released him. With only the faintest of whining sounds, they pushed him into the beast’s saddle. With a grunt of effort, he helped Yria up behind him.
“Meet at the rendezvous. We’ll be right behind you.” He glanced to the Clansman nearby. “Tuteng!”
The Clansman’s brows furrowed beneath his horns as he met the bird’s stare. He gave the creature a brief pat on its beak and a whisper. The creature closed its eyes, rose on its long legs, and started sprinting toward the blown-off doors.
“NononononoNONONONONONONONO—”
Urda’s protests were lost in the cry of the bird as the Oyakai spread its wings, leapt from the floor, and took flight into the night. Coiling smoke and falling snow parted before it, as though afraid of sullying such a creature. They did not resume until the Oyakai’s dark feathers disappeared into the night.
“Okay.” Jero wiped sweat from his brow. “We’ve got to get the rest of them—” He turned. And saw me. “Ah, shit.”
His eyes didn’t go wide with shock. His mouth didn’t fumble for excuses. He stared at me, worry etched in his wrinkles, with wary disbelief. I’d seen that look before, in the hundred eyes of a hundred faces of a hundred people who thought me dead, right before I put a sword through them.
“Sal,” he whispered my name as I approached. “You made it.”
“Yeah.” I wiped blood from my face with the back of my hand. “I’m good at that, turns out.”
I didn’t recognize the man staring at me, this mess of wounds and wrinkles like scars. I didn’t see the man with the soft eyes that had met me on a cold night in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t find the man with the nice smile who had poured me wine and sat with me and pretended we were both normal. I had no idea where the man was who had traded with me, in quiet words that only people like us spoke, the secrets we kept close as our cuts.
This man—this man with every muscle drawn taut, bristling with pain and fear—I didn’t recognize.
But that look… that wild-eyed, ready-to-kill look…
I knew that look.
“Listen,” he whispered, letting out a breath. “I need to tell you—”
“You need to shut up,” I replied. “And you need to get out of here.” I gestured back toward the rising smoke. “Everyone does.”
He opened his mouth like he wanted to say something. I narrowed my eyes like he really shouldn’t. Whatever he had to say, I wanted to hear when I was in better shape to strangle him.
Instead, he nodded weakly and gestured toward one of the Oyakai. He held out his hand to help me up into the saddle. I stared at him until he withdrew it. And then withdrew ten more paces.
I reached up to grab the bird’s saddle. Pain flared inside me—pain from the drugs, the burns, the wounds. I gritted my teeth, bit them back.
“Leaving so soon?”
But wouldn’t you know it, that’s when I found another pain in my ass.
His voice came as languid as his stride, a slender man strolling into the rookery as though he were leaving a nice restaurant and not a manor filled to the brim with flame. His clothes were shredded, torn by the dozen wounds and singed by the dozen burns across his body. Yet for all that, his gaze was steady and unbothered beneath the bony plate jutting from his forehead.
Dalthoros.
For a minute there, I thought I was really going to get out of here without some last-minute birdshit like this.
“Personally, I can forgive the mess you made.” He brushed ashes from his bare shoulder. “Really, I lament the loss of the artwork more than the loss of the nobles you slew. However.”
He narrowed his eyes. Purple light flashed behind them. The Lady Merchant’s song rose, clear as a bell over the sound of flame.
He was a mage.
Of course he was a mage.
Why the fuck wouldn’t he be?
“The captain is of the belief that all citizens of the Imperium, no matter how foppish, are worthy of her protection. It is the mandate of her rank as Sword of the Empress and the mandate of our mission here.”
His skin rippled like water. Across his body, his wounds began to close themselves shut. The reddened flesh of his burns returned to a healthy pink. In the span it took me to realize how deep the shit I was in went, he stood up, hale, hearty, and ready to fight again.
A Mendmage.
A fucking Mendmage.
He was fresh, I was wiped. He was strong, I was weak. And even if I did manage to somehow muster the energy to give him a bloody nose, he could regenerate in the blink of an eye.
My skin burned, my blood burned, my skull burned. Yet somehow, I felt something very cold settle in the pit of my belly.
“An insult to the Imperium, I can handle.”
Dalthoros started walking toward me. I set my feet.
“An insult to the Empress, I do not mind.”
He raised his sword. I flicked my shield out.
“But an insult to the captain?” He shook his head. “That I cannot abide. Whatever Vagrant god you believe in, I suggest you make peace with, for I shall leave nothing to—”
He didn’t finish that sentence.
Well, he did, but I’m not sure the gurgling noise he made when five delicate fingers wrapped around his throat counted as words.
The hand on his neck was joined by another that seized his ankle. His eyes bulged out in confusion, his mouth struggling to find the breath to scream as he was hoisted into the air. Terror bloomed across his face as he was leveled like a javelin at the wall.
And promptly hurled.
His body struck the stone. There was a thick, wet snapping sound. He crumpled bodily to the floor, where he lay.
Agne, covered in soot and stains, glanced from the man she had just hurled back toward me.
“Sorry,” she said. “Were you and he about to do a thing?”
I blinked at the crumpled mess that had been Dalthoros before shaking my head.
“No, I’m fine.”
“Good, good.” Agne stalked forward and I could see there wasn’t a scratch on her. She approached a larger Oyakai with deep azure feathers. “I’m taking this bird, if no one minds.”
After that, she could have taken my virginity and I wouldn’t have minded.
We mounted in short order, Tuteng at our head. He waved a hand. The Oyakai responded to whatever strange power he had, taking off at a run. One by one, the birds leapt into the air. One by one, they spread their wings.
And we took flight.
The smoke and heat fell away. The night air, cold and sweet and painfully clean, hit my face, filled my lungs. Snow fell and melted upon my skin and the pain melted with it. I breathed so deep I thought I might faint and fall off the bird’s saddle.
But I didn’t. I flew out into the night, behind the rest of the birds we had stolen, ahead of the fire I had set. With every breath I took, I whispered into the wind.
“I made it.”
After everything, every lie, every wound, every shitty thing I did, we had done it. The birds were ours. The plan was secure. I was alive.
Somehow.
I looked over my shoulder. The fires had consumed the manor entirely, lighting up the night sky like a funeral pyre. And at its center, unbothered by flame or the carcasses blackening around its feet, the effigy stood.
Its empty gaze was canted upward. Its single eye, cold and blue, was fixed upon me. Its red heart beat.
Perfectly in tune with mine.
TWENTY-SEVEN
LITTLEBARROW
Suffering had a way of making the world seem too small.
It was the first thing Meret had learned when he came to the Borrus Valley, in the aftermath of that great war that shook the region. When faced with all of it—the broken limbs that wouldn’t heal right, the night terrors that kept people from sleeping, the times when people just broke down crying for no reason—it all seemed so… suffocating.
It shamed him, sometimes, to think of it like that. But he had no other word for it. It tightened around his neck, the suffering, like a noose. Village to village, home to home, it was always there. Always present, in some form or another. Always closing in a little tighter, every time he took a breath.
Maybe that’s why he kept moving on.
It hadn’t occurred to him, until he had met the scarred woman with the big gun, just how big the Scar was and what kind of horrors he had been lucky to avoid. He’d heard stories of the fanatics of Haven and their monsters, but they’d always seemed just that: stories, far away from his work and the people who needed it. Hell, even the Imperium that owned the Valley sometimes felt like a myth—he’d only ever seen mages from afar.
But this story she told him… it was too much.
It had too much fire and screaming and death. There were too many monsters and not enough heroes to stop them. It was all the wars he’d struggled to avoid and all the blood he’d hoped to move on from. Now it, all of it, and the woman who sparked it all off had crash-landed in his township.
Maybe that’s why he stood up and gasped out, “I need some air.”
Sal looked up from across the table. “You feeling all right?”
No, he thought.
“Yeah,” he said, his head bobbing in slack agreement. “Yeah, I’m… I just…” He fumbled with his hands before patting his legs. “Blood clots build up if you don’t move around, you know? They can kill you.”
“Really?” Sal leaned back, scratched herself. “What a sad way to go.”
Better than being burned alive.
“Right. Sad,” he said. “So I’m just going to… you know…”
She stared at him, her blue eyes empty and her lips pursed. For a moment, he wondered if she was about to call his bluff, if she knew what he was about to do. But if she did, she didn’t show it as she inclined her head.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll be here.”
He nodded again, dumbly. He stumbled toward the door. He walked until he was sure he was out of sight of the windows.
And he started running.
He tore his way down to the bottom of the hill, stumbling over rocks and bushes, letting cold air fill his lungs, not stopping until he’d run enough that exhaustion overtook fear. He bent over, hands on his knees, eyes wide and unblinking.
Monsters, he told himself. She fights monsters. She burns cities. She kills people. She’s a Vagrant, a fucking magical murderer in a war brimming with magical murderers. How long until they follow her here? How long until it’s another war?
He swept his gaze over Littlebarrow, over its humble houses that he’d come to know so well. He caught himself staring, trying to picture them engulfed in flames, trying to see the trenches that would be dug into fields to hold all the bodies. How long would it be before Old Man Rittish’s house was kindling by some spell or cannon? How long would it be before Danisca and her three children were crushed beneath the foot of some monster?
How long, he wondered, would it be before they realized it had happened because of him?
Sindra was right, he told himself. You brought her here. You let her stay here. You did this. You did this. You did this. You did this. You—
“Meret?”
A raspy voice, one usually accompanied by complaints of bad joints and bad weather, reached his ears. Rodic, all thin angles and gray hairs, stood nearby, beside a run-down old bird yoked to an even more run-down old cart, brimming with possessions.
“Are you well, young man?” Rodic was years gone from Imperial territory, but his accent hadn’t faded with age or distance. “You look as though you’re going to vomit.”
He hadn’t actually thought he would vomit until Rodic mentioned it. So he kept his answer a short, gurgling, “I’m all right.” He glanced to the cart, looked over its possessions. “You’re… leaving?”
His face curled into a severe frown. “Not by choice. I’ve held this home for forty years and six children. I’d rather not abandon it.” He gestured vaguely down the road. “But I’d rather less see that done to it.”
Lady Kalavin’s home. Opulent and austere, even in ruin. Sal’s gun had shorn the top of it clear off, the shattered timbers of its second floor standing like a crown of splinters and broken furniture. That house had withstood six bandit raids, the local lore went. Over a hundred men with a hundred weapons.
And Sal had destroyed it with just one shot.
“More are leaving,” Rodic said. “Except Sindra. I thought I’d wait it out with her, but she…” He sighed, a cloud of cold breath trailing out from weary lips. “She said there was no mercy in that Vagrant.”
She’s right, he told himself. She was always right.
“Rodic,” Meret said, “I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s not your fault.” Rodic held up a hand to stop his apology. “And you’ve done too much good for Littlebarrow for me to begrudge you trying to do a little more. But, Meret…” He looked back up the hill, cringing, as if he expected Sal to burst out at any minute and start shooting again. “She’s not worth it.”
He swallowed. “Not worth what?”
“The town, the struggle, whatever you’re putting yourself through to try and help her.” His eyes narrowed. “You ever seen a Vagrant’s work, Meret?”
“I’ve seen some traces of the war around here and—”
“Then you’ve seen the work of civilized people pushed too far. But a Vagrant…” His lip stiffened, his breath coming more shakily. “I was traveling from Bentpine, up the road, after delivering some lumber there, six years back. I’d gotten half a day out when I remembered I hadn’t gotten the credit notice signed. I went back and…”
His voice drifted off into the cold, became one more piece of snow falling on the ground.
“And what?” Meret pressed.
“And… nothing,” he whispered. “The town was gone. Torn down to its foundations. The people were scattered about, impaled on the ruins of their homes, or smashed against the streets. Over six hundred people. Gone in less than a day. I learned later that it was the work of a Skymage—Vantha the Zephyr or something like that. She hadn’t taken a damn thing from them. She hadn’t offered any demands. She had no reason at all. She just showed up and…”
He shuddered, took in a deep breath. “War makes animals out of people, Meret, but they eventually change back into people. Vagrants, though… Vagrants aren’t even animals. Animals have a reason for killing.” He glanced back at Meret’s house. “Listen… there’s room in the cart. And the old lady”—he gestured to his bird—“is still staunch. She’ll get us to the next town by sunup. Come with me, Meret. You don’t want to be around when what happened to Bentpine happens here.”
