The Gallows Black Read online

  I turned and ran, heading for the nearest alley I could find. Had to put some distance between us, had to find a new angle to attack her from.

  “There she is!”

  The squadron of Revolutionaries that came flooding out from the alley would make that difficult.

  I screeched to a halt as they leveled their gunpikes at me, jagged heads glistening, muzzles gleaming. I turned to run, but it was too late. Behind them, Tatha let out his howl.

  “FIRE!”

  And a dozen hammers clicked in response.

  I had a moment to see it—the blaze of gunfire, the plumes of smoke wafting, the bullets shrieking toward me.

  A moment turned to a second, then ten, and into an eternity before I realized the bullets weren’t moving. They hung in midair, suspended by some unseen force. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Olithria rising, her hand extended in a spell and a fresh dent in her mask. She flicked two fingers and the bullets fell to the ground, clattering harmlessly upon the stones.

  “We had an agreement, barbarian,” Olithria uttered, drawing closer. Behind her, two other mages descended from the sky to take up menacing position. “You would curb your fanaticism long enough to see justice done and we would grant you the dignity of living.”

  “The Revolution can tolerate the stain of your decadent corruption no longer,” Tatha growled. “Nor shall we abide a Vagrant to deny the vision of the Great General. You vile oppressors know neither justice nor dignity. Stand aside.”

  “Crawl back to your fanatic leader and tell him you were unsuccessful. Else we’ll enchant your carcass to tell him yourself”—she narrowed her eyes as she spat the last word—“nul.”

  Tatha’s eyes widened at the insult. Olithria’s chuckle was black and morbid. The Lady’s song grew louder as spells were called to hand. Reloaded gunpikes clicked into the firing position. Two forces, alike in savagery and bereft of mercy, stood poised to kill each other for the honor of taking my head.

  What is a girl to do with such flattery, am I right?

  … Seriously, though, I was pretty sure I was fucked.

  And I continued to think that right up until I noticed the glint of glass. My foes didn’t see it, the tiny translucent sphere rolling across the street. Hell, I barely noticed it myself until it came to a halt at my feet. I had just enough time to squint at the swirling vapor locked within it before I realized what it was.

  Gas.

  I thought it rather than said it, but I think they figured it out once it exploded.

  I hit the ground as a great cloud of white vapor roiled out of it, greater than could possibly have been hidden within such a small vessel, to fill the square in a blinding pale cloud. I pulled my cloak over my nose, hoping not to choke on it. Yet it passed into my mouth and tasted like nothing but ash.

  Not gas. Smoke?

  “Imperial trickery! More spells! Open fire! FOR THE REVOLUTION!”

  “The nuls have toys! Annihilate them!”

  Curses became formless shrieks became spells and gunfire. Bullets were fired haphazardly into the vapor, gouts of flame and lighting bursting from within the cloud as the two sides exchanged volleys. I kept my head down, not daring to look up.

  Not until I felt a hand take me gently by the arm.

  I looked up. I almost didn’t recognize her without her manacles. Yet she knelt beside me, so calm as to be utterly oblivious to the blind carnage unfolding around us. Her eyes were large and attentive behind a pair of spectacles she hadn’t had before.

  The Freemaker.

  Twenty-Two Dead Roses in a Chipped Porcelain Vase.

  “For future reference,” she said, gesturing to the cloud around us, “when you see a cloud of blinding smoke appear in the midst of your foes, that’s a good time to run.”

  She didn’t wait for me to retort. She barely waited for me to get up, hauling me to my feet and taking off at a sprint. She guided me through the cloud, leaving the sounds of carnage behind us.

  “Your arrival was quite timely,” she said. “I admit that I hadn’t actually figured out a way out of that situation by the time you started shooting. The shame of being held captive by people who barely understand indoor plumbing will forever haunt me.” She shot me a smile over her shoulder. “I mean… thank you. For saving me.”

  “Uh… right. You’re welcome,” I said with all the confidence of a woman who definitely had been intending to do that. “Can you get us out of here?”

  “Decidedly unlikely. The entirety of the city was under lockdown for the execution, at the insistence of the Revolution and Imperium. The guard will have only doubled by the time we could get there. I’m afraid we’re both fairly likely to be dead.”

  “I meant out of this whole… you know, shooting-spell shitshow.”

  “Oh. Yeah, no, I can do that. Come this way.”

  The mouth of an alley loomed large and black out of the smoke. She pulled me in, and I stared into the impenetrable wall of white that loomed behind us.

  “What the fuck was in that glass?” I asked, sounding more astonished than I’d intended.

  “A creation of mine,” she replied. “Originally I intended it to be less blinding and significantly more toxic.”

  “Wait, more toxic?” I stared at her, incredulous. “So is this toxic?”

  She shot me the exact same stare. “What would be the point of a nontoxic cloud?” She pushed her glasses up her nose. “I would have expected Sal the Cacophony not to ask such a stupid question.”

  “You’ve heard of me, then?” I asked.

  “I mean, I have now. You have a way of making yourself known.”

  She glanced up. I followed her gaze to the shadow of one of the mages, flying high overhead. He narrowed his eyes, brimming with violet light, upon seeing us as his fingers splayed out, electricity dancing across his palms as he aimed a lightning bolt toward us.

  I whipped the Cacophony up, squeezed the trigger. A bright flash of blue shot out from the dragon’s maw and sped toward the mage. In a single frigid breath, Hoarfrost took shape, a burst of frigid wind and shards that spattered across the mage like vomit from a talkative drunk. The energy leaked out of his eyes and his hands alike, a look of confusion across his face as blue ice began to crawl across his skin. In another second his body had frozen into a blue-and-white statue, his face scarred in a final moment of panicked puzzlement.

  He hung rigid in the air for one more second, an ornament of flesh and frost, before he fell.

  The Freemaker watched him plummet into the cloud of smoke, removed her glasses, and wiped them clean on her dress. She winced at the sound of something shattering.

  “Yeah, like that.”

  THREE

  Colonel Tatha Vindictive stared out over thirty-odd men and women of the Revolution and met their resolute stares through the only eye left uncovered by the bandages wrapped around his seared face.

  “Understand this,” he said with a pained wince, voice creaking. “The Great General, guided by his profound wisdom, bade us come witness the demise of the Freemaker above all else. He, endless as he is, knew that our duty to cleanse the Scar of the hated Imperials could rest a moment to address a greater threat and see a purveyor of inferior machinery put to an end.” His stare hardened. “Do you think the Great General a fool?”

  “The Great General is wise beyond years, courageous beyond time!” the Revolutionaries barked in short order.

  “This remains the case. Despite the day’s…”—he paused to touch a finger to his bandaged face—“misunderstanding, our orders remain clear. The Freemaker perverts the wisdom of the Great General and disrespects the Machinations of the Revolution. Will you stand for this insult?”

  “The Glorious Revolution is implacable, unstoppable, irrevocable!”

  “Just so. The decadent Imperials, if they can pry their lips from their wineglasses long enough, may try to impede us. We shall prevail.” He raised a hand in benediction. “As the Great General vests authority in me, I so ve
st it in you to carry out the Revolutionary mandate. Search whatever house you suspect of sheltering the Freemaker. Silence anyone who may speak against you. Execute those who seek to impede you, Imperial or otherwise.”

  “Even civilians, sir?”

  The boisterous reply was cut off by one of the Revolutionaries at the front of the squadron, a young-looking woman who lowered her gunpike and cast a curious look at the colonel.

  “Sir, were we not instructed to demonstrate to the city that the Revolution is here for their protection?” she asked. “How can we tell them this while also tearing their home apart?”

  Colonel Tatha Vindictive stared out over this single woman with his one good eye. He opened his mouth as if to speak, paused, then sighed. And without another word, pulled a hand cannon from his belt and emptied a shot into her skull.

  “You have your orders.” He flipped the chamber open, let the spent severium shell fall onto the street next to the dead woman. “Ten thousand years of toil demand your penance.”

  “Ten thousand years!” the Revolutionaries barked and, with not a single glance spared for their dead comrade, turned and fanned out into the streets.

  I felt a vague urge to scream—if only so someone would do so on the woman’s behalf—but I didn’t want to give my hiding spot away.

  The knowledge of what they did to their enemies bade me hold my tongue.

  From the alleyway I watched one set of pursuers disperse. I glanced up into the night sky and spotted the other. Mages, carried on the lilting song of the Lady, sailed through the sky like clouds. Angry little clouds who could spit frost and fire and whatever else the Lady gave them. They swept over the heads of the Revolution, over the citizens fleeing to get inside, violet-tinged scowls searching through the city.

  Since their rebellion from the Imperium, no fewer than two generations of Revolutionaries have been born, sent to fight, and then buried in the Scar. Hating Imperials began as a necessity and became a tradition. Likewise, the mages of the Imperium have looked down upon the nuls—figuratively and otherwise—since they first heard the Lady’s song.

  Granted, the colonial wars had been over for ages, but the two never shied away from killing each other and whatever stood between them. So it was more than a little unusual to see them united—or at least abstaining from violence—in a common cause.

  But I guess I’m just that much of an asshole to warrant it.

  Or at least I hang around that kind of an asshole.

  Specifically, the kind of asshole who completely ignores the threat of imminent death and the extremely polite Vagrant watching the fucking alley so that they don’t both die while she does… does…

  “What the fuck are you doing over there, anyway?” I hissed to the woman kneeling over some crates.

  Twenty-Two Dead Roses in a Chipped Porcelain Vase continued to sift through the crates, pushing various discarded cloths and other trash aside, not even looking up at me as she did.

  “Well,” she said in a very I-don’t-even-give-a-shit-that-freaky-flying-people-are-looking-for-me tone, “I appear to be sifting through garbage, so I am either possessed of an exceedingly unusual fetish or—”

  “Or you’re searching for something,” I finished for her, rolling my eyes.

  “Careful. If you say more smart stuff like that, I might fall in love.” At this she shot me a rather charming smile. An insufferable one that made me kind of want to punch her, but still charming. “Whatever else my pursuers may want of me,” she continued, looking back to the crates, “I won’t be able to give them the proper answer until I find my tools. I managed to hide some around here before I was captured.”

  “Right.” I glanced up as the shadow of a mage swept over me and disappeared over a rooftop. “So, ‘pursuers’ seems a little too tame for the small army that’s been sent to kill you.” I looked back to her. “What the fuck did you to do to piss them off so bad, anyway?”

  She paused, her eyes growing hard behind her glasses. Her voice came out as a hushed, reverent whisper.

  “I took the oath.”

  And that gave me pause.

  I’d heard about the Freemaker’s Oath, in drunken whispers and smugglers’ stories. I didn’t know much more than the name. No one did. The Freemakers, hunted as they are by the Imperium, the Revolution, and basically everyone else who would rather a lot of people with a lot of knowledge be dead, are understandably protective of their methods.

  But I knew a few things.

  I knew the oath forbade Freemakers from interfering with each other. I knew it demanded they accrue knowledge at all costs but forbade anyone from telling them how to use it. I knew that they shed their old names to join the organization.

  I wonder who she had been before she became Twenty-Two Dead Roses in a Chipped Porcelain Vase.

  “Understand,” she continued, “that our work is easily misunderstood by the small minds of this world. They find the notion of dedication to a greater idea, not an emperor or a general, to be terrifying. They call us mercenary intellects, peddlers of what mayhem our work creates.” Her eyes blazed behind her glasses. “When, in fact, those puerile minds who stand in my way have simply gazed upon the same future I have and seen a world that all their fear and hatred could not control, and they find this adequate cause to try to kill me.”

  I stared at her for a long time. I idly scratched an itch on my flank.

  “No, seriously, though,” I said, “how much did you steal from them?”

  “Okay, you can’t own knowledge, so I can’t have stolen anything, can I?” she snapped at me. “Whatever else they say, they can’t—ah, here we are.”

  She pulled free a thick leather satchel from beneath a pile of ratty discarded hides. She pried it open, the glisten of glass greeting her as a number of vials, spheres, and baubles rattled around inside. She looked them over, lips moving frantically as she counted each of them, eyes widening with realized horror.

  “Where is it, where is it, where is it,” she muttered. “The solution I need isn’t here. I know I packed it. Someone must have taken it.”

  “They look a little like liquor, don’t they?” I asked. “Maybe a drunk took them.”

  She stared at me as though I had just slapped her dead mother with her dead puppy. “How is the notion of a backwater lackwit guzzling years of work supposed to soothe me in the slightest?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “The ones missing are mostly explosive, so I guess we’ll know as soon as we hear someone turn into an eruption of gore and—”

  Darlings.

  She froze up, eyes positively enormous behind her glasses. She whirled around, searching for the source of the sudden voice. I don’t think she was at all soothed to realize that it was coming from inside our heads.

  The voice of the Imperium speaks to you.

  “What is that?” the Freemaker whispered. “Is that a ghost? Are ghosts real?”

  I held up a hand. “Telepathy. Relax.”

  “Relax? At some strange woman inside my head?”

  “It’s not her, it’s just her voice. She’s sending it to everyone in the city, so it can’t be that refined. She can’t tell where we are.”

  “How do you—”

  I pressed a finger to my lips. I wasn’t in the mood to answer her questions. Also, trying to have a conversation while someone’s voice is babbling inside your skull is pretty fucking annoying.

  While we’re certain most of you are lovely people, we cannot help but notice that many of you were rather unhelpful in our pursuit of the rogue Freemaker and, recently, the uncouth Vagrant who released her.

  Olithria’s voice. Somehow it was even worse when it wasn’t coming out of a face I could smash my gun into.

  Let’s see if we can’t make a better impression this time, hm? If you see a short woman with black hair and large glasses, do let us know. And if you happen to see a scarred woman showing too much skin and sporting tacky tatt
oos—

  “HEY!” I cried out.

  —simply run to your roof and scream. We will hear you. If you can’t manage that, at least stay in your homes and out of our way. We wouldn’t want anything unfortunate to happen, would we?

  “What does she mean by ‘unfortunate’?” the Freemaker whispered.

  “What the fuck do you think a woman who can break the earth in two with her hand means by ‘unfortunate’?” I snapped back.

  And if the offending parties happen to be listening… do make it easy on yourselves and surrender, hm? Your associate’s execution may not have happened today, but we do have him in our custody still. We could be compelled to release him, if you cooperate. If you don’t by—oh, let’s say dawn—I’ll be very happy to see him dead in your stead and we’ll simply kill you anyway. Let’s be reasonable about this, shall we? You know how to find us.

  Zanze. She had Zanze.

  But did she know she had him? Or did she just assume he was some henchman of the Freemaker’s? A lover or a husband or something else she could use as leverage?

  Or did she know I was looking for him? That his was a name on a list I wholly intended to cross off before my next sunrise?

  Did she know just how many people I would kill to put him in the earth?

  Someone did. And he was whispering to me in a burning voice.

  At my hip, the Cacophony seethed with such heat that I could feel him through the leather of his sheath. He couldn’t read my thoughts—despite being a magic gun—but he knew what I was thinking—possibly because he was a magic gun.

  He was reminding me what we had come here for.

  And that we couldn’t afford distractions.

  Smart thing to do, he reminded me, would be to leave now. Track down Zanze, let the people wise enough to stay out of my way live, take out the rest as they came. This Freemaker was a shrewd girl—fuck, they don’t let you join the Freemakers without knowing the names of chemicals that people don’t even know exist—she could take care of herself. I could leave her, find Zanze on my own, hope everything worked out.