The Gallows Black Read online

  I held him there.

  “Not yet,” I whispered as I drew my sword instead.

  He burned in my hand, impatient. But I had a plan. It wasn’t going well, mind you, but it was the only one I had.

  “Really?” She looked at me, hand on the gun, blade in my hand. “All this for him? And for a common Freemaker?”

  “She’s not common,” I replied. “You and I both know that, don’t we?”

  Like I said, I couldn’t tell what she looked like behind that mask. But I didn’t need to. The air went still between us. She grew heavier in that moment, no longer a heavenly creature deigning to set foot on a dirty earth, but just one more desperate soul in a shithole of the city. And in that moment, I knew what face she wore behind that mask.

  “I see,” she said. “Then you know why she had to die.”

  “I know why you think she had to die,” I replied. “Corpsewrighting is forbidden for a reason. The Spellwrights of the Imperium are already protective enough of their arts. They wouldn’t want to see them used to make some kind of monster of dead meat.”

  “He is not a monster,” she snapped suddenly, voice echoing behind her mask. “He is my son. He served the Imperium nobly and fought with honor in defense of the Empress’s dominion. And he was… shot.” Her voice grew so cold that I thought ice might form on her mask. “A warrior like him, slain by neither honorable blade nor elegant spell. A Revolutionary swine gunned him down with a primate’s weapon. He deserved better.”

  “He doesn’t deserve what you’re trying to do to him.”

  “He was taken from me before his time.”

  “He swore the same oath you did. The same oath I did.” I regarded her calmly. “Maybe it was too rigorous for him, too.”

  Admittedly, that probably sounded cruel. And admittedly, that was the point. I had fought Olithria once before. Even with the Cacophony, it hadn’t gone well. I was no match for her when she was thinking calmly and rationally. If I could get her angry and unfocused, maybe I had a chance.

  “YOU PIECE OF SHIT!”

  But probably not.

  My ears filled with the wail of the Lady Merchant’s song. Olithria’s eyes flashed purple beneath her mask. She leapt from the earth, took flight as she came toward me, sword aloft.

  And then crashing down.

  One strike from her sword had been enough to rattle me yesterday. It damn near shattered my skeleton this time as I brought up my blade to block. Our steel met in a crash of sparks, the force of her flight knocking me off my feet and onto my ass.

  The air came rushing out of me as the ground came up to meet me. I barely managed to catch her sword as she howled, bringing it down once again. Even with two hands, my arms trembled trying to hold off her blow. Her strength was hysterical, her rage driving the blade closer and closer to my throat. I was just biding my time until she overpowered me and ran me through and we both knew it.

  Me and him, that is.

  I dropped one hand from my grip. The tip of her blade was an inch away from my throat. I gritted my teeth, reached down to my hip with a shaking hand. He leapt into my grasp. I pulled the hammer back. She didn’t notice anything.

  Not until she looked down and saw the Cacophony’s grinning barrel pointed at her.

  I pulled the trigger.

  Discordance shot out and struck her square in the belly. Sound exploded between us, a wall of sheer noise that sent her flying and me skidding across the street. I lost what precious air I had regained, my ears ringing as I was flung. I couldn’t hear myself curse at the gun, nor had I the breath to do it, but I still tried.

  I could aim and pull the trigger. But it was he who shaped the magic. He could have spared me that blow.

  But I guess he was still feeling bitchy.

  I got to my feet, struggling to draw breath. At the very least, a shell at that close a range should have taken care of Olithria.

  “You dare strike a Judge of the Imperium?”

  Unless, of course, she had some kind of magical armor for assholes.

  Then I guess that would have just made her real mad.

  Her armor came off her in fragments of bronze, clattering to the ground. Faint sigils glowed across its surface and winked out. Written armor, when I wasn’t wearing it, was a huge pain in the ass, it turned out. It was all the Cacophony could do just to smash it.

  But her armor was gone, at least. All I needed to do was hit her with another shell and… and…

  And she was casting another spell.

  She raised her hand, swept it toward me. A wave of flame followed, rising up from the earth and washing over the stones toward me. I threw myself to the side, feeling the heat lick at my boots as I did, flames crackling. And when I tumbled back to my feet, my ears were full of the Lady’s song.

  A bolt of lightning sprang from her hand, lancing out with the sound of a thunderclap. I fled. It pursued, tearing up the street as I bolted around the square. But even then, I could feel each shock of the earth as it inched closer toward me.

  She wasn’t going to give me a chance to aim.

  So I settled for pointing the Cacophony in her general direction and hoping his mood had improved just a little.

  I squeezed off a shot. A shell streaked from his grinning maw. She raised a hand, her eyes glowing. The shell came to a halt two inches from her face, suspended in midair by her spell. It exploded in a flash of light and a burst of tiny, arcing bolts that danced across the earth and her body and did nothing but make the hairs stand up on her body.

  She stared at me as if insulted by that display.

  And though I doubted she heard it, I whispered all the same:

  “Wait for it.”

  She took a step forward. A fragment of armor leapt from the earth and struck her, the force knocking her leg out. She struggled to rise, only to find a boot stuck hard to the earth. Another fragment of her armor sped up, shooting toward her. She brought up a hand to shield herself from it, leaving her open to the other fragment that shot toward her. As well as a discarded helmet flying toward her. And also a shattered shield left behind from yesterday’s brawl. And also the giant slag tangle of choked chains and shattered wood that barreled at her like a small boulder.

  She screamed as more debris piled itself on top of her, burying her under a small mountain of scrap. I was honestly impressed. Shockgrasp was always a niche spell. I usually didn’t use it. I certainly hadn’t planned to load it that morning.

  But the Cacophony had just been so insistent, I’d hated to disappoint him.

  She was pinned, snarling, struggling to dislodge the debris compelled to cling to her. I took aim, squinted, pulled the trigger.

  And Hellfire sped out.

  It struck the mountain of debris and erupted in a pillar of laughing flame. It spread over the wood, the metal, drinking them in with a hundred fiery tongues. Wood ignited. Steel melted. Her screams were lost in its delighted cackle as she disappeared beneath the roaring flames.

  I breathed out what little I’d been able to pull back into my lungs. Magic or not, fire still burned. And no mage, Judge or otherwise, could fight off fire like that.

  No matter where we come from or where we’re going, a giant mountain of flaming wreckage makes equals of us all, as the old saying went.

  Or maybe that wasn’t an old saying. I was pretty sure it was, but I was also pretty sure I had a concussion.

  In any event, it didn’t matter. Over the laughter of the flame and the crackling of the timber, a newer, stronger sound emerged. The Lady’s song, bright as a sunrise and piercing as a shard of glass driven into my ear, rose to a staggering scream in my head.

  And hell followed.

  The debris exploded out in a sphere of shrieking fire, shards of flaming timber and cooling steel flying out and coming to a halt in midair. A maelstrom of fire and ruin hung in a smoke-choked sky, and at its center stood Olithria.

  Her clothes had been seared, leaving her body scorched and blackened. Wounds were t
orn open as her magic jerked shards of wood and metal from her body to join the whirling inferno. Her mask hung in fragments around her face, exposing a single eye twisted in fury.

  And alight with magic.

  She threw both hands toward me.

  The maelstrom followed.

  And I was running.

  Wreckage struck the earth around me, exploding into cinders. Shards of metal flew through windows and impaled walls and streets. Fire rained down as if hurled from an angry god. And through it all, I could hear nothing but the Lady’s song filling my ears. Not the sound of my feet on the stones, not the sizzle of the Cacophony in my hand as he tried to warn me, not the great fist of wood and flame that came blazing toward me.

  It struck me square in the side, sending me flying across the square to smash against a house. Everything inside me sang out at once, bones crying, skin screaming, each of them trying to be heard. My vision swam and my breath left me as I tumbled back to the street, unmoving.

  But I still had breath. I still had vision. Enough to see the lettering on my scarf glow brightly and wink out.

  She’s still saving my ass, even when she’s not around, I had just enough sense left in my skull to think. She really is nice, isn’t she?

  Unable to will my bloodless limbs to move, barely able to keep my eyes open to see, all I could do was sit there and watch as Olithria emerged from the flames and approached me, sword in hand, murder in eyes.

  You don’t meet a girl like that often, I thought. Should have stayed with her. She gives up corpsewrighting, you give up killing people. That would have been a nice life, wouldn’t it? No corpses. Just us. Should have just gone back to sleep with her. Should have stayed with her.

  I drew in an ashen breath. I closed my eyes.

  But who the fuck are you kidding?

  I opened them again and saw Olithria’s blade leveled at my throat.

  You could never give this up, could you?

  She drew back her blade. I closed my eyes. And I wondered, absently, if she would leave enough of me for Liette to try to fix.

  “Mother?”

  I thought that might have been my voice, a last gasp right before I died for a woman I’d forgotten long ago.

  “Mother, are you there?”

  But that’s when I realized someone else was talking. I wasn’t dead. I could still hear.

  “Mother… Mother… Mother…”

  And the Lady’s song had gone quiet.

  I heard the sound of heavy pieces of debris falling out of the sky, the crackle of their fires sputtering out into hissing smolderings, the clang of metal as a sword fell from a hand and lay limp on the ground.

  Olithria was no longer looking at me. Her eyes were on the other end of the square, where Linnish’s corpse lay. And beside him, walking with a stiff, uneven gait, another corpse entered the square.

  “Gallicus…” she whispered.

  “Mother,” the corpse said—his body was but a few feet away, his voice a thousand miles. “Mother, are you there?”

  “GALLICUS!”

  Her blade was forgotten, along with the woman she’d intended to plunge it into, as she ran toward the corpse that had once been her son. No graceful flight, nor even an elegant stride, she was frenzied and stumbling in her rush, clawing the fragments of her mask away as she did.

  I caught a glimpse of the face behind the shattered mask: a pair of eyes, glistening with tears, a mouth open in a broad smile, a voice fumbling for words she didn’t have as she caught her son and pulled him tight.

  “She did it,” Olithria wept. “She did it, she did it, she did it.” She squeezed him tightly, clutching him to her chest. “Gallicus… Gallicus, you’re back. She brought you back.”

  “Mother,” her son rasped. “Mother… Mother… where are you?”

  “I’m here, Gallicus,” she whispered, stroking his stiffened hair. “I’m right here.”

  “Glory to the Imperium…” he said. “Glory… to…”

  “Don’t think about the Imperium, Gallicus. You don’t ever have to worry about them again.” Her tears rolled down her cheeks, painting pale lines through the red and black of her skin. “I’m not going to let them take you from me again. Any of them.”

  Some might have called it fortune, a happy twist of fate that saw my life spared and a grieving mother reunited with her son against all odds, against death itself. And if I were dumber, I might have agreed with them. But I knew this was no opera.

  And I knew what happened next.

  “Mother… Mother…”

  “Gallicus?” she said. “I’m here. Why do you keep saying that? Why…”

  She thought to look at her son for the first time. She pulled him back, stared at his face, his lips twisted into a rictus smile, his eyes milky and without pupil or iris, his voice a distant echo of itself as he whispered, over and over…

  “Where are you, Mother?” he asked. “Where are you? Where are you?”

  “Gallicus. Gallicus!”

  Gallicus… but no Liette. Where the hell was she that he wasn’t there with her?

  Olithria seized him by his shoulders. She shook him. As though this were a nightmare he could awaken from, as though she could force him to be her son again. But I saw the realization dawn on her face. I saw the light in her eyes go dark.

  This wasn’t a nightmare.

  That wasn’t her son.

  “Mother… Mother… where are you?” he babbled. “Glory to the Imperium… Mother…”

  Olithria was a Judge of the Imperium, an enforcer of a brutal regime that viewed their right to use magic as their reason to rule over those who couldn’t use it. She had sought the most forbidden of practices and tried to execute the woman who’d failed to use them. She was, like so many people in the Scar, a killer masquerading as a person, whose death would save countless lives and do immeasurable good.

  And, knowing all this, I still couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  I couldn’t even raise the Cacophony as she threw back her head, as a wail tore itself out of her throat and across the silent square, as she collapsed, quivering and unmoving, just one more corpse that hadn’t realized it was dead yet.

  Death might have been kinder to her. To a lot of people. But kindness isn’t something you find in this land. If it were, I wouldn’t have gone through all this just to see Zanze killed before my…

  My eyes drifted to the spot where his corpse lay. Or where his corpse was supposed to lie. A dark patch remained, but there was no body to go with it.

  I should have fucking known.

  Another sound caught my ear. A symphony I’d heard before, of a blade pushing through flesh, of wind rushing out of a punctured lung, of blood pattering softly on the earth and a body following.

  Olithria lay dead on the ground at the feet of the man she had just killed. Zanze or Talmin or whoever he was pretending to be jerked her sword out of her body and held it up, scrutinizing it.

  “Huh,” he muttered. “Cut through her like a fucking fish. Imperial blades are a lot sharper than they were in our day.” He turned to me, flashed a horrific grin. “Eh, Sal?”

  “Zanze,” I replied, hefting my sword over my shoulder. “Or are you Talmin now?”

  “Talmin’s dead. I don’t need him anymore.” Zanze glanced at the wound in his chest and winced. “Be nice if she could have given him a better way to go. That fuckin’ hurt.”

  I didn’t doubt it had. Just because you could reshape your insides didn’t mean a blade through the chest would tickle.

  “The real shame, though, is this.” He stepped over Olithria’s corpse to inspect Gallicus, cringing as the walking carcass continued to mutter and babble. He waved a hand in front of his face. “He’s really fuckin’ gone, isn’t he? For a minute I thought the Freemaker could actually bring him back.” He sighed. “Ah well.”

  The sword flashed. Hacked three times. Gallicus’s head rolled across the street and his body collapsed, motionless, atop his mother’s.r />
  “Bit of a waste, isn’t it?” I asked. “Wasn’t this whole ordeal for him?”

  “This whole fuckin’ waste of time was for his corpse, yeah,” he grunted. “But the Freemaker fucked it up. A live body we could use. A dead body we could use. But this thing doesn’t know which it is.” He glanced away. “So much time wasted. Fuck me. If only I’d—”

  “Look at me.”

  He paused. He turned to me. Stared at me through a stolen face.

  “When you talk to me, Zanze,” I said, “you do it with your real face.”

  Talmin had an easy smile. The kind that was used for bawdy jokes and being nice to people who didn’t deserve it. But Zanze’s smile was broad, toothy, and predatory, and it damn near split the man’s face in two as his skin shimmered.

  And the Lady Merchant’s song rang in my ears.

  She asks a Barter from all mages, the Lady does. To get power, you have to give her something she wants. For some of the arts, it’s as easy a trade as offering blood. For the more refined arts, the price is a little more esoteric.

  For a Maskmage like Zanze, she’ll give the power of shape-shifting.

  And she’ll take your face.

  His flesh rippled like water and, just like a reflection, the face of the quiet man called Talmin disappeared. What was left was a stooped, naked figure, withered and pale as a cold moon. Zanze looked up at me through a face without color, without hair, without a nose, lips, ears, or anything but a pair of beady eyes and a broad, ugly grin.

  He shot me a smirk. “You figured me out just like that, huh?”

  “I can always smell an asshole. When I learned you were working for Li—” I caught myself. She had given that name to me. No one else. “For the Freemaker. You wouldn’t have done that unless you wanted something from her that you couldn’t get by killing her.” I glanced at Gallicus’s head. “And this is all that she had.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I wanted him alive,” he replied. “Did you know he’s distantly related to the Empress? Sixth cousin twice removed or some shit like that—I don’t know, I wasn’t listening when they told me. But he has a claim to the throne, regardless.” He clicked his tongue. “I spent months pretending to be his aide in camp in the battle outside, convincing him to leave the Imperium and come work for us, but then a Revolutionary bullet took him out and I was left with…”