Ten Arrows of Iron, page 69
There were roars—animal, feral, and painfully human. There were wails of the defeated, shrieking the last ounces of their beings into the wind before they were silenced forever. There were maddened cries of the victorious, so drunk on hate and carnage that they no longer could tell the difference between triumph and agony. There was laughter. Single. Solitary. Senseless. The unnerving joy of someone who just figured out the punch line of a joke they’d heard too often and realized it wasn’t funny the first time.
There were explosions. Flashes of crimson snuffed out like candles. Pillars of fire that howled defiantly against the snow. Clouds of soot-flecked flakes that fell and settled upon the earth like bruises.
Or so she thought. Perhaps it was just the wind. Perhaps it was just her imagination. She couldn’t bear to think of anything else.
It was worth it.
And now they became a crutch. Those words. Keeping her upright, keeping her moving, keeping her believing that all of it—Littlebarrow, Terassus, everyone and everything—had to mean something.
It was worth it.
She walked with them.
It was worth it.
She leaned on them.
It was worth it.
And they splintered a little more with every step.
Congeniality chirruped warily. Ahead of them, a shadow appeared through the snow, drawing closer.
Liette.
It wasn’t her. Sal knew that, in the cold parts of her. The figure that came limping out of the white and gray was solitary, too tall, dragging something long behind them. Yet that word grew softly in feverish hope. It made excuses—maybe she’d been separated from Meret, maybe she was always that tall and Sal had never noticed. It burned, small and soft and hot.
For a few moments.
Tretta Stern emerged, haggard and bloodied, wounds painted across her skin and uniform, a broken gunpike dragged behind her like a loved one she couldn’t bear to leave behind. Her breath was ragged, every gasp torn through laboring lungs. How long had she been out here? Sal wondered. How had she survived?
She didn’t ask. Tretta didn’t answer.
She looked up at Sal through one eye, the other so concealed behind caked-on red-and-purple bruises that it had vanished entirely. She opened a mouth in a bare-toothed scream. She took up the gunpike in her hands. And she charged.
Sal didn’t move. Didn’t draw steel. Didn’t blink. She watched Tretta’s legs pump numbly beneath her for a few steps. She watched Tretta raise her weapon and scream. She watched Tretta take one, final, futile swing. Too slow. Too far. Too little.
The woman collapsed to her knees. Bereft of a weapon that worked, a body to carry it, of anything but the fury that had kept her going, she collapsed. She thrust the gunpike into the earth, leaned upon it, head bowed and body wracked with desperate breaths.
Fallen. Halted. Defeated.
Sal waited. Waited for the urge to draw steel and finish Tretta off. Waited for Tretta to find the strength to stand up and kill her. But when she searched her heart for either, she could find nothing. And when she searched her head…
It was… worth it.
On the splintering crutch of those words, she started walking again. Through the snow. Through the wind. Past Tretta.
“You won’t kill me.”
Not a question. Not a plea. Tretta’s voice, tattered and threatening to fly off in the breeze, spoke a truth both of them knew. And Tretta’s eye, burning bright and hateful, did the same.
“But I will kill you,” she said to Sal. “I will… wait as long as I have to. I will do whatever I need to. I will gather every drop of blood you’ve spilled, every sorrow you’ve left in your wake, every life you’ve ruined. And then… I will rain down upon you, Sal the Cacophony, with everything I have. Until everything you are is ash and dust and then I will cast you out on the winds.” She bowed her head again, belabored from even those words. “I swear this. To the Revolution. To the Great General. To you. I swear this, Sal.”
Not a threat. Not a promise. Tretta coiled around the truth she had spoken, to the great pain that had borne a great hate. She clutched it to her breast, let it burn brightly into her. Perhaps it would comfort her in her final moments. Perhaps it would smolder and die out, like so many other things.
But it wasn’t Sal’s hatred to take. Nor her fire to extinguish. She left Tretta with that. In the snow. In the wind.
It was worth it.
On four words that grew softer in her head with every step.
She heard the music two hours outside of Littlebarrow. The soft crackle of a voccaphone, the dulcet song of an opera she couldn’t remember the name of, that came swirling through the wind. Faint and fleeting.
By the time she convinced herself she wasn’t imagining it, she began walking toward it. Through the thickest part of the snows. Up a steep hill. Until the winds ebbed softly and the white fell not so thick.
By the time she knew it wasn’t Liette, or Meret, or anyone she wanted to see, she was too close to it to turn back. She crested the top of the hill to find a small tent situated at the center of a patch of grass, the snow cleared by the warmth of an alchemical globe. A voccaphone played an opera recording she didn’t recognize upon a teak table, accompanied by a bottle of wine and two glasses. Beside it, a man sat in a chair, an empty one beside him, and stared out from on high.
By the time she realized it was Two Lonely Old Men, she had already sat down beside him.
He did not look up at her as she took a seat. He said nothing as they stared out over the Borrus Valley sprawling below. He merely reached for the bottle of wine, poured a glass, and handed it to her.
Together, they watched the fire.
From so far away, they couldn’t hear anything—the explosions of the bombs falling, the drone of the locusts, the screams of the battle. As silent and small as a miniature replica, they watched. Seven airships glided silently over the Valley, dark fish in a gray sea, dropping shadows upon the floor.
Red wounds burst where the bombs fell. And beneath them, villages disappeared. Great plumes of smoke painted the sky, black headstones, colossal and hazy, for the graves of homes and families. Over a hundred of them reached up. And more grew every time the Iron Fleet, the Seven Arrows, glided away.
“In truth, I never forgave you.”
Two Lonely Old Men spoke. His voice was weaker than it had been when she last saw him.
“Or them,” he said. “In my head, I did. I used reason, rationale, reality to explain why they destroyed Lastlight. Why I should have let it go and rebuilt. But in my dreams…” He pursed his lips. “In my dreams, it was never Lastlight. It was my city. Mine. And they had taken it from me. And you had taken it from me.”
Sal sipped the wine. It tasted sweet and fragrant. Below, another village disappeared in a wave of fire. Tiny black shapes vanished beneath the red.
“In my dreams, I hurt,” he said. “All the reasoning didn’t matter, nor did all the ways I told myself that it couldn’t have been avoided. In my dreams, I couldn’t see what purpose it served or what knowledge could be gleaned from it. I saw my city, I saw its spires and its lights, and I saw them go away, one by one. And all I had left was the hurt.”
From the floor of the Valley, a salvo of lightning and frost magic flew skyward to bounce off an airship’s hull. Cannons retaliated. Another village vanished.
“Doesn’t that seem strange?” he asked. “To let dreams dictate reality? It seems strange now, but at the time… at the time, it felt like I was sleeping. Like I just kept sleeping until one day I couldn’t tell if I was awake or not.” He sipped the wine. “Maybe it was my dreams that came up with this. With punishing the Imperium and the Revolution for what they’d done to my city. With using you to do it. For that, Sal, I am sorry.”
She did not forgive him. Another fire burst on the ground.
“Jero knew,” she said softly.
“He did.”
“And Tuteng?”
“Him too. He took the money I paid him and disappeared. Back to his home, I like to believe. But Agne, the twins… you…” Two Lonely Old Men let out a bone-deep sigh, settled into his chair. “Jero could see the wisdom of my actions. To see the Imperium and the Revolution and all the other terrible powers of this world would never give up their influence willingly. We had to make them destroy each other. We had to make the world see how vile they were. Jero agreed with me. He believed you would, too.”
She didn’t. Another headstone of smoke rose into the sky.
“Did you come to punish me?” he asked. “I’m afraid… you’re too late.”
She glanced at the table beside him, where the voccaphone played. Beside the bottle of wine, a tiny vial lay empty. Blood dripped out of Two Lonely Old Men’s nose. He discreetly dabbed it away.
“Grandmother’s Kiss,” he said. “Did you know I invented it? Long ago. The Ashmouths requested of me a painless poison that could be used for some nefarious purpose. I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t even care about the money they offered me, I just wanted to see if I could do it. And I did. It’s a potent poison, shuts down the nerves first, then the organs.” He tried to raise a hand, couldn’t. “My nerves are growing insensate. Any horror you might want to visit upon me would be fruitless. I figured it fitting to be my end. As fitting as anything else.”
She quirked a brow. He smiled.
“I didn’t poison yours,” he said. “You’ll realize that soon enough, if you don’t believe me. I didn’t forgive you… but I didn’t blame you.”
His eyes drifted to her scars.
“You know what that’s like, don’t you? To live with a thing that you can neither ignore nor remedy. That was my hurt. I could do nothing for it. Nothing but make them pay. To show them that I could hurt them worse than they hurt me. In my dreams, I could not see any way of feeling whole again.”
He reached for his glass of wine. Numb fingers tipped it over.
“I don’t think you believe me,” he whispered. “You don’t think this was for a great cause, or that I knew what I was doing. That’s fine. It isn’t what you should tell people, anyway.”
He looked back out over the Valley and frowned bitterly as the smoke rose. The singer on the voccaphone broke into an aria.
“What you should tell them about Two Lonely Old Men,” he said, “about the man who burned this world to the ground to expose the rot beneath it, is…” He took a deep breath. “Is that a broken, tired man stood against the two strongest forces in this world. And shattered them with a few clever words and some ink. Tell them that Lastlight was worth avenging. Tell them that the people of this world—”
“No.”
Sal didn’t look at him as she interrupted. The voccaphone crackled dimly. She took another sip of her wine.
“You didn’t do any of that,” she said. “Neither did we. We didn’t do anything but kill a lot of fucking people. That’s all. We’re not great people. Not broken people.” She took a long swig, spat it onto the snow. “We’re killers, you and I. Whatever else we did, that’s all we were. And whoever else we hurt, we didn’t care. You didn’t. Jero didn’t. I didn’t.”
The sky over the Valley was black now. Black with smoke. Black with flying machines that rained death. Black with the screams she couldn’t hear. Sal set her glass upon the armrest of her chair and stood up.
“The Scar’s full of people like us,” she said. “People won’t remember us. They shouldn’t. They don’t deserve that. Neither do we.”
The wind murmured. She looked up. The clouds began to swirl overhead and snow began to fall once more.
“Whatever happens because of what we did,” she whispered, “whatever it’s going to mean… that’s theirs. That’s for the people who could make a better world than we could. That’s for them. You and I…”
She looked down at Two Lonely Old Men. He stared up at the sky, mouth open, snow falling upon his glassy, unblinking eyes.
“If there’s any mercy in this dark earth, you and I will be forgotten.”
Sal the Cacophony took one last look over the Valley, over the black smoke headstones and the bright red graves. She stared at it exactly as long as she had to. She pulled her scarf a little tighter around her face. She took her bird’s reins in one hand. She let the other rest upon a burning black hilt at her waist.
She turned and went back down the hill. Away from the Valley. Away from the war. She walked as the snow fell upon her footprints, leaving no trace that she had ever been there.
And the sorrowful song of an opera with words she didn’t know continued to play.
Long after she had disappeared.
THE STORY CONTINUES IN…
BOOK THREE OF THE GRAVE OF EMPIRES
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Photo Credit: Libbi Rich
SAM SYKES—author, citizen, mammal—has written extensively over the years, penning An Affinity for Steel, the Bring Down Heaven trilogy, Brave Chef Brianna, and now the Grave of Empires trilogy. At the time of this writing, no one has been able to definitively prove or disprove that he has fought a bear.
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if you enjoyed
TEN ARROWS OF IRON
look out for
LEGACY OF ASH
Book One of the Legacy Trilogy
by
Matthew Ward
Legacy of Ash is an unmissable fantasy debut—an epic tale of intrigue and revolution, soldiers and assassins, ancient magic and the eternal clash of empires.
A shadow has fallen over the Tressian Republic.
Ruling families—once protectors of justice and democracy—now plot against one another with sharp words and sharper knives. Blinded by ambition, they remain heedless of the threat posed by the invading armies of the Hadari Empire.
Yet as Tressia falls, heroes rise.
Viktor Akadra is the Republic’s champion. A warrior without equal, he hides a secret that would see him burned as a heretic.
Josiri Trelan is Viktor’s sworn enemy. A political prisoner, he dreams of reigniting his mother’s failed rebellion.
And yet Calenne Trelan, Josiri’s sister, seeks only to break free of their tarnished legacy, to escape the expectations and prejudice that haunt the family name.
As war spreads across the Republic, these three must set aside their differences in order to save their home. Yet decades of bad blood are not easily set aside. And victory—if it comes at all—will demand a darker price than any of them could have imagined.
Fifteen Years Ago
Lumendas, 1st Day of Radiance
A Phoenix shall blaze from the darkness.
A beacon to the shackled;
a pyre to the keepers of their chains.
from the sermons of Konor Belenzo
Wind howled along the marcher road. Icy rain swirled behind.
Katya hung low over her horse’s neck. Galloping strides jolted weary bones and set the fire in her side blazing anew. Sodden reins sawed at her palms. She blotted out the pain. Closed her ears to the harsh raven-song and ominous thunder. There was only the road, the dark silhouette of Eskavord’s rampart, and the anger. Anger at the Council, for forcing her hand. At herself for thinking there’d ever been a chance.
Lightning split grey skies. Katya glanced behind. Josiri was a dark shape, his steed straining to keep pace with hers. That eased the burden. She’d lost so much when the phoenix banner had fallen. But she’d not lose her son.
Nor her daughter.
Eskavord’s gate guard scattered without challenge. Had they recognised her, or simply fled the naked steel in her hand? Katya didn’t care. The way was open.
In the shadow of jettied houses, sodden men and women loaded sparse possessions onto cart and dray. Children wailed in confusion. Dogs fought for scraps in the gutter. Of course word had reached Eskavord. Grim tidings ever outpaced the good.
You did this.
Katya stifled her conscience and spurred on through the tangled streets of Highgate.
Her horse forced a path through the crowds. The threat of her sword held the desperate at bay. Yesterday, she’d have felt safe within Eskavord’s walls. Today she was a commodity to be traded for survival, if any had the wit to realise the prize within their grasp.
Thankfully, such wits were absent in Eskavord. That, or else no one recognised Katya as the dowager duchess Trelan. The Phoenix of prophecy.
No, not that. Katya was free of that delusion. It had cost too many lives, but she was free of it. She was not the Phoenix whose fires would cleanse the Southshires. She’d believed–Lumestra, how she’d believed–but belief alone did not change the world. Only deeds did that, and hers had fallen short.
The cottage came into view. Firestone lanterns shone upon its gable. Elda had kept the faith. Even at the end of the world, friends remained true.
Katya slid from the saddle and landed heavily on cobbles. Chainmail’s broken links gouged her bloodied flesh.
“Mother?”
Josiri brought his steed to a halt in a spray of water. His hood was back, his blond hair plastered to his scalp.
She shook her head, hand warding away scrutiny. “It’s nothing. Stay here. I’ll not be long.”
He nodded. Concern remained, but he knew better than to question. He’d grown into a dependable young man. Obedient. Loyal. Katya wished his father could have seen him thus. The two were so much alike. Josiri would make a fine duke, if he lived to see his seventeenth year.
