Ten Arrows of Iron, page 62
Flesh, twisted and knotted and the color of a long-dead tree, clung tenaciously to the trembling interior of the Relic. It pulsated, shuddered, breathed with a life that seemed ancient and unnatural. It coiled over itself countless times and, within the folds of its flesh, I could see… things.
Wings, insectine and shivering. Faces, eyes closed and mouths open in some ancient slumber. A woman’s arm, long and delicate. A child’s leg, chubby and nascent. An eyeball swirling madly in its socket. Organs that belonged in no monster I ever knew, let alone a person.
A great tumorous mass of… things. As though whatever had occurred within this husk had just begun growing whatever it wanted. And as the great mass of skin and sinew and bone trailed upward, I could see what crowned it. Or rather, what it had grown from.
Eldest. Whatever the fuck Eldest was. The left half of its body disappeared into the grotesque mass, but from it came an androgynous form, skin radiant and polished as bronze in a sunset, carved to the closest thing I could think as perfect. And its face…
Ethereal? Ancient? Angelic? Terrifying? All of those words were true.
Yet… words seemed altogether too limited, too trifling and insignificant, to encompass what looked at us out of the Relic. Alive. And aware.
“Could you…” Liette approached Eldest with a reverence she’d never offered anything before. “Could you do that the entire time?”
“No.” Outside the barrier of the Relic, Eldest’s voice reached deeper into me, its every word like the plucking of a vein inside me as though it were a harp string. “Not until this moment.”
“Why?”
“Because this was the moment… I would need you.”
“Yeah, uh…” I stepped forward, glancing over the horrific, tumorous mass as much as I could stand. “I’m not sure how”—I gestured vaguely toward the thing-that-should-not-be—“this is going to help us get you out of here. You didn’t get any smaller, just… squishier.”
“A body is a husk. Nothing more. I require it no more than you require clothes.”
I didn’t want to think too hard about that.
“All that is required is this.”
I didn’t want to watch, either. But I couldn’t look away.
With the one arm that wasn’t a part of the skin, Eldest reached toward its chest. Its skin rippled, liquid and meaningless, as its fingers reached inside itself. The great mass of its entirety shuddered, tensed, as if holding a collective breath. Slowly, it withdrew its hand and reached out to Liette, its fingers unfurling. She studied it for a moment before tentatively cupping her hands together as it dropped something into her grasp.
It was beautiful.
A light. Radiant with colors I couldn’t have seen in my darkest dreams. They swirled over each other, clashing against each other, a chorus of brightness that fought, lived, died entire lives in the span of seconds.
“Is it…” Liette’s voice fell. Words seemed too impure to describe it. “Is this your heart?”
“If you wish it to be,” Eldest’s voice resonated from the light. “It is all that I have ever been. All that I ever will be. All that I have ever wanted… and all that I have ever failed to achieve.”
Her fingers shook as they curled around the light. Slowly, its radiance softened, weeping out between her fingers, until all that remained was a perfect sphere: prismatic, polished, and tiny.
“You will…,” Eldest’s voice ebbed out from it, “forgive me… one day…”
And it fell silent.
The great knotwork of flesh and sinew that had been Eldest’s body stiffened, going from tense to rictus taut. The mass grew darker, its glistening vibrancy draining with every moment and being replaced by a cracking, calcifying sound.
That noise crept across the abandoned husk. In its wake, every limb, every face, every eye and stalk and wing and finger was left petrified in pristine stone. The ethereally beautiful face of Eldest fell limp on its neck and, in the moments before it was forever frozen, I wondered if it didn’t wear a look of sadness.
Then I let my breath go. And Eldest became just another ancient thing, like all ancient things: gone without answers, having left us too many questions and not enough time to figure them out.
What had Eldest meant? Who was coming? What had it failed to achieve? What the fuck kind of horror was out there that a fucking Scrath was afraid of it?
Maybe I was being unrealistic expecting an ancient horror that had been, up until a few hours ago, a flying turd to make some fucking sense, but still—
“Huh. So it was real.”
A voice. Thick with exhaustion and long-dulled pains. A perfect match for the man who met my eyes when I whirled about, gun in my hand, to see him standing on the lower level.
Jero Erstwhile, a thick knife in his hand and blood painting his face, stared past me, past Liette, to the calcified husk of Eldest.
“I had no idea,” he said.
FIFTY-TWO
THE FLAGSHIP
Jero,” I whispered. I lowered my gun, let him hang from my fingers behind me—out of sight, but close.
I could feel the question boiling on Liette’s lips as she stepped back. Just as she could feel the answer as I deliberately stepped in front of her and tightened my grip on my blade.
“How did he get in here?” Liette whispered.
“Did you know the Revolution builds escape hatches for its command centers? Cadre offices, garrison posts… airship cabins.” Jero smiled hollowly. “They always leave a way for themselves to escape. Even while they tell their soldiers to die for them.”
“How are you alive?” I asked.
“Same way you are,” he replied. He took a long, limping step forward. “I couldn’t die until I got here.” His eyes were still on the Relic. “Fuck me, we really could have done something magical with that, couldn’t we?”
“It’s the whole reason we’re here.”
“The whole reason we’re here is to bring down empires,” he replied. “The Relic would have been a nice way to do that, wouldn’t it? An object of unimaginable power and unknown origin that only Two Lonely Old Men knew how to use? One that could build bridges and change the world?” He grinned hollowly. “You couldn’t find a better story in an opera.”
I felt the ache in my muscles before I realized I’d been holding myself tense since I saw him. Every move he made, every direction his eyes wandered, made me hold my blade a little tighter. It was the blood painting his face, or the empty look in his eyes, or the ugly bend of his grin, or all of that but…
I didn’t recognize him.
“It was a lie, then,” I whispered. “The whole plot, all that shit, it was all a lie to get here.”
“A little, yeah,” he replied. “Or at least, we thought it was. Two Lonely Old Men had a few leads, but we thought them just Revolutionary propaganda.” He chuckled. “Fuck, if he could be here to see this, I wonder what he’d say.” His smile faded to a thousand miles away. “Or would he even care? Real or not, the Relic was never the point.”
“Then what was?”
He turned his smile toward me. That same smile I’d seen in those dark nights. That same smile he greeted me with.
And it made me die a little to see it.
“Exactly what we said it was,” he said simply. “Bringing down empires. By showing the world just how much blood comes out of them.”
He wasn’t there, the man I’d met back all those nights ago. That laughing man, who hid his pain in the dark parts of his smiling wrinkles, was gone. In his place was this killer, this man whose many faces had slid away and revealed nothing underneath. Jero was gone, I told myself. He’d had the goodness beaten out of him or just let it go to get a better grip on his weapon. This wasn’t Jero, I told myself.
And I almost believed it.
I wish I could have told you I didn’t recognize this man. This man with the empty eyes that had seen too much, with the blade that fit too easily in his hand.
I wish I could have told you this wasn’t really him. He was someone else: the man that I had shared pain with, the man who hurt like I did, the man who was too clever, too funny, too good to be this person.
But the truth is… this was him. This was who he’d always been. The laughter, the soft voice, the gentle hands; those had been the act. Underneath all those faces and laughing wrinkles, he’d always been this.
Just like I was.
“Revenge,” I muttered. “For Lastlight. For his precious, ruined city.”
“Yeah, it sounded weird to me, too,” Jero replied. “He could have just built another one. He’s the greatest Freemaker the world ever knew.” He tipped his head toward Liette. “No offense.”
She cringed away from him. I held her a little closer to me. She knew this face, those eyes, too well to be at ease. She’d seen me wear them often enough to know.
“But then he told me something that made a lot of sense to me.”
He took a step forward. We took a step back.
“He told me that a city isn’t just stone and water and wood. A city is imagination, a city is ideas, a city is a dream. You pour yourself into it, everything you have, and it comes out as its own thing.”
He took another step up the stairs. My pulse quickened. My chest tightened. The Cacophony seethed.
“He told me that a city can be destroyed and a city can be rebuilt. But when it comes back, it’s something else. And when it’s gone… it’s gone forever. All those dreams, all those memories, all those things that made it what it was… just gone.”
He ascended to the second level. My eyes were locked on his. And his eyes were somewhere else, some long-ago place where he had once been happy, where he’d held so tightly to something that still slipped out of his fingers.
“Even if you get another one, what you had is still never coming back. Like a person. A child. A mother.”
All that remained was this man. This blade. And nothing else.
“A brother.”
At the corners of his mouth, at the edges of his eyes, something trembled. The last twitch of the corpse of a good man who’d died along with his brother.
“They take, Sal. This is all these fanatics do. They take your mind, they take your body, they take your…” His lip stiffened. Wetness rimmed his eyes. “They took him from me. He was all I had and they took him apart, piece by piece. They took his heart, his voice, they carted him off like cuts of meat. Once he was totally gone, when there was nothing left of him, they sent him out to eat a bullet so they could escape.”
The wetness froze on his face, disappeared, leaving behind only a long, cold dark.
“He didn’t get a burial. They didn’t leave enough for that. So, this is going to be his grave. This airship. This Relic. The whole fucking Scar.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Killing won’t bring him back, Jero.”
“Don’t fucking chastise me with two-copper opera rhetoric, Sal. I don’t care that it won’t bring him back.” He sneered. “Or is killing only okay when you’ve got tattoos and a fancy gun?”
“I’ve got those, sure.” I reached up, pulled the collar of my shirt down, exposed the knotted flesh of my long and winding scar. “I’ve also got these. Killing didn’t make them go away, either.”
“I know that—”
“No, you fucking don’t. I mean, killing doesn’t make it stop. All the blood in all the Scar that I’ve spilled, and every morning I still wake up hurting like hell, my scars still ache when it gets cold, and when I look in the mirror, I’m still not Red Cloud. Not anymore.” I shook my head. “We kill. We do some good by killing. But it never makes us happy.”
“Well, shit, Sal,” he said, grinning. “You’re in the wrong fucking business if you’re looking for happiness, aren’t you? It’s gone. Along with Lastlight, Jandi, and Red Cloud. They’re all gone. I know we can’t make it hurt less and I know we can’t bring them back…”
He raised his blade, pointed over our heads toward the viewports.
“But we can take them with us.”
I turned. As the clouds parted, I saw.
Far away, so far that I could almost pretend they weren’t real, I could see them. The farms, the homes, the townships, and the villages sprawling across a vast plain. The Blessing. The patch of land that everyone had decided was worth killing so many people over years ago during the Borrus War.
People. Thousands of them. Daughters and fathers and grandfathers and drunks and farmers. Sprawled across the land, so tiny from so high above, like insects ready to be crushed underfoot.
And we were heading right for them.
“She was right.” The words hung icy in my craw, so jagged that I feared to speak them lest they tear my mouth apart. “Velline was right. We’re heading for Imperial land.” My eyes narrowed as the realization hit me. “Because someone told them we were.”
“Honestly, I was surprised they took the bait,” Jero said. “But what’s an Imperial but a Revolutionary pointed in the opposite direction? A fanatic is a fanatic, no matter what colors they wear.”
I whirled back on Jero, my jaw clenched, my blood boiling.
“This was the plan, then,” I spat. “The real plan. Divert the Iron Fleet to the Blessing, get the Imperium to attack, and then… then…”
Cold and cruel as dawn rising on the aftermath of a battle, it hit me. The sigils in the belly of the ship. Command sigils. Etched on the Relic engine. On the hull. On the bombs.
“The bombs,” I whispered. “That’s what the sigils do. They’re going to drop the bombs.”
Jero’s smile was bleak, sad, and terrifying. “This world has become so used to a fanatic’s boot on its neck that they don’t even notice anymore, Sal. We’re part of it, you know. Vagrants, outlaws, killers… someone needs to show them. Someone needs to do something.”
He reached into his satchel. I tensed, trying to draw my gun. My hand was stayed as I felt Liette’s hand wrap around my wrist. Slowly, so delicate and careful I barely felt her do it, she slid the Cacophony’s chamber open.
I was ready for a weapon. I wasn’t ready for the tiny tin whistle he produced, laden with inscriptions.
“Urda’s whistle,” I breathed, recognizing it from the Crow Market so long ago.
“Close. Urda’s too delicate to know what we had to do up here, but the principle is the same. Two Lonely Old Men bound the sigils’ command to the sound of the whistle, just as Urda bound his sister’s magic to one. Not sure why our patron decided to keep it a whistle… homage, maybe?”
I kept my eyes on his, forced his stare on mine, held every other part of me completely still. I couldn’t let him notice Liette, or her hand slipping into my satchel.
“Two Lonely Old Men said he couldn’t understand it,” I growled.
“He couldn’t, at first. But he’s the greatest Freemaker the Scar has known. He figured it out. I didn’t think it was necessary, personally. If there’s anything you can trust the Revolution to do, it’s kill people for no reason. All we had to do was set this up and then trust them to do the rest.” He sighed. “But neither he nor I wanted anything left to chance.”
“So that’s it, then? All this shit about building a better world? About freeing people from the Imperium and Revolution? All of it was a lie?”
“None of it was a lie. A lie worthy of the name, anyway. This world will be born again, beautiful and free of the sicknesses that plague it today. It’s just going to be messier than we thought it would be.”
I felt Liette’s fingers wrap around a shell in my satchel. Slowly, subtly, she began to extract it, her other hand holding the Cacophony behind my back.
“But it’s going to be worth it, Sal,” he continued. “I know it doesn’t seem like it—it was hard for me to believe at first, too. Once we deal a blow to the Imperium, to the Revolution, to all the fanatics out there, when we cut them so deep they can’t get back up, we can start again. Once we show the world how—”
“No.”
He fell silent. His words fell, cut off and bleeding on the floor.
“You’re about to kill thousands, Jero,” I said. “There’s no grand scheme to it, no high ideal, no magic way this all works out. You’re about to kill thousands. For no other reason than you want someone, anyone, to hurt as bad as you do.” I sharpened my eyes to a scowl. “If you’re going to kill them, you fucking grant them the dignity of admitting why.”
I wanted a clever retort. I wanted a grand speech. I wanted to be wrong about him. Fuck, I needed it. I needed him to have some great words prepared to make me doubt, to show me how wrong I was, to prove this wasn’t all as simple as that.
But as I looked into those empty eyes, free of wetness or pain or anything that wasn’t cold and dark, I knew I was right.
And so did he.
He looked out the viewports. The mountains started to thin out, giving way to hillside villages. We were here.
“You’re right, Sal,” he whispered. “You’re absolutely fucking right. You deserve honesty, just as they do.”
He raised the whistle to his lips. Liette slipped the shell into the Cacophony.
“So believe me when I say,” he whispered.
The sigils across the whistle began to glow. The Cacophony’s chamber snapped shut.
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
Then I drew.
“Me too.”
And I pulled the trigger.
A burst of smoke. A searing heat. A wall of sound. Discordance sped toward him. He’d seen me draw, flicked his wrist, a retractable shield starting to deploy. He was quick. Too quick.
But that’s the thing about the Cacophony. You can be the quickest, the cleverest, the most ruthless, it doesn’t matter. He breaks them all the same.
Discordance erupted in a blast of sound. The viewports cracked, bodies and equipment scattering like toys in a tantrum. Jero’s shield protected him enough to send him rolling instead of flying, but it caught him off guard.
He’d dropped the whistle.
I bolted for it, ignoring the agonized shriek of my body. Any pain, any exhaustion, any fear, I’d have time enough to feel later, if I were still alive. Because if I stopped now, I wouldn’t be. None of us would.
