“Holy shit.”

  But I had bigger problems.

  I looked up. Liette stood in her doorway, the magical sigils dissipating as she broke the seal. She took in the carnage, the fire, the distant sounds of pain and fury, and looked at me.

  I snorted. Spat blood on the floor.

  “Hey,” I said. “We, uh… we should probably go.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  THE IRON FLEET

  If your priorities are straight, you’ve seen a fair share of art. And if you’ve been anywhere in the Scar, you’ve seen a war painting.

  In the Imperium, they’re living portraits, woven by magic and paint to portray heroic Imperial legions subduing nul interlopers with flashes of magic and sound. In Revolution territory, they’re miles-long murals wrought by a thousand artists depicting, in grueling agony, the struggle against Imperial oppressors. Even the freeholds have their own paintings depicting someone—usually someone rich—bravely beating back monsters or bandits.

  No one loves war more than someone who doesn’t have to fight it, after all. But they find the collateral—you know, all the blood—rather inconvenient. So they pay the artists to make their paintings, to make themselves feel grand, to dazzle the peasants, but most importantly, to trick themselves into believing their own lie that war is some grand adventure.

  Once you see it for yourself, though, you’ll never be able to look at those paintings again.

  Maybe he was a father, or someone’s lover, or just some poor dope who was promised a better life in the Revolution. But the young man lying at my feet as I stepped out into the cold wind on the deck wasn’t even human anymore. His eyes were twisted into some amalgamation of rage and horror, forever frozen in the moment he realized everything he had been told was a lie.

  A coarse match for the hole carved into his chest.

  Smeared blood painted the deck from where he’d dragged himself to the gangway in a feeble attempt to escape belowdecks, a red road that twisted its way across the deck and led to more carnage. The corpses, mages and Revolutionaries alike, were strewn across the deck like discarded favors from a rich man’s party. Each of them stared up at the gray sky passing overhead. Each of them wore the same face as this poor bastard.

  Above it all, the sirens blared, beckoning soldiers to battle. Though, if you’d looked out upon the gray skies that day, stained with fire and smoke, you’d swear it was a dirge.

  Only the people it was eulogizing didn’t know it was for them.

  Soldiers thundered across a deck thrice as large as any ship I’d ever seen, and bled upon the deck, and died upon the deck. Revolutionaries stood in tight packs, pointing massive crossbows at the sky and squeezing off shots as their comrades rushed around with bundles of bolts in their arms to replenish their comrades’ ammunition. Flashes of magical lightning and flame erupted across the deck, mingling with the miniature explosions of severium charges as Revolutionaries with gunpikes struggled to fight off Imperial boarders who, in turn, struggled to massacre their comrades.

  The eruption of flame and smoke, the wail of sirens, the macabre symphony of steel punching through flesh, all coagulated into a noisome miasma of sound. And yet, through all the din of suffering, the song of the Lady Merchant rang out in one clear, sustained note, rising higher with each body that fell broken to the deck.

  It was no work of art that anyone had ever seen. No glorious painting, no amazing story. It was a bland, bitter joke told by some insatiable god, who simply kept repeating it over and over for his own amusement.

  “How?”

  I recognized that quavering tone in Liette’s voice as she stared out over the carnage from the safety of the gangway. It was the sound of certainty shattered, of a learned person staring out over something deliberately senseless and struggling to make sense of it.

  And failing.

  “How did they find us?” she whispered, stepping out onto the deck. “Our plans were so precise, we were so careful.” She clenched her teeth. “We were so close! They can’t get in the way! They can’t ruin this like—”

  She tried to rush out. I caught her by the shoulder, pulled her back into the gangway. She made a noise like she was about to protest. I held up a finger for silence, pointed it to the sky.

  And on shrieking wings, hell came.

  A shadow appeared across the deck, a black ink stain that blossomed to the size of a carriage in the span of an instant. It swept over a squadron of shooters, who turned their crossbows and terrified eyes skyward, launching bolts and panicked screams into the sky.

  You always see their talons first: four black daggers punching through the clouds to snatch a hapless bastard. Then you see the wings, huge ivory feathers stained with red flecks. By the time you hear the screech, it’s too late.

  Like it was for those fucks on the deck.

  The Tamkai, huge and spear-beaked and bearing an Imperial rider, crashed into the pack of shooters and snatched them off the deck. The remainder either scattered or futilely tried to squeeze off panicked shots as the giant bird took flight again, disappearing into the clouds with their comrades. A moment later, their meager defense turned into screaming retreat as the bird dropped their comrades.

  In ten different pieces.

  “Tamkai,” I muttered. I spied their dark silhouettes diving and gliding through the clouds, striking at the decks of the other airships. “Fighting Shrikes. They came prepared.”

  “But how?” Liette asked. “How did they know? No one knew!”

  No one except me, I thought. And the people who told me.

  I cringed as another soldier was carried off by Tamkai claws. “I mean, I can always ask them,” I muttered. “Or we can get the fuck out of here.” I scanned the railing. “These things have escape vessels, don’t they?”

  “I…” Liette found her composure in a sharp breath. “Yes. They do. Each airship has a skyskiff.”

  “Great, let’s get one.”

  “We can’t.”

  She pointed toward the railing and a pair of pulleys designed to hold a smaller vessel. A smaller vessel that was, fittingly, not presently there. Someone had already made off with the skyskiff and our chance of escape.

  “Lovely,” I sighed.

  “There are more on the flagship,” Liette said. “At least six.”

  “Unless those have already been taken, too.”

  “They haven’t,” Liette said. “The flagship’s crew was hand-selected by the Great General for their loyalty and their absolute willingness to go down with a ship.” She adjusted her glasses. “In any event, there aren’t any other ways off this ship that don’t involve us dying horribly in a fiery wreck.”

  I peered out the gangway. The flagship hovered ominously in the sky, impassive and unbothered by the attacks swirling around it, explosions from its cannon lighting up the sky as it fended off boarders. That was our way out.

  And all that stood between us was miles of open sky filled to the brim with gigantic murderbirds.

  So, you know, not great, but…

  “Neat.” I sniffed. “Well, if you’ve got any better ideas than ‘sit here and wait to die,’ I’m all ears.”

  “Let me think.” Liette rubbed her temples, hummed. “We’re still aloft and in formation, which means the captain is still alive. The Imperium haven’t breached the helm.” She pointed across the blood-soaked deck to the helm’s cabin. “But we could.”

  “You know how to land this thing?”

  She glared at me. “It’s a colossal ship given the impossible power of flight by incomprehensible technology. Of course I can land it.” She adjusted her glasses. “But we’re over the mountains. I couldn’t land without everything, you know, exploding. I could pull us closer to the flagship, though.”

  “Good enough,” I grunted. I flipped the Cacophony open, slammed a shell into his chamber. “If we don’t draw attention to ourselves, we should be able to make it. Stay low, stay close, and we just might…”

  Warmth. Pressure. Familiar as an old scar. I glanced down and saw five tiny fingers wrapped around my hand. I looked back at her. She looked back at me in a way I had sorely missed.

  Maybe I was a monster in her eyes. Maybe there would be another world, one day, without people like me. And maybe that would be a better world.

  But I still walked this dark earth and I still watered it with the lives of hundreds. If I was going to be a monster… I could be the one that protected her from bigger monsters, at least.

  We nodded at each other. We sprinted out onto the deck. Severium charges exploded in the air around us. Crossbow bolts whizzed past us, were answered by flashes of lightning and bodies hurled through the sky by magical force. We held on to each other, her grip in one hand, the gun in the other. The helm’s cabin loomed large before us.

  You can do this, I told myself. You’re going to make it.

  I won’t have it said that Sal the Cacophony was a liar, even to herself. But if someone said that Sal the Cacophony was inattentive, I couldn’t rightly argue.

  Considering I didn’t see the man with the giant crossbow until he fired.

  The Dragonkiller bow launched with a whirr of a motor. A harpoon-sized bolt plunged into the deck in front of us. I jerked hard on Liette’s hand, leaping behind a slain Tonkai for cover as another bolt punched into its carcass.

  I peered over its corpse. A trio of Dragonkillers—two of them reloading their massive weapons as the third kept hers trained on me—stood atop the cabin. How the fuck hadn’t I noticed them?

  “It’s fine,” I muttered to myself. “Dragonkillers are made for shooting down birds, not people. They’re too inaccurate to pin us down.” I tensed, readying myself to run as I peered over the bird. “On my signal, make for—”

  “No!”

  Liette’s shriek was accompanied by the whine of metal cutting through the sky. She jerked me down to the deck just in time to spare my face a harpoon-sized piercing. The bolt whizzed past, two inches from my head, to impale the deck beside me. I glanced, horrified, from it to her.

  “They shouldn’t be able to do that,” I said.

  “They couldn’t.” Liette offered a smile so sheepish I wanted to shear her lips off. “Until I, uh, recalibrated them.”

  “You what?”

  “They were inefficient!” she protested. “And I had some free time! What was I supposed to do? Not fix them?”

  “Yes, you dumb fuck, that’s exactly what you should have done.” I peered back around the dead bird, wincing. The Dragonkillers were reloading. Even if I stayed put, they’d shred my carcass cover eventually. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “No matter,” the Cacophony hissed inside my head. “The most glorious weapon in the hands of a primate is no better than a very fancy stick. Unleash me upon them.”

  “You’ll damage the helm,” I muttered, trying not to let Liette overhear me talking to my gun. “We need it.”

  “I promise to leave enough of it to operate.” He paused, contemplative. “I promise to try to—”

  “No,” I snarled.

  “Do you have any better ideas?”

  I didn’t, no. But there had to be a better way of doing this than just pulling the trigger and hoping for the best.

  Then again, that strategy seemed to work out for me most of the time.

  Sort of.

  “All right.” I took him in both hands, stilled my breath. “One shot. Then we run. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Liette said.

  “Oh, let’s,” the Cacophony hissed.

  I came up, hammer drawn back, expecting to be greeted by a hail of harpoons. But none came. In fact, not one of them was so much as looking in my direction. The shooters’ weapons were empty, their mouths agape, and their eyes were fixed upon the great shadow falling over them.

  They screamed frenzied instructions at each other, cursed the slowness of their weapons’ motorized winches as they reloaded, shouted as they aimed the massive crossbows skyward and unleashed a trio of harpoons…

  … and then ducked as all three of them bounced off something inside the clouds and fell back to the deck.

  I said before that Dragonkillers were wildly misnamed, but until that moment, I didn’t know just how wildly. Because, as it turns out, while a Dragonkiller can split a bird in half, against an actual dragon?

  “HOLY SHIT!”

  It does dick-all, apparently.

  A glimmer of obsidian scales flecked with amethyst. The beat of feathered wings. A great roar and a lash of a long, spiked tail. That was all any of us saw before the three Dragonkillers, as well as the entire fucking helm, collapsed beneath six tons of angry, red-eyed reptile.

  “A dragon…” I uttered the word with the same reverence with which one utters the name of a god. Made sense, since they’re both giant fucking things from the sky that can kill you if the mood strikes them. “They brought a fucking dragon.”

  Depending on who taught you your Imperial history, the painfully rare Imperial Dragons were either a gift to the First Empress after she conquered the territory from which they came or a creature sent by the Lady Merchant to indicate her favor for the Imperium. Their exact numbers: an Imperial secret. Where they come from: also an Imperial secret. But their purpose was well known, from the highest Imperial noble to the lowest nul.

  The Empress only sent a dragon when she didn’t want someone dead.

  She sent a dragon when she wanted them burned so thoroughly to ash and cooked fat and skin that she could make ink out of their corpses to pen a letter reading: don’t fuck with me.

  In a spray of gore and splinters, the mighty beast crashed down upon the helm’s cabin and perched atop its ruin. A long, serpentine neck craned up, a crown of horns and ridges framing its eyes in sinister slits as it scowled across the deck. Toothy jaws craned open, a sac beneath inflating as it drew in a deep breath and—

  Oh, fuck.

  “RUN!”

  I seized Liette by the hand and tore off at a sprint, all but dragging her behind me as we made for the gangway. The deck plunged into chaos. The Imperial boarders rushed to the railings, leaping off into the howling void and trusting their birds to catch them. The few remaining Revolutionaries degenerated into a screaming mess. I bashed, kicked, cursed my way through them as I shoved Liette into the gangway, leapt atop her, and drew her up in both arms as I pulled my scarf around us both and shut my eyes.

  But I couldn’t shut my ears to the screams.

  The roar of fire erupting from the beast’s gullet was powerful as it raked across the deck, but not so powerful that it could drown out the agony of those incinerated by its powerful breath. I could feel the heat licking against my back, the scarf’s enchantment only barely keeping us safe. I don’t know how long it lasted or when the sounds of their terror finally stopped, but when it did, I could hear only one voice.

  “Glorious.”

  I looked over the deck, its vast sprawl awash in crackling flame and charred carcasses, as the dragon surveyed its gruesome work. Through the smoke, I could see figures clinging to the beast’s scaly back via specialized harnesses. And atop its crown of horns, her white hair a stark contrast to the black blade she wielded naked in her hand, a pair of imperious purple eyes scowled down at me.

  “CACOPHONY!” a familiar voice screamed, her fury carrying over even the dragon’s.

  You know, I had hoped to go at least a month before Velline came back to kill me.

  But as shocking as it might sound, I had bigger problems than either the colossal, fire-breathing hellmonster that had plummeted out of the sky or the vicious, talented magical bitch with an admittedly very good reason to want to stab me to death.

  Those fuckers had just destroyed the helm. Which we kind of needed to not crash.

  So, you know. Things weren’t going great.

  A hand fell upon my shoulder.

  Not Liette’s.

  I whirled around, Cacophony in hand. The eyes that stared down the barrel, wide with terror, were not hers, either. Nor was the surprisingly feminine scream that ensued as those eyes flinched away, hidden behind a pair of ink-stained fingers.

  “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, don’t shoot!” Urda shrieked, cringing away. “I swear, I thought you were right behind us!”

  “Urda?” I lowered the weapon. Not because I had ruled out shooting him for abandoning me, but I’d at least wait until we were somewhere less cramped. “Where the fuck were you?”

  “An excellent question.” He peered between his fingers, mostly satisfied that I wasn’t going to kill him. “One I would be happy to answer in exquisite detail if we weren’t—”

  The deck shifted violently beneath our feet as we started to plummet out of the sky.

  “Yes, exactly,” he said, gesturing down the stairs leading belowdecks. “Shall we?”

  Not like we had any other options.

  Our boots rattled the timbers as we rushed down the halls, the floors splintering and dipping beneath our feet. The wail of wind became a scream as the speed of the airship’s descent picked up. Through the twisting corridors, we ran until we came to a crossroads.

  That’s when I realized Liette wasn’t following me.

  I turned. She was standing at an intersection of the corridor, staring down a hall. The hall that led back to her room.

  “Liette!” I shouted. “Come on!”

  “But…” Her voice was brimming with despair. “The sample. The jar. My work.”

  “You can’t save it now! Come on!”

  “But without it, I can’t…” She stared at me, tears in her eyes. “I still need to fix…”

  My hand shot out, took her by the wrist. I pulled her close.

  “You can’t fix me,” I hissed. “But I can save you.”

  Whether I could or not was up for debate. So was whether it was polite to pick her up, throw her over my shoulder, and rush off in pursuit of Urda even as she screamed and begged me to turn back. Later, I’d apologize and maybe she’d forgive me and maybe she wouldn’t.

  She’d be alive to do it, at least.

  “Fucking finally!” Yria’s exasperated wheeze reached us as we rounded a corner and found the Doormage leaning against the wall, barely able to stand, though apparently still very capable of spitting. “You running a fucking sewing circle up there or some shit?”

 

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