Ten arrows of iron, p.1
Ten Arrows of Iron, page 1
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Sam Sykes
Excerpt from Legacy of Ash copyright © 2019 by Matthew Ward
Excerpt from Ashes of the Sun copyright © 2020 by Django Wexler
Cover design by Lauren Panepinto
Cover illustration by Jeremy Wilson
Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Map by Tim Paul
Author photograph by Libbi Rich
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sykes, Sam, 1984– author.
Title: Ten arrows of iron / Sam Sykes.
Description: First edition. | New York : Orbit, 2020. | Series: The grave of empires ; book 2
Identifiers: LCCN 2019059644 | ISBN 9780316363471 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780316363495
Subjects: GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3619.Y545 T46 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059644
ISBNs: 978-0-316-36347-1 (paperback), 978-0-316-36346-4 (ebook)
E3-20200630-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
For Those Returning to the Scar…
One: Littlebarrow
Two: The Valley
Three: The Valley
Four: Littlebarrow
Five: The Valley
Six: The Caned Toad
Seven: Littlebarrow
Eight: Snowbird
Nine: Elsewhere
Ten: Terassus
Eleven: Meticulous’s Safe House
Twelve: Elsewhere
Thirteen: Terassus
Fourteen: The Caned Toad
Fifteen: The Crow Market
Sixteen: The Crow Market
Seventeen: Littlebarrow
Eighteen: The Caned Toad
Nineteen: The Caned Toad
Twenty: Yun Attoro Estate
Twenty-One: Little Haven
Twenty-Two: Little Haven
Twenty-Three: Yun Attoro Estate
Twenty-Four: Yun Attoro Estate
Twenty-Five: Yun Attoro Estate
Twenty-Six: Yun Attoro Estate
Twenty-Seven: Littlebarrow
Twenty-Eight: The Caned Toad
Twenty-Nine: The Caned Toad
Thirty: The Caned Toad
Thirty-One: The Caned Toad
Thirty-Two: The Valley
Thirty-Three: The Valley
Thirty-Four: Littlebarrow
Thirty-Five: The Valley
Thirty-Six: The Iron Fleet
Thirty-Seven: The Iron Fleet
Thirty-Eight: The Iron Fleet
Thirty-Nine: The Iron Fleet
Forty: The Iron Fleet
Forty-One: The Iron Fleet
Forty-Two: The Iron Fleet
Forty-Three: The Iron Fleet
Forty-Four: The Iron Fleet
Forty-Five: The Iron Fleet
Forty-Six: The Flagship
Forty-Seven: The Flagship
Forty-Eight: The Flagship
Forty-Nine: The Flagship
Fifty: Littlebarrow
Fifty-One: The Flagship
Fifty-Two: The Flagship
Fifty-Three: The Flagship
Fifty-Four: Elsewhere
Fifty-Five: The Flagship
Fifty-Six: Littlebarrow
Fifty-Seven: The Valley
Discover More
Extras
Meet the Author
A Preview of Legacy of Ash
A Preview of Ashes of the Sun
Also by Sam Sykes
Praise for Sam Sykes and Seven Blades in Black
For every reader who still carries scars.
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.
Tap here to learn more.
FOR THOSE RETURNING TO THE SCAR…
Perhaps you’ve heard the tales of Sal the Cacophony. Wielder of the magic gun that brings ruin, destroyer of Lastlight, avenger of Stark’s Mutter, slayer of Vraki the Gate, and she who leaves only cinders in her wake.
Then again, perhaps you haven’t. Or perhaps you just don’t remember. I won’t hold it against you.
Bear with me, though. I was kind of drunk for a lot of it.
It all started when I was “captured” by one Governor-Militant Tretta Stern, a saltslick of a woman in the service of the Glorious Revolution of the Fist and Flame: the people who come in with big guns, kill everyone, and leave. On behalf of said people with big guns, she inquired what happened that led me to preside over such a ruin across the Scar and, I suspect more pressingly, what had happened to one of the soldiers she was intended to rescue.
I was on the hunt for certain wicked people—we don’t have time to go into all the reasons they deserved to die, but trust me, they did. Each of them a Vagrant who broke their oath to the Imperium—same as the Revolution, except big magic instead of big guns and, oh, they both want to destroy each other—in a bid to bring it to ruin, and led by the fiend Vraki the Gate.
Pursuing them led me to the door of my former lover, Liette, who had very good reasons to be a former lover and even better reasons not to help me, but what can I say? I’m just that charming, probably.
Together, we followed those people to a township named Stark’s Mutter, only to discover—after narrowly escaping gruesome death at the hands of lunatic zealots from Haven—that they’d summoned a horrific beast known as a Scrath that had promptly fled from their control. In an attempt to summon a new one and provide it a suitable host, they abducted children from Stark’s Mutter, and I was determined to kill them.
The, uh, names. Not the children. I saved those ones.
That led us to cross paths with Cavric Proud: soldier of the Revolution, future abduction victim and the object of Tretta Stern’s interrogation. After “borrowing” his vehicle and him—kidnapping is bad, sure, but I was in a hurry and I couldn’t fucking drive that thing—we followed their trail to the Weary Mother, a barge serving as the mobile fortress of the Ashmouths, the largest crime syndicate in the Scar.
It was revealed to us—after a thrilling battle—that Vraki had taken the children to a source of great power: the Husks, a battlefield so suffused with magic from battles between the Revolution and Imperium that he could draw from its latent energy to summon another Scrath. We found the town of Vigil, a former Revolutionary garrison that had been utterly destroyed by an Imperial Prodigy named Red Cloud—a mage who requires no Barter.
I knew it well. Because I was Red Cloud.
Once, anyway.
I revealed to Tretta my former identity as a celebrated hero of the Imperium and she was kind enough to refrain from putting a bullet through my head long enough for me to explain what had happened.
Vraki and I… we were once members of the Crown Conspiracy, seeking to overthrow the Empress and her non-magical son to replace them with a true heir. That all changed when it turned out the plot involved me being betrayed by him, by my friends, by my former lover—the other one—Jindu the Blade. They stole my magic. They took my power. They left me for dead.
And I was eager to return the favor.
Liette and I… we had a fight. She left at Vigil. I found more enemies there that led me and Cavric to the town of Lastlight, a great city built by an amazing inventor known as Two Lonely Old Men. It was a beautiful, magnificent town, a triumph of alchemy, engineering, and spellwrighting so majestic that even the Imperium and Revolution wouldn’t fight inside its walls.
In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have destroyed it.
But I did. To flush out Vraki’s associates. And it worked. I followed them to Fort Dogsjaw, a ruined Imperial fortress famed for being the site where the Imperial Mages, upon learning that the Empress’s son had no powers, rebelled and became Vagrants.
What happened was incredible. I fought Vraki and his followers, rescued the children of Stark’s Mutter, foiled Vraki’s attempt to summon an inhuman monstrosity, and narrowly escaped with my life.
It was thrilling. Incredible, really. Life-changing, epic, astonishing.
You sh
ould have seen it.
Anyway, I escaped to a ruined Lastlight, barely alive. With the help of Cavric and Liette’s timely return, I was able to escape back to the town of Lowstaff.
And I was followed.
Vraki and Jindu, eager to take vengeance, returned and destroyed the town… and so did I. I ruined that city, I killed people, I shook that region to its foundations. I left Vraki dying in his own dust, and Jindu, the man who betrayed me, the man who held my heart in his hands and put a dagger through it…
… I let him get away.
I don’t know why. To this day, I don’t know why. And neither did Liette. She left me. Again. I didn’t follow her. What I’d done to Lastlight, to Lowstaff… I couldn’t do that to her.
I hope she’s doing all right.
Tretta Stern, my captor, was ready to execute me, having gotten my full story. But an intervention from Cavric—who, as you can imagine, came to forgive me for kidnapping him—allowed me to escape.
And then he left, too.
And all I was left with was my namesake. The Cacophony. The gun that shoots magic, burns bright, and, sometimes, talks to me. And while Vraki and his underlings had been slain, those were only seven names on my list.
And thirty-three of them had betrayed me.
And so, in search of the others, I went out.
And that’s when things got worse…
ONE
LITTLEBARROW
The day the sky rained fire began like any other.
Meret awoke before the dawn, as he always did, to grind the herbs he had dried last week into tinctures and salves that would cure by next week. He gathered the medicines he needed to, as he always did—balm for Rodic’s burn that he had gotten at the smithy, salve for old man Erton’s bad knee, and as always, a bottle of Avonin whiskey for whatever might arise in the day—put them into his bag, and set out. He made his rounds, as he always did, and visited the same patients he always had since he had arrived in Littlebarrow three months ago.
The name was a little unfair, he thought. After all, it was a long time ago that a woman had built a shack to live in beside the cairn she had constructed for her only child. Since then, enough people had found it a good place to stop on sojourns into the Valley that it had grown to a township worthier of a name that matched its thriving circumstances. But as it wasn’t his township, he thought it not his place to protest the name, no matter how much he had grown attached to the place.
While it was nowhere near as big as Terassus or even the larger towns in the Valley, and it still had its share of problems, Littlebarrow was one of the better places his training had taken him. The people were nice, the winter was relatively gentle, and the surrounding forest was thick enough for game but not so much that larger beasts would come sniffing around.
Littlebarrow was a fine place. And Meret liked to think he had helped.
“Fuck me, boy, you missed your true calling as a torturer.”
Not everyone agreed.
He glanced up from Sindra’s knee, now wrapped in fresh antiseptic-soaked bandages, to Sindra’s face, contorted in pain, with keen distaste that he hoped his glasses magnified enough to demonstrate how tired he was of that joke.
“And you apparently misheard yours,” he said to his newest patient. “I would have thought a soldier would be made of sterner stuff.”
“If my name were Sindra Stern, I’d agree,” the woman growled. “As the Great General saw fit to call me Sindra Honest, I’ll do you the courtesy of pointing out that this shit”—she gestured to the bandages—“fucking hurts.”
“It hurts much less than the infection the salve keeps out, I assure you,” Meret replied, cinching the bandage tight. He dared to flash a wry grin at the woman. “And you were warned about the importance of keeping the joint clean, so in the interests of honesty, I believe I could say I told you so?”
Sindra’s glare loitered on him for an uncomfortable second before she lowered her gaze to her knee. And as her eyes followed the length of her leg, her glare turned to a frown.
The bandages marked the end of her flesh and the beginning of the metal-and-wood prosthetic that had been attached months ago. She rolled its ankle, as if still unconvinced that it was real, and a small series of sigils let off a faint glow in response.
“Fucking magic,” she said with a sneer. “Still not sure that I wouldn’t be better off with just one leg.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t be able to help as many people without it,” Meret added. “And the spellwrighting that made it possible isn’t technically magic.”
“I was a Revolutionary, boy,” Sindra said with a sneer as she pulled her trouser leg over the prosthesis. “I know fucking magic when I fucking see it.”
“I thought that the soldiers of the Grand Revolution of the Fist and Flame were so pure of ideal that vulgar language never crossed their lips.”
Sindra’s face, dark-skinned and bearing the stress wrinkles of a woman much older than she actually was, was marred by a sour frown. It matched the rest of her body at least. Broad shoulders and thick arms that her old military shirt had long given up trying to hide were corded with the thick muscle that comes from hard labor, hard battles, and harder foes. Her hair was prematurely gray, her boot was prematurely thin, and her heart was prematurely disillusioned. The only part of her that wasn’t falling apart was the sword hanging from her hip.
That, she kept as sharp as her tongue.
“It’s the Glorious Revolution, you little shit,” she muttered, “and it’s a good thing I’m not in it anymore, isn’t it?”
“True,” Meret hummed. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to treat you.”
“Yeah, lucky fucking me,” Sindra grumbled. “I wouldn’t mind a couple of alchemics our cadre medics used to have, though. A hit of those and I could fight all night.”
“I am but a humble apothecary, madam,” he replied. “And while herbs and bandages take longer, they heal just as good.”
Sindra sighed as she winced and hauled herself to her feet, her prosthesis creaking as she did. “You’re just lucky that it’s a choice between keeping you around and keeping soldiers around. If it were a choice between a smart-mouthed apothecary who couldn’t heal for shit and, say, a Hornbrow who hadn’t eaten in days, I’d slather myself in sauce and pry its jaws open myself.”
He agreed, but kept it to himself.
Littlebarrow had been fortunate enough to escape most of the battles between the Revolution and its inveterate foes, the Imperium, which had raged through the rest of the Valley. The wilderness surrounding it had seen battle, he had been told, and there was the incident with farmer Renson’s barn that was turned into kindling by stray cannon fire. But by and large, the two nations kept their fighting focused on the cities and resources. A township like Littlebarrow was worthy only of a few scuffles between Revolutionary cadres and Imperial mages.
One such scuffle had deposited Sindra here two years ago. After a savage battle that saw her grievously wounded after bringing down an Imperial Graspmage, she had been left for dead by both her comrades and her foes. The people of the township had taken her in, nursed her back to health, and begged her to put her sword and strength to the defense of their township, which she, in possession of a generous heart that nonetheless burned relentlessly for justice, reluctantly agreed to.
At least, that’s the way Sindra told it.
Meret suspected the true story was perhaps less dramatic, but he let her have her stories. It was true enough that she had the injuries that came from defending the town against the occasional monster that came wandering out of the woods or outlaws that came searching for an easy hit. But if the war ever came back to this part of the Valley, a middle-aged woman with a sword wouldn’t do much to stop it.
Hell, neither would a hundred.
He’d been to the rest of the Valley. He’d seen the tanks smashed into the earth by magic, their crews buried alive inside them. He’d seen the towns and cities reduced to blackened skeletons by cannon fire. He’d seen the big graveyards and the little graveyards and the places where they just hadn’t bothered to bury the bodies and had left the bird-gnawed bones to rot where they lay.
It hadn’t put him off. After all, the wounds inflicted by that terrible war were the whole reason he had come to the Valley once the Imperium claimed victory and started settling it again. But part of him wondered if the reason he hadn’t lingered so long in Littlebarrow was because, deep down, he knew that he’d never come close to mending even a fraction of those wounds.
