Ten Arrows of Iron, page 52
She stood, feet planted on the ground, hands clutched into fists at her sides. Her mouth was contorted and trembling like she was about to carve a bullet six days old out of her. I didn’t know what pain ran through her, what memory the Lady Merchant wouldn’t let her forget. But I knew she was looking straight at me, unflinching.
And there was only pain in her eyes.
“For?” I asked.
Her eyes sank a little, along with her frown. “I… don’t know.”
“You came all the way down here to say that?” I placed a hand to my chest in shock. “Well, gracious me, all is forgiven, then. Don’t I feel fucking silly for holding a grudge over you leaving me to die on the floor?”
She winced. “I deserve that.”
“You deserve worse.”
“That too.” She closed her eyes, pursed her lips. “All these years, all this time, I haven’t been able to think about anything else. I’ve spent days of my life trying to think what I could have done, what I might have—”
“Fuck’s sake, do you think that makes it better?”
I stormed off the bench, seized the bars, like if I just got angry enough I could bend them and get at her. But contrary to whatever stories you’ve heard, anger isn’t enough. With steel, with flame, it’s something terrible and great.
By itself, anger is just something you do when you’ve run out of tears.
“What did you think? Did you think this was some bad opera? That I just needed an elaborate enough apology? That you could sing a pretty song about how bad you feel and I’d forgive you?”
She said nothing. In her silence, the rattle of metal echoed as I slammed my fist against the bars.
“DID YOU?”
“No!” she shouted back. “I didn’t think that! I didn’t… I wasn’t thinking about that… about…”
“About what?” I roared back at her. “About what you took from me? About this?” I gestured to the scar running down my body. “It was my magic, Darrishana. It was a part of me. And you just stood back and watched them do it. You didn’t say a word. You couldn’t even look me in the eye.”
Just like she couldn’t now. Just like how she hugged herself the way she did when she wanted to disappear. Just like how I used to think that was adorable, how I lived to see her happy. And how all it did now was make some part of me wish I had a sword.
“It was mine,” I growled again. “And you took it from me. You took the sky from me. I was Red Cloud and you took that from me. Why, Darrish?” Silence. I smashed the bars again. “WHY?”
“BECAUSE I WAS TERRIFIED OF YOU!”
Now she looked at me. Now with tears. Now with legs shaking so bad she had to lean on the wall and with a face that looked like she would rather I have just punched her.
“Of you,” she whispered, “of Red Cloud. I watched you fly into the sky, I watched you burn people, and when you came back down, I recognized you a little less. I didn’t know when you would come down one day and Salazanca would be gone and there would just be Red Cloud. I guess I thought… when Vraki said he could take your power… I thought… I…”
Behind money, war, and sex, the world is built on lies. We need them—the little ones we tell to get out of duty, the big ones we tell to get people to do what we want, the cold and cruel little ones we tell ourselves to keep going. Lies are like liquor—even the bad ones still make you feel good.
Until they don’t.
The truth is worse. The truth is harder, messier, uglier. No matter how good it may be, no one’s ever happy to hear it.
This was easier when I thought she was a villain, easier when I thought she didn’t care, easier when I thought I could cross her name off and be done with it.
This…
“How long did you spend thinking of that?”
This was worse.
“How long did you tell yourself that those words would make things better?” I snarled. “It was my power, Darrish. MINE. I don’t care how bad it scared you, it wasn’t yours to take!”
“I know. I always knew. I just…” She slumped to the floor. “I didn’t know how to make it right, Sal.” She stared out into nothingness for a long time. “I went Vagrant because I… I mean, I didn’t know what else to do. Then when I found out about the Relic, when I knew what it could do, I thought maybe—”
“That I’d forgive you? Because you found a flying piece of shit in a box?”
“Honestly, I thought they’d just shoot me on the spot.”
I paused. That, I hadn’t expected.
“The Revolution, the nuls, looking for help from mages? From Vagrants? I thought it would be a trap. Honestly… I didn’t care. When it turned out not to be, when I met Liette, when she told me about the world she could create…”
I slumped back down onto the bench, the fight draining out of me along with the blood. Liette’s words came flooding back to me, built themselves into a cold stone monument on my shoulders that bent my neck so low I felt like my head would fall off.
“Her world without me,” I whispered.
“You heard, then,” Darrish replied quietly.
“She told you?”
“Often. Does the thought scare you?”
“I don’t get scared.”
“Yes, that’s something someone who is scared says often.”
“Well, fuck, how would you feel if someone like that told you that someone like you didn’t belong in her world?”
She stared at her feet. “Relieved.”
She really had a talent for making me want to punch her in the face. I wonder where she picked that up.
“Do you enjoy this life, Sal?” she asked. “Being a Vagrant? All the fighting, all the killing, all the…” She gestured vaguely at nothing. “This?”
“I’m good at it.”
“That’s not what I asked. That’s not what Liette said, either.” She pursed her lips, stared so hard at the floor she looked like she was waiting for it to open up and swallow her. “Liette wants to make a world where you don’t have to kill. Where you don’t have to hurt. Where you don’t have to be Sal the Cacophony or Red Cloud or…” She sighed, looked at me. “You could be whoever else. Anyone else. With her. Without her. Wherever. She wanted that. For you.”
Something sour lodged itself in my craw. “Then why didn’t she say that?”
“Because she’s pig-headed, stubborn, and so prideful a lion would envy her, obviously.” Darrish sniffed. “One of the many reasons we didn’t… well, you know.” She blanched. “Also, she gets really excited about… stuff that comes out of other stuff. Like, really excited. It’s weird.”
“Fuck you,” I grunted. “It’s adorable when she does that.”
She smiled at me. Like she used to. I remembered a time when it didn’t hurt so bad to see her face again.
“I guess that’s why I stayed here with her,” she said. “I wanted to see that world. I wanted to make things better. I wanted…” She shook her head. “Fuck. I wanted to do something good for you.”
“I wouldn’t have forgiven you.”
“I know.”
“It wouldn’t have changed anything.”
“I know.”
“You’d still be who you are. I’d still be who I am.”
“For fuck’s sake, I know,” she snapped. “I have spent years knowing. I know and I don’t care and I still want to do it.”
“Why?”
A frown deep as a scar. A pair of eyes, too sorrowful to look up. Gone, as she turned on her heel.
“You and she were meant for each other,” she muttered as she walked toward the door.
Like I said, truths never make anyone feel good. It’s not like opera. There’s no great moment of revelation when the heavens open up and bestow an immutable law upon a society grateful they don’t have to think about it and come to their own decisions anymore.
If you’re lucky, you just go on lying until you can get far enough away from them when they come collapsing down. But more often, you get this. No resolution. No satisfaction. Just a realization that some scars are too deep for the truth to heal and nothing really changes.
If you’re smart, you’ll just accept that and make peace with it. It’s not something that’ll make you happy. But it’s something that’ll let you rest.
“Darrish.”
You should know by now that people like me don’t get to do the smart thing, the happy thing, or the thing that lets them rest.
She stopped as I called out to her, an ear up, attentive.
“I’m not going to forgive you,” I said.
“Sal, I fucking get it,” she replied. “If you wanted to rub my face in that fact, you could have at least used fancier words this time.”
“Let me finish,” I snapped. “I’m not going to forgive you… but I need a favor.”
She paused. “I can’t let you out.”
“You could, if I asked real nice, but that’s not what I wanted.”
She turned. The hurt was still there, but there was just enough curiosity in her eyes to make me lean out from between the bars.
Maybe Liette was right. I was a killer, a destroyer, an outlaw—and maybe she could make a world where people like me wouldn’t exist. But it wasn’t going to happen with that Scrath. I knew that.
In my scars, I knew it.
“Look.” I sighed. “What happened with us, nothing’s going to make right. But I believe you want to try. If you still do after this shitshow, then do me a favor.”
She didn’t say yes. But she didn’t leave or spit in my face, either.
In this business, we call that a win.
“Stop her,” I said. “Convince her to find another way, destroy her research, kill the fucking thing in the box if you have to, but don’t let it get out.”
“Sal, Liette’s certain that—”
“I know she’s certain. She’s too fucking smart not to be certain. And fuck, maybe she can control that thing, but not forever and not before it starts controlling the Revolution. You need to stop her from letting that thing out.” I licked my lips—when did they get so dry? “Please.”
Even as I spoke, I could feel my scars aching, that sensation of something reaching into me, crawling around inside me. Like just speaking of the Scrath was enough to draw its attention. And the longer it lingered there, slithering through my veins, the more I recognized it.
The same feeling that I had when I looked upon the effigy in Terassus.
The same feeling that I had when I’d fought one in the dark.
The same feeling that I had on the night I lost everything…
I couldn’t let that happen again. Not to her.
“Darrish!” I slammed the bars.
“I’ll try!” she blurted. “I’ll try, Sal. But… what are you going to do?”
“Don’t worry about me.” I rubbed my neck, looked around my cell. “I’ll figure out something.”
“How?”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have said ‘I’ll figure out something,’ would I?” I waved a hand. “Sometimes, it’s all about waiting for the right opportunity.”
Darrish’s face screwed up in irate bewilderment. “You’re hinging your entire plan on that? Like some shitty opera? Like the third act from Speaker for the Ghosts?”
“Fuck you, I loved Ghosts.”
“It was trite and full of clichés. Opportunity does not just show up like that and—”
The door burst open. On a trail of blood, clutching her side, Tretta Stern—wounded, breathless, and wearing a face wild with desperation—limped in. I folded my arms and shot the smuggest smile I could manage at Darrish.
“Now,” I said, “admit that Ghosts was good.”
“Sergeant!” Darrish, ignoring my excellent line like an asshole, rushed to Tretta’s side to support her. “What’s going on?”
“Intruders…,” Tretta gasped, collapsing to one knee. “Ambushed me…”
“It wouldn’t have happened if you had bothered to look behind you, Commander.”
Slowly, a knife dangling from his hand, blood trailing in his wake, he came out of the gloom of the corridor. And though I thought I’d seen all his faces before—the laughing one, the loving one, the wounded one—I only barely recognized this man who came into the brig. His eyes were clear and calm, his tone cool and even, and his face was expressionless behind the mask of blood that painted it.
His voice I knew, even drained of passion and humor as it was now.
As he walked into the brig, the pack with my weapons slung over his shoulder, I knew him.
“But a fanatic can’t look anywhere but where they’re told, can they?” Jero said, each word a knife wound. “You didn’t, Commander. You didn’t look back when you were ordered to retreat. You didn’t look back when my brother hurled himself into the fray.” He flicked Tretta’s blood off his blade. “You didn’t look back for his corpse.”
“Erstwhile,” Tretta spat, pulling herself up to her feet and reaching for her own weapon. “Deserter. Counterrevolutionary. Traitor.”
“And still alive,” Jero replied. “While Jandi isn’t. Do you even remember his name, Captain?”
“I remember the Staunch brothers,” Tretta replied, anger in her voice. “I remember one being the bravest Revolutionary I ever had the privilege to command, one who gave his life for his cause, his comrades, his cadre. And I remember you, Erstwhile. You’re not fit to share his name. The Great General knew that when he took it back.”
“And you’re not fit to speak it,” Jero snarled. “It doesn’t matter. Your whole farce of a Revolution is about to answer for his death. For every death.”
“Jero?” I whispered from behind the bars.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Sal,” he replied, smiling sadly. “I had some business to attend to outside the ship.”
“Sal?” Darrish looked at me, eyes wild with terror. “You know this man?”
Needless to say, three people under the same roof who’ve either loved you, tried to kill you, or both, made for an incredibly awkward situation. So awkward, in fact, that I would have given anything for something to change the—
An explosion. A quaking deck beneath my feet. A distant avian screech followed by the blare of warning sirens.
“ALL HANDS, ALL HANDS! REPORT TO BATTLE STATIONS IMMEDIATELY! IMPERIAL ATTACK! IMPERIAL ATTACK!”
Yeah, that’d do.
FORTY-FOUR
THE IRON FLEET
It’s true that the battles between the Revolution and the Imperium have ravaged the Scar, put millions out of their homes, and resulted in some of the most widespread destruction known to humanity, but there were a few upsides of their battles.
For one, they made an excellent cover for illicit activities—such as escaping from a cell.
There were other advantages, too, but I couldn’t really take the time to list them since I was about to die and all.
“There they are! Open fire!”
The rattle of the decks beneath my boots was sharply punctuated by the crack of gunpikes. Sparks erupted in a halo around me as severium bullets shrieked past, biting into the pipes and hull of the corridor. I pulled my luckscarf over my head as a shot whistled past and took a chunk out of the hull—a stray shot, I’d survive, but given the generosity with which the Revolutionaries pursuing us were handing out bullets, I didn’t like my chances.
“All hands to decks! All hands to decks! Glory to the Great General! Glory to the Revolution!”
The sirens continued to blare, mechanical voices echoing off each other as commands were barked and soldiers raced to follow them. In the noise and fury, I’d lost Darrish and Tretta both. And my search for either of them was abruptly cut short by the—
“DIE, IMPERIAL SCUM!”
Yeah.
A Revolutionary came barreling out from behind a corner, leaving me just barely enough time to pull my sword up as the head of his gunpike came crashing down. I caught the serrated blade against my weapon, but he had weight, momentum, and years of fanatical propaganda on his side. His blow brought me to my knees, the second knocked my sword away, the third would cut clean through me.
Or it would have if Jero hadn’t cut him first.
He leapt out of the shadows behind me, catching the gunpike’s haft in one hand and swinging around to get inside the Revolutionary’s reach, where his weapon would be of no avail. In his other hand, a knife leapt out of a hidden sheath before Jero buried it in the soldier’s neck.
Three quick, mechanical pumps of the blade—throat, kidney, lung—and the fanaticism, along with the rest of him, bled out of the soldier and onto the floor. He collapsed, his final moments of bewildered agony frozen on his face.
“All right?” Jero asked, breathless as he reached down to me.
“Not fucking all right,” I replied as he hauled me up. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Busy.”
“With what?”
Through the din of the sirens, I heard the click of triggers. Gunpike shots rang out as Jero seized my hand and led me down the twisting corridors of the airship. Turn after turn, he jerked me into the shadows before we came across an alcove ensconced in a twisting mass of rattling pipes. He pulled me in, pressed a finger to his lips, and waited.
The boots came not long after. A gang of Revolutionaries came rushing past, sparing us not even a glance as they thundered by. Jero waited until the sound of their boots had faded before turning toward me with a shit-eating grin.
“Not bad, eh?” he said. “No one else knows about this spot. I used to come here to smoke on patrols when—”
He didn’t finish that sentence, as it turns out it’s pretty hard to speak with a mouthful of fist.
“Where the fuck did you go?” I snarled as he reeled from my punch. “I was almost killed and you left me! AGAIN!”
“Is it at all possible for you to make a point without violence?” Jero muttered, rubbing his jaw.
“It is exactly as possible as you doing something without making people want to inflict violence upon you.” I gave him a coarse shove. “You said there wouldn’t be more lies! You said you were going to handle something on the ship!”
“And I did!” he snapped back. “I went into the armory and the engine room… and I handled it.” He spat on the floor. “The sigils needed to be applied, remember? The twins and I were leaping from ship to ship to handle it. And… a few other things that needed taking care of.”
