The Gallows Black Read online

  And I would have. Honestly.

  But every time I closed my eyes, even to blink, I could still see her smile.

  “Listen.” I sighed, rubbed the back of my neck. “You don’t need this. Come with me, I’ll find you a way out of the city, and then you can—”

  “No.”

  I blinked. She was standing there, in front of me, hugging her bag to her chest and with both feet planted like roots. She had looked so delicate when I had seen her that afternoon, a fragile thing of porcelain and silk that someone wanted desperately to break. Now she stood there, staring at me resolutely behind those glasses.

  Fuck me, had her eyes always been that big?

  “I can’t leave Talmin behind.”

  I blinked. “Who?”

  It hit me a second later. Zanze. She didn’t know his real name—of course, he wouldn’t have given it to her. But she didn’t know his real face, either. She didn’t know what he truly was.

  “Listen,” I said, “they had him on the gallows—”

  “Scaffold.”

  “Huh?”

  “A gallows is used only to execute people via hanging. We were about to be beheaded, so they had him on a scaffold.”

  How does someone so cute make me want to punch them so many times?

  “Whatever. He was being executed for a reason. He’s not a good—”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “They put him there because he helped me. He smuggled in ingredients for me, never hurt anyone, and they want to kill him for it. They took Eresan’s head because of me. I won’t let them take his, too.”

  “This is the Scar, honey,” I replied. “Chances are he was going to end up on the wrong end of a noose eventually.”

  Her face screwed up, trying to contain the anger flashing across it. And then it exploded. Behind her glasses her rage was magnified to the point that I could see the veins inching across the whites of her eyes.

  But when she opened her mouth, it was to take a deep breath. She slowly removed her glasses, cleaned them, and stared at herself in the reflections of the lenses.

  “The oath,” she said.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Article fifteen, item two,” she replied. “‘Any willing associate to a Freemaker must be justly compensated for their investment. No Freemaker shall ever willingly forsake an associate, including an aide, an assistant, a test subject, or a specialist.’”

  “Right.” I rubbed my eyes. “Which one of those is he?”

  “All four, depending on my needs. Regardless, I can’t leave him behind without being expelled from the Freemakers—which, in Freemaker terms, means getting shot in the head.” She replaced her glasses, straightened them on her nose. “So I suggest we get going.”

  “Wait, what?” I normally didn’t like sounding so incredulous, but really. “What’s all this we shit?”

  “You can’t expect me to get him myself, can you? I know where he’s being held. I know its defenses, but I’m no match for a group of madmen bristling with magic and another group of madmen bristling with a lot of gunpikes and—” She caught herself, held up a finger. “Sorry, madmen, madwomen, and other individuals who remain mad.”

  Now, all of that certainly sounded like very good reasons not to go, at least to me. But before I could say it, before I even knew it, she was standing close to me, looking up at me. I had never noticed that she was shorter than me before.

  “And who else could protect me from all that but Sal the Cacophony?”

  She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. I didn’t look away. She raised two fingers to my face. I didn’t stop her. And she whispered—to herself, to me, to someone I didn’t know.

  “Do the stories say,” she whispered, “how you got these scars?”

  And I didn’t answer her.

  Her fingers alighted on my cheek, quivering, like she was hesitant to touch me. Her skin felt cold on mine, like a breeze through a broken window. I don’t know why I didn’t stop her—maybe I wasn’t sure what was happening, maybe I was just taken aback by this slip of a woman touching me, maybe something else.

  But I stood there. I stared at her. And I let her run her finger across the long, jagged scar on my cheek. Down to my jawline. Past that, to my neck. And down to my collarbone.

  And then some part of me started screaming.

  My hand shot up, caught her by the wrist, pried her hand away. Her breath escaped her in a gasp. In her glasses I could see my eyes, the color of ice, reflected back at me.

  “And who said I was going to help you at all?” I asked.

  She blinked. “Well, why did you help me escape the scaffold?”

  Because I was aiming for the guy you wanted to save.

  Somehow that didn’t sound like something comforting to say.

  But this didn’t seem like the right time to tell her exactly why I was out to kill this guy. Nor did I have time to tell her exactly why his name was on my list. The Cacophony seethed at my hip, reminding me of the wisdom of just leaving her behind.

  … But she had said she knew where he was being held.

  And they had said they were going to execute him by dawn if we didn’t get to him first.

  And being led right to the man I was looking to kill seemed a lot easier than searching for him amid a city crawling with the aforementioned madmen with their magic and explosives and possibly magical explosives.

  I made my decision.

  And the Cacophony, in a bright searing pain that lanced into my hip, made his displeasure known.

  “Okay,” I said, biting back my wince. “So, theoretically, if I were to agree to help you, I’d—”

  “Perfect. Glad we agree.” She pushed past me, ignoring my protest and my attempt to grab her as she brazenly strode into the street that had just recently contained dozens of people eager to kill us. “Now, the prison we were held in is back this way, but—”

  She was cut off as I seized her by the shoulder and dragged her back into the alley. She let out a protest, muffled by my hand. She followed my pointed finger skyward as a mage flew past, silent but for the fluttering of his cloak as he scanned the street and moved on.

  “Granted, I only know the one Freemaker, but I’ve learned two things about them.” I held up two fingers. “They’re supposed to be brilliant, and they’re wildly protective of their own. If the first is true, then you’ll stay back and let the woman with the big fucking sword lead the way because if the second is true, I’d rather not have a group of vengeful, secretive weirdos blaming me for the death of Twenty-Two Roses in a Chipped Porcelain Vase.”

  I slowly released my hand from her mouth. She regarded me thoughtfully for a moment.

  “And, in return, I have two articles of concern of my own.” She held up two fingers. “If you’re going to touch me like that, warn me first. And this will take all night if you keep using my name like that.”

  “Well, what else am I supposed to call you?”

  She brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. And she looked at me, more shyly than a woman that pristine ought to be able to. And she gave me a smile that would one day ruin my life.

  “Call me Liette.”

  FOUR

  Between roving bands of outlaws, horrific beasts stalking the wilds, inclement weather and the little matter of the huge war between magic and machines, the Scar wasn’t a land known for being particularly hospitable. Most freeholds ended up as either fortresses or piles of cinders.

  Last Word had the distinction of being a city that aspired to be more than just a bulwark between civilization and all the sets of teeth waiting to feast on it. Situated on a crossroads for caravans and with lots of arable farmland, it had quickly prospered, going from a shithole to a craphole to barely a hole at all. Houses here were well built and polished, the streets were clean and inviting, most people had mastered indoor plumbing.

  Which was probably why the Imperium and the Revolution both wanted this city, but I digress.

  Liette’s wor
kshop, situated in a cozy little square and flanked by a sundries store and a carpenter, looked like the sort of place I’d eventually want to settle down once I had killed everyone that needed killing. A humble, unassuming, two-storied home with windows covered by velvet curtains and a beautiful little garden in the front. It looked downright homey.

  Or it would have, anyway, if it hadn’t currently been crawling with Revolutionary soldiers.

  I peered out the window of the abandoned house we had taken up shelter in across the street. The darkness of her shop was brimming with lights: lights of cigarillos smoked by bored soldiers keeping watch outside, lights of lanterns inside as they searched the place, lights glistening off the serrated heads of the many, many gunpikes they carried…

  “That’s a lot of soldiers for one Freemaker,” I grunted.

  Liette popped up in the window beside me, scrunching her nose with keen distaste at the assembled soldiers.

  “Only a dozen?” A note of offended ire tinged her voice. “Why not a hundred? Why not a tank?”

  I blinked at her. “What the fuck did you do, exactly?”

  “Merely offended smaller minds.” She waved a hand. “The mages, at least, had the decency to imprison me in a warded cell. No chance for escape. I appreciated the professional courtesy.”

  “Warded.” I grunted. “Of course. Fucking mages. I assume your friend is still there.”

  “Correct.”

  “And you’ve got something in there,” I gestured at her workshop, “that’ll… what, blow it up?”

  “Oh, no. You can’t blow up a magic door. That’s insane.” Liette shook her head. “No, it’s much more simple to just blow up everything around the door. I’ve got half the alchemics needed to do that.” She pointed toward the top floor of her workshop. “The other half are hidden up there, in a secret panel behind a tasteful landscape painting. Get them for me and we can get Talmin out of prison.”

  And into a grave.

  But I didn’t say that.

  Any thought I might have had of getting to him without her withered in my head. If he was in a spell-warded cell, then he’d be under the guard of whatever mages and wards Olithria had left behind, a number of which I was sure would be rigged to alert her when someone tripped them. I could handle wards or I could handle Olithria, but probably not both at once.

  So my plan of simply wandering in and blowing him to pieces didn’t seem all that feasible. But blowing a wall to pieces and then blowing him to pieces seemed like it would work. I just had to make sure to find a reason for Liette to get away so she wouldn’t see it and—

  Wait, why? I shook my head. Why does it matter if she sees? Why would you care what she thinks? You’re Sal the fucking Cacophony, aren’t you?

  I was.

  And I was about to prove it.

  I could feel the gun’s eager heat before I even wrapped my fingers around his hilt. He all but sprang into my grip as I fished shells out of my satchel and flipped his chamber open. I had loaded three of them—Discordance, Hellfire, Hoarfrost: my favorites—when I felt the shock all but radiating off her face.

  I glanced toward her. “What?”

  “Who made those? The bullets.”

  I had promised not to tell, but the guy had been a real asshole, so…

  “A Dead Dog Buried on a Black Hill.”

  “That guy?” She looked like I had just force-fed her grandmother her grandfather’s ashes. “His creations are… inelegant! Destructive! Devastating! And that… that thing is a menace.”

  “Hence why I was planning to use it.”

  “No. No, no, no. The future lies within that workshop, and it is exceedingly delicate. Just shooting off like a madwoman will ruin everything.” She sniffed. “Also, I could make them much better.”

  The Cacophony burned in my hand, simmering with offense. I couldn’t help but agree—shooting off like a madwoman had solved plenty of my problems before.

  “So what do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Can’t you do it quietly? Sneak in like a thief? Vagrants are good at that, aren’t they?”

  “What about a rogue mage suggests thief?”

  “I think I read that somewhere.” She glanced me over, settling on my tattoos. “You look like a thief, anyway.”

  “Appearances are deceiving,” I grunted. “You don’t look like an ass, but there’s a lot of shit coming out of you right now.”

  “Look, just…” She sighed. “Please, just try to minimize the damage.”

  “Sure,” I said, slamming the cylinder shut and sheathing him. “I’ll try.”

  “Good.” She sighed, body shrinking with relief. She peered out the window. “The guards are changing. Something’s happening. You’d better go now.”

  You ever notice that it’s always the people who need help the most that are the pushiest?

  I didn’t have time to take umbrage at her tone, though. Dawn was fast approaching, and with it Zanze’s death at someone else’s hands. I was in too much of a hurry to argue.

  I stalked to the door and had just begun to push it open when I felt a small hand wrap around mine. I glanced over my shoulder, saw her holding on to me with one hand, the other rooting around inside a bag at her hip. She pulled free a thick scarf, plain red but for some illegible purple script written along the edges. Releasing me, she draped it across my neck and tucked it tight. The smell of flowers filled my nostrils.

  She smiled at me softly. “For luck.”

  I grunted, nodded my gratitude as I pushed my way out the door and into the street.

  It’s not that I didn’t appreciate luck—I owed a few scars, a few drinks, and one very good night to it. But do this as long as I had, and you start to realize luck is no substitute for planning, experience, or grit.

  And none of those are a substitute for a big fucking gun.

  Don’t get me wrong, I’d said I’d try to do this carefully and I’d meant it. I just didn’t intend to try very hard, especially when time was of the essence. The Cacophony was still burning with indignation as I pulled him out, but I expected I’d soothe him soon.

  The soldiers stationed at the workshop were listless, leaning heavily on their gunpikes as they smoked and muttered and joked with each other. Conscripts, I wagered, drafted into the Great General’s army when the Revolution took over their town. The promise of free meals and a pistol to the head was enough to keep them from deserting, but no reward or threat can make a true believer out of a drudge.

  One shot from the Cacophony and the faithless would scatter. Two would take care of anyone who felt tested. I’d be in, out, and on my way to killing a man with only minimal trouble.

  Or at least that was the plan.

  The guards suddenly looked up as I approached, snapping to attention and raising their gunpikes. I cursed, ducking behind an abandoned wagon. Now was a real inconvenient time for them to grow a spine, but it wasn’t trouble I couldn’t handle.

  “At attention, lads!” one of them barked. “The Relic Guard’s here!”

  That, however, was.

  A bird came loping into view, carrying a hulk of a man upon its back. The beast looked fit to collapse when he dismounted, his head almost as high as that of the seven-foot monster that had carried him here. He looked like he had been carved out of a rock by a mason who’d slapped a blue coat on him and called it a day once he vaguely resembled a man, his boots clacking across the stones as he approached his comrades.

  “Sergeant Resolute!” one of the soldiers barked, approaching out of the crowd.

  “Colonel wants a report.” Resolute’s voice was a stone rolling downhill to crush someone at the bottom. “So report.”

  “Still searching, sir. But we’re—” The guard glanced toward his comrades, who had all taken several steps backward. He swallowed hard, looked back to Resolute. “The Colonel shall have his prize, sir. We’ll make it so.”

  Resolute stared at him flatly for a moment before raising his nose in the air like
a hound and taking a deep breath.

  “Smoke,” he grunted, eyeing the stamped-out cigarillo butts on the floor.

  “Er… yes, sir.” The guard coughed. “Some of the soldiers took a liberty while on break, waiting for the others to—”

  “Laxity,” Resolute said.

  “Uh… I suppose so, but if you read the Revolutionary Mandate, it allows for—”

  Resolute didn’t seem like he read all that much. I don’t mean that he looked dumb because he was big. I mean that he crushed the guard’s skull.

  The guard’s body stood on its feet, taking a good two seconds to realize that its head was currently a mess of pulp and shattered bone, before it slumped to the floor. Resolute stood over it, his massive arm extended and ending in a gauntlet the size of two men’s heads stacked together. The other soldiers visibly bit back the urge to scream as they watched their comrade’s blood drip off five plated fingers.

  They knew better than to question a Relic Guard.

  No one knew where they came from, the Relics. Even the Imperium’s finest mages were baffled by what precious few could be obtained. Only the men in the very tallest towers of the Revolution seemed to know how they worked.

  To look at them, you’d swear they were impossible. At a glance they looked like stone, but they were… shaped all wrong. Woven, rather than carved, each finger of the gauntlet moving and trembling with a life all its own as Resolute clenched his hand into a fist. An ancient sound, stone groaning in a dying earth, punctuated each movement as he raised his hand in a salute.

  “Ten thousand years, comrades.”

  “Ten thousand years!” the soldiers barked hastily back.

  This was not good.

  I know that sounds like stating the obvious—after all, nothing got easier when a guy the size of a small mountain wearing gauntlets of living stone showed up—but to find a Relic here was beyond anything I’d planned for. Relics were items entrusted only to those whose loyalty was so assured it bordered on fanaticism, and the Relic Guards who carried them were summoned only in the direst of circumstances.