Ten arrows of iron, p.19
Ten Arrows of Iron, page 19
Fucking Wardmages.
“Darrishana!” I shouted.
“Don’t,” she whispered back to me.
“Don’t be fucking stupid.”
“I am not,” she replied, cold as I had been. Did it cut so deep as it felt now, I wondered, when I had sounded like that? “You can’t have that name. I gave it to Salazanca. Not to Red Cloud.”
“I am Red Cloud.”
“You are.” She turned, started walking away, until she was just one more ash on the wind. “And I wish we were both different people.”
Nothing ever happens like it does in opera. Stories don’t end when the curtain falls and the audience leaves. Steel is answered with steel, blood with blood, a fire set keeps burning until it has nothing left to burn. And no matter what opera says, you can’t really leave what you’ve done behind you.
But you can try your hardest.
Meticulous’s house was far behind me, a distant pillar of smoke that faded into the night sky like the last glutted crows flapping lazily away from a stripped carcass. So, too, were the guards who had come to investigate—none of them motivated or stupid enough to come looking for me after I’d left. The numbness setting in from the cold and the Vechine wasn’t comfort, but it was closer than I’d had in a while. Left alone with the dark and the falling snow as I made my way through the streets, I had a moment to breathe, to think.
“NO!”
So, naturally, some shithead decided to ruin it.
I followed the sound of a shriek of what I assumed to be a small child and instead found a full-grown man. On his knees in the middle of a small square, Urda was elbow-deep in his satchel, his eyes glistening with terror as he eviscerated the bag, scattering quills and papers out into the snow.
“No, no, no, no, NO, NO, NO!” he whimpered into the bag, as though some sympathetic creature inside would be moved to pity and give him what he was looking for. When that didn’t happen, he clenched his fists and pounded futilely at his own skull. “It isn’t… it’s not… it isn’t—”
“For fuck’s sake, I said I’m sorry!” His sister stood nearby, alternately screaming at him and Jero. “It all looked like the same chicken-scratch shit to me!”
“It was the schematics of an airship.” Jero thrust a finger in her face. “How the fuck do you not know what those look like?”
“They were coded, Sir Shitstain.” Yria slapped his finger out of her face. “Don’t go wiping my ass with sandpaper because you forgot to mention that little part.”
“What about him?” Jero turned a sneer toward Urda, who was moaning into his own hands. “He was the codebreaker. That’s why we brought him on.”
“He was busy,” Yria grunted.
“Busy?” Jero scoffed, stalking toward Urda. “So busy that he ruined the entire—”
His words, and his stride, were cut short as Yria imposed herself between her brother and Jero. She’d never had the most pleasant of demeanors to begin with—the only time I ever saw her laugh was when someone was farting, bleeding, or both—but the snarl on her face was so twisted with anger she could have carved it out of her face with her own knife.
“Don’t. Ever. Touch him,” she uttered. “You told him to break their code and he did. You told him to forge that dead fuck’s writing and he did. You wanted him to make sure he got the right scrap of paper, you should have told him.”
Jero’s face went blank, his body stiff beneath his coat. I’m not sure Yria noticed it—hell, I barely did. When you meet a killer in the Scar, you expect some screaming maniac with a big weapon and a bigger ego, and most of the time, that’s what you get. But those aren’t true killers; those are thugs who view violence as a means to get what they want: money, food, fear.
A true killer moves slowly, deliberately. A man who’s cut more throats than he’s kissed doesn’t waste time on threats or boasts. He goes soft and still as night, moves so slowly you don’t even notice the knife he’s reaching for until it’s in your belly. His kills are special; they’ve earned the right to be—he doesn’t waste them.
So I wondered, as I watched Jero’s hand flit unconsciously toward the back of his belt where he kept his blade, what it was that Yria could have done to make him want to draw it.
“You had your job,” he whispered. “My job was to find Meticulous and kill him. And I did.”
“No.”
His hand fell. His body loosened. The anger he kept hidden behind his face buried itself deeper as I approached.
“I did,” I said. “Which means I’m owed an explanation for what’s going on.” I glanced from their confrontation to Urda, quietly sobbing. “Because it looks like someone fucked up.”
“Someone did.” Jero pointedly looked away from Yria, rubbed his eyes, and sighed. “We weren’t after Meticulous just for his correspondence. He had information on the Iron Fleet. Specifically, the mechanical layout of the airships.”
I furrowed my brow. “How do you know he did?”
There. A flash of worry across his face. The briefest dart of eyes as he searched for an answer before staring at me too intently. Meet enough liars, you start seeing their little flinches and twitches. Even the good ones have them.
“He’s the sole point of authority for the Revolution out here,” he said. “Who else would have them?”
And Jero was very good.
“I thought I grabbed ’em,” Yria muttered as she gestured to the papers scattered on the ground. “But they’re no good. Meticulous coded some fake ones, left ’em out for me to find, paranoid bastard.”
“A paranoid spy. Imagine that.” Jero ignored the curse she flung at his back. “Regardless, those schematics are essential for our plan. Urda can’t work without them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Can’t change it, can’t change it, can’t change it…” Urda’s whimpering came accompanied by his knees pulled up to his chest, tears streaming from his eyes. “If I can’t change it, I can’t fix it, and if I can’t fix it, I can’t stop it, and if I can’t stop it, I can’t—”
“Hey.”
Urda’s frantic muttering fell silent. His eyes fell to the ground. And his sister fell to her knees beside him.
“Look at me,” she urged, taking him by the shoulders. “Look.”
She wasn’t a gentle woman. Nor even a kind one. She was firm and coarse as old leather. That’s what she gave her brother when he looked up at her—something firm, something earnest, something that wouldn’t let him look away.
“We fucked up,” she said. “But we’ve fucked up before and we’ve fixed it before. We’ll fuck up again and we’ll fix it again. And we’ll fix this, too, all right?”
Urda licked his lips, wiped the tears from his eyes, nodded feebly, and began to draw in deep breaths. It was a touching scene—or as close to one as I was likely to see in this city—and while I hated to ruin the mood, I couldn’t help but lean over to Jero and whisper.
“They’re not going to fix it, are they?”
“Fuck no,” he replied. “Not unless they can stop an airship by cussing and crying.”
I squinted. “The schematics showed you how to stop an airship?”
“Not exactly.” Jero sighed, scratched his throat. “Sneaking past an airship’s guns is easy enough to do when you’re not carrying around a gigantic Relic of unimaginable power. But once we’ve got that thing, we’ll be easy prey for any one of those ships.”
“Unless something keeps them occupied,” I hummed.
“Precisely.”
“I take it from the considerable pain in my spectacular ass this plan is giving me that just destroying them isn’t an option.”
“There aren’t enough mages in the Scar, let alone the world, to bring down the whole Fleet. And we won’t have the time or the tools to fuck with their engines.” Jero gestured to Urda, who was slowly getting to his feet with Yria’s help. “Our hopes rest on this little shit.”
I stared at Urda as he stumbled on a stray piece of ice and fell flat on his face. I sniffed.
“So, we’re fucked, then?”
“Essentially,” Jero sighed. “A Spellwright can convince a sword it can burst into flames or a cloak that it’s as strong as steel…”
The realization struck me square across the face. “Or an airship that it can’t pursue.”
Jero nodded. “With just a few sigils, Urda could stall their engines or silence their guns. Long enough for us to escape with the Relic, anyway. But he can’t convince an object it’s something else if he doesn’t know what it is first.”
Despite what my numerous injuries would have you believe, I don’t consider myself to be particularly stupid. But it’s true that I prefer simple things: strong whiskey, straightforward lovers, and problems you can solve with a sword or, if it’s particularly complex, an explosion.
And shit like this was why.
Spellwrighting was an art in the same way math was: technically true but mostly birdshit. The act of wrighting relied on an intimate understanding of the object to be inscribed upon and the more complex the object, the more potential there was to go wrong—hence why a wright couldn’t, say, turn a kitten into a fire-breathing monstrosity.
Not after the last time, anyway.
And while an airship wasn’t as complex as the biology of a living thing, it was something big enough and complicated enough that any attempt to alter it would require a thorough understanding of its internal processes. On his own, Urda simply couldn’t cut it.
But she could.
I didn’t like the way I smiled at the thought of her. My smile was supposed to be confident, effortless, a Vagrant’s smile. The grin that pulled its way onto my face without me realizing, though, was as dumb as a smitten kid’s. She had a way of doing that to me. Of making me think things without realizing it. Just like I thought of her then.
Her eyes, brown and serious and so very big behind her glasses. Her hair, always so neatly tidied except for the few strands of black she could never force into obedience. Her face, always so stern and serious until I’d say the right thing, make the right joke, notice the right thing about her before she gave me a smile just as big and stupid as the one I wore.
I wonder what Liette would say if she were here now.
“Obviously,” I could hear her voice even now, “an airship is far too large and unwieldy to allow room for error that might be invited by stylistic decision. And given that the Revolution both possesses the only ones in existence as well as being a pack of short-sighted, propaganda-choked miscreants, we can assume that their limited capacity for creativity would likewise prohibit them from creating anything overly complex. Hence, we need merely deduce the most obvious means of constructing an airship, assume they followed that, then extrapolate what we need from that.”
Then she’d look at me, and I’d have this big, stupid grin I was wearing just from thinking about her face, and adjust her glasses and ask me why I was smiling. And she’d smile back. And I’d feel the scars aching on my body and the weight of the names on my list…
And I’d wonder how long it would be before she looked at me and saw only a monster again.
“I’ve got to handle these two.” Jero lay a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Tuteng’s ahead in that tower.” He pointed toward a dark house a block away, a tower rising into the night sky. “Grab him and tell him we’re ready.”
I shot him a flat look. “I just nearly bled out. Why do I have to do it?”
“Would you rather stay here and deal with the twins?”
My lips pursed. My eyes narrowed.
“Has anyone ever told you, Jero,” I said, “that you ask to get punched in the mouth a lot?”
“All the time.” He shot me a wink as he turned around. “I promise you, by the time this is all over, I’ll ask you to do worse.”
THIRTEEN
TERASSUS
Now, don’t let my frustration fool you, I’ve been a part of heist plots before.
Some of them even ended without everyone dead.
For example, in Sevric’s Last Boast, myself and a few gentlepeople of peculiar talents and persuadable moralities were convinced to ambush a train. Now, never mind how it turned out or who started stabbing who—that part’s not important and you can’t prove it was me. What is important is that I’m well aware that a plot takes a lot of people with a lot of talents: some of them more hands-on, some of them more hands-off.
So, don’t get me wrong, I knew that Tuteng was probably doing something very important at that moment.
I just wasn’t sure if it was important enough to prevent me from hitting Jero for making me haul my busted ass up these stairs to find him.
Or maybe I was just in a bad mood.
Schematics. All of this had come down to drawings on a shitty piece of paper. All our plans to make a better world, all my ambitions to find the names on my list, all of it gone because Urda couldn’t tell which shitty paper was the right shitty paper, Agne couldn’t not kill the only guy who could have helped us, and Jero couldn’t be bothered to tell me the plan so I could have stopped this.
It had all been for nothing. Everything. Every corpse, every scar, every drop of blood. All that I’d done and all that I’d killed and everyone I’d lost, all of it had led to this dead end. And all I was left with were shadows crowding around me and the ghosts waiting behind me.
Maybe that’s what made me mad—no, not mad, hopeless; the cold cramp in my chest that came when people were more disappointing than I was—when I ascended the stairs of the tower and found Tuteng at its highest floor.
Or maybe it was because while I was getting shit done, he was busy stroking the feathers of his pet bird.
“It’s not that far,” he whispered to the Shekkai on his hands. “I promise. I would never ask you to…”
He glanced up, suddenly aware of me. In the shadows of the attic, the bony stumps where his horns should be looked like another set of eyes, wide and surprised. A contrast to his true eyes, which regarded me with annoyed indifference.
“We’re going,” I said to him. “The guards are closing in.”
Tuteng’s ears twitched. He hummed thoughtfully. “We’ve got some time.”
“No, we do not have fucking time,” I sighed. “This place is crawling with—”
“With humans,” he said. “And they’re crawling around everywhere. If Jero wants his plan to go off, he can wait. Now, if you don’t mind…”
He continued to glare at me, waiting for me to be silent. Normally, I wouldn’t have indulged that, but his bird was also staring at me and… well, if you’d seen the way it looked, you’d have given them space, too.
He muttered a few more words to the bird before it let out a soft chirp. He smiled, nodded at it, then rose to the window. With a quick flick, he sent the bird flying. It took off into the night sky, but Tuteng continued to wait, watching it.
Like he wanted to make sure it got out safely.
“Where’s it heading?” I asked.
“Weiless,” he replied. “Where Jero wants her to go. Where I asked her to go.”
“Asked?” The realization hit me, made my eyes go wide. “You’ve got a Beast-Tongue.”
“Humans call it that.” He chanced a glance at me. “You know many Rukkokri?”
“Enough to know that the only ones who work with humans don’t go back to their clans.” I gestured with my chin toward his brow. “How’d you lose your horns?”
He smiled—or frowned, it was hard to tell with him, really. But the expression on his face was bitter, all the same.
“Money. Same as anyone.”
“You sold them?”
“I might as well have,” he sighed, looking back out the window. “Humans love killing each other. But they love one-sided fights the best. Makes them think their wars are good when they don’t take a scratch. So when one group of them wanted to ambush the other, I showed them the way through the wilds to do it. For metal.”
I winced. “Imperium?”
“And Revolution. Even Haven a few times. Made no difference to me.” He ran a finger fondly across the stump of his horn. “Or to my mother when she lopped these off and cast me out. Neither of us could tell you whether it was Imperials or Revolutionaries who destroyed our home, choked our land, killed my nephew. All she saw were humans. And me helping them.”
“Sounds rough.”
“Being cast out of the only home you’ve known, shunned by your people, and forced to work with the same things that lost you your horns in the first place?” He sniffed. “Yeah. A little.”
I paused, uncertain as to whether I wanted the answer. “What is Two Lonely Old Men paying you to work on this?”
“A lot.”
I shrugged. “A man could do a lot with a lot.”
“He could. My mother will do more with it, though, when I send it to her.”
“What? Why the fuck would you ever do that?”
“Because she’s my mother. They’re my people. And you aren’t.” He continued staring out the window at the empty space where the Shekkai had been. He sighed wearily, turned around, and stalked toward the stairs. “I don’t have anyone else here. And I won’t when the crows take me.”
He hesitated at the top of the stairs, turned toward me with those dark eyes. Eyes that had seen a suffering I’d never known, a unique pain that sang a different song than my own scars.
“What are you going to have when the crows take you?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that. When I signed on to this, I had so many: a better world liberated from war, the names of the people who gave me these scars, an end to the ghosts and the shadows and the nightmares…
But now…
Now, my mouth just hung open, trying to find a response.
“Just kidding.” Tuteng smiled, clapped me on the back, headed down the stairs. “I actually don’t care.”
And there he left me. Without an answer. Without a reason to keep going at this. Without anything but two words that weighed on my mind.
The crows.
And the idea that came from them.
