Ten arrows of iron, p.29
Ten Arrows of Iron, page 29
Velline glared at her. “How many have you had?”
“Six”—she squinted, trying to recall—“teen?”
“You’ll touch not another drop.”
“What?” The woman’s face contorted from confusion to rage to a piteous pout while mine was still stuck on annoyed. “But, Captain—”
“I warned you,” another voice, accompanied by another figure, slid through the curtains. “The appreciation of these swine isn’t worth the discipline.”
A man. Delicate-looking in body beneath a delicate-looking coat and breeches, his black hair perfectly coiffed and his handsome face perfect in all the ways that makes a man look boring. Though it seemed the feeling was mutual, as he stared at me with an unimpressed pair of brown eyes over a wineglass. I couldn’t blame him—compared to him, I looked downright shabby. He was flawless.
That is, if you didn’t notice the unnatural bony plate jutting from his forehead.
“Regardless, Captain,” he spoke, sounding bored, “your absence has been noted. The common rabble—”
“Dalthoros,” Velline warned.
Dalthoros rolled his eyes. “Fine, the uncommon rabble is clamoring for your return.” He gestured to Shenazar. “If you’d be so kind as to relieve your faithful troops of entertaining them?”
“Very well,” Velline sighed. She gestured to me. “But may I have the honor of introducing—”
“Please, Captain.” Dalthoros turned and left. “If I have to meet any more preening nobodies, I might start to lose my pleasant demeanor.”
“Yeah.” Shenazar moved to follow, pointedly sheathing her sword. “Hey, it doesn’t count if Dal gives me his wine, does it?”
“You’ll need that sword if you intend to take it from me.”
Velline watched the two go with keen displeasure written across her face. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and snorted.
“Fucking mages,” she whispered before turning to me. “Pardon. The other Hellions require my services. But even if they don’t, I’d still like to know your name.”
“Sal,” I blurted out.
“Sal.” She turned the name over on her tongue, finding its taste peculiar. But she smiled all the same and nodded toward me. “I am pleased you found me tonight. Please don’t take long to do it again.”
With another quick bow and a turn on her heel, she disappeared, leaving me alone in the dark with one burgeoning question.
Why the fuck did you give her your real name?
I shook my head. This was what wine did to you, made you sloppy, careless. Drinking whiskey only makes you punch people and write bad poetry. That’s why assholes drank wine—they didn’t care.
Velline had noticed my scar and now she had my name. It might take an hour or a day, but there’s no way a woman like that wouldn’t eventually figure out who I was. Which meant this operation was about to get a whole lot more complicated.
Kind of made me wonder why I had to leave my gun behind if I was going to fuck this up anyway, but I didn’t have time to dwell on that. I didn’t have time to do anything except drain my wine, toss the glass aside, and put a hand down my dress.
Hidden in the tiny pocket sewn into the waist, I fished out a piece of red chalk. I glanced around, ensuring there were no other charming, violent strangers lurking around in here, before heading to the back of the room and finding a spot wedged between two especially gaudy statues.
I grabbed the edge of a sheet and wiped down the wooden wall. I took the chalk carefully in hand and began to draw a rectangle big enough for a man to fit through. Upon the chalk, Urda’s tiny sigils began to glow, their magic humming to life.
Portals were a tricky business—you didn’t shit all over the laws of time and space without certain precautions, after all. To ensure a safe arrival, the portal had to be perfectly drawn upon a clean surface by spellwritten chalk. Just one slipup could be the difference between the portal working or collapsing, trapping everyone using it inside.
Which meant I probably shouldn’t have drank quite so much wine before doing this, but as they say, drinkers can’t be choosers.
Or… someone said that, probably.
Once the square was drawn, I rapped on it twice. The square sat silently in the dark. I furrowed my brow, rapped again, and again silence answered me. For ten minutes this continued, me knocking, the square being just a square. I had just started to wonder if I hadn’t done it right—what with me having drunk two bottles of wine—when something happened.
I heard her song.
The Lady Merchant’s tune, distant and whimsical, was barely a note amid the chorus of magic being expelled in the banquet hall. And when the portal sprang to life, it did so weakly, a dull purple glow lighting up as a swirling vortex of fading light blossomed into existence.
And from it, Yria sprang.
Breathing hard and covered in blood.
“Yria?” I asked as she fell out of the portal and collapsed, wheezing, upon the ground. I reached down to help her up. “What the fuck happened?”
A hand drenched in red grabbed my arm. She looked up at me with one wild eye, the other blinded by the blood leaking out of a gash in her forehead. Breathless, she wheezed.
“We got a problem.”
TWENTY-ONE
LITTLE HAVEN
Decadence!”
A howl went into the night. A hundred torches were raised.
“Vanity!”
Swords followed, thick-bladed metal thrust into the sky like it could cut the stars out.
“MAGIC!”
And then they started screaming.
Hundreds—it was impossible to tell how many, exactly—of them threw their heads back, the long tails of their red blindfolds fluttering like flames as they let out a long, angry scream. They waved their weapons, brandished their torches, carved bloody sigils into their flesh, and burned themselves to demonstrate their immunity to pain. Within seconds, the stones of the square were drenched in blood and the sky was ablaze with fire and fanaticism.
And not for the first time, the good people of Haven conspired to fuck everything up.
The throngs of men, each one adorned in bloodied marks and wearing a cloth to hide his eyes, turned their blind gazes to the center of the square. Towering over them was a crude effigy of a human made from rotted timber and bones, topped with the horned skull of some incredible beast so freshly killed it still had gristle on it. It stood twenty feet in the night sky, silent and immobile.
You almost wouldn’t notice the gnarled woman standing at its feet.
“The time has come for the sin to be burned from this city!”
If she wasn’t shrieking all the fucking time, anyway.
The Sightless Sister swept a glare across the crowd of the devoted. Within the empty eye sockets, the meat long gouged from them, two orbs of witch-fire burned, whatever dark power her god had given her coursing through her veins. She raised a rotted staff and, with a rotted mouth, rasped in a rotted voice.
“Your long ardor within these walls,” she screamed, “choking on the reek of excess, yearning to breathe the clean scent of ash, has come to an end! Rejoice, brothers, for tonight we…”
She said more, but I kind of tuned it out. Once you’ve fought as many Haveners as I have, their rhetoric tends to run together. A lot of shouting about burning, killing, sinning, and so forth—whatever dark magic their Seeing God gave his disciples, he apparently didn’t see fit to give them a wider repertoire of calls to violence.
Besides, I wasn’t here for her.
Between plumes of smoke weaving through the sky, I could see a figure slumped over against the stake he was tied to. He was wearing different clothes than he had been when I saw him last and his face was painted a morbid shade of purple from the bruises and blood baking upon his skin, but I recognized him.
It was Jero.
Beaten. Bloodied. Breathless.
He hung there, suspended by the ropes, with his head bowed and his body unmoving. I only knew he was still alive because I knew Haveners didn’t offer dead flesh to their god.
Which means, I thought as I scanned the crowd of shrieking crimson devils, he won’t be alive much longer.
Outside of Haven, the Seeing Gods’ disciples preferred to stick to small packs to avoid detection by powers hostile to lunatics trying to burn people alive. They only ever gathered in numbers this big for two reasons: to pray or to kill a lot of people.
Of course, they always tended to kill a lot of people after praying.
So just one reason, I guess.
Point being, whatever they were here to do, they weren’t going to do it without giving an offering to their god. Which begged a question…
“How the fuck did this happen?”
I turned to face Yria, who squatted behind me, pressing a cloth to the gash in her temple. She blinked back at me, her wound giving her an extra glower as she narrowed her eyes.
“How the fuck do you think it happened, Lady Licktaint?” she snarled. “We got the shit kicked out of us!”
I held up my hand for her to stay quiet—not that I believed anyone might hear us over the roar of the crowd, but Yria had a voice like a broken harp fired out of a cannon.
Little Haven, as the collection of ramshackle and bombed-out husks of buildings had come to be known, was a relic of the war left to rot. Abandoned by its residents when the Revolution shelled this town, rebuilding the little square had proven less pressing than building a noble a third garden and it had remained dilapidated, splintering, and unfit for the residents of Terassus.
Deranged cultists, however, liked it just fine.
The already-crumbling houses had been further cannibalized by the Haveners. Eaves, doors, porches had been stripped. Any wood that could be pried apart was broken into kindling for the fires they loved so much and that dotted the square. The only buildings left intact were guarded and brimming with hoarded weaponry.
It was only through luck that Yria had managed to find a building still whole enough to offer cover so she could make a portal. And it was from that building we watched, staring through a cracked window.
“It’s like this,” she sighed. “While you and Agne were busy making kissy faces at the nobles, Jero and me were going to handle the other part. We were going to come down here, have a glimpse at these ash-sucking sons of bitches, and get out. Only, we weren’t expecting—”
“DRINK IN HIS BLESSING!”
“Yeah.” Yria gestured in the vague direction of the Sightless Sister. “Jero had his disguise on and it was working like it usually does when—”
“Like it usually does?” I asked. “How many times has Jero been here? What has he been doing here?”
“That ain’t the part of the plan that’s my job, now, is it?” Yria growled. “I don’t fucking know what happened, but they saw through him this time. That socket-eyed strumpet looked at us like we had just drawn cocks on our faces.”
“Sightless Sisters sense magic.” I glanced out the window. “But they’re blind beyond that. They can’t see through regular disguises.”
“Well, they fucking did this time, didn’t they?” Yria muttered. “Would have been nice if we knew they learned some new tricks.”
“Yes, it would have.” I glared at her. “It would have also been nice to know literally any other fucking thing that’s happening right now. Where did the Haveners all come from? What were you trying to do out here?”
“Spy on ’em, like I said.”
“But why? What was the other part of the plan?”
Yria gave me the sort of look one usually reserves for the moment they wake up from a six-whiskey night and realize they went to bed next to livestock.
“I… don’t know.” She scratched her head. “Two Lonely Old Men only told Jero what to do with these freaks. My job was just to open the portals.”
And my job was just to find a spot for the portal to be opened. Two Lonely Old Men hadn’t told either of us and the only person within a mile who knew the entirety of his plan was about to be killed.
Why? I couldn’t help but think. If the fucking plan involves the Imperium and fucking Haven, why the hell wouldn’t he tell us? Why didn’t he trust us? What else isn’t he…
That would have been a productive and frustrating avenue of thought, I was certain, had I not suddenly been waylaid by a very distinctive reek. Over the odor of ashes and cinders, the aroma rose like a cloud of flies over a corpse.
It tasted coppery in my mouth, sent my senses aflame, my brain boiling as it seeped into my nostrils. I knew to cover my nose then, because I had smelled this particular stink once before.
And on that night, entire cities had burned.
I peered out the window and saw them: plumes of crimson mist rising here and there from low-slung braziers around which the Haveners huddled, wafting the roiling clouds into their faces and breathing in, clouds of red disappearing down their throats.
“Fuck me,” I whispered, “they’ve got Firelung.”
“The fuck is that? Some kind of drug?” Yria snorted. “How come I ain’t heard of it?”
Possibly because it was an incredibly rare, incredibly costly, and incredibly, incredibly toxic alchemic that only Haven knew the secrets of and ever only brought out when they were about to go to war. Firelung made a human feel neither pain, pity, nor fear, turning the average weakling into the most deadly warrior the world had ever known.
For the few hours it took for the drug to make their head explode, anyway.
A single whiff of it could change the tide of battle. And they were inhaling bushels of the shit. They wouldn’t be taking it unless they were planning for an actual fight, rather than just slaughter.
“What’s that big logs-for-cock thing they’re looming on, then?”
The effigy’s horned skull poked above the roofs of the houses, so huge that it required several mooring ropes to keep it from toppling over. Within its wooden rib cage, I could see a fire burning like a beating heart. And by its illumination, I could see the bodies.
Men. Women. The people of Terassus had been impaled on wooden stakes jutting from its body, morbid decorations weeping red onto the thing’s crude body.
I didn’t know how the Haveners had managed to build this thing without anyone knowing. I didn’t know what the fuck it was for. I didn’t know how they’d gotten so many drugs, so many weapons, so many people here.
But I knew why.
This wasn’t one of their standard war parties, rampaging and butchering hapless civilians in the name of “purification.” They wouldn’t show up in this number, this well armed, unless they intended to fight an enemy that would fight back.
“The Imperium.” The realization hit me like a brick to the face. “They’re going to attack the fucking party.”
“No shit?” Yria glanced over the windowsill. “Well, good thing we ain’t there, ain’t it?”
“Was this part of the plan?” I seized her by the shoulders, anger flooding my face. “To have the fucking Haveners fight? What the fuck was he thinking? What were you thinking?”
Yria blinked. “All good questions, I ain’t denying, and I’m happy to suss ’em out with you.” She jerked a thumb toward the window. “But if you’re gonna do that, it might be worth plugging your ears, because—”
“BRING THE SACRIFICE!”
“Yeah, that.”
Jero’s body collapsed into the grasp of a pair of fanatics as they harshly dragged his limp form toward the colossal effigy of wood and bone. The Sightless Sister’s face split apart in a broad smile as the fanatics lashed him to the thing’s right leg.
“Witness now the herald of our victory.” She swept her gnarled arms out toward the effigy. “We grant you a body, O Seeing God! We grant you legs to walk! We grant you arms to smite! We grant you eyes to see!”
She held a hand out. A fanatic placed a cruelly serrated dagger into her grasp. Her smile broadened as she swept her sightless gaze toward Jero, watching her through an eye sealed shut.
“We grant you blood to power you.”
Fuck.
Granted, the intricacies of Haven’s culture—let alone the role they played in Two Lonely Old Men’s scheme—were lost on me, but I understood this shitshow clear enough.
It would have been smart to run away now—there were too many fighters, too many weapons, too much rage-inducing drug in the air. It would have been smart to figure out what the hell Two Lonely Old Men was originally trying to do. It would have been smart to do anything except what I ended up doing.
But fuck, you probably already knew that, didn’t you?
I held out my hand toward Yria. “Give me your knife.”
Yria shot me a peculiar look, but obliged all the same. I tested it for heft—too light to do real damage, but I’d killed with less. She watched as I took the blade to the skirt of my dress and cut it away, eyes widening as she caught a glimpse of bare leg.
“Er, yeah,” she said, scratching the back of her neck. “I know the stories about you say you’re, uh… but this doesn’t seem like the—”
“I’m getting Jero and getting out of here.” I tied the shredded garment around my face. “Whether you’re coming with us or not depends on if you’re smart enough to not finish that sentence.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh fucking boy. Sal the fucking Cacophony’s got a plan. Where do I figure into it?”
“Stay here.” I crept to the door, eased it open. “Keep an eye on the portal and get ready to close it the second we get through and—” My eyes narrowed as I spied a thick bracelet sitting on Yria’s wrist. “Is that…”
She grinned as she flicked her wrist. Meticulous’s retractable shield fanned out, dented but still solid.
“Slicker than a newborn, ain’t it?” she asked. “Jero fixed it up for me and—HEY!”
I prized it off her wrist, affixed it to my own, and gave it a test for weight. Good heft. Good enough to crack someone’s skull, at least. I didn’t typically use Revolutionary gear.
But then, I thought as I flicked my wrist and retracted the shield, I don’t typically do this sort of shit for men, either.
