So, remember the thing I said about shit?
No, the other thing.
No, the other thing.
The part about it being directly related to how many people know about it. I stand by that advice, just so you know, but it occurred to me then—in that tent, seated beneath that lamp, with about a dozen-odd hand crossbows leveled at a dozen-odd parts of my body that I preferred unperforated—that there is a glaring, yet critical, addition to that advice.
If, at any time, should the people who do find about the kind of shit you’re in turn out to be a Scar-wide syndicate of thieves, assassins, and criminals: stop worrying about the shit you’re drowning in and begin worrying about the shit you’re about to have forced directly down your throat.
See, shit coming down on you isn’t anything new in the Scar. Everyone’s got someone gunning for them, after all. But shit that the fucking Ashmouths consider interesting? That’s… that’s…
Well, let me put it this way.
“Sal the Cacophony,” a voice grated against my ears. “It is my extremely unfortunate obligation to inform you that any thoughts you might have of your capability for dealing with the amount of pain we are prepared to visit upon you are erroneous, hubristic, and grievously, grievously misinformed.”
Actually, that was a way better way to put it.
A pair of pointy elbows wrapped in a suit worn far too long landed on the table, thin fingers wrapped in painfully tight gloves steepled. Above them, a face ragged with exhaustion and stained by a pair of blood-rimmed eyes, leered into the halo of light cast by the alchemic lamp.
“Understand that we are already well aware of the situation you find yourself in,” Necla the Shroud—Nightmage and Ashmouth crony with a lovely singing voice the one time I heard him—spoke through teeth clenched tight enough to hurt. “As we are already well aware of the forces arrayed against you. Our spy network is denser than a stone wall. We know everything, Sal.”
I held his gaze in my own, kept my lips tight and my hands on the table. Though his threats made something bitter rise in my craw, I didn’t show him a reaction. I gave him nothing to bargain with, nothing to threaten me with, nothing to use against me.
There’s only one way out of an Ashmouth noose, and it’s slowly and carefully.
“Understand, too, that if we desired you dead, you already would be.” Necla made a vague gesture to the Ashmouths around him. “Given that you aren’t, it would be safe to assume that the wisest course of action would be to listen carefully, speak carefully, and above all, think carefully. Life can become very good or very bad for you after you leave this tent, Sal. Which it is depends on your actions.” He leaned back, took me in through his bloodshot eyes. “Any questions?”
I sniffed. Rolled my shoulder. Smacked my lips. Spoke.
“How are you doing, Necla?” I asked. “Getting enough sleep?”
Necla, I could tell by his face, was not happy about that crack. By his face, actually, I could tell he was not happy to see me. Or to be here. Or to be alive, really.
Not that I could blame him. He was drained of color and any emotion more positive than murderous. His eyes were bleary, bloodstained pits in a visage more skull than skin. And his frown was so thick and heavy, I worried it was about to break his neck.
Someone, I could see, had been busy.
A Nightmage pays his Barter for his magic, like any mage. The Lady Merchant gives them the power to manipulate minds and eyes. And in exchange, they give her their dreams—the good ones, specifically. What’s left behind after she takes those is so horrific that most of them simply choose to forgo sleep.
The more magic they use, the more dreams they lose. The more dreams they lose, the more sleep they fear. The more sleep they fear… well, I don’t know if you’ve ever stayed up too late and gotten cranky the next morning, but if you can imagine that a thousand times worse and with mind-altering, hallucination-inducing magic attached, you’ll have a reasonable idea.
“I am not getting enough sleep, Sal.” Necla’s voice was a needle pushed through leather. “I am not getting enough sleep because I am using a lot of magic. I am using a lot of magic because my employers are keeping me busy. My employers are keeping me busy because an extremely irritating buffoon with a magic gun decided to cause a war.”
“I thought the Three loved wars,” I replied. “The Ashmouths always make money in them.”
“They do. And they do. I, however, do not. I, however, am capable of thinking further than my coffers. I am capable of thinking what happens when this war grows big enough to stop being polite—of everything that will come after and everything that will fail to come back.” His bloodshot eyes widened. “And I am capable of thinking about that because it is all I see whenever I drift off for even a second.
“Bodies ground beneath tank treads. Entire cities disappearing into eternal night. Forests upon forests of corpses.” He rubbed his temples. “And at their center… you. Always you, Sal the Cacophony. Even in my dreams, I can’t escape you. I have drowned mothers in front of their children and slept like a baby, yet somehow you”—his voice sharpened—“are capable of such reeking foulness as to penetrate every fucking facet of my brain. Were we not here on official business, I would torture you to death. And even though we are, I am strongly considering it. Now. I ask again. Any. Questions.”
My eyes slowly drifted to the man sitting next to him. Rudu, arms tucked into his loose shirt and folded across his chest, looked back at me through eyes likewise rimmed with red. Though, in this case, for an entirely different reason.
I glanced at the long pipe hanging from his lips, the coils of silkgrass smoke swirling around him like affectionate serpents. I gestured at it with my chin.
“Give me a hit?”
Rudu looked for a moment at Necla, who shook his head. He scratched his stubble, sighed, then removed the pipe from his mouth and handed it across the table to me. I took the deepest inhale I could manage, breathed a cloud of smoke across the table. I handed the pipe back to Rudu, who regarded Necla’s glare with puzzlement.
“What?” he asked. “You said we were here to talk.”
“Unbelievable,” Necla snarled. “Need I remind you we are Ashmouths? Feared? Absolute in conviction and skill?”
“I’m still all those things,” Rudu said, tapping the ash from his pipe and starting to load another. “But there’s being feared and absolute, and then there’s just being an asshole.”
“Look,” I said, trying as best I could to let the smoke seep into my senses. “If I promise to find you very scary, can you maybe get to whatever shit you want to talk about? I promise I’ll even cry a little.”
“There’s no need for that shit, either,” Rudu said, turning back to me. “We aren’t here to make any more threats than would be professionally expected.”
“Then what are you here for?”
Necla opened his mouth to answer. Rudu held up a hand to silence him. He stared at me, a frown deepening behind the veil of smoke slipping from his lips.
“We’re here to help you. And Liette.”
The Ashmouths around me twitched, raised their crossbows a little higher. Even though I couldn’t see their faces, I knew they were bristling. And I knew that because I was fucking bristling.
“I’ll tell you what I told him.” I spat toward Necla’s feet. “You say whatever the fuck you want to me and we’ll all be happy. You ever put her name in your mouth again, and I’ll—”
“Blow my head off,” Rudu said, “with the Cacophony. Yeah. He told me.” He glanced around at the various assassins. “And shit, I bet you could. But I bet it would end messier than either of us want to deal with right now.” He exhaled another cloud of smoke, shrugged. “After we talk, though? Who knows?”
I held tense for a moment before relaxing, letting the Ashmouths follow suit. That was as good an offer as I was going to get right now. And besides, he had just let me hit his silkgrass. It’d be rude to start shooting.
At this point, anyway.
I seethed. “So talk. Or shoot. Either way, make it quick. I’ve got shit to do.”
“Lives to ruin,” Necla whispered more than hissed. It wasn’t hate that made his eye twitch like that. “Civilizations to destroy. People to crush like—”
“All right, then,” Rudu interrupted, nudging Necla out of his seat. “Take a walk, Necla.” He handed his pipe to a nearby Ashmouth. “You all go with him. See if you can get him to relax.”
Necla staggered awkwardly toward the door, the assassins reluctantly filing behind him. “I was hired to ensure that she listened.”
“And you did.” Rudu gestured to me. “She’s listening. Now, let me do what I was hired to do, which is make sure you don’t fuck this up by being you.”
A few hisses, a few curses for professionalism’s sake, but they left all the same. And once we were alone, I couldn’t help but observe Rudu.
“I’ve never seen you without your pipe.”
“I’ve never seen me without my pipe, either. This is that serious.” He leaned forward. “Necla’s twitchy. He’s not the only one. Every Ashmouth in the Scar is on edge.”
“Fuck you. You’re making money hand over fist, like you do in every war.”
“This isn’t every war, Sal. I haven’t been told everything yet, but the Imperium isn’t fucking around this time. There’s talk of Prodigies arriving. There’s talk of…” He grimaced, afraid to say it. “They say there’s going to be a Recivilizing.”
His grimace became mine, accompanied by a cold pain in my chest I was damn sure was in his, too. You didn’t hear a word like Recivilizing and not worry. That was the whole point of a Recivilizing.
The official point of the rarely invoked right of the Empress was peaceful in nature. A Recivilizing was a flooding of a “troubled” area with Imperial merchants, Imperial food, Imperial theater, and crucially, Imperial money, effectively turning a freehold into an Imperium city in a matter of weeks.
The unofficial point was what came before: the vast, vast, vast amounts of resources poured into slaughtering, terrorizing, and torturing whatever local forces might resist or resent the Imperial way of life. A list that included: local criminals and warlords, surrounding bandit clans, Revolutionary operatives, freehold barons of insufficient loyalty or lineage, peacekeepers who might be suspected of treason, bards and poets who spoke too much and sang too little, tavern keepers who lacked sufficient Imperial wine, merchants who looked at an Imperial soldier funny, regular-ass people who didn’t look at an Imperial soldier funny but had something an Imperial soldier wanted, and then, of course, anyone who may or may not resent the Imperials for killing all their families.
Just to make sure.
I’d never seen one. Though I’d studied it, same as every mage in the army had. I knew how it worked. And I knew the body count.
Recivilizing a rebellious city carried a body count so high you’d weep to know the number of it.
Recivilizing the entire Revolution would be…
“So, yeah,” Rudu sighed. “War is good for the Ashmouths. Massive, crushing execution of lawbreakers? Not so much. We’ve already lost ten Crow Markets, with all their assets, to the Imperials. If this keeps going, there won’t be a war. There’ll be a winner. And the Three don’t want that to happen.”
“Yeah,” I replied bitterly. “The Three prefer their murders a little more casual, don’t they?”
Rudu held up a hand—either to stop me or whatever he was about to say. After a moment, he let out a weary breath. “In another month, the war will have lost us so much money the Three won’t fucking care if they get executed. They’re determined not only to survive this war, but to find a way to recoup their losses.”
“And let me guess,” I said. “They’ve found a way to do it.”
“Yeah.”
“And it involves me.”
“Uh-huh.”
I rubbed my temples, made a sigh in that I-know-I’m-about-to-get-fucked-I-just-don’t-know-how kind of way. “All right. What do they want me to do?”
“Let them take care of you.”
I blinked. “Take care of, like…”
“Like whatever you need. Whatever home you want, in whatever region you want, with however much silks, wine, drugs, servants, or even a fucking duck pond, if you want it. The Three will hide you from any retribution from any adversary. Kill whoever you want. Remove whatever trace of yourself you want gone. They’ll kill the Great General and the Empress the same fucking day, if it’ll make you happy.”
“All right, well, I admit I wasn’t going to guess that. But the Three have asked for the Cacophony before and the answer is still—”
“They don’t want the gun. They don’t want your lover.” He stared at me intently. “They want the thing inside her. They want the Scrath.”
Heart in my throat. Blood in my ears. Fingers twitching.
Not good.
“I don’t—”
“Just. Please.” Rudu interrupted. “Don’t pretend. We know everything. I’m not trying to intimidate you. I’m trying to inform you. The Three want the thing inside Liette. They’re willing to give you anything and everything you want—for her, for you, for anyone you want—for a chance to extract it.”
“We have money. We have—”
“Not like we have money. We know about the Freemaker’s assets, too. They’re not even a fraction of the Three’s. And even if they were, money can hide you from the Imperium and the Revolution only until it runs out. The Three can hide you from them forever. The Three can make sure any mouth that speaks your name ends up dead in an alley. They can give you…”
He trailed off.
“Give me what?”
He looked at me again. His smile was soft. Sad. Painful.
“Don’t you want to rest, Sal?” he asked. “Because I fucking do. I want to stop using my magic to do shit for other people. I want to stop worrying if the people who want to kill me today are the same people who will want to kill me tomorrow. I want to grow things in the ground. Or make books. Or… or… I don’t fucking know what, but something other than this… whatever it is the fuck Vagrants do. I hate this life. And if the Three were offering me a new one, I’d fucking take it.”
I stared at my hands. “And if they were offering someone… someone like Liette a new life?”
He stared at me. “If I had a different life, maybe I’d have someone like Liette, too.”
Everyone has a reason for going Vagrant.
Some, like Rudu, didn’t want to kill in someone else’s name. Some, like Poneir, didn’t want to die in someone else’s name. Some, like me, didn’t want to die before we were ready to. Everyone knows a Vagrant’s reasons—it’s in their stories, in their underlings, in their targets.
But a Vagrant has a reason to give it up, too.
It’s tiring work. Not just the fighting. The being okay with the fighting. The waking up and knowing in your scars you won’t go back to sleep without a new one. The drinking to escape the violence, the violence to escape the drinking. The stories, the swords, everything—it builds up, it gets bigger. And then one day, it’s so big you just can’t fight it anymore.
And when that day comes… that’s when you don’t have a reason to stop being a Vagrant.
I never thought I’d have that problem. Damn near every waking and every dreaming began and ended with me thinking I’d die same as I lived. That didn’t change when I met Liette. I still had too many memories of arguing in the dark and leaving in the middle of the night to keep chasing my revenge, my list…
But that was before.
That was me dying. Me fighting. Me killing. Not her. And when I left, it was me who was going into the blood, the corpses. Me who was cleaning off before I came back to her. Me keeping the blood off her skirts, me keeping her safe, me not worrying her about what I’m doing to who and where. I did it. All of it. And more, before…
Before the Scrath. Before the Ten Arrows. Before I fucked up.
And now… I wasn’t thinking about my reasons, anymore. I wasn’t thinking about being a Vagrant or not being a Vagrant. I was thinking about her.
And what I’d do to make it right for her.
“How?” I asked.
“How, what?” he replied.
“How would you extract it?”
He stared up at the lamp for a moment before sighing. “I’ll be honest. I don’t know. I’ve seen ideas. I’ve seen the mages and Freemakers and Spellwrights they’ve got on hand. But I have only half a clue as to what a Scrath actually is and no clue at all how to get it out.”
“Then what makes you think they can?”
“When have you ever known the Three to not get something they want?”
Once, I thought, glancing down to the sheath at my hip. His sheath.
Only once.
I don’t know how long I stared, how long I sat silent, how many times I ran over how wrong this could all go in my mind. But each time I worried about each disaster, each problem, each way the shit could sweep over my head and into my lungs and drown me… I came back to one word.
Her.
“Anyway, you don’t have to answer now,” Rudu said. “And I wouldn’t ask you to. Not now. But I will ask you again.” He crossed his arms. “And after that… well, I don’t fucking know what the Ashmouths will do, but I know they told me not to ask a third time.”
He slid off his chair, wandered to the tent flap.
“We’ll be in Toadback, Sal. For as long as we can be. Meet us there. We’ll make it right.”
And then he was gone.
And in his absence, I was left alone with the questions. How the fuck could I trust them? How could I believe they could do what I needed them to? How could I even think about working with them?
But every question had an answer. And none of them were as insane as I needed them to be to write the whole thing off.
I couldn’t trust the Ashmouths—and they knew that, otherwise they wouldn’t have offered terms to me. A criminal is, above all else, a merchant too honest to make it in business, after all. I couldn’t believe that they knew how to save Liette, either. But neither was Rudu wrong—if there was such a thing as a possibility of taking it out of Liette, the Three would know who could do it, where to find them, and which family member to kill to make them work.
As for why I could even think about it?
Keeping the Scrath out of the Cacophony would be a good enough reason to consider it. But I wasn’t thinking of that. Or the Ashmouths, really. I was thinking of her.
Find a person who makes you breathe a little cleaner, like she does, and you might also do some pretty fucked-up things not to lose them.
Eventually, I found my legs. And the energy to move them. I found my way outside. I found my way back toward my little corner of Booty Haul.
But then someone else found me.
“Sal the Cacophony?” a voice from behind me asked. And I would have been concerned, if it hadn’t been quite so prepubescent.
“Yeah?” I turned to the lad with the serving tray.
“Don’t go to Toadback.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Toadback. Don’t go to Toadback. It’s not safe.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Who the fuck are you, kid? And what the fuck do you know about Toadback?”
He shrugged. “Heviri. And nothing. I was only paid to say it.”
“By who?”
“By a Mister ‘Fuck You, I Didn’t Get Paid to Do Extra Work, so Give Me Metal or Fuck Off.’” He glanced me over. “So, you got metal?”
“I’ve got a slap across the mouth you might get along with.”
“All right, well, pleased to meet you, Miss ‘Broke Asshole.’ I’ll be off now.”
Now, don’t go getting worried about what I said. I wasn’t actually going to slap him unless he kept talking for, like, ten more seconds. And when he took off, I didn’t feel the urge to chase him. I couldn’t do much with what he’d just told me, after all.
Toadback was dangerous. Any place a gang of assassins tells you to meet them is dangerous. I didn’t need telling.
But someone wanted me to know, all the same. Someone wanted to make the effort to warn me. Someone wanted me alive. And, in this business, that’s almost as bad as someone wanting you dead.
Was it Poneir? Or Grini? Rudu, with a pang of consciousness? Or someone else? Who the fuck had paid that kid?
I glowered over the crowd at him as he collected another tray and got to work. He talked to no one else that wasn’t buying moonshine. I could still catch him, make him talk.
But honestly? Why bother? Someone wanting me alive, while concerning, was not so pressing a concern as the many someones wanting the other thing. And besides, it wasn’t like I had a way of making him talk—I wasn’t going to have it said that Sal the Cacophony threatened children. Or paid them for birdshit reasons.
Still, I thought as I walked away, he was a nice kid.
He’d be a great killer someday.