TWELVE
ELSEWHERE
There is a story.
It’s known to only a few. The people who made dark deals in dark places. The people who found the blood on the stone.
It begins down in the dark, beneath the Imperial Palace of Cathama, where thirty-four people met to bring down an empire and one of them limped away. Down there, where a woman grasped a crown made of brass thorns in her bloodied hands, red life whispering from wounds that would one day be scars. Down in the deep, where the woman who had once been Red Cloud and would one day be called the Cacophony, emerged from the gloom as neither of them.
But this is not that story.
This is the story of the metal in her hands. A crown, brass and twisted into thorns, sitting in a place of foreboding honor in the Imperial crypts, down there in the dark. It was meant to fade from memory, along with the emperor who had worn it upon his fevered brow.
But the crown refused to be forgotten.
It simply waited. Waited until bloodied hands grabbed it. Waited until a fevered mind heard it. Waited until a shattered heart held it.
And she had listened.
The woman, her uniform unable to stanch the blood, thought only of the pain, of the betrayal, of the agony that had brought her here. A pained mind cannot reason—reason is the first thing you give up when you get hurt. And a mind that cannot reason cannot argue.
And neither did she.
She followed a guiding voice. Whispered promises in her heart. They would give her everything she needed to make the pain stop, if only she would give them what they needed.
And she wanted to give it to them.
They brought her down the dingiest, darkest alley in Cathama. They brought her past the dredges and nul outcasts who lurked in its barrows. They brought her to a small shop in a small building on a small street in a small part of the city.
She raised her hand to knock.
The voice told her not to.
The voice told her she was done asking to enter.
And she didn’t argue. She shoved the door open, leaving a bloodied handprint on its window. She stumbled inside, the blood falling out of her and onto the shop’s hardwood floors. She looked up through darkening vision, to the man standing there in the middle of the shop.
Tall. Dark skinned. Gangly as a scarecrow and with a head of black hair as big and vast as the night. He stood there, a cup of tea in his hands, his mouth hanging open with a word he couldn’t say, his eyes unblinking with a thought he didn’t dare do.
“Your name,” the woman gasped, “is a Dead Dog Buried on a Black Hill.”
“I…” The man looked like he was about to deny it. He sighed, instead. “Yeah. That’s me.”
The woman held up the crown. The man stared at his reflection warped in its thorns.
“He says,” the woman said, “it’s time to pay your debt.”
And she fell onto the floor.
And did not rise.
Sharp, stabbing hours turned into long, anguished days. The man tended to the woman without a name as best he could—brilliant as he might have been, his mind had always been focused on things less practical and more aspirational than medicine. She healed with alchemics, with time, and with as much whiskey as she could fit between the two.
It took time to become accustomed to it. The absence of her magic. The great emptiness inside her where her power had once flowed. The silence within her where she had once felt a beautiful song meant only for her.
She wept often.
She bled occasionally.
She was silent frequently.
But she healed.
In the corner of the man’s dingy workshop, recuperating upon a dingy cot, as the man paced around his dingy workbench, his long dark stare fixed on the thing it held.
And if she looked close enough, she could almost convince herself the crown of brass thorns stared back.
“Fuck me,” A Dead Dog Buried on a Black Hill muttered as he paced. “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. I was this close to convincing myself this day would never come. This damn close to forgetting about this shit.”
He put his hands on his knees, leaned forward. He squinted, scrutinizing the crown, peering at it from every angle he could imagine, as though there were some perfect way to look at it that would take away the unsettled look on his face. He reached out, hands trembling, terrified to touch.
His fingers rested upon the brow of the crown. His breath caught.
“It’s warm,” he whispered. “Holy shit, it’s warm.” He swallowed a painfully dry breath. “Did he actually fucking do it?” He looked to the woman without a name. “Did he actually fucking do it?”
“Wouldn’t be here if he didn’t,” she responded faintly. “He told me to find you.”
A Dead Dog Buried on a Black Hill’s face grew long. “How much do you know?”
“He told me,” she said, “everything.”
“It didn’t tell you everything,” he said. “It couldn’t have. How long have you had it?”
“A few hours.”
“A few hours is not enough time to understand what—”
“I understand,” the woman without a name interrupted. “Wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. He’s told me what he can give me, told me what it’s going to take.” She took a sip of sour whiskey, felt the pain in her jaw dim to a throbbing ache. “I can do it.”
“No one can do it.”
“I can do it,” she responded, less faintly this time. “And so can you. He told me of your deal.” She looked to him. “Is it true? Did he take away your pain?”
The man smacked his lips, nodded. “I’ve been around for a long time because of him.”
“Then you owe him,” she said. “And you’re going to hold up your end of the bargain.”
His brow furrowed, incensed at being spoken to in such a way. But the moment he started to speak up, he felt something tugging at the edge of his consciousness, an errant pull demanding his attention.
The crown. It sat there. Twisted brass briars reflecting his own slack-jawed horror back at him.
It looked at him. It spoke to him.
And he was compelled to agree with it.
“You understand the magic this is going to take, right?” he asked. “We’re talking old magic. The Oldest Magic. Before the Imperium. Before the first Emperor. The libraries don’t even know this shit exists.”
“But he did,” she replied. “He knew. And he told me. An oath. A bargain. A deal. Same as the Lady Merchant. I get it.”
“No, not the same. This isn’t a transaction, this is a contract. It—”
“Shut the fuck up,” she uttered, turning her one good eye toward him, “and pay your debt.”
A Dead Dog Buried on a Black Hill frowned, but did not protest. He turned to the crown, tentatively picked it up. He held it, looking at it from every angle he could again, though this time with less trepidation and more curiosity.
“Exactly as he described,” he whispered, “unbelievable. He knew all the materials we’d need for this.” He shook his head, muttered to himself. “Not enough metal in the crown, but he did say we were going to need more. I can get the alloy. I can make him into a sword that can kill kingdoms.”
“No.”
He looked up at her. “No?”
“No,” she replied, looking at the crown. “He changed his mind.”
And the crown looked back at her.
And smiled.
“He wants to be a gun.”
Days passed long and slow and painful. The woman without a name learned new lessons she never wanted to: how to walk instead of fly, how to feel the limitations of a human frame, how to heal without magic.
Harsh lessons, as any lesson worth knowing is. But she learned them, there in the dingy workshop, hidden away from a world that continued to turn without her. The hours under the floorboards were spent mostly hurting, sometimes reading, frequently crying.
And writing.
Always writing.
Names. Faces. Laughter in the dark. Eyes that had turned away from her suffering. Smiles that grew longer as she bled.
She dedicated them to memory, wrote down every name she could, every detail she could remember. Wrote until her quill tore her paper to pieces and she reached for another one and tore that to pieces, too. The names became seared onto her mind, into her skin. Moments that weren’t spent blinded by agony were consumed by anger instead.
The man, for his part, did not object to this.
He dutifully continued to uphold his end of the bargain. He provided what medicine and comfort and treatment he could. He provided her paper sometimes, books other times, whiskey each time.
But he, too, was consumed. By his work. By his bargain.
His workshop was ablaze. A forge to melt metal to exact specifications. A set of specialty tools to construct tiny mechanisms for a weapon. Inks of bizarre origin to be penned in painful sigils, layer upon layer, each one vanishing into the brass as soon as it was dry.
It was long work. Painful work. Monotonous work.
“Hey.”
So much so, that they found themselves in a sort of pained rhythm.
“You hear about your friends?”
Muttering to each other to pass the time. Remind each other of the existence of other humans.
“They’re not my friends,” the woman without a name said.
“Whatever,” the man replied, not looking up from his work. “Imperium went hunting for them after they figured out what you all were up to down there. They tore ass out of the city and slipped out of the entire Imperium before the Empress’s trackers could pick them up.”
She paused. “Did any die?”
“Nah. The Empress is the Empress, but she chose each of those fuckers for a reason. None of them were caught. All of them escaped.”
She wrote something down. “Where did they go?”
“Same place anyone goes to escape the Imperium, I would bet,” he muttered. “Not a province or prefect that isn’t searching for them.” He held up the piece he was working on, squinted at it, chided himself at some imperceptible flaw before returning to it. “But last I heard, they don’t have those in the Scar, do they?”
“They went Vagrant.”
“Looks like. Feels like a waste, you ask me,” he grunted. “Go through all the effort of trying to overthrow the Empress only to go play opera hero in the Scar. Could have saved us all the effort and just done that to begin with.”
She was silent for a long moment. “That wouldn’t bring them what they wanted.”
“Sure it would have,” he replied, hammering something into place with a delicate glass mallet. “They’d be far away and be free of the Empress, the Empress would have them out of her hair, everyone’s happy.”
“They wanted the throne.”
“Nah.”
“I was there.”
“I know.”
“No, I know. I know what they wanted—”
“Yeah, what was it again?” He scratched his chin. “To overthrow the crown? Be their own Imperium? Rule over this one?”
“They wanted power. Control.”
“Freedom. Same thing.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, sure,” he muttered. “I’m a fucking nul running an illicit workshop in a city full of magic bastards who can set me on fire for looking at them wrong. What the fuck would I know about power and freedom? Clearly, your magic bastard problems are far too complex for me to handle. Hey, by the way, I emptied the bucket you piss in. You’re welcome.”
She said nothing to that. He continued talking. Not necessarily to her.
“People don’t change,” he said as he continued to work. “Trace a king and a peasant back to their roots, you find the same quivering pile of shit desperately hoping to be free. He’ll do it any way he has to. Even found an entire fucking Imperium. You look at an emperor and see a powerful man, but what you get is a cock who thinks stomping on people is the same as being free.”
There was a faint hissing sound. The metal on his workbench twitched, gave out the slightest note of steam.
“Don’t fucking take that attitude with me,” he muttered to the metal. “This is a contract. I don’t owe you flattery.” The metal simmered. He continued. “Freedom’s the only thing anyone wants. Freedom to run, freedom to hurt, freedom to die as you think you deserve.”
She stared at her hands and wondered if that was true.
Those hands that used to command reality. Those hands that had leveled five hundred foes in a single day. Those hands that used to taste the wind and feel the sky upon them.
That was freedom. Had been freedom. No one could have touched her up there, no one could have made her feel weak, wounded.
Useless.
The woman with no name wondered if that was what she truly craved. She looked inside herself, into all the memories of flame and of shadow, and all the wounds and lashes she had borne. She looked past her dreams and her lives she imagined she’d one day have. She looked past the agony in her body that crept into her brain on spiderweb strands. She looked.
And she knew what she wanted.
“What did he give you?” she asked the man, almost as an afterthought.
And the man paused. And the man stared into emptiness.
“He gave me what I asked for,” he answered.
And then continued his work in silence.
Time passed. Blood dried. Scars knit.
And, day by day, their work finished.
Until the day she pulled herself from her bed on legs that ached to run again and came to the worktable. The man stood there, thinner and paler than he had been when he had started, and laid trembling hands upon a black box.
She looked down at his hands. The scar across her right eye twisted as she scowled at him.
“Open it,” she said.
“I will,” he said, with a voice that indicated he might not, “but I need to tell you something.”
“You’ve told me a hundred times before.”
“And I’ll tell you a million times if I have to because I can’t open this box unless you know damn well what’s inside.”
“Power.”
“Not power. Magic.” His voice turned deadly serious. “The first magic. The oldest, strongest, and most terrible kind. There was no other way to make him whole again.” He inhaled sharply. “Before the Imperium was even a dream, this is what they used to make magic. No Barters. Just an agreement.”
His fingers alighted upon the box again. Faint wisps of smoke peeled out from between the hinges.
“A bargain,” he said. “What you ask of each other, what you give to each other… you won’t be able to get back, understand? Not until it’s over.”
“Until what’s over?”
He frowned. “He’ll tell you. You sure you still want to do this?”
She nodded. No hesitation. She had asked herself that question the day she crawled out of that dark place and every day since and the answer was always the same.
The man sighed, disappointed in her answer. Slowly, he creaked the lid to the box open. Slowly, hissing steam and heat alive with anger rose from within. Slowly, she took him in—his brass eyes, his long grin, his dragon’s head.
He had wanted to be a dragon.
She reached into the box. Her fingers stopped just short of his metal, her body sensing something she couldn’t. But the scars on her skin were too heavy, the pain was too fresh.
She took him by the black hilt.
And inside her blood, she could feel a voice.
It introduced itself, politely and properly. It sympathized with her agony. It proposed a solution.
It offered a deal.
And she took it.
And on that day, they both found their new name.