Ten arrows of iron, p.24
Ten Arrows of Iron, page 24
And then yawned to life.
A portal burst into being, a swirling hole of light and nothingness. But that was impossible… wasn’t it? There were no Doormages here—Rudu and I sure as shit weren’t any—so how could—
“Yria!” Urda shrieked, leaping through the portal and disappearing.
“Fuck.” Jero sighed as he took me by the shoulder. “I was hoping we could avoid that.”
I blinked again. “Wait, what are you—”
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned that I don’t like portals, haven’t I? They’re vile, nasty things that make you feel like your insides get torn out and rearranged on the other side. Not everyone survives them and sometimes the stress of that alone feels like it’s enough to kill you.
Anyway, turns out none of that is helped by being high on silkgrass.
Jero gave me a stiff shove. I fell through the portal, into a world of blinding light, hurtling through nothingness and space I didn’t have a name for, my screams lost on the void before, just as swiftly as it all had began, it came to an ugly, jarring end.
I plummeted out of the portal and landed harshly on something soft, a surge of pain lancing through my injuries. Urda grunted as I collapsed upon him. And then he screamed as Jero came hurtling out the portal to land on top of me.
“Well, look who showed up,” a voice chuckled. “Thought maybe I was gonna have to set out tea to get Lord and Lady Fancyfarts back.”
Yria. How did she get here?
She wandered over to the portal, lazily, and waved a hand. The light snapped shut almost instantly. I blinked, stared out from the pile of men who had a knack for irritating me.
Agne and Tuteng, apparently ensconced in a game of cards, glanced up from the table. Snow fell against the window. Madame Fist came in with a tray full of tea and made a comment about people dirtying her floors. Yria just grinned as she reached out and pulled Urda free from beneath me.
“Neat trick, isn’t it?” she chuckled. “Makes me wish we could do it more often. So…” She licked her lips. “You get your little papers or did I just blow my load for nothing?”
SEVENTEEN
LITTLEBARROW
Does it?”
Sal looked up as the words tumbled out of his mouth. She tossed a piece of rubble atop the twisted wood and metal, held out her hands toward him.
“Does what?” she asked.
“Get tiring.” Meret grunted as he struggled to pull a particularly large chunk of debris out of the earth with slightly more dignity than his noises would imply. “The fighting, the killing, the… I don’t know, being a Vagrant.”
She shot him a smirk too coy for a face as beaten and bloodied as hers had been.
“You were just talking about how lovely a Vagrant’s life sounded. All that romantic talk about being able to change things. I thought I was listening to an opera.” She chuckled as she came up beside him. “What changed? Was it the stabbing? Most people are less interested in this lifestyle once they realize how much stabbing is involved.”
“No, it’s not the stabbing.” Meret cleared his throat as she pressed her shoulder against his and took hold of the debris. “I mean, yes, obviously, I would prefer there to be not so much stabbing in my future, but the sentiment remains the same. I can appreciate the—”
“Here.” She interrupted him as she slid into a squat, tightening her grip on the chunk of metal. “Plant your feet. Bend down. Lift with your legs.” He nodded, mimed her stance. “Ready?”
He nodded again. They started to pull. The sound of their grunting joined the hiss of snow shifting and the slobber of wet earth. Slowly, they hauled the object—a wing, maybe? Or a figurehead? It was hard to tell—out of the earth, sodden from melting snow.
The body came with it.
“SCIONS!” Meret shrieked, and dropped the object, eliciting a curse from Sal, but he didn’t care about any of that. He rushed toward the person clinging to the wing, reaching for the satchel at his hip. “Hang on, I can…”
His voice trailed off. His hand slid from his satchel. His eyes fell, like the snow fell. Two more pieces of white, fallen upon a corpse, helping no one.
You can do what? he asked himself.
He knew it was a man—or what looked like a man, anyway. But nothing else. The fire had taken his skin, sinew, hair, face. What few remains had been left behind had been shattered by the fall. He lay there, clutching the wet earth where that piece of debris had been, as though it would give him solace.
Solace, Meret realized, that he couldn’t give.
Couldn’t help him, he told himself. Couldn’t even comfort him in the last moments. You could have helped him if he had a cold, though. Or a sprained knee. That’s what you do, isn’t it? The small stuff?
He turned and looked out over the field. What rubble could be moved had been gathered into small piles that dotted the snow-covered field. Like cairns.
How many other bodies were out there? he wondered. Buried under rubble? Burned up in flames until only skeletons remained? Crushed under metal or wood or the sheer weight of seeping, damp earth?
How many of them might still be alive? he wondered. Trapped there, screaming for help, begging for aid from gods they didn’t know they believed in? Bleeding out, broken, burning…
What could he do for any of them? How could he save them? What if he did? How could he save the next ones? And the next ones? How many empty-eyed, dead-inside people would he leave behind on his way to other empty-eyed, dead-inside people?
What are you even doing here?
He wondered.
The field didn’t answer him. No matter how long he stared.
“Were you still planning on helping?” Sal shouted at him.
He babbled a few apologies she couldn’t hear as he hurried to catch up to her. He took hold of the wing, melting snow and burned flesh sloughing off it as they dragged it toward the pile, and together they tossed it upon another cairn.
Sal wiped her brow with the back of her hand. “So, what changed?”
“Huh?” he asked.
“You made it sound like a Vagrant’s life was positively magical,” she replied. “Now it sounds like you’re not so sure.”
“I’m not. I mean, I am, but… I mean, is anyone sure about such a… I mean…” He held his hands out, not finding the words there, either. “I don’t know. I’m aware a Vagrant’s life isn’t magical. I’m aware that they tend to deal with, uh, rather a lot of blood.”
Sal looked over the field of rubble-cairns and sniffed. “Yeah, I’d say that’s accurate.”
“But I confess, even with that, there’s a certain… romanticism?”
She shot him a queer look. “Have I made this sound romantic? You know most Vagrants aren’t as attractive as me, right?”
“Romantic isn’t the right word.” He thought of the dead person and cringed. “At all. But… the Scar’s a difficult place, Vagrant or not. Everyone’s suffering, everyone’s bleeding, everyone’s dying…” He stared at the rubble pile, at all the great things that debris had once been, built by great people. “Everyone’s always dying.”
“They were dying before Vagrants were a thing. If it wasn’t the war, it’d be the outlaws. If it wasn’t the outlaws, it’d be the beasts. If it wasn’t the beasts, it’d be… I don’t know, some kind of hellplague that made you shit your lungs out.”
“That’s not a thing,” Meret countered sharply. “But if it was, you could probably do something about it. Just like you can drive off the monsters, kill the outlaws, stop wars—”
“No one can stop a war.”
“But you could do more,” he insisted. “Anyone else is just… just prey. All we can do is run away and lick our wounds. But a Vagrant can fight back, can’t they? I mean, do you worry about bandits mugging you on the road?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“Not everyone.”
He glanced down to the big brass gun upon her hip. And it glanced back at him; he could feel it under its sheath. It was looking at him. It was smiling.
“All right, you’ve got a point.” She brusquely shifted her scarf over the gun, hiding it from his view. “Once they see him, most troublemakers don’t tend to sniff around.”
“But it’s not just the gun, is it? It’s the legends, the stories, all the fear that’s heaped upon your name. Have you ever just spoken your name and sent someone running?”
She grinned. “Once.”
“Have you ever had someone come looking for more after that?”
Her grin fell. “Once.”
“When a beast attacks, what do you do?”
“Normally, I try to avoid it.” She walked away from him, pulled something from the ground. “But if I can’t, I’ll blow it to hell.”
“What about a warlord? When they attack a village you’re staying in, what do you do?”
“Blow them to hell.”
“What if a Revolutionary squadron tries to conscript you? Or an Imperial Judge billets himself in your house? Or—”
“There’s only so many ways I can say it, Meret,” she sighed. She trudged back to the pile, dragging a barrel behind her. She upended it, the rank smell of oil filling the air. “If everything about this life sounds so great, why don’t you try it?”
“Well, uh,” he said, clearing his throat, “a Vagrant is a mage, right? I don’t have any magic, ergo—”
“There are a lot of famous outlaws that aren’t Vagrants,” Sal replied as she started dragging the oil barrel to the next pile. “Red Rinjar, Lucky Airo, the Grunch—she’s an asshole, for the record. You think any of those warlords fear bandits or monsters?”
“Well, no, but they’re probably all brutes from birth, right?”
“Red Rinjar was, yeah. But she was also a merchant’s daughter. Lucky Airo is a grandfather of six. The Grunch was a chef. All of them started small.”
“But they weren’t apothecaries.”
“If you know how to save a man’s life, you know how to take it.” One by one, Sal visited the rubble-cairns and upended oil over them before shaking out the last drops and adding the barrel to the last pile. “The rest of it—the cronies, the weapons, the power—you get along the way. The only thing that makes us what we are is whether we’re willing to kill someone.”
She turned and looked at him. Not with the flippant grin she’d sometimes offered him or the distant melancholy he sometimes saw when she wasn’t looking. She looked at him the way she had when she’d first asked him to save that woman, Liette.
She looked at him like everything hinged on his answer.
“Are you?” she asked.
Are you?
He echoed the question inside himself. He’d seen his share of death before. More than his share, if he was honest—and he still stood strong where the sight of death would shake others.
Not that it hadn’t shaken him. No one could look at that many corpses, that much suffering, and not be. But lingering under all that shaking, quivering fear, there was something solid, something sharp and hot that he could never seem to grab hold of.
Anger.
Anger at the armies that had dug the mass graves he’d seen the bodies in. Anger at the outlaws that had burned the villages he’d left behind. Anger at the monsters, the fiends, the merchants of suffering who glutted themselves at feasts of misery and laughed while they choked on blood.
Sometimes, he could grab that anger. Sometimes, he could hold it in his hands and hone it until it was a sharpened point, fit for thrusting right through someone’s—
“Yes.” The words suddenly tumbled out of his mouth. “Yes, I am.”
He didn’t know what he had expected her reaction to be. Probably disbelieving laughter or one of those smug-ass grins she shot him when she was about to say something insufferably clever. But she didn’t give him either of those. She merely held his stare for another moment, then nodded.
He had meant it. And she knew he had.
“There’s a gang that runs outside the Valley. The Sad Lads.” She chuckled. “Dumb name, but they’re decent sorts, as outlaws go, and they could use someone who knows how to heal. They target rich fucks, military caravans, that sort of thing. You seem like the type that cares about shit like codes of honor.”
“Well… I mean, I don’t want to kill just anyone but—”
“They owe me a favor. I can set you up with them, if you want.”
He blinked. “What? Really?”
Again, that stare of hers. That earnest, violent look. “You’re doing something for me. For Liette. Something important. Sal the Cacophony doesn’t shirk debts. If I can make this right by that, I will.”
His mouth hung agape. Here it was. An answer. A way to hold on to that anger, a way to fight back, a way to change things. He stammered, looking for a reply, finding only a jumble of messy words.
“I mean, I’d be… I’d be… of course, my first duty is to my patients. I’d have to settle things with Liette—which I’d be happy to do even if I wasn’t going to be a… or if I wanted to be a… wow, an outlaw? What kinds of codes of honor? Do I have to swear a loyalty oath or do an initiation? Will I have to put something in my—”
“Holy shit, calm down, I’m not talking about right this second.” She reached into her pocket, pulled out a sheaf of tindertwigs. “But if you want that… or if you want anything, really… I’ll get it for you.”
Despite the morbidity of the situation, he found himself grinning. “That’s not what I’d have expected from Sal the Cacophony.”
“There are nice stories about me, you bag of ass,” she replied, sneering.
She struck the twig, setting it aflame and tossing it atop the rubble pile. The rubble caught instantly, the oil and severium dust alighting in a purple-tinged flame that belched smoke into the sky.
“A word for the intrepid, though,” she said. “Get used to this.”
“To what?” He adjusted his glasses. “You never told me what you’re doing.”
“Burning,” she replied. “For the dead.”
“The… dead?”
A sad, tender smile—not something he’d have expected from her, either—crossed her face and was gone in an instant. One more cold and beautiful thing, burned and disappeared in the flames.
“Someone should remember them,” she said. “When the killing’s done, memories are all you get to keep.”
The trek back to Littlebarrow felt longer than it had taken to assemble the rubble piles. That task, he’d only been burdened with wood and metal. For the journey back, he’d been laden with heavier things.
This morning, he’d been ready to call Littlebarrow his home. But that had been before the sky opened up, before the fire rained down, before he knew that even here, war could reach him. Reach anywhere. What safety was there in a world where even the sky could erupt in flames?
Could he do it?
Could he leave it all behind? Not just Littlebarrow, but all of it: the herbs and the bandages and the patients, the finding a village and leaving it knowing that it would soon be destroyed, the helplessness and the empty words and the people…
The people.
What would they do without him? he wondered. Who would take care of the old wounds and the bad knees? Who would brew up tinctures for bronchitis and colds? Who would…
Who would protect them, he asked himself, when the war comes to them?
That thought settled heavy on his shoulders, along with the others. Tinctures and salves were all well and good for tiny problems. But what good would they do against falling bombs and fiery spells? How would a tea for fever help a man torn apart by magic or shot through the heart with a gunpike?
It wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. He’d just pick up his bag, move to the next village, start over. And the whole thing would just keep going.
But what if it didn’t have to?
What if he met these Sad Lads? What if he learned to use a sword? A gun? What if he stood up to fight? Who would look to him as a hero? Who would come running to him for protection from the bandits and the outlaws? Who would go on living a long, boring life and die quietly in their beds at the end of a long, tiring journey, because of him?
He could do it. He could change everything.
He would change everything.
That’s decided, then, he told himself. Leave it behind. All of it. Once you do this for Sal, your life as Meret is over. You’ll need a new name, like… Meret the Malice. No, wait, that’s a Vagrant’s name—they seem touchy about their names. Malicious Meret, then. Or something else. You can be anyone. You can do anything. You’ll finally be able to—
“Been busy?”
Sindra’s voice cut through him cleaner than the cold—or a knife, for that matter. He started at her rasp, saw her sitting upon a chair on his porch, a cigarillo burning in her mouth.
“Uh, yes, as a matter of fact,” he replied. “I was just out there helping Sal with some disposal.”
“Sal.” She repeated the name with the same dire ominousness with which one repeats the name of a plague. “You were helping her.”
“I was.” Without realizing it, he drew himself up. “She requested it. Liette needed quiet to convalesce. It seemed a good idea.”
“You don’t think that time would be better spent helping this town?” She gestured out over the village, over its darkened windows and doors left hanging open. “The people are leaving, Meret. Because of her. Because of what she’s done and what she’ll do.”
He winced, as though struck. “Yes, that’s… that’s awful. Truly. But she fell here. She didn’t choose to.”
“And you didn’t have to choose to help her, but you did.” A sneer, old and deep as any of her wrinkles, painted her face. “Now these people are heading out, leaving everything behind, going onto roads crawling with outlaws and monsters, because they’ve got the good sense to realize a town with a Vagrant in it doesn’t stay a town for long.”
He sighed, rubbed his temples. “Sal wouldn’t do that.”
