Ten Arrows of Iron, page 50
So I can see how you might have thought smashing it would be a bad idea.
But fuck, I couldn’t think of anything else. I couldn’t think of anything except that wide stare and how badly I needed to get away from it.
Liette was still rummaging through her books. She didn’t notice as I slid a hand down to the Cacophony, nor did she notice me wrapping my hand around his hilt. Whatever this thing was, I wagered a magic gun would stand a better chance of breaking it than any sword.
But when I reached out to him, when I tried to draw him, he would not come.
That hadn’t happened before.
I pulled on his hilt, but the gun remained firmly in his sheath, refusing to be drawn. I squinted at him, waiting for some snide remark, some hissing chastisement, some sign that I’d insulted him. That wouldn’t have been surprising. But he remained quiet, cold, and useless as a lump of brass.
Mind you, when you deal with a magical firearm that eats people, you learn not to let a lot of stuff bother you. But this did.
This was the first time I’d seen the Cacophony afraid.
“Ah, here it is.”
Liette came back, taking several breaths to blow a considerable layer of dust off a rather flimsy-looking tome that looked bound together in straps of rawhide and wood.
“The hell is that?” I asked. “A how-to guide for flying poop?”
She squinted at me. “What? No. How would… what would the parameters of that even be and…” She waved a hand, promptly derailing whatever train of thought that had been. “No, this is a history book.”
“That’s too thin for a history book.”
“I will take both your observation, and the fact that you have only ever read books that use the word throbbing liberally, into consideration.” She hummed as she flipped through its crumbling pages. “On the histories of nations, customs, and kings, we are inundated with records. On the histories of what came before them, less so. But…” She tapped a page. “Here. Look.”
I squinted at the page. There, in faded and withered ink, was an illustration of buildings. Though, only barely. Those parts that weren’t in utter ruin were of indecipherable geometry and incoherent purpose. I didn’t know their function, but I knew them.
You saw these ruins crop up across the Scar now and again: ancient sites found anywhere from rolling plains to hidden beneath caverns. Sometimes, people built freeholds around them. More often, they ended up destroyed by scavengers or bandits, or in battles between the Revolution and Imperium. Occasionally, they just… disappeared, vanishing overnight to appear somewhere else in another year, as though they’d always stood there.
Don’t get me wrong, that was weird. But in the Scar, I don’t have a lot of attention to spare for things that are merely weird and not actively trying to kill me. I’d seen these around before but never gave them any thought. Judging by the flimsiness of this text, I doubted anyone else did, either.
Except Liette, apparently.
“This is the work of a Freemaker, Cold Comfort for a Dying Widow,” she said. “She dedicated her life to detailing the history of those who occupied the Scar before us. The fact that she could accumulate so little is a testament to the difficulty of the task. But she was able to date this ruin accurately.”
Liette beamed at me the way she did whenever she was about to solve a puzzle. Or whenever she saw a dog. She fucking loves those things.
“This ruin goes back over five hundred thousand years. Do you see?” She gestured to the turd. “The entity is an Ancient!”
I glanced at the turd. “Is that what you call yourself?”
“There is no people that refer to themselves by such a pretension, but if it elicits joy from you to do such, I would not deny you such trivial pleasure.”
I wondered, absently, if that book mentioned these Ancients being assholes.
“However, your information is accurate. That structure was wrought by our hand.”
“Incredible,” Liette whispered, breathless. “Who built it? Which one of you? How did you do it?”
“It does not matter.”
“What? How could it not? We haven’t even begun to guess the function of them!”
“It does not matter for the same reason their function does not matter. We wished it to be there, so it was. We wished it to serve us, so it did. We plucked it, whole and complete, from where it was and placed it where it needed to be.”
“How… how is that possible? Through magic?”
“If it pleases you to think of it as such. We had no word for what we did. We simply did. We simply were.” Eldest’s eye narrowed. “And when that was no longer enough, we simply were not.”
Liette wanted to ask more, I could tell by the way she was vibrating in her shoes. But in my experience, anyone annoying enough to speak in cryptic gibberish tended to tell you everything, whether you asked or not.
“When this world was young…”
See?
“We were not unlike you. We strove to collect knowledge, to understand the land we walked upon, the air we breathed, the stars we looked upon. We were concerned with such petty things back then, and our knowledge was in pursuit of that pettiness. We discovered ways to defy age, to free ourselves from hunger and desire, to cast out our weaknesses, in our quest to know everything. And one day… we simply did.”
“Everything?” Liette whispered, wrinkling her nose. “That’s impossible.”
“Everything is impossible. Until it is not. For us, nothing was. And when nothing was, we saw no need to remain here. And we ascended.”
“Ascended…” I squinted. “To where?”
“We have no name for where we went. It was unimportant to us. In time, we saw that it was not so far away from this world as we thought it was. As time went on, we realized it was painfully close. Soon, we could hear whispers without mouths, see visions of lives not our own.”
“Ours,” Liette whispered. “You saw us. Is your world that close to us?”
“Closer. When the time is correct, and when we are invited, we may even cross over.”
My eyes widened. My voice died. My breath died in my throat.
One after another, the realizations came flooding into me on a cold-blooded river: the dread sensation that came with its voice, the emptiness in its stare, the terrible familiarity that came from looking at it. I knew this thing. I’d fought this thing. This thing had nearly killed me. Twice.
My hand shot out, seized Liette by the shoulder. She let out a cry as I hauled her back, putting myself between the jar and her. She shot me a furious scowl, but I could live with that. More than I could live with her getting torn apart by what this thing could do, anyway.
“Sal!” she snapped. “What are you doing?”
“Protecting you,” I said. “Get out of here before it moves.”
“This is unnecessary,” Eldest said.
“I quite agree,” Liette added. “What do you think—”
“I don’t think shit,” I snarled, whirling on her. “I know what that thing is.” I leveled a finger at Eldest. “It’s the smallest one I’ve ever seen, but I know a fucking Scrath when I see it.”
I felt Liette wither behind me. I heard her breath run dry. I knew whatever objections to my reaction she might have been thinking of, they were gone now.
When it came to Scraths, there was no such thing as an overreaction.
We didn’t know much about them, those things that came from somewhere else, that warped reality with every unnatural breath, that wore humans like clothing and discarded them just as fast. Everything we did know came only by sifting through the body parts they left behind.
We knew they could be called to our world by a select few—fewer, now that I’d killed Vraki. We knew they could exist only by occupying a human host. We knew they couldn’t be stopped, killed, contained, reasoned with, appealed to, bribed, seduced, or anything that didn’t end up with them tearing apart everything they came across.
Now, I guess, we knew that they could do… whatever the fuck Eldest was doing.
“Is that true?” Liette whispered. “Eldest, are you a…”
Its eye quivered for a moment. “Yes.”
“There, see?” I reached for the jar. “Once again, we could have saved ourselves valuable time and energy if you’d just let me smash the shit out of it to begin with. Open a window, would you?”
“And no,” Eldest suddenly interjected. “To your eyes, I would not be dissimilar. Yet there remains a difference between myself and that which has come before.”
That was a good point, I had to admit. But I was already excited to destroy this thing, so…
“Wait.” Liette, like the adorable little pain in the ass she was, seized my arm to stop me. “What do you mean by that?”
“Your heart beats, pushes blood through your veins, propels you to motion. The process is the same in any beast. Yet you are not the same as a bird or a cat, are you?” If there were a way for an eyeball to look smug, Eldest would. “The principle is the same. We share lineage, the Scraths and I. We are not siblings.”
“But if Scraths can only come here when called,” Liette whispered, “then how did you get to be here?”
“Don’t talk to it, Liette,” I warned.
“Simple. I was cast out.”
“What? By whom?”
“It doesn’t matter, Liette,” I growled.
“Family, you would call them. Compelled by envy. Or resentment. I do not know. And ages spent inside that prison—the Relic, you called it—have diminished my curiosity toward their motivations. I think of only one thing now.”
“Incredible,” Liette whispered, pushing closer. “How did you send yourself out of the Relic? Are there more of you inside other Relics? What is it you want?”
“I… want…”
Eldest’s eye widened. I shouted her name. I pulled her back. The thing uttered a single word.
“OUT.”
Pain. Not dread. Not unease. Pain shot through me at its voice, lancing through my bones, my sinew…
My scars.
I clutched my chest, gasping for breath. Agony flooded my senses, painting my vision dark, my body numb, filling my ears with the sound of a ringing, wailing, screeching disharmony that shook me down to my skull. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t hear…
“Sal.”
Except one voice.
“No, no, no. Not like this.”
Whispering. Urgent. Terrified.
“I was so close.”
And it made everything hurt less.
Just a little.
Feeling returned first, the sensation of her hands on my cheeks, and everything else followed the tips of her fingers. My hearing brought me back to the din of the airship. I felt the splintered deck under me—when had I fallen down? My vision returned.
She was standing over me.
“Are you all right?” she whispered. “It… it spoke and you just—”
“Yeah,” I muttered, clambering to my feet with no small effort. “I did. Which is why we need to destroy it.”
“I… I don’t…” She looked from me, back to Eldest—to the Scrath—and doubt painted her features. “It’s… so…”
“Liette.” I forced her name through my teeth. “It’s a Scrath. You know what they do. You’ve seen what they do.”
“I have,” she replied, pointedly not meeting my gaze. “And I’ve never seen one speak before. Not like this.”
“For fuck’s sake,” I almost whined. “You’re too smart not to realize that an unnatural killing machine that talks pretty is still an unnatural killing machine. Get rid of it, Liette.”
She closed her eyes. She swallowed something bitter. “I can’t. Second law. It helped me. I can’t turn my back on it.”
“The fuck you can’t. Just step aside and let me do it, then.”
“I can’t do that, either.” When she could bear to look at me again, her eyes were pained. “Sal, whatever this thing is—Scrath or not—it can do things we thought impossible. It heals illnesses, it creates matter, it alters time. Think of all that we can do with that.”
“I am thinking of that,” I said. “I’m thinking of what illnesses it can cause, what matter it can destroy, how fucking insane it is to try to alter time. You could do amazing things with it, I don’t doubt.” I reached out and tapped her head. “Now think of all the terrible things it could do with you.”
She slapped my hand away. “I am always thinking. I have considered everything and any eventuality that may come up will be dealt with in a manner befitting my—”
“Oh, listen to your fucking self. No matter how fucking smart you are, that thing is a Scrath. You can’t reason with it. You can’t outsmart it. You can’t use it.”
“Don’t fucking tell me what I can’t do,” she snapped back, composure trembling out of her through her fists. “I am Twenty-Two Dead Roses in a Chipped Porcelain Vase. I brought down cities with a formula and killed barons with a sentence. If there is anything in this thing that can be used for any good and anyone in the world capable of using it, it’s me. So if you can kindly remember that you’re speaking to a fucking genius, it would be vastly appreciated.”
“It’s a MONSTER!” I screamed.
“SO ARE YOU!” she screamed back.
I recoiled. I stared. My mouth hung open.
I’ve been stabbed before. I’ve been shot. I’ve been strangled, punched, gored, bitten, burned, hurled, and broken before.
I would have rather gone through each and every one of those for every day I drew breath on this dark earth than hear her say that.
Shock painted her face. Pain was there, too. But there was no apology. There was no need for one. We both knew what I’d done to deserve that name. We both knew there was no taking it back.
“Sal,” she whispered, “I…”
“Don’t.” I shook my head. “No more words.”
That was more for me than for her. If I said anything else, if I even opened my mouth, well…
I wasn’t going to have it said that Sal the Cacophony broke down crying.
It had been a mistake to follow her here. A mistake to look into those eyes of hers again. A mistake to think that this was anything other than what it had always been: a bunch of bodies for me to kill so we could steal something and use it to kill more people. I knew that now. Maybe I always had.
I pulled my scarf up around my face. I headed back toward the door. I ignored her eyes upon me, the words dangling on her lips as she searched for something to say, the perfect word to make this better. My hand lingered on the handle, like I was waiting for her to find it.
But she was the smartest person in the Scar. She knew fucking well no such word existed.
So I made ready to leave again. Maybe I’d find the nearest squadron of Revolutionary soldiers and start shooting and hope for the best. Or maybe I’d just head to the edge of the deck and hurl myself off. Either way, I’d be leaving her here.
Her, I thought as I glanced behind me, and that fucking piece of…
I paused.
In the jar, Eldest was staring at me. Staring… and smiling.
Through the mouth it had suddenly grown.
How had it grown that? Could it always? What made it do that? My mind flooded with questions, but once I looked at its eye and saw it darkened by that hungry void of a pupil, I realized the answer.
And that’s exactly the moment the door exploded.
An eruption of sound and smoke. The sting of a severium charge assaulted my nostrils. Wood splintered and metal hinges went flying as the impact of a bullet punched through the door and caught me square in the belly.
Liette screamed as I went flying backward. My breath rushed out of me. My body was alive with pain. But it was still alive—I saw the sigils on my scarf glow brightly before fizzling out, the luckwritten enchantment on it having kept me alive through the blow.
I skidded along the floor. Through a cloud of severium smoke, a figure came rushing toward me. I jerked my sword free, reached out to thrust at my assailant. Another blade shot out quicker, though, batted mine aside and brought a hilt cracking against my jaw.
I fell to the floor. A boot came down upon my wrist. A blade came down to level its tip at my throat. A voice, jagged and sharp as a rough-hewn dagger, punched into my ears.
“Sal the Cacophony,” a woman snarled. “In the name of the Great General and the Glorious Revolution of the Fist and Flame, I hereby sentence you to death.”
I looked up into a pair of dark eyes looking just as pissed off as the day I’d first seen them. The day they sentenced me to death the first time.
“Tretta Stern,” I said, coughing up blood. “Had I known you’d be here, I’d have brought flowers.”
FORTY-THREE
THE IRON FLEET
Okay, so.
The initial attack on the airships did not go as planned. That’s bad.
The Relic we’ve been chasing is actually some kind of cell for an otherworldly being capable of changing reality. That’s really bad.
That otherworldly being is actually a creature of unimaginable horror and unstoppable power and it wants out. That’s extremely bad.
I would forgive you for thinking that I was being just a touch short-sighted for thinking that running into ex-lovers all day long was probably the worst thing to happen to me that day.
“I’ve been waiting for months for the chance to kill you, Cacophony.”
But I hope you could see where I was coming from.
Granted, Tretta Stern—the woman I was captured by, about to be executed by, then escaped from by setting fire to her city—wasn’t exactly an ex. But she was currently tying me up. So, you know, close enough.
“Every moment I’m awake, every dream when I sleep, I see your face.”
See?
She spoke sharply between the hissing of hemp as she secured my hands behind me. “All these months after my failure, the only thing that’s kept me going is that image and the thought of putting a bullet through it.”
It was kind of a shame that she was getting ready to kill me, because except for that last bit, that all sounded kind of sweet.
