The Gallows Black Read online

  I glanced back at Resolute, who seemed as surprised as I was to see me alive. And, just as quickly, he came to the same realization I had. Luckwritten magic would protect me from a blow like that just once until could recharge. In hours. Now I was at his mercy. And I was running.

  The Cacophony was seething, positively thrilled, begging me to unleash him. His joy turned to anger, burning me as I bolted for the door. But I didn’t give a shit. A burn could only hurt me. A blow from a pair of Relic gauntlets would turn me to a small puddle of red goo.

  A hurled bookshelf, though, would just fuck me up.

  I glanced over my shoulder just in time to see him pry one out of the walls, lifting it over his head like it was just a toy. I glanced back at the door just in time to see it swing open, a handful of Revolutionaries standing, armed and agog, pushing their way in.

  “Wait.” The one in the lead—a handsome young lady with a very large gunpike—squinted at me. “Are you—”

  I was.

  But I didn’t have time to tell her that.

  The bookshelf sailed over my head as I fell to the floor. There was a scream and a spray of splinters as the shelf smashed through the woman, and the man behind her, and the man behind him, to wedge itself in the door.

  I was trapped.

  “Fuck, fuck.”

  I whirled, drew the Cacophony on Resolute. Squeezed the trigger. He saw me, raised both hands, stone fingers spread wide. The shell struck him square in the palm.

  Hellfire roared to laughing, burning life, a red blossom that spread out to swallow wood and paper alike. I grinned. A blade might not stop him. A spell might only annoy him. But fire doesn’t give a shit who it eats—everyone burns. And however strong those Relics had made Resolute, they hadn’t made him fireproof.

  … Or… had they?

  I didn’t know much about how the Relics worked. No one did, outside the Revolution. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when Resolute’s fingers shut tight, smothering the flames into a few pathetic trails of smoke whimpering out from his gauntlets.

  But I still was.

  “Fuck, fuck, FUCK.”

  He began lumbering toward me. Singed, shredded, annoyed, but otherwise unharmed. I backed away, searching for a way out. The windows had been shattered, there were more than a few holes in the walls, but there was a colossal stone of a man between me and any of them.

  I raised the Cacophony at him. He spread his arms out wide, as if welcoming the shot. Why wouldn’t he? My two best spells hadn’t done shit to him. I didn’t doubt that he could take Hoarfrost square in the face and emerge from it just a little chilled.

  Only shot I had left. I had to make it count. Act like I’d shoot low, then put it straight in his fucking face. I waited for him to get a little closer, ready to fire.

  I wasn’t ready for him to stop.

  But he did, his body jerking with a grunt like he had just been stung by a bug. As I followed his gaze down to his leg, I could see that it wasn’t a bug, but a six-inch dagger stuck into his thigh.

  He stared at it, puzzled by this tiny thing that thought it could hurt him.

  Then it started to glow.

  He let out a roar as the magic burst to life, electricity bursting out of the blade in yellow arcs of light. His leg went out from under him, and he fell to one knee as the electricity rendered him numb. And behind him I could see a slight wisp of a woman, clutching another blade.

  Liette hastily scrawled a crude set of sigils across another dagger with a quill, glancing up furtively as Resolute fell to his hands. His roar became an agonized howl as she plunged it into his shoulder. Across his skin, veins grew bright red beneath his flesh, steam rising from them. He shrieked, hand rising to pry the dagger out as Liette darted away.

  But I saw he wasn’t reaching for the dagger.

  He caught her ankle, one tremendous finger wrapping around her foot to try to drag her toward him.

  It would have been wiser for me to run while he was distracted. I was done with her, after all. And it would have saved me a lot of trouble.

  But in all the years that followed this night, there would be tales of how Sal the Cacophony had been brave and relentless and fought a Relic Guard to a standstill.

  Never once would anyone say Sal the Cacophony was wise.

  I rushed toward him, picking up my stray blade as I did. I aimed the Cacophony at his free hand, resting on the floor. I pulled the trigger and Hoarfrost screamed out in a blue flash. The shell struck his fingers, ice blossoming across the gauntlet and onto the floor. He lunged back to pull Liette toward him, found his hand trapped against the floor. He growled as she pulled away, looked down at this latest nuisance holding him immobile, then up at the woman who had caused it.

  And then he saw my blade.

  His body jerked. His limbs stiffened. His eyes, for the first time since I had seen him, betrayed an emotion. Surprise, maybe. Or shock.

  Or whatever it was a man felt once a sword was jammed halfway up through his chin.

  I pulled the sword free. He spilled out onto the floor in a grotesque spatter, blood steaming on Hoarfrost’s ice. His body, and the steel wedged inside him, slumped over and did not rise.

  I had enough breath left in me to look over his body and stare at Liette and rasp between breaths.

  “What the fuck did you do?”

  And my body, finally free enough from danger to feel all the pain I had put it through, collapsed.

  FIVE

  I don’t know how long I lay there. But it wasn’t long enough. Because when I felt a pair of hands on my cheeks and opened my eyes to a dark-brown stare furrowed in concern behind a pair of giant glasses, I was still extremely pissed off.

  “Don’t move yet,” Liette whispered to me. “I’m taking stock of your injuries.”

  “I’m fine,” I grunted.

  “It is impossible to be ‘fine’ after taking a blow from a Relic.” Her eyes lingered upon my chest, which I could now feel a colossal bruise blossoming across. She winced. “Does it hurt?”

  “No,” I replied. “It feels amazing. I love getting hit with a gauntlet the size of my fucking head. Really makes me appreciate the simple things in life, such as not getting hit with a gauntlet the size of my fucking head.”

  Liette adjusted her glasses. “Your mental faculties seem intact, at least.”

  “Thanks to this.” I fingered the cloth of the scarf. “This thing is luckwritten.”

  “Yes. I said it was for luck, didn’t I?”

  “I thought you were just wishing me good luck.”

  Liette looked at me like I had a drawing of a cock on my forehead.

  “I fail to see how sending you in armed only with platitudes would have benefited either you or me.”

  “Yeah, no, good thing.” I forced a grunt through clenched teeth as I pushed my aching body to its feet. “Otherwise I might have gotten nearly killed by a guy with giant fists made of rock.”

  I surveyed the carnage surrounding me. I couldn’t have been out for long. A dark night still hung over the ruin, Resolute’s cold corpse a hulking shadow. The workshop stood as a graveyard, to men, to books, to everything but me.

  Which, weird as it sounds to say, struck me as odd.

  Through the gaping holes in the wall, I saw a street empty of soldiers and their guns. “There should have been reinforcements by now.”

  “Some of them fled earlier,” Liette replied. “They were following the sound of a siren. I doubted it was good. But then, I also doubted there was much I could do about it.”

  “So we’re alone?”

  “For the moment, that is correct.”

  “Good, good.” I closed my eyes, drew in a deep breath, then opened them along with my mouth and screamed. “So why the fuck didn’t you tell me you were a wright?”

  Her eyes widened behind her glasses. I could see them darting around, as if trying to search the rubble for an answer. Eventually she settled on looking away.

 
“It wasn’t relevant.”

  “Right.” I rolled an ache out of my shoulder. “It’s not relevant that you know an art that the Imperium considers sacred and the Revolution considers blasphemy. I mean, it might have helped explain the extent to which they’d both go to kill you. But don’t worry.” I gestured at the blood weeping down my body. “I fucking figured it out.”

  “It wasn’t relevant and still isn’t,” she replied, voice calm and measured, “because it changes nothing regarding our own relationship. There was no reason to inform you otherwise.”

  “Fuck me, but that’s a lot of words to say, ‘I’m full of shit.’ Did you learn that from your books or were you just born gifted?”

  “If you bothered to read more, you’d have more words to express yourself than vulgarities.” She regarded the destroyed remains of a tome blowing on a breeze with keen distaste. “I’d offer you a book, but, you know, you destroyed all of them, despite me asking you not to.”

  “Well, I was doing my best, but then, wouldn’t you know it, a bunch of people tried to fucking kill me.” I waved a hand at the ruin. “They’re just books, anyway.”

  Her eyes widened and her body stiffened up in a way that suggested she was about to either die from shock or stab me.

  “Given the contrasting natures of our… professions, I am going to choose to forgive that statement,” she replied, terse. “And regardless of what I can or cannot do, our objective remains the same. You cannot liberate Talmin without me, nor can I do it without you.”

  “Oh, you don’t need me.” I reached into the satchel I had looted and pulled her journal free and shook it at her like a weapon. “You can just pilfer up some help from the local graveyard, can’t you?”

  She stared at me, trembling. “What are you implying?”

  “It’s not an implication.” I hurled the journal at her. “You’re a fucking corpsewright, too.”

  She screamed, reaching out to catch the journal like I had just tossed a baby. She fumbled with it, clasped it to her chest, and looked at me, horror battling anger on her face.

  Anger won.

  “Don’t speak of what you don’t understand.”

  Decisively.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I replied. “I’m sure you’re animating dead flesh for entirely wholesome reasons. What are they, anyway? Labor? Slaves? Fighting?”

  “I have nothing to explain to you.” She managed to keep a cold composure for precisely six seconds. “But I’m going to, anyway. It’s dead matter. Bereft of life or value beyond what I can do with it. And with it, I can do a lot. I can push our understanding of—”

  “It’s a body,” I replied. “It’s a person. It’s someone’s husband, wife, son, their fucking dog, I don’t care. You can’t fucking take the dead like that.”

  “But you can make them, right?” She gestured around the carnage with one hand. “You can kill whoever you like and it’s just fine, isn’t it?”

  “The Scar’s a hard place. Killing to survive is—”

  “Oh? And were you just trying to survive when you shot that… that thing”—she gestured to the Cacophony—“into the crowd at the scaffold?”

  “The what?”

  “The fucking gallows! You wouldn’t expect a child to believe a weapon like that hasn’t claimed people who didn’t deserve it, let alone me. Or are only your causes so noble? Was it just worth it to save me?”

  You hear tales of Freemakers. Some people call them mad inventors who push boundaries that were never meant to be pushed, others say they’re reclusive geniuses who could save the world if they released even a fraction of their knowledge, and more people say they’re just assholes out for money like every other asshole in the Scar.

  There are no tales that say they’re small women who can see you with eyes that big and look as hurt as she did when she looked at me.

  “Was it to save me?” she asked.

  I couldn’t tell you why her voice hurt to hear.

  I was Sal the Cacophony. Vagrant. Murderer. Wielder of the Intrusive Thought, bearer of the Bad Omen. The gun and I were the same, a weapon of noise and fire and brass that carved our way through the Scar and left behind corpses and people cursing our names. At the sight of my scars, my tattoos, my very footsteps, people ran.

  But she hadn’t.

  And when she looked at me, she didn’t look at my scars. Or my gun. She looked at me. Sal. Just Sal.

  And I couldn’t tell you why that hurt worse.

  I had only two reactions to that kind of pain. And since I couldn’t turn my gun on her, I did the only other thing I knew how to do. I pulled my scarf up around my face. I stared at her for one more second.

  Then I turned around and began to walk away.

  She didn’t call after me. Nor curse my name. Nor shriek or weep or anything else. Everything we needed to say, the silence said for us. And it settled over that cold carnage like a layer of dust on an antique.

  So it was, with perfect clarity, that I heard the street begin to shake.

  I froze. The sound of earth groaning filled my ears and my bones alike, sending them rattling inside me. A creaking scream of metal followed, a tinny tortured shriek that fought to be heard over the stones.

  I looked up and saw something at the other end of the street, a shadowed crown passing over the roofs of houses. One by one, what few lights remained in the city flickered out in shaking windows as something colossal came rolling around the corner on metal wheels.

  Relics aren’t just weapons. Things like gauntlets and guns are positively pedestrian in comparison to the potential of the Revolutionary engines. How they work is even more mysterious, but it’s what they can do that’s terrifying. A single Relic engine can keep a township lit up for a hundred years, or power a device that can swallow a river whole, or…

  “Gaze upon the face of your retribution and tremble, swine!”

  Or it can make just a really big, fuck-off gun.

  To look at it, you’d call it a tower: carved stone bricks seated atop a base of metal wheels, rock and iron alike groaning with effort as it rumbled forward. The barrel of a massive cannon thrust out of its face like an odious nose. Upon platforms rigged to its side, Revolutionary soldiers clung, gunpikes in hand. And from atop its battlements, the sneering face of Colonel Tatha scowled down upon me.

  The Revolution called these things Relentless Marchers of the Inevitable Realization of Futility.

  Since that was too much to say while screaming, most people just called them Marchers.

  “For your heedless crimes against the Glorious Revolution of the Fist and Flame and the natural order it protects, we hereby sentence you, Freemaker, to a swift end.” Tatha’s bellows were punctuated by swipes of his sword. “May your end illuminate the grisly fate that awaits all who betray the Revolution.”

  I stared up, wide-eyed, at the tower. Then I looked back to Liette and screamed.

  “WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO?”

  She didn’t answer me. She wasn’t looking at me. She was staring up, mouth agape and eyes unblinking at the sheer dedication someone was trying to kill her with. She wasn’t moving as the tower groaned, rotating toward her. She wasn’t moving as the cannon lowered its iron scowl upon her. She wasn’t moving as…

  Fuck me, I thought. She’s not moving.

  I ran toward her without realizing it. I grabbed her hand without thinking. I pulled her into a dead sprint without quite knowing why.

  I’d think of a good reason once I wasn’t about to be shot at by a giant fucking weapon that shouldn’t exist.

  “FIRE!”

  Tatha screamed.

  The tower answered in a rising hiss of flame.

  The cannon erupted in a flash of light that lit up the night. A severium charge flew out, striking the grisly remains of the workshop and drowning it in flame. Corpses, books, metal, and more were swallowed in the blaze, the inks and alchemics left behind spewing brightly colored flashes and smokes into the night.

  Th
e shock of the strike swept out over us, knocking us to our hands and knees. I lingered there, trying to figure out whether to find my footing or my breath first, when I felt small hands on my arm.

  Wordlessly she pulled me to my feet. She took my hand in hers. She looked at me again.

  And we kept running.

  The Marcher came rumbling after us, shaking the earth and threatening to knock us off our feet. And despite how hard we ran, I could feel its inevitable lumbering toward us. It was slower than us, but it was also powered by an arcane engine.

  So, you know… things weren’t great.

  Even now I could hear Revolutionaries crying out orders as the firing team behind the cannon started reloading it. Gunpikes cracked behind us, sending shots out from the tower to strike the earth and kick up clouds of splintered stone. I could almost feel the tremble of Tatha’s lips as he got ready to scream the order.

  There was only so much I could do against that, of course. Even the Cacophony was no match for a Marcher.

  But he’d be insulted if I didn’t at least try.

  I whirled, the Cacophony leaping into my hand. In short order, I fished a shell out and slammed it into his cylinder. I aimed up at the cannon as the cannon aimed down at me.

  “What are you doing?” Liette screamed to be heard over the roar of the engine. “We have to run!”

  I shut her out. I closed one eye. I held the gun in both hands, his hilt boiling in my grip. I waited for him to tell me when.

  “FIRE!” Tatha screamed.

  “SAL!” Liette shouted.

  I didn’t hear either of them. I simply heard a single burning whisper.

  Now.

  I squeezed the trigger.

  The shell shot out, past the cannon and into the tower.

  And Hellfire exploded.

  A dragon with too many mouths, sheets of flame came erupting out of the tower’s slits, the cannon’s opening, the very cracks in the stone. The firing crew inside and their screams were swallowed by the laughter of flame.

  The cannon’s barrel fell, drooped down toward the street.

  I spared myself a smile.

  And then I heard the cannon. Still hissing.

  No words. No curses. No time to do anything but turn around. I seized her with both my arms. I leapt forward. I landed, her beneath me, my back to the cannon. And I didn’t know why.