Ten Arrows of Iron, page 9
A very… very tall woman.
Her admittedly fine wardrobe couldn’t do much to hide the muscle packed onto the six-and-a-half-foot frame that loomed over Jero like an exceptionally dapper tower. Tight-fitting breeches and boots strained against powerful legs, and she wore a red silk vest over a long-sleeved white shirt contouring a powerful chest and broad, brawny arms.
She pulled Jero off his feet like he was a toy, bringing him face-to-much-prettier-face. You wouldn’t think a woman that tall could be coquettish, but the smile she shot him was a fine match for the fluttering of her eyelashes, her elegant features framed by short-cropped jet-black hair, oiled and slicked back.
“I’m vaguely insulted you didn’t offer me at least a bottle of wine beforehand, though.”
You wouldn’t think a woman that tall could giggle as effetely as she did, either, but damn if today wasn’t just full of surprises.
“For you, I’d need far more than a bottle.” Jero, it had to be said, did not share her amusement and regarded her flatly. “Put me down, for fuck’s sake. We have company.”
“We do?” She glanced over him at me and her eyes lit up. “We do!”
She dropped him rather rudely and strode over him as though she had already forgotten that she could step on him. Smiling, she extended a large hand replete with perfectly manicured nails to me.
“Madam,” she said, “don’t we look lovely today?”
“Uh, thanks?” I reached out and took her hand. “I’m—”
“Oh, I know full well who you are.” She brought my hand up and gently kissed the first two fingers in the old Imperial style. “I’ve heard the stories. The nice ones, anyway.”
I couldn’t help but grin. “There are no nice ones about me, madam.”
“Oh? Is it not true you once fought ten outlaws to a standstill to defend a young gentleman’s honor?”
It was true.
Well, it was partially true.
Well, it was vaguely true.
He wasn’t honorable, just a rich spawn of a richer sire who ran away to go start his own outlaw kingdom and who I had to drag back to his father… who, at the time, was willing to let slide the fact that I had robbed his caravan not three days earlier if I did. The part about fighting ten outlaws to a standstill was true, though.
I mean, I guess they were standing still after I blew them up, so yeah, like I said, vaguely true.
“You have me at a disadvantage,” I replied, “Madame…”
“Agnestrada,” she said, voice smooth as silk.
I furrowed my brow. The name sounded familiar. And there were only so many women that tall in the world, let alone the Scar. Still, I found my thoughts more consumed with what, exactly, Jero and his master were planning that they needed someone like her around.
“Agne.” Jero rose to his feet and dusted himself off. “Am I to assume your presence here means something’s gone awry? We were on our way to see Two Lonely Old Men.”
“You were, yes. But now you’re on the way to help me with something else.” Agne jerked a thumb back down the way we came. “The man himself asked me to come find you and help find the others. That delightful little horned man took off this morning and the twins are doubtlessly scribbling away somewhere.”
Jero clenched his teeth. “Then go find them.”
She shook her head. “The one twin only listens to his sister. And she only listens to you. She doesn’t like me for some reason.” She leaned over to me—well, over me—and whispered conspiratorially, “I suspect she’s envious of my feminine mystique.”
I certainly wasn’t about to argue that. And neither was Jero, who rubbed his eyes and threw up his hands.
“All right. Fucking fine. I’ll help you find them.” He glanced to me, gestured down the hall with his chin. “He’ll be expecting you, though. Last door. Knock first.”
“A pleasure to meet you, my darling.” Agne took Jero’s hand in hers, sparing the other to offer me a dainty wave as she hauled him off. “I simply can’t wait to start killing people with you.”
She seemed nice.
I continued down the hall, coming to a pair of double doors at the end of it. Simple, unassuming—not the sort of thing you’d expect a Freemaker, secretive as they are, to be hiding behind. But I leaned out and knocked, all the same.
No answer came back.
I waited a moment before putting my hand on the knob and pushing the door open.
And I came face-to-face with the city I had killed.
It was Lastlight. Lastlight’s streets, polished and pristine. Lastlight’s homes and shops and buildings, marching down the avenues. Lastlight’s spires rising high above everything to look down upon it through sparkling windows behind flying red-and-white banners. Lastlight’s canals, beautiful and blue, wending their way through the streets and under bridges like veins of precious ore.
And the lanterns…
Tiny lights scattered across the city, hanging from every eave, decorating every tower, floating down every canal. When Lastlight had still stood, these lights had lit up the whole city, a sky full of red and white stars under which people had traded, laughed…
And died. The night I had brought a war to their doorsteps.
The detail on the city was so perfect that it took me a second to realize it was entirely miniature. The re-creation sprawled across an immense table, the sole furniture in the room, beneath the glow of an alchemic light overhead. Each building was a perfect replica of its life-sized original, down to the last window on the last house on the last lane.
It was incredible. I felt like I should have been marveling. And if I was anyone else, I probably would have.
But I was Sal the Cacophony. And I couldn’t look at that tiny city without seeing a little cemetery. Each building a grave. Each spire a tomb.
Too many of them wrought by my hand.
“Three months.”
A voice rasped from the vastness of the room. In the shadows on the other side of the table, something stirred and leaned forward, into the pale light.
A man. Or maybe a skeleton that hadn’t figured out it was dead yet. It was hard to tell.
He was tall, thin, and honestly not that old. But weariness had carved away youth and vigor, leaving behind someone too gaunt to eat, too tired to die. His hair was more white than black now, hanging in unkempt streaks about his haggard face. His body bent in the way that only once-proud postures could. His clothes were fine, but unwashed and wrinkled. And his face hung like a dead man from a tree, sallow skin sagging around a pair of deep-set, dark-circled eyes.
Two Lonely Old Men.
Once the greatest Freemaker in the Scar. Now keeper to the world’s tiniest crypt.
“Three months, twenty-four days, sixteen hours, forty-nine minutes and”—he paused, closed his eyes, his lips continuing to twitch silently before he finished—“seven seconds.” He waved a thin hand over the miniature city. “That’s how long it took.”
I stared at the city—his city—silently. Had it been that long since Lastlight was destroyed? Since I had disappeared into the wilds and went chasing my death? It felt longer to me, like I had vanished from a world that had kept on going for years after I was gone.
I wondered if it felt like that to him, too.
“Lastlight… the real Lastlight, was built in just twenty-two years,” Two Lonely Old Men continued, his voice like broken glass. “Inexact, I know, but it never truly stopped building. Every year, there were more people wanting more homes. Every year, I thought we could build the towers higher or make the lanterns glow brighter.” He stared at the miniature city for a long, silent moment. “The lanterns were the hardest part to get right. There were so many of them.
“But I remember each one,” he said, “because I was there for each one we put up. It was my alchemics and sigils that made them glow, after all. And it was my design that every building was made from. I was there for every tower, for every tavern, for every café and shop and garden and park…”
His voice trailed off. His eyes did, too, drifting off to some dark place in the room and staring at a ghostly city much grander than this one.
“Twenty-two years.”
He swayed, unsteady, and leaned on the table’s edge.
“And they destroyed it in less than a day.”
They had.
Or rather, we had.
The Scar was full of tales of how it had happened. No one could agree on who fired the first shot—whether it was Revolutionary cannons or Imperial birds dropping spells. Just like no one could agree who the first civilian casualty was—a family caught in the crossfire or an old man who was struck down in a blast. But everyone knew that the Revolution and the Imperium tore each other to pieces and, in the process, took Lastlight with them.
Sal the Cacophony was also there. Some said that she started the whole thing. Some said she just walked out of it. Some said that she individually went from house to house and put a blade in the throat of every last man, woman, and child she could find.
Honestly, when I think back, I sometimes have a hard time remembering which it was.
But I was there. And I had brought fire and blood to that city. When I walked away, I walked away from a pile of ash and dust.
I wanted to say that it had been worth it. That evil people had died because of what I did that night. And that was true. But when I opened my mouth to say that, I could taste the lie on my tongue.
No matter how many evil people I had killed, I had killed far more good people.
I didn’t know what words I could say to even those scales.
I didn’t know if they existed.
“I don’t blame you, Cacophony.”
Maybe he sensed my hesitation. Or maybe he was just talking to himself. He wasn’t looking at me, his eyes still locked on that tiny city.
“You weren’t the first person to bring weapons to my city,” he said. “Nor was yours, impressive as it was, the most destructive one she had ever seen. All you did was start a fight. Lastlight had seen many fights before.” He shook his head, sending strands of hair trembling. “It was me who let the Imperium in. Me who let the Revolution in. Me who, somehow, assumed they would never think to stain it with their ugly war.”
He twitched, grimaced, shut his eyes.
“Not right. No, that’s not right at all. It’s not that I assumed they would never fight. It just… didn’t occur to me.” He looked back at his tiny city, despair creased over his face. “I thought everyone would look on Lastlight like I had. I thought they would see its lights and its towers and its water and see what I saw. Every morning I awoke, I stared out over that city and thought how lucky I was to have been able to build it, to have created it.” He sighed so hard he almost lost his balance. “You look at your child and you wonder all the great things she’ll become, all the things she’ll do, she’ll see. No one ever looks at their child and wonders how many people will die because of her.”
His voice drifted off. His eyes followed. He wasn’t staring at the tiny city anymore. His hollowed-out eyes might still be on it, but he was looking somewhere else, somewhere far away where that city still stood and its people still laughed and travelers still came from miles just to stand under its lights for a few hours.
I stared at those tiny buildings, just like him. I tried to see it. And for the most fleeting of instants, I almost thought I could. Then I blinked. In the instant my eyes closed, all I saw were ruins, ash-choked.
And silent.
“Is it true?”
I glanced up. He wasn’t looking at me. But he was speaking to me.
“Is what true?” I asked.
“The story,” he said, “about how you got your scar.”
I didn’t need to ask which one he referred to. Absently, my hand reached up, fingers alighting on the long, jagged line that wound from my collarbone to my belly. Underneath my touch, it ached, as though it had its own heartbeat.
“Depends which one you heard,” I asked. “There are a lot.”
“I heard,” he rasped, “you got it from Vraki the Gate. I heard he took something from you. I heard you took something from him.”
The scar beat faster with each word, throbbing under my fingers.
“Then it’s true,” I whispered. “If you want to know what he took from me, though—”
“I don’t.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to know that. I don’t need to know it. I just…” He finally looked up at me. “What do you feel… when you think about it?”
I didn’t answer.
I wanted to say it was because I didn’t know how. I wanted to pretend that it was beyond me, those emotions and feelings tangled up like briars that hurt just to pull on, let alone out. I couldn’t possibly do it. I couldn’t even try. It would hurt too much.
Yeah.
That sounded like what a normal person would say.
The truth was that I knew the answer. I knew it the day I got this scar and I’d only been honing it, sharpening it like a knife, every day I woke up still alive. And that’s why I hesitated. Because it was a knife.
You didn’t draw it unless you planned on cutting someone with it.
“It feels like”—my voice came so soft that I didn’t even recognize it—“one day I woke up… and every door in the world was locked. And everyone but me had a key. The doors they just walked through like it was so easy, I had to break down. So I did. I beat them down, shattered them, pounded on them until my hands bled because even if I didn’t know what was on the other side, I knew I couldn’t stay on this one for one more second.”
His gaze grew heavy as it lingered on me. “And what,” he said, “was on the other side?”
I dropped my fingers. The scar’s heartbeat slowly went silent.
“Another door.”
He nodded slowly.
“That’s why I couldn’t blame you.”
He looked at me with those hollow eyes. I could see within them the great void where so much had once been—so many ideas, so many stories, so much hope for so much more. And now there was… nothing. Nothing except an empty, vacant darkness in which I could just barely see, beneath all those dead dreams, a tiny light.
And it burned red-hot.
“I believe I understand you, Sal the Cacophony. And I hope you understand me… do you?” he rasped. “It’s a pain, isn’t it? Like a lost limb. That feeling that something should be there, inside you, that isn’t there and you can’t sleep soundly, no matter how much you drink or who shares the bed with you. It’s a hole… and you don’t know how to fill it, but you aren’t going to feel right until you do. And the only way you can possibly think of—”
“Is to take it back from the people who put that hole in you,” I finished for him.
I hadn’t even realized it until the words left my lips.
And his mouth curled into a bitter smile as he inclined his head in a long, slow nod.
Liette had told me about this man once. Among normal people, Freemakers were legends—brilliant inventors, alchemists, Spellwrights, engineers, and more. And among Freemakers, Two Lonely Old Men was unto a god. The stories written about his brilliance filled ten books—she owned nine of them. I had no idea if any of them were true.
But he was right about me and him.
We understood each other.
So I closed my eyes and let out a cold breath.
“What do you want from me, then?” I asked.
He turned toward his tiny little city and stared over it with a sad, cruel little smile. And that tiny light in his eyes burned hotter.
“All I require,” he said, “is the absolute destruction of the two most powerful nations in the Scar.”
SIX
THE CANED TOAD
Life is measured in deals. Specifically, bad ones.
Any scar you collect, any corpse you leave behind, any tender-eyed pretty face you wake up next to comes with a cost, whether you know it or not. Scars don’t come without pain, corpses aren’t left behind without someone to avenge them, and any heart you get will be one you eventually break.
There are no good or bad costs, just ones you are or are not willing to pay. But, paradoxically, all deals are bad ones because any deal worth making means giving up something you can never get back.
In the case of the deal proposed to me, the cost was steep, indeed. Aside from the very likely possibility that it would end in me just dying and accomplishing nothing, Two Lonely Old Men’s proposal to destroy the Imperium and the Revolution alike was more or less asking me to give up sanity entirely. After all, I had enough trouble just fighting one mage or one tank—how the hell he planned on taking out two nations positively brimming with them was a concept beyond me.
Granted, I wasn’t a genius Freemaker. Then again, I wasn’t out of my fucking mind, either.
He was asking the impossible. He was proposing the deranged. He was hoping to avenge thousands of fallen souls by the destruction of two nations. And in exchange…
In exchange…
He was offering me revenge.
Every last name on my list. Every mage who had ever crossed me. Every hand that gave me these scars, every eye that looked on helplessly and did nothing while I bled out in the dark, every reason I still wake up from a dead sleep screaming, stuck on this cold, dark earth.
He could give it to me, too. That much, I didn’t doubt. His city might be gone, but the genius that built it was still there. Two Lonely Old Men had enough informants, loyalists, and money to guarantee that even the most elusive name on my list couldn’t escape his reach. Or mine.
Like I said, the only costs worth considering are the ones you’re prepared to pay. And that’s why I was heading downstairs—down the halls of the inn, down past a glaring Madame Fist as I made my way into the basement, down to the door locked therein.
For what he was proposing… I was ready to pay.
“Foolish.”
Not everyone agreed.
“I could sense his fear, his desperation,” the Cacophony rasped from his sheath, his voice burning. “He is no brilliant mind. He is a grieving widower clinging to a cold corpse. You waste our time indulging his delusion.”
