ONE

THE SCAR

Ozhma was not having a good day.

The inn had been out of breakfast potatoes. She’d had to change a wagon wheel an hour out of town. And now she was being asked to prevent thousands from dying needlessly in a hellstorm of flame and fury.

She hadn’t even worn the right shoes for it.

Her nice little red boots were made for dazzling buyers, charming customers, and not—as she specifically said when she joined Avonin & Family Whiskeymakers—trekking her magnificent ass up an incredibly steep cliff.

Maybe not specifically, but she was sure that cliffs were covered in the reasonably long list of places she would not haul her ass. But then, she reasoned, she was pretty sure she’d never have agreed to be escorted up a cliff by the threat of painful death should she not.

“Listen, you want to sit still back there?”

And yet…

She glowered up from beneath her hat—her very, very sweaty hat—at the back of the man’s messy head of hair. Man was as close a descriptor as she could decide on for him—he was male, tall, and with the lean fighting muscle she liked so well, but the rest of him was a mystery.

His clothes were an ill-fitting shirt and baggy trousers, cinched in some vague attempt at the Imperial style by a thick cloth sash. An immense amount of skin, marred by scars and a tattoo of a thick tree trunk, was on display—which she didn’t mind—but his long brown hair was a greasy mess, a match for his stubble-caked face—which she did mind.

He looked like a bandit. She’d have been happy to call him one. But bandits rarely smelled so strongly of silkgrass, and the pipe dangling from his lip positively reeked. And no bandit she had ever heard of carried a thick piece of wood at their hip instead of a sword.

“Not to complain or anything.” The man exhaled a cloud of smoke that coiled over the crown of his head to blow back into her face. “Actually, a lot of people—including me—are going to die if you fuck this up. So I guess I do mean to complain a little.”

“Wow, what amazing advice,” Ozhma replied, her breath heavy with nerves. “This entire time, I’ve been wondering what I could possibly do to make your life easier.” She glowered at the back of his head as hard as she could—he couldn’t see it, but she damn well hoped he would feel it. “Need I remind you, sir, that I am doing a service for you.”

“You’re doing it because we’re dead if you don’t.”

“That doesn’t make it not a service. And, if you hadn’t noticed”—she gestured to her own short, chubby, and impeccably dressed self—“I’m not particularly built for this.”

“I had noticed, actually.” He struggled to cast a glare over his shoulder at her. Which, considering their position, was difficult. “Why the fuck do you think I agreed to carry you? Your perfume isn’t that nice.”

Ozhma furrowed her brow. “It’s not like I enjoy this, either. I left a lot—and I must stress a lot—of whiskey back with my wagon that I would hate to lose while I’m doing this favor for you.”

“I told you I’m good to cover whatever you lose.” The man snorted twin plumes of smoke out his nostrils. “Your war profiteering won’t suffer.”

Despite everything else about him, Ozhma had actually been rather close to liking him before he said that. But the words did not so much cut her as fashion themselves into a huge fucking axe and embed themselves in her back.

It wasn’t the first time she’d been accused of that. How could it be? Once the Borrus Valley exploded, the rest of the Scar wasn’t far behind. There wasn’t a freehold, a town, a hamlet, or even a fucking hovel between here and the Valley that hadn’t been wracked by the Imperium’s and Revolution’s latest cock-measuring contest.

Nor was there anything new about that. Being crushed between the two powers was something every Scarfolk expected.

Normally.

But that had been before. Before the Valley and the Ten Arrows. Before the Imperial retaliation. Before the Revolution started conscripting every civilian they could find and forcing them into battlefields their bones would decorate and before the Imperium started burying entire towns alive.

And normally, she could let his words slide.

Normally.

“NO!”

But not today.

Her hands curled into fists around his clothes. Her thighs squeezed around his middle. Her entire body shook so hard upon his back that he had to stop and find his footing again.

“Take it back,” she said.

“Huh?”

“I am not a war profiteer. Take it back.”

“Look, we don’t have—”

“Take it back,” she said, making to hop off of his back, “or I’ll leave. You can do whatever you want about that, but neither you nor I will go one step farther unless you take. That. Back.”

There were many, many important lessons one learned in the Scar and almost all of them revolved around not angering things that could kill you. Not angering a tall, muscular, drug-addled son of a bitch with a weapon was number six. But there were also many, many things a woman like Ozhma was ready to get angry over.

And one of those things was letting someone else tell her what she was.

“All right, fine. I take it back.” He sighed, adjusted her on his back. “You’re a fucking saint for doing this. I’ll erect a damn statue of you and tell my grandchildren of your grace. Fuck me, sorry.”

Ozhma beamed, her mouth falling open in delight. “I didn’t know you were a grandpa!”

“I’m not. Can we go?”

“Oh, sure.”

Immediately assuming someone’s sincerity was not necessarily a hard lesson she’d learned, but it just made her life a little easier and also he was a tall, muscular, drug-addled son of a bitch with a weapon.

“And not that I’m trying to bring it up again,” he said, “but there’s a lot riding on us getting to the top of this mountain soon, so I’ve got to ask… is there anything that would make it go faster?”

She paused, thinking. “I always find trips seem shorter with a little pleasant chatter.”

“Are you fucking serious?”

“Well, why not? You’re asking me to help with a task whose exact nature you can’t tell me but which has a lot riding on it. I can accept that, but it seems just plain rude for you to ask that of me and not even tell me your name.”

Ozhma had only recently been promoted to representative-at-large in the company, but she’d found a truth that spanned across the many townships and cities she’d visited: be it Revolutionary, Imperial, Haven, or worse, people bought things the same way. The currencies changed—sometimes it was whiskey, sometimes it was trust, sometimes it was patience she asked for—but the sale was always the same.

And it started the same way in the man’s bristly face. Reluctance melted away into a sigh of smoke and exhaustion and—dare she hope—just a little kindness.

“Rudu,” he said.

“There,” she began to say, “now—”

“Rudu the Cudgel.”

Her lips puckered as those last two words sank into her.

The Cudgel.

The tattoos. The weird clothes. The bizarre weapon.

Holy shit, she told herself as her eyes widened and her brow glistened, holy shit, he’s a fucking Vagrant.

“That make you nervous?” Rudu asked.

“NO, WHY WOULD IT?” Ozhma shouted nonchalantly.

“If I wanted to hurt you, I wouldn’t be carrying you, would I?” He grunted, adjusted her on his back. “And if you didn’t want to hurt me, you could sit up a little, for fuck’s sake.”

“Right, I… I trust you,” she said and somehow believed it, a little. “It’s just… you weren’t kidding, were you?”

He took a deep drag of his pipe. “I wasn’t.”

“People are in danger?”

He held his breath. “They are.”

She swallowed, afraid to ask. “Vagrant danger?”

Rudu exhaled a shimmering cloud, pointed skyward with his chin. “What do you know about what’s on the other side of this cliff?”

She followed his gaze. The horizon of the Nails’ towering cliffs and mesas was stained dark here and there, the sound of distant earth shifting a bare whisper from this far away.

“It’s… New Vigil, right? The city?”

Rudu let out a bleak chuckle. “Yeah, it might have been that, at one point. Before people decided it was worth fighting over, anyway.”

Ozhma wrinkled her nose. “Fighting over? Really?” She glanced around the desolate cliffs. “Isn’t it out in the Nails? The place people very specifically avoid because it very plainly is not worth killing over?”

She herself had only traveled this close to the forsaken land because it cut a few hours off her journey. And because no one—a broad group including bandits, armies, and herself—thought it was worth fucking much. Ideal traveling, if you kept your eyes open.

“I didn’t say it was worth killing over.” He sucked on his pipe, let out a cloud of shimmering pink smoke. “I said it’s worth fighting over.”

Ozhma grimaced a little. “Uh, can you… maybe explain the difference?”

“Many years and wizard drugs ago, I could have.”

Ozhma’s chest tightened. She swallowed something bile-bitter. She tried to take a deep breath and tasted only the rancid reek of Rudu’s pipe smoke.

And for the first time since she’d taken this job, Ozhma began to think that, perhaps, things were getting out of hand.

It was a chilling thought. She hadn’t exactly lived a dangerous life—her parents had died horribly after she’d moved out, which by the standards of the Scar was considered lucky—but she’d never before felt that there was something she couldn’t handle. She’d learned how to run the family business, how to fend off debtors, how to stretch a piece of metal to its utmost limit, all before she was fifteen.

Honestly, even when her wagon had been stopped by a scruffy-looking weirdo who reeked of drugs and looked like he’d just mugged a beggar for his clothes, she hadn’t panicked. This was, after all, the same Ozhma who’d been waylaid by bandits three weeks ago and walked away having sold them some very fine whiskey and not had her head chopped off.

That was it, wasn’t it? she asked herself. That was the moment you thought you could handle anything, be it bandits or debtors or… or… Her eyes drifted toward Rudu. Or a fucking renegade mage high off his fucking ass on silkgrass asking you to handle a city—a whole fucking city—of people who are about to die and… and…

She glanced down the long and winding path that led back to the road, back to her wagon she’d carefully hidden, and back to Miss Malice, the ornery bird who pulled it that she’d left grazing on seed. She could make it there, she thought, and maybe pretend this hadn’t happened. She could force herself not to look back or think about it or ever acknowledge it. She could return to the office, tell them it was just another boring delivery, take a week of vacation to drink enough that the entire thing would one day be a vomit-soaked blur. All she had to do was run.

Well, not run, she told herself as her body began to sweat at the very idea of it. You could… I don’t know, tumble down? Roll? Jump? She squinted. Actually, no, all those would probably end in… like, dying. And there’s no guarantee that—

“You all right back there?” Rudu interrupted.

She didn’t know how to answer that. Not anymore. She didn’t know how to talk to a Vagrant. She’d never met one; she’d heard stories and they all ended the same way.

There were two outcomes to an encounter with a Vagrant: you either gave them what they wanted or you gave them what they wanted and they ripped your soul out, imprisoned it in a skull, and carried it around as a toy for all eternity.

That last one probably wasn’t true. But maybe it was? She had no idea. She’d never even met a legal mage, let alone a Vagrant. She wasn’t ready for this. She wasn’t capable of this. She was a sales representative! In the deep Scar! She sold whiskey to hicks! She couldn’t have this many people relying on her.

How many people were they even talking about? A hundred? A thousand? How many people were in New Vigil? How many hicks and drunks and shopkeeps and merchants and… and…

And people just like Mom and Dad.

A worm of a thought. It burrowed into her brain, that thought, made her think of the hard times. The times when sales were slow, when shipments were lost, when they had to come together and think of what keepsake to sell next.

The times when, somehow, no matter how bad things got, they still managed to feed her and give her nice clothes that she asked for, and that one week where they’d had Dad’s terrible dumplings because she loved them so much…

She didn’t know how many people were in New Vigil.

But there were probably a lot of them that knew hard times.

And, with a resigned sigh, Ozhma knew what her answer was.

Ozhma had seen exactly one weapon of war in her life.

Plenty of weapons—swords, hand cannons, the odd eviscerator-spoon here and there—but only one weapon made specifically for killing a lot of people in a short amount of time.

They’d called it the Journey of Four Thousand Indefatigable Strides. But that was really hard to remember, so most had just called it by the name she would hear often, spoken in the same hushed reverence one speaks of monsters.

Tank.

A great beast of metal armor and belching severium smoke, iron crab legs picking through the hills beyond her home, a horror of a cannon attached to the top of it. She remembered its great metal shudder when it came to a stop, the smoke-tinged hiss as it settled down and its iron hide split open to release soldiers into her city. They’d only come to restock, the gun had never even pointed in her direction, the whole affair had taken only an hour.

One hour with a tank had given her nightmares for years.

“Oh, my sweet heavenly fuck.”

Dozens of them sprawled before her.

She had the fleeting idea that they looked like toys from so high up here, iron soldiers scattered across the plains far below. Yet the blackened scars where their still-steaming guns had fired and the pall of severium smoke that hung around them, mantles on a war god’s shoulders, was thick. Some lay splintered into metal shards and smoldering wreck, the charred remains of their crews scattered like ashes.

It was a sight that made her breath catch in her throat. A horrifying sight. An awful sight.

And they were by far the least alarming thing.

She couldn’t call the marching flatlands a battlefield. Rather, the sight reminded her of a butcher’s shop: a mass of tangled iron machines and red meat and odors.

The scars of battle had worn away the land, the grasses chewed up beneath the treads of tanks and the churn of machine wheels, the trees sundered by gunfire. The sky fared no better, colored by smoke and the crackle of lingering lightning, decorated here and there with weapons and projectiles that hung lazily in the air and drifted idly by, punctuated by a blast of unearthly flame or the glow of violet eyes beneath.

She’d never met a mage before today. But she knew what magic looked like.

She just never thought it would be this horrible.

At the center of the disaster stood a great towering Marcher tank mounted upon treads, smoldering like a colossal torch. Across the stained and ruined land, the bodies lay: their uniforms and corpses indiscernible from flame, soldiers lay twitching beside smoldering machinery, purple flames burned impromptu pyres. Looming over it like a morbid specter, an airship—a horrific mass of wood, metal, and engine—hung over the battlefield, its engines filling the sky with the sound of locusts and its cannons poised at its railings.

Her mind went numb at the sight of it. The smell of shit and blood and metal and severium powder on the breeze. She didn’t even notice that the bodies of the two armies weren’t pointed toward each other.

Their aggressions were turned to the looming shadow at the edge of the plains, the great city of fire-scarred walls and ominous iron gates, whose battlements trailed smoke and were painted with dried blood.

“Is that…” Ozhma craned to get a better look. “Is that New Vigil?”

“Yes,” Rudu grunted, glaring up at her. “You fucking mind?”

“Oh!” Ozhma looked down at him and smiled sheepishly. “Sorry.”

She scooted back down to a comfortable position, draping her arms around his neck as he readjusted his grip on her legs and pulled her a little firmer onto his back. With a grunt of complaint, he continued carrying her up to the top of the cliff.

She didn’t take offense at his ire, but it did surprise her. Grassheads, in her experience, tended to be fairly relaxed after two bowls and catatonic after four.

Rudu had just finished his eleventh.

And he was still stressed.

She couldn’t blame him, she supposed. If she had previously seen the wreckage of the plains below, she’d probably need to smoke a lot, too.

Hell, it was probably only because she was downwind from him and his pipe that she wasn’t completely losing her shit over the span of their trek.

“What happened?” she asked, breathless. “What the fuck happened?”

“What’s it look like happened?” Rudu asked.

“Like hell took a shit on earth.”

“Whoa. That’s pretty good.” Rudu puffed on his pipe. “I was going to say that the Imperium and the Revolution both want that city bad enough to attack it at once and divide it up later, but I like yours better.”

“What do you mean? The Imperium and the Revolution have been trying to kill each other for longer than I’ve been alive. What could make them do that?” She blinked. “Hang on, the Imperium and the Revolution? Guns and wizards? Pointing in the same direction? How the hell is that city still standing?”

“They called a ceasefire last night,” he replied. “The dumb bastards behind those walls won’t give up. But the dumb bastards in front of those walls won’t stop killing each other. So now a bunch of dumb bastards, including you and me, are going to try to sort this shit out.” He exhaled a large cloud of smoke. “One day is all anyone is willing to wait. Come tomorrow, if negotiations don’t work, they’ll just level it and fight over the crater.”

“Well, that’s just ridiculous. You can’t have a ‘leveled’ field and have a crater, since a crater is a depression.”

“That is not helpful.”

“Grammar is always helpful,” Ozhma said, without pausing to ponder why she didn’t have many friends. “But, anyway, that’s good, right? Negotiations? Negotiations are good. Negotiations means people at least want this to end well.”

“Maybe. But ‘well’ for you and ‘well’ for two nations with enough guns and magic to wipe their ass with civilization are two very different things.”

“Okay, yes, true, but let’s… try to stay positive,” she said, wincing. “If people are willing to talk, then people are willing to listen. And if you can do both, then you can get done whatever needs to get done.”

“Huh. That’s pretty insightful.”

“Thank you. My mom used to say it,” Ozhma said, beaming. “So if they’re willing to talk, then you just need an envoy who’s willing to talk. Who are you sending?”

“You.”

“Oh! Neat.”

The next few seconds before Ozhma, blissed out on secondhand silkgrass, realized what he had just said would be some of the happiest of her life.

“Wait, what?”

“We’re here.”

It had either been the drugs or the sheer, desperate denial she was using to keep herself together, but without realizing it, they’d arrived at a camp. The road sharply leveled out onto a flat cliff that overlooked the plains, providing a view of the carnage. Military tents had been erected—self-serious blue of the Revolution a wary distance from the gaudy violet of the Imperial pavilion—and the air was alive with activity.

Messengers and clerks in Revolutionary uniforms rushed to and fro, delivering documents to a small fleet of overworked scribes who busily translated them into scrolls to be sent by messenger birds. Imperial mages sat in deliberate circles, their eyes aglow with their power as they stared into pools of water in which images of cityscapes and blood-soaked fields flashed. Multiple people with multiple medals of distinguishment argued, red-faced and furious.

But no one was killing each other.

Which, while ideal so long as she was in the thick of this, was nonetheless bizarre. She could fathom, with a little creative thinking, a cause that would convince the Imperium and Revolution to choose not to attack each other. But the idea of the two actually setting up camp together to talk damn near broke her brain.

Just like the fall from Rudu’s back damn near broke her ass.

“Hey!” She clambered to her feet, rubbing her amazing rear end. Rudu seemed to neither notice nor care, waving for her to follow as he entered the camp.

She hurried to stay close to him. As menacing as she’d once found him, Rudu now seemed like a big, sweet, drug-addicted puppy in comparison to the people surrounding her. Revolutionary commanders wielding bizarre weapons snarled at Imperial mages, glowing eyes impassive beneath their cold metal masks. These were people used to killing, used to not being bothered by killing. And, one by one, each and every one of their cold, appraising eyes fell to her.

Silence followed her through the camp, the heated arguments and the concerned chatter dying as the camp’s inhabitants watched her go. It unnerved her to be watched by people carrying steel. Always had. People like that had a way of looking at you—you caught it, if you paid close enough attention—like they were considering all the ways they could take you apart.

She abandoned any thoughts of running, then and there. She couldn’t bear the idea of even turning around. She couldn’t see their eyes; she couldn’t know what they were thinking.

“You’re late.”

But in another second, she did anyway.

She came to a paralyzed halt beneath a stare hewn and sharpened to cold iron knives. A hard-faced woman, features sharp enough to carve the skin off a serpent, with a proud jaw framed by black hair cropped in military fashion. A match for her short-cut blue coat adorned by stylish medals affixed to the lapel. The dried grime of battle lay upon her like it would on a blade: fittingly.

The arcane command structure of the Revolution made Ozhma’s head hurt to even think about, but she knew an officer when she saw one. They didn’t give big, fuck-off swords like that to just anyone, after all.

“Can’t be late if I didn’t tell you when I’d be back,” Rudu replied.

The woman narrowed her eyes. “You informed my aides that you were going out to”—she paused to cringe—“‘find some turd to flush down this particular shitter.’”

“And I found one,” Rudu replied.

“HEY!” Ozhma snapped.

Ozhma swallowed hard as the woman leaned over her, her terrifying face made even more terrifying by the hard shadow painting it.

“And you are prepared to accept this duty?” she asked, her voice as severe as her stare. “To accept the burden of negotiation and the lives that shall endure or end by your decisions?”

Ozhma blinked. “Um…”

The woman glared at Rudu. “You did not tell her?”

“Didn’t have time,” Rudu replied as he lit another bowl. “Gave her the basics: city, killing, lot of people dying because of you, that sort of thing. If I told her any more, I didn’t think she’d come.”

“Imbecile,” the woman hissed. “You dare bring a civilian into this without being clear to her of the dire nature of—”

“I want to help.” Ozhma tried to sound how she thought boldness ought to sound like. “I… I heard enough. If there are a lot of people…” She stood as imposing as someone of her stature could muster. “Then I want to try.”

The woman’s gaze softened, if only just a little. But beneath the iron layer of anger was a steel layer of discipline. She stood rigidly for a moment and offered a deep, formal bow.

“You have the gratitude of the Glorious Revolution of the Fist and Flame and of its Great General, madam,” she said. “And you have the honor of addressing Cadre Commander Tretta Unbreakable, servant of the Great General and his will in these circumstances.”

“Uh… hi?”

Tretta spun on her heel, began stalking toward the center of the camp and a wide pavilion set up there. She didn’t even bother to gesture to follow; she merely kept talking and left Ozhma scrambling to catch up to her.

“I will be as brief as I am able,” Tretta said. “The city of New Vigil is presently under the occupation and control of forces hostile to the Revolution. Revolutionary citizens are held within.”

“Among others,” Rudu added from behind.

“Others?” Ozhma asked.

“We have knowledge of Imperial, Scarfolk, and various freehold citizens behind the walls, as well,” Tretta replied, “but the bulk of the population is made up of Revolutionaries.”

“Lapsed Revolutionaries. Deserters.” Rudu offered a bored shrug to Tretta’s bare-toothed snarl. “You said she needed to be informed.”

“There is no such thing as a lapsed Revolutionary, merely Revolutionaries waiting to be returned to the embrace of the Great General.” She sucked her anger in back behind clenched teeth. “Regardless of affiliation, the citizenry present is unarmed and vulnerable. Our attempts to decisively take the city ended… un-ideally.”

Ozhma glanced back over the cliff to the horror on the field below. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“In the interests of reducing further casualties, we called for a ceasefire and the enemy agreed,” Tretta said. “We are not so naïve as to believe that treating directly with the enemy would result in anything other than carnage, hence mutual terms have been decided upon that envoys shall act in our stead, such as yourself.”

Ozhma’s head bobbed along, heavier with every word that sank into it. “Right. Okay. So I’m… an envoy. Okay. An envoy is a representative. I’m a sales representative. That’s basically the same thing. Basically the same thing. Basically the same thing.” She smacked her lips, wondering which word she would have to emphasize to believe it. Instead, she settled for looking to Rudu. “Right?”

“Oh. Yeah, no, just think of it like a sale except instead of making money, you’re trying to keep a small city full of people from becoming a pile of ash.” He tapped his bowl out on the heel of his sandal. “But yeah, basically.”

“Right. Good. We agree. Good. Great. Good, good, good.”

“It would be difficult to overstate the danger you’re walking into,” Tretta said as she came to a halt outside a lavish Imperial pavilion. “Only in the direst circumstances against the vilest of foes would we override the Revolutionary Mandate.” A grotesque centipede of an expression crawled across her face. “I truly never thought there would be such a day. Or a foe.”

She pulled back the pavilion’s curtains, exposing a decadent interior of exquisite furniture and hardwood flooring. The military accoutrements—the maps pinned to tables, the scattered documents and open manuals, the minuscule troops on the table—only served to heighten the room’s wonder. It was as though someone had simply magically transported an entirely furnished war room into the middle of nowhere and—

Oh, right, Ozhma thought suddenly. Mages.

If anything could diminish the room’s splendor, that distinction belonged to the pavilion’s sole occupant.

A woman, short and spear-slim, stood at its center. Her Imperial military coat and the longsword at her hip suggested she belonged there, but only just. Her hair, Imperial ivory, hung in greasy tatters, her figure stood slouched and defeated, her uniform looked as though she hadn’t taken it off in days. Bruises and scratches that had yet to be healed—or cleaned—dotted every inch of skin.

“The Three’s representative has been selected.” Tretta gestured to Ozhma, who stood trying to squint into the war room. “You represent Imperial interests here. Do you have any questions before she departs?”

The white-haired woman turned around and Ozhma cringed. Exhaustion colored every inch of the woman’s face a ghastly pale. Her chapped mouth and tear-stained eyes both hung slack, resignation exploded across her expression, as though exhaustion, horror, sorrow, and anger had battled it out and her face had simply collapsed under the weight of them all.

Whatever war this woman had fought, she’d clearly lost.

“This woman?” she asked, weary voice a match for her face. “You want to send a civilian in there?” She managed a glimmer of incredulity for Tretta and Rudu. “To her?”

“Hey, your envoy had a dick-nose but I didn’t say shit, did I?” Rudu snapped back.

Some fragment of emotion, some edge gone dull, scraped across her face, desperate to come loose. But it, too, fell beneath the weary weight on her face and disappeared.

“Send whoever, do whatever,” she said, turning her back to them, “I don’t care anymore.”

Ozhma didn’t realize she had been holding her breath until the curtain fell. The chill that slid over her was hard to shake off as Tretta turned and began to lead the way once again.

“She seems…” Ozhma struggled to find the word. “… Nice?”

“Our Imperial counterparts in this plan are less optimistic than we are,” Tretta said, her voice hardening. “Their leader has yet to arrive. Their commanding officer will not even deign to speak with us directly. Her shortsightedness remains her weakness. The enemy feeds on our anger, takes everything from us with it.”

“You’re exaggerating,” Rudu sighed.

Tretta came to a sharp, sudden halt. She whirled on Rudu with such ferocity that Ozhma almost cried out, terrified of the swords she was certain were about to come out. Tretta stood an inch from his face and spoke between clenched teeth.

“She is a killer,” Tretta said, “a danger to every being that has ever breathed the air of this land. I will not permit her to do to this city what she’s done to the rest of the Scar, no matter who I have to cut through or into how many pieces. Whether you choose to be behind my blade or in front of it when that happens, I leave to you. Am I clear?”

Rudu took in the threat in one long, unblinking stare of stunned silence. Or what appeared to be stunned silence, anyway, until he exhaled a cloud of shimmering silkgrass smoke into her face.

“Relax,” he said, “I’m here for my employers’ interests. Not hers.”

Tretta curtly waved the smoke from her face. “Good.”

At the very edge of the camp, where the tents gave way to scrub grass, a man lingered. Newt-like and clad in Imperial silks, he leaned upon a cliff face, beside an immaculately drawn square of chalk, not sparing the approaching trio so much as a glance up from the fingernails he was focused on cleaning.

“The final envoy has been selected,” Tretta barked. “Open the portal.” Upon the man’s distinct lack of motivation to move, she hissed. “Did you hear me?”

“I did,” the man replied in a refined Imperial accent. “But I didn’t hear ‘please.’ Nuls have the manners of animals.”

He turned away, eager to end this conversation. Violet light flashed behind his eyes; he rapped his knuckles upon the chalk square.

A light blossomed across the rock face, bursting to violet life. Veils of twisting light coiled, spun, and danced around each other in a miasma of light and movement. Ozhma was forced to turn her face away, shield it with her hands, yet she could still feel the twisting light. Like it was looking at her.

“Magic,” Tretta said, sneering. “Detestable, yet necessary. Time is of the essence and the enemy cares nothing for the lives beneath their heel. It falls to us to care more for their people than they do. Our top priority is getting as many people out of there alive as we can before daybreak tomorrow. After which, we will be forced to act. Do not permit the enemy to claim ignorance of that fact. Or the fact that our action shall be swift, overwhelming, and final.”

Tretta affixed her with a spearhead of a glare, one that punched straight through her ribs. Her mouth ran dry. All the tanks, all the mages, every bloodied edge of every bloodied blade on that battlefield… and she was responsible for holding them all back? How? How could she? How could anyone?

“Man, she’s my fucking envoy,” Rudu grunted, smoke wisps leaking through his teeth. “If you want to terrorize someone, go yell at your own people and at least get saluted for it.”

Tretta’s eyes sharpened to points upon him so cruel that Ozhma almost felt herself bleeding. But for as much as those eyes made her cringe, she didn’t truly panic until Tretta’s very big sword came out of its sheath.

“Do not suffer from the delusion that I will permit you or your vile, withered employers to interfere in this. If the Three dare to interfere, I will—”

“You make a lot of threats, lady,” Rudu interjected without looking up from his pipe. “Enough of them were funny that I let them go, at first, but now all this talk about shoving things into other things, well.” He took a deep drag. “It’s starting to seem a little unprofessional. I can’t say as I think my vile, withered employers would want to work with anyone unprofessional.” He looked up, pointedly exhaled in Tretta’s face. “What do you think? Should we ask?”

Tretta’s body shook with barely restrained rage. Her grasp on her blade tightened, the silk of her coat stretching against the muscles desperate to unleash the steel. And her eyes—those hard, savage eyes that it hurt to be under—burned forge-hot.

And she did sheathe her sword, turn on her heel, and storm away.

“What the fuck?” Ozhma whispered urgently, seizing Rudu’s sleeve like a giant child clinging at her drug-addled parent’s arm. “What the fuck? Did she say the Three? Like the Ashmouths the Three? Like the criminal fucking killers the Three?”

“I’m going to level with you, lady,” Rudu replied, “I’m not a very nice guy. No one here is. And definitely not the fucking maniac squatting in New Vigil.”

He looked down at her. And in his eyes, she saw an ugly honesty, the kind that comes before you learn how badly you’ve fucked up.

“I didn’t tell you everything. But I didn’t lie to you, either,” he said. “You can help a lot of people, but…” He frowned. “Her, me, everyone here—we’re not the kind of people who have things work out very often. I don’t want you to turn back. But if you want to…”

“I don’t,” Ozhma replied before she even realized it. And by the time her brain had caught up to her heart, her head was already nodding. “I’m… I can help. I can do this.”

He nodded. But he didn’t smile. Maybe, even though he’d asked her here, he’d wished she’d taken the chance to run.

She would never know. Not for sure.

“All right.” Rudu looked back toward the door of light. “Ever used a portal before?”

“No. Never. Not once. I’m… I’m a little terrified, if I’m honest.”

“Understandable. Ever walked through a door before?”

Ozhma found enough relief to smile. “I have. Are they basically the same thing?”

Rudu put a hand on her shoulder.

“Nope.”

And pushed.

“Holy shit. Took them fucking long enough to send someone, didn’t it?”

Ozhma could hear the voice. But she couldn’t see who was speaking. Or at all.

“Oh my goodness! Look, she’s not moving! Was she hurt? Tortured? Did those maniacs… impugn her?”

The moment she had stepped through, the portal was absent from her, as was anything that had happened after it, along with basically all of her memories, sensations, feelings, and possibly—she couldn’t be sure—the entirety of her digestive tract. Other than that, though, it seemed like it had worked.

“Nah, this is just her first time through a portal.”

“You can tell that?”

“Yeah. Look at her twitch. Like a fucking newborn piglet pushed all glistening and raw out of a sow’s ass. Miracle of life. Thing of beauty.”

Her mind slowly pieced itself back together, word by word. Ozhma. Rudu. Tretta. Negotiation. Enemy.

And bit by bit, everything else began to come back: the flow of blood through her body, the feeling of the hot ground beneath her…

“Until I am absolutely certain whether your description or your abhorrent understanding of anatomy offends me more, could you possibly stop with the grotesquery? Our guest requires aid.”

“Well, just hold on for a second. She might be dead and we don’t have to do anything. Sometimes happens. Check to see if she shit herself.”

“You cannot, in any conscience let alone good, ask me to do that.”

Ozhma’s vision, finally, caught up to the rest of her. She found herself flat on her back and staring up at two faces.

A woman and a man. Twins, by the look of it. Both of them had the same long features and the same scrutinizing, shrewd eyes, both of them wore their black hair in braids. But the man’s face was nervous and timid beneath his hood. And the woman’s… well, it certainly wasn’t fucking timid. Her brows were knitted in a permanent scowl and her chin was adorned with tattoos depicting the twisting bars of a portcullis.

The decoration lent her smile an unsettling quality matched only by the coarse cut of her voice as she grinned over Ozhma.

“Congratulations!” she said. “You didn’t shit yourself! It’s a fucking miracle.”

“Rude,” the man chastised before reaching down to help Ozhma up. “Apologies for Yria. For all her talents, she can be a little…” He hesitated as he stared at her arm, removed a cloth from his belt, wiped her sleeve clean, and then assisted her. “Tactless.”

“Oh, listen to Diplomat Dickwipe here,” Yria grunted as she took Ozhma’s other arm with less delicacy and more effort. “Talking about tact like we aren’t in the middle of a fucking war zone.”

Together, they gently raised Ozhma to her feet. Or tried, anyway. The woman’s arm was weak, her body stiff as she lifted.

Ozhma stood, swaying, on earth flattened and baked by searing heat. The smell of metal and powder filled her nostrils. Behind her, a second sun burned, the immense pyre of the Revolutionary tank continuing to wail to the sky through a mouth of flame and smoke. The corpses were arranged around it, petitioners bowed in worship before a macabre god.

The field. She was in the field. In the blood, in the guns, in the bodies.

Ozhma inhaled a breath of ash and stale blood. Her head wobbled on her neck, unwieldy and heavy with sights she hadn’t been ready for. She kicked up plains dust as she swayed on unsteady feet.

“Easy there!” Yria cautioned. “Don’t fucking go tits over on me, woman. I don’t think I could manage lifting your ass twice in one day.”

Ozhma twitched. And for one hot second, she was able to put the horrors she had just seen out of her mind long enough to remember the lesson she’d learned so many years ago in Mom and Dad’s shop.

Never regret a sale. Never take anything for free. And never, never let them talk shit.

“Yria, was it?” she asked.

“Yria the Cell.” The woman made a crude mockery of a bow. “At your service.”

“Ozhma. Charmed. Vagrant?”

Yria grinned a big, tattooed grin and elbowed her brother. “See? She noticed.”

“I can’t imagine I’m lucky enough that your magic power is the ability to choke on your own ass.” Ozhma paused in the midst of dusting off her skirt to cast an appraising look at Yria’s narrow hips. “Nor could I guess where you’d find any in that mockery of a backside. But if you could muster the strength to kindly shut all the way the fuck up of your own volition, I’d be grateful.”

The twins’ faces, in stunned unison, fell. Their mouths hung open, their eyes went wide with shock. Then they looked to each other.

“Oh, I like her,” the man said.

“Fuck off, I liked her first,” Yria snapped.

“Let’s hope she doesn’t end up killing us all after that. That would be awkward.” The man waved a hand and moved to drape his sister’s arm over his shoulder, gesturing Ozhma to follow. “If you wouldn’t mind? We’ve only got a day, after all. My name’s Urda, by the way… not that you asked, despite my giving you multiple obvious openings and, oh, never mind, you’re not even listening.”

Had she been, she probably would have felt a little embarrassed. As it was, though, she could only manage enough sense to follow numbly along as the twins led her across the plains.

From afar, the carnage on the field had seemed awful, but comfortingly abstract—a frightening portrait, something that would give her a few nightmares and then blissfully fade from her mind.

But this close, here among the reek of shit and blood and the broken metal, it was something real and something impossible. She couldn’t bring herself to see the details: the blood staining the ground, the shattered barricades and broken machines, and the bodies that lay with their backs turned in retreat and painted by gun and arrow wounds.

To see them, their faces screwed up in fear that had twitched out of their corpses, would be too much. But her eyes wouldn’t let her look away. It all became a singular blur, a monster of twisted metal limbs and a crown of corpses and eyes full of blood, one that she knew would never fade from her mind, blissfully or otherwise.

And still, impossibly, that creature was easier to look at than the survivors.

Them, she couldn’t help but see the details: the glassy emptiness of their eyes, the wounds that painted their patchwork uniforms and the cuts that they’d stopped binding when they’d run out of supplies, the weary shake of their bodies as they dragged the corpses and helped the wounded heading toward the distant walls. The closer they got, the more there were, until Ozhma found herself just one drop in a tide of suffering flowing slowly toward the walls of New Vigil.

“This is… horrible,” Ozhma whispered, breathless.

“Is it?” Yria muttered. “I didn’t fucking notice.”

Ozhma felt her cheeks flush. The obviousness of the statement hadn’t even occurred to her. She had just had to say it. The truth of it was too heavy to hold in her head.

“Sorry, but…,” Ozhma said. “They didn’t tell me much about what happened here before they… you know. I’m still not totally sure what’s going on?”

“Well, if you did, that’d make you a popular fucking girl, wouldn’t it?” Yria spat. “You probably know more than any of these sad fucks here.”

“I know that the Imperium and Revolution both want this place bad enough to…” She winced as a man dragged one end of a stretcher with two bodies on it, the other end dragging through the dirt. “To do this.”

“The situation is slightly more complex than that,” Urda said, pointedly searching for any space to stare at that wasn’t covered in blood. “Theoretically, anyway. It’s not precisely clear what the Imperium and the Revolution want with New Vigil, but they’re willing to kill for it.”

“You know fucking well as I do that the killing is what they want,” Yria spat. “They aren’t going to stop until we’re choking on our own ashes.”

“Please stop saying things like that. You’re making me very nervous. They wouldn’t have sent envoys if they just intended to kill everyone.”

“They would if they know this place is worth dying for.”

“Is it?”

Ozhma hadn’t become aware of the question that had tumbled out of her mouth until the twins looked over their shoulders at her. Yria managed a long sneer.

“This shitburg?” Yria asked. “What do you think?”

Yria turned away, but the movement was awkward. So was her entire gait, Ozhma noticed. The weight of her body was off, like she wasn’t used to walking with all of her limbs. Her eyes drifted toward the woman’s arm, to the blackened spider’s web of veins against the pale skin. It hung at her side, completely paralyzed.

“Some would say it is, at least,” Urda offered. “You see, due to the intricate nature of our, shall we say, attendants, we—”

“Cram your fucking craw, you talky twat,” Yria snarled. “We aren’t fucking supposed to talk to them.”

“If that’s the case, I must once again renew my objection to your abhorrent treatment of her.”

“Well, if they wanted someone treated all yes-madam-may-I-lick-your-ass, why the fuck did they send me to make the fucking portal?”

“See? See? You know the way you talk to people, including me, is terrible, but you refuse to stop! Given the delicate nature of this circumstance, you need to—”

“What circumstance? The fucking armies about to blow our cunts out of our skulls? That fucking circumstance?”

Ozhma kept track of the twins’ bickering only as long as it took to be stunned by it. How anyone could act so… so normal in this, it hurt her head to wonder. And yet, looking at the soldiers felt worse.

The closer they got to the city walls, the more intact the defenses became. Craters from cannon fire stood alongside newly deployed barricades and dug-in ballista nests. Soldiers in patchwork armor and various stains of blood manned stations with autobows, blades, spears, anything they could get their hands on. Ozhma cringed to see some soldiers wielding kitchen knives as weapons. And once she saw how small and young the hands that held them were…

She looked away. But that didn’t help.

Behind her, across the sprawling plains, the armies of the Imperium and the Revolution stood.

They’d looked terrible enough from the cliff, the toys of a particularly cruel child. But here, on the ground, with the violet glow of mages’ eyes peering out between veils of dust and the tanks looming out of a sea of half-buried bodies…

All the bodies…

There was nowhere to look. Nowhere her eyes could rest that wasn’t stained with blood or decorated with corpses. Even the living carried the same haunted, glassy stares as the carcasses of their comrades, only the mechanical rhythm of their weary movements distinguishing them from so much flesh rotting out on a rotten field on a rotten earth.

She wanted to throw up. She wanted to scream. She wanted to collapse.

But she couldn’t even bring herself to close her eyes. She forced herself to take it in, to swallow the bile and hold back the tears. Whether she’d been asked, ordered, or threatened, she was here to try to help these people. To try to get them out of here okay. They needed it. They needed her.

She had no idea if she could do it.

Only that she had to do it.

The world inside the fire-scarred walls of the city was little different than the world outside. There were fewer bodies and bloodstains littering the dirt roads, but to call it welcoming would be a lie. Hell, she didn’t even feel right calling it a city.

The bombed-out ruins of homes stood charred alongside the skeletonized, half-dead houses that had escaped the fire but not the soldiers. All along the unpaved streets, she saw houses destroyed or scavenged to make defenses. A few landmarks stood out—an opera house in the distance, a few larger buildings that served as storehouses and barracks—but everything else looked like the city hadn’t even gotten started before people had begun blowing the shit out of it.

Wagons pulled by heavy draft birds plodded up and down the street, transporting the wounded and cowering deeper into the city before returning with a burden of siege weaponry or armaments. Soldiers—old and young, hale and weathered—lined up to receive weapons, tools, secondhand medical supplies. Some seized their steel and raced off to reinforce the front, some accepted it and trudged off with weary resignation, and some simply had it thrust into their numb hands to let the tips of their blades fall and drag in the dust, staring glassy-eyed out at some blood-and-char horizon that they hadn’t stopped seeing just yet.

There was no such thing as priceless, Mom and Dad had told Ozhma once. Everyone got what they wanted, so long as they were willing to pay for it. The obsessive mutterings of a pair of charming old tightfists, that advice had seemed, but it had seen her through a life in the Scar. Death and suffering, the two staples of the Scarfolk, were easier to handle if you could believe that they were the natural consequence for seeking out riches, living on one’s own terms, whatever led them to that morbid end.

It was a timid truth. The kind that falls apart if you look too long at it.

And Ozhma hadn’t blinked since she set foot past the walls.

Where was the choice in this? Where was the meaning in this suffering? What had these people done to deserve this? What could anyone do to deserve these hollow-eyed stares and muted, broken voices?

And what, she wondered, could she do to stop it?

“Hold on a second, assholes, we’re here.”

The twins came to a halt. Yria jerked her thumb over her shoulder.

“You want to hurry the fuck up and get inside or you want to take another look at my ass?”

Ozhma glanced up at the building looming over them. A dingy, one-story affair with a thick door, boarded-up windows, and a dirty sign swaying overhead that portrayed what Ozhma couldn’t be sure but on closer inspection mostly certain was a pair of rothacs engaged in furious intercourse.

“A tavern?” Ozhma squinted at the sign. “This really isn’t the time. And it looks like it’s out of business.”

“Well, now, do you see anywhere else that we could use as a headquarters, Lord and Lady Fuckmouth?”

Ozhma looked up and down the dirt streets. Everywhere else was either skeletonized, bombed-out, or currently on fire, it was true. So she merely sighed, followed the twins to the thick door, and prepared herself for whatever scene of misery awaited on the other side.

“DO I FUCKING LOOK LIKE I KNOW WHAT A BATTLE SQUARE IS?”

She was not, however, prepared for the sheer wall of sound that bowled her over.

“Fires are still going in the Dirtmouth neighborhood! Where the fuck is our water?”

“Am I seeing this? They brought a fucking airship to a fight?”

“Beat the shit out of anyone who runs. I don’t care how old or young. If we lose one more to desertion, we’re as good as dead.”

There were certainly more voices than those—many more—but those were the only words she could make out. The rest was lost to the rush of noise pumping through the arteries of the cramped tavern.

What tables hadn’t been used to barricade the windows were laden with briefings, maps, leathery covers of old war manuals stained by overturned inkwells. A steady stream of messenger birds alighted on the windowsills to deliver tiny scrolls before being sent back off. The tinny, machine screech of mechanical apparatus that belched out paper scrolls with illegible markings on them punched through the noise.

Against the chaos of their own making, the people seemed almost insignificant.

They ran from table to table, carried sheaves of papers and news through the choked walkways of the tavern, frantically scribbled down messages to be fastened to overworked birds before hurrying them back out, screamed at each other and argued over what the sigils on the paper coming out of the machines meant.

Ozhma guessed, by the cleanliness of their green coats and the relative lack of blood on their clothes, that she had found the leadership.

Men and women in varying degrees of emotional breakdowns milled about, numb from exhaustion and fear. The air reeked of desperate panic. A sufficiently loud noise could have killed a good half of these people, they looked so run-down.

This was the enemy? These terrified men and weary women? These people in ill-fitting coats running around like headless birds? They didn’t look capable of keeping a stone inside this city, let alone a population.

“Sorry, can I help you?”

A man had stopped in the middle of the rush. Dark skinned, his hair natural and thick, he stood in a green military coat far too big for him and carried a sheath with no sword at his hip. His smile was strained, but his was the only face she’d seen thus far that wasn’t either miserable or dying.

“Oh. Um, yes, we’re here to…” She glanced behind; in all the chaos she hadn’t even seen the twins slip out. “I mean, I’m here to…” She paused, thinking—to do what? To fail? To suck and die? To… no. Pull yourself together. You can do this. “I’m an envoy?”

“Oh! You’re the last! The others are already downstairs. If we hurry, you can…” He caught himself, smiled and extended a hand to her. “Sorry, things are a little…” His lips pursed, unable to find a word he was comfortable with. “At any rate, I’m Meret.” He caught himself again. “Sorry, Tactical Officer Meret.” And again. “Damn it, wait, no, I’m Field Officer Meret.” And again. “No, sorry, I was right the first time. Meret. Tactical Officer Meret. Sorry, I’m not… it’s really… I don’t…”

Ozhma seized his hand in both of hers. She gave his arm a tug—not a lot, just enough to make him turn his weary eyes to her. She gave him the warmest smile she could think of and gently patted the top of his hand.

“Ozhma,” she said. “Ozhma Tenstead. It is my utter pleasure to meet you, Meret.”

He blinked, as if she had just punched him in the mouth. Then, like ice off the thaw, the strain seeped out of his smile and left behind something more relaxed, if only a little.

Every part of that gesture—the use of both her hands, the tug, the choice not to call him by the title he wore so poorly—was deliberate, a practice honed over years in her parents’ store. The tweaks had taken time to figure out, but it had all come from the same lesson.

Nothing was going to get done unless everyone felt good about doing it.

“You, too, Ozhma,” he said. “And… thank you. For coming here. I… had some reservations about the envoys the Revolution and Imperium sent.” He blinked. “Oh! Yes, we should probably get you to them, before…” He chuckled nervously. “Before everyone dies.”

She winced. Normally, they were relaxed for more than three seconds. Then again, she told herself, they were all about to be incinerated, so…

“I don’t want to ruin your day,” Meret said as he guided her through the human frenzy, past the tavern’s bar and toward a door in the back, “but negotiations haven’t been going that well.” He paused, thought. “Well, that’s not fair of me. No one’s been shot yet, so they could be going worse.” He stopped, hand on the door, and looked back at her. “Do you want a drink, by the way? Sorry, I should have asked earlier.”

She blinked. “A drink?”

He gestured to the tavern’s bar. It was, like every other surface, laden with papers and documents and maps. But, unlike every other surface, there were more than a few half-drained bottles and upturned glasses. One would have thought that people facing down the two strongest armies of the Scar would ask people to be more sober… then again, Ozhma reasoned, facing down the two strongest armies of the Scar would also be a pretty good reason to drink.

“I think I’m fine,” she said, all the same.

“Right. Good. Okay. Understandable.” He moved to open the door, but clenched his teeth, like he couldn’t bring himself to open it. “Actually, you should really take a drink with you.”

He made a gesture. A man rushed over with a sloshing tankard of brown liquor and thrust it into Ozhma’s hands.

“Oh,” she said. “Um… thanks?”

“Sure, sure.” Meret opened the door, leading down to a cellar. “Just keep moving forward. You’ll find the general in the back, with the other envoys.”

“You’re not coming?”

“Sorry, I kind of… have to make sure we don’t all die, you know?”

That was a good reason to stay behind, she had to admit, but as she stepped out onto the stairs and followed the dim lamplight into a dark room smelling of earth and old bricks, she was still more nervous without Meret by her side.

His had been the only face that wasn’t haunted by the violence. Hell, she already missed that nervous, soft-spoken voice of his. Without him, in the dark, the other faces—the glassy eyes, the slack jaw, the numb horror—seeped back into her memory, nothing to keep them out but the tankard in her hands.

It turned out Meret had been right to give her a drink.

She brought it up to her nose and sniffed it. The pungent scent of whiskey filled her nose, made her want to vomit, always had since she was a kid. Outstanding, she thought, they’d sent her into this mess and she couldn’t even be a little drunk for it.

“Are we all going to fucking have to die for this?”

Which was unfortunate because, though she didn’t know it then, it would have been very useful to be shit-faced that day.

“It’s not about you! It’s not about your problems!”

She followed the sound of voices.

“Don’t you fucking throw that in my face!”

Or rather, voice. Specifically, a male one. Specifically, an angry male one.

“I’m telling you that there is no way out that doesn’t end like this. You can’t be the one to make this decision alone. You CAN’T.”

She couldn’t make out who he was talking to and the reasoning became clear as soon as she reached the end of the cellar. Another door, thick wood and mounted on the brick with heavy iron hinges, stood there, stoically trying to hold back the angry shouting within.

“No. Fuck you. FUCK you.”

Ozhma heard the muffled voice of someone replying. She squinted at the door, tiptoeing closer and pressing her ear against it, trying to make out that other voice.

“I’m sorry.”

Was that… a woman?

“The last envoy they caught eavesdropping, they broke both her arms.”

Ozhma started, nearly dropping her tankard of whiskey. She composed herself in time to remember the two other envoys. One of them, tall and reed-thin and wearing Imperial purple, stood leaning against the cellar wall, a contemptuous look on his face. His Revolutionary counterpart, a young lady with a short-cropped hairstyle and a long diplomat’s coat, offered her a nod.

“Oh. Sorry.” Ozhma scooted away from the door, clutching the tankard against her chest as she extended a free arm to the Imperial. “Ozhma. I’m the third envoy.”

“Galatatian ki Zanzora, Imperial emissary granted the honor by Her Highness, Empress Athura the Fourteenth.” He glanced at her hand, didn’t take it. “Charmed.”

“Oh, um.” Ozhma glanced to the Revolutionary woman. “And… you are?”

“Cadre Agent Insightful,” she replied tersely.

“How long have you been waiting here?”

Insightful didn’t answer. Nor did she even bother looking down at Ozhma. Her pose was rigidly at attention, her eyes locked straight ahead.

“Don’t bother, madam,” Galatatian said. “Until she sees the enemy, she refuses to speak. Possibly for the best. Negotiations take a certain amount of authoritative verve. Ill-suited is this art to the brainwashed masses.” He smiled down his nose—which, Rudu was right, did look a lot like a dick—at Ozhma. “Or the unwashed, if you’ll pardon.”

Ozhma wouldn’t, in better circumstances. But then the door slammed open.

Looming out of the frame was an imposing man. Or, Ozhma corrected herself, a man trying to appear imposing.

His frame was broad and corded with lean get-shit-done soldier’s muscle that even his weathered green coat, trimmed with harsh-looking fur, couldn’t hide—and in fact, only accentuated. His long black hair was done up in an afterthought of a tail, framing a hard face that had scars, beard, and mustache in all the right places to be a man you shouldn’t fuck with.

And yet…

His hard face couldn’t hide the wrinkles where he smiled too much and laughed too easy. His long body couldn’t hide the parts where he’d gone a little softer, a little broader, a little warmer. And his eyes, ravaged by fear and fury as they were, couldn’t dim the kindness.

There were very few people Ozhma liked right off the bat.

But this man was one of them.

“You’re the envoys? Fucking great.”

A little.

“Apologies.” The man attempted to rub sleeplessness from his eyes, failed. “That was uncalled for. Thank you for coming out here. We appreciate the effort to end this without additional violence.”

“Without violence or dignity, apparently,” Galatatian interjected snidely. “No wine, no food, no accommodations; has your little art project of a city ever received properly the emissary of a true power?”

The man stared at Galatatian’s nose. “You ever blow your nose and find spunk in your handkerchief?” He ignored the furious stare the envoy sent him, pointedly glanced over Agent Insightful, and looked down at Ozhma. “And you’re the envoy of the Three?”

Am I?

“Er… yes?” Ozhma forced the nervousness out—confidence, she chided herself, confidence, knowledge, and patience were how you made any sale, be it for money or lives—and forced a smile on her face. She held out her hand awkwardly. “Ozhma. Sir.”

“Cavric,” he replied, taking her hand. And her smile became a little less forced. “Cavric. Leader of New Vigil.”

“Oh! You’re the general?” She smiled at her good luck—she’d been baffled as to how to even begin negotiating, but here she was, already warming up to its leader. She pulled herself up, stood tall and straight as she could. “I’m here to ensure the safety of the people here, sir. I can only hope that we are both open to doing what’s necessary.”

Cavric’s face fell. Something cold and bitter as the ice on dead crops crept across his scowl.

“I hope so, too, Ozhma.” He pulled his hood up over his head, stalked away. “But it’s not me you’re negotiating with.”

“What?” she shouted at his back as he stormed up the stairs of the cellar. “Then who?”

“Me.”

A voice from behind the door.

The other voice.

It came crawling out of the darkened room like a spider: low, dark.

“You can come in here or I can go out there, but if I have to fucking get off this chair, I’m breaking it over someone.”

Galatatian narrowed his eyes in an unconvincing attempt to steel himself. Agent Insightful tensed up, like she was walking to a fistfight and not a negotiation. Both of them pushed forward past the door, leaving Ozhma to scurry behind them like a child.

The dank earth of the cellar opened up into something… the opposite of that.

A room. An expertly polished, exquisitely furnished, and extremely impossible room opened up into the earth. Hardwood floors, walls, and ceiling made a perfect square, adorned with rugs, chairs, beds, and shelves brimming with books and beautiful things—even the pavilion she’d seen back at the camp was pathetic compared to this room.

This amazing room… buried underground… in a city that was plainly starved for resources.

Ozhma squinted, trying to work it out in her brain. How could a city so strapped it could barely defend itself have a secret room this luxurious? What was it? Some form of decadent bunker so that the city’s rulers could wait out in comfort while their people died? Had she been wrong about Cavric? About Meret? Was this truly the enemy?

She looked to her fellow envoys to see if they also struggled with the luxurious sight. But their eyes were fixed in dread on the center of the room. On the grand velvet chair in the middle.

And the bloody figure draped across it.

Illuminated by the faint light of a lantern overhead, the shadows swirled too deeply around the figure for Ozhma to see more than a few shattered fragments of a human: white hair drenched in sweat, corded muscle under skin painted with scars, a long hand at the end of a long arm colored with ink, raised in request.

“One moment, if you don’t mind,” the figure said, their voice raw with exhaustion. “I told you if I got up off this chair, I’d break it over you and I don’t intend to be called a liar. And since I’ve killed a lot of people today and I’m just a little hungover, before I get off this chair and we get started, indulge me as I make this perfectly clear.

“I don’t want any prestigious introductions, any verbose threats, any wordy demands like ‘methinks you must consider the recompense’ or shit like that. I know who you are and I know who you work for. I know what your bosses want.” The voice grew colder. “And I know what they’re willing to do to get it.

“So if I get up and hear any fancy wordplay intended to sound ominous, threatening, or anything I deem unacceptably dramatic, I’m going to break the mouth it came out of. That’s rule one. Rule two is that you don’t say shit until you’ve heard what I’ve got to say. You so much as sneeze while I’m talking, I’ll break… break…” A frustrated sigh. “It’s been kind of a long day, can you just pretend I said something threatening there? Thanks.”

Ozhma’s grandparents had once said she was too nice to go into sales. Ozhma’s great-grandparents had once said she was too nice to be alive. And, without quite realizing it, she proved all four of them right as two words politely came tumbling out.

“Anything else?”

Ozhma clapped a hand over her mouth with a gasp. The two other envoys went rigid, their expressions horrified. From the armrest it was draped across, the figure’s head looked up.

And a pair of eyes, blue and cold as a river at the end of winter, looked over her.

She swallowed hard as the figure rose off the chair. Her heart hammered in her chest with every weary fall of bootsteps. Her breath ran so short she almost fainted before the figure stepped out of the shadows.

And became something much, much worse.

A woman. Tall, corded with muscle left generously bare by what could be generously called an outfit of leathers and cloth, a sword hanging heavy with use at her hip. Her long arms were painted with tattoos, writhing cloudscapes of thunder and wings illustrating a chaotic portrait across her flesh. Dried blood adorned her skin, along with a number of cuts, bruises, and outright wounds. Rudely cut hair, Imperial white in color, hung around a face decorated with scars, a long one running the length of her right eye.

Ozhma’s heart fell.

She hadn’t seen the scars, the tattoos, the face ever before in her life. But she knew them.

Ozhma had lived a lucky life: good parents, comfortable upbringing. But one thing she had never appreciated until that moment was how much of the world’s horrors were stories to her. Tales of ravenous beasts, of dangerous weather, of the wild and unkillable Vagrants had been just that to her: tales.

Until that moment, Sal the Cacophony had been no different.

Ozhma had heard some of them: the one about her killing a thousand men in one night, the one about how she’d destroyed Paarl’s Hollow to deny bandits the joy of it. What was supposed to be the usual birdshit. What very well might have been the usual birdshit.

But what wasn’t the usual birdshit was what was happening in the Scar.

The destruction of the Borrus Valley, the bombing of the Blessing, the tens of thousands upon tens of thousands decorating the Scar in bloody heaps because of the resurgent war between the Imperium and the Revolution—Ozhma had heard of that, too; she had seen it with her own eyes. And she had heard, from every lip that could bring itself to stop sobbing long enough to speak, that the fire that ravaged the Scar had all been sparked by one woman.

And her terrible, terrible gun.

“Yeah,” Sal the Cacophony said, narrowing her eyes at Ozhma. “Is that for me?”

Ozhma froze.

Oh no, is what for her? Is that Vagrant slang? Is she about to shoot me? All of us? Is she going to steal my face? Can she do that? Do the… Oh, hang on.

She hadn’t even finished thinking before the tankard was out of her hands and into Sal’s. The woman tilted her head back, guzzling the liquor like it was water. It dribbled from the corners of her mouth, down the slope of her collarbone, across the muscle of her body to mingle with the sweat and blood and scars.

The scars.

She was covered in them, elegant strands of knotted flesh to answer the chaotic ink of her tattoos. And none of them presided over her body with the same majesty of ruin as the thick one that wound its way from her collarbone to her belly.

“Thanks.” Sal let out a belch, sucked in air through her teeth. “Tastes like shit.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Anyway, sorry for the threats, but it’s important that you hear this.” She lowered the tankard, took a long breath, composed herself. “It began like this, right?”

“That is enough.”

It was Galatatian that swept forward, hot on the heels of his own outrage. His face twisted into a dick-nosed mask of authority, he strode in front of Ozhma, sweeping an arm out as though he could sweep aside the entire city with it.

“Scourge of the Innocent, Harbinger of the End Times, Oathbreaker and Violator of every Imperial Code!” Galatatian thrust a defiant finger in Sal’s face. “Do not dare to seek to threaten an emissary of Her Majesty with such vile crudity. We shall entertain none of your coarse pageantry and demand, under the wrath of both the Imperium and the Revolution, that you release the people of this city and immediately submit to—”

Ozhma guessed that was inappropriately dramatic, because that’s when the violence started.

Sal seized Galatatian by his collar, hauled him off his admittedly very nice shoes, and raised her drained tankard like a headsman’s axe. It hung in the air for a long, terrifying second.

Ozhma’s eyes were locked on the metal bottom of the tankard. She let out what she considered to be a very reasonable plea for calm.

No one could hear her. Not over the sound of the envoy’s face breaking.

The tankard came down. Galatatian’s outrage choked on Galatatian’s teeth as Sal slammed the bottom of the tankard into his face. Blood spattered her knuckles as she raised it and brought it down again and again, filling the room with a wet, crunching music. She released his collar. Galatatian slumped to the floor, moaning.

Sal stared at him there for a second before turning, her cheeks painted with his gore, to face Ozhma.

“It began like this,” she said, “right?”

“Right,” Ozhma, sweat beading on her brow, agreed.