This was the one part about people that Ozhma was no good at.
She’d once been assigned to deliver a case of Avonin & Family batch 182, “The Wedding Whiskey,” it had been affectionately called, owing to how often it was requested for such occasions. So her impending delight had been dashed when she’d arrived and found a feast gone cold, a party gone quiet, and an old man sitting where his daughter should have been getting married.
He’d said nothing. Never explained what had happened. But the wedding had clearly not gone as planned. And the old man had only a few words to thank her before he started sobbing. She hadn’t left—she wasn’t a complete monster—but the truth was that tragedy sat unwell with her. People’s pain was terrifying to her, sometimes.
How could it not be? Pain was wild, unpredictable. You never knew what someone in pain was going to do or ask of you or how to give it to them or if you even wanted to.
She’d simply sat there, silently, trying her best not to say anything.
As she sat here, silently, trying to avoid the sound of Sal’s quiet sobbing.
The Vagrant wasn’t calling attention to it, of course. She’d simply leaned away from Ozhma, covered her eyes with a hand and just… stopped. Stopped talking, cursing, drinking. Everything except shuddering softly as a quiet, pained noise escaped now and again.
What was the protocol here, after all? Offer consolation? To Sal the fucking Cacophony? Tell her it was all going to be all right, when it was obvious to everyone that came within six feet of her that it was not going to be all right? When she had just spent hours upon hours explicitly explaining how things had become so incredibly not all right?
Offer scorn? Harsh criticism? Tough love? That seemed like an excellent way to get smashed in the mouth with a tankard, so maybe not. And even if it didn’t, Ozhma found she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
So she sat, awkwardly, and waited as Sal’s voice went steadily softer until it went quiet.
“Sorry.” Sal wiped her eyes, sniffed. “Sorry about that. What did you say?”
“Oh! Um.” Ozhma fumbled around with her notes, not quite sure what to do. “I was going… well, do you need, like, a minute? That sounded like it was… um…”
“It was,” Sal said. “It really was.” She sighed, shrugged. “But it’s not like it’s going to get better anytime soon, so we might as well keep going. What’d you ask earlier?”
“Right, right.” Ozhma flipped through her papers, squinted. “I wanted to know about Quickmages. I’m still not quite sure what they are, despite two of them featuring in your account. Velline and Jindu.” She paused, looked embarrassed. “Um. Am I allowed to talk about him? He seemed a touchy subject.”
“Yeah, it’s fine. He’s—” She stopped, touched a scar. “Anyway, a Quickmage’s magic enhances their speed and reflexes to unbelievable degrees. They can move so fast and react so quickly that the rest of the world slows to a crawl.”
“That explains why you couldn’t see them fighting.”
“It also explains why there’s not many of them and the vast majority of them work for the Imperium,” she said. “How do you fight a guy that can see you pulling a sword and cut you in half before you’ve even thought about touching the hilt?”
“Well, I mean, you tell me,” Ozhma said. “You seem to have held your own against a few.”
“I’ve gotten lucky a few times,” Sal replied. “I’ve never fought Velline alone. If I did, she’d have torn me apart.”
“But she didn’t.” Ozhma thumbed through her notes, muttering to herself. “In fact, a number of your foes seem to forgo killing you to confront you first. Chiriel, Tretta, Velline.” She caught herself. “Those are all women examples, I realize, but your ability to enrage people across genders is truly remarkable.”
“Fuck, woman, go easy on me, would you?” Sal half winced, half grinned. “And you’ve noticed mages are dramatic. Vagrants love making speeches before they fight. I love making speeches. We try to do each other that courtesy.”
“If that were true, you probably wouldn’t have killed Necla,” she said. “And it’s not just mages who do it, either. I have a theory.” She paused, looked up over her papers timidly. “That is, um, if you’d like to hear it.”
Sal sighed, rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Go ahead.”
“Well, have you noticed it’s very rarely about the people who you’ve pissed off?” Ozhma glanced through papers, reviewing her notes. “Like, I’m sure it happens, but most of the people who claim to need to kill you are also claiming they’re doing it in defense of someone else. The Revolution, the Imperium, um… Darrish.”
Sal tensed. “Yeah.”
“Do you ever wonder if they do that because they worry they’re too much like you?”
Sal glowered. “I didn’t. But go on.”
“Well, you’re pretty destructive, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not like the Revolution or Imperium is known for restraint. And it doesn’t sound like these Vagrants particularly cared about the people, either. But you at least tried to get people across the bridge.”
“Well, yeah. It was my fault. I had to.”
“Right. Because if you didn’t, you would be something of a monster, right? Not saying you are, just saying—”
“Yeah, I get it. What’s your point?”
“So, it’s not like destroying a bunch of shit in the name of protecting people is exactly good. But if you’re destroying a bunch of shit and not doing that, it’s worse. I think your enemies need to make it clear that they’re fighting for someone else because they worry that, otherwise, they’d be like you. Just killing and breaking and burning with no purpose.”
“Well, thanks for that, asshole.”
“No, I mean they think you do that. So they want to not be like you. If that makes sense.”
“Not really. But I’ll confess that I haven’t spent a whole lot of time contemplating it.” She smacked her lips. “I’ll also confess that I’m probably not going to spend a whole lot longer contemplating it. Maybe another minute or so.”
“Well, it might be useful for figuring out how to avoid conflict.”
“You can’t avoid conflict. You can only face it when it comes.”
“I…” She was about to say that made no sense, but after a while with the woman, Ozhma could see how it could make sense. “Well, that seems like a pretty awful way to live.”
“I completely agree.”
Ozhma furrowed her brow, her mouth hanging open. “Has anyone ever told you you’re fairly cryptic for a woman famously ill-tempered and foulmouthed?”
“Does cryptic mean ‘incredible ass’?”
“You know it doesn’t.”
“Then you know no one’s told me that before.”
A knock at the door mercifully smothered this line of dialogue in the crib. It creaked open to reveal Cavric, face creased with weariness.
“There’s been a situation up top,” he said.
“The kind that needs me?” Sal asked.
“Yes, hence why I called it a ‘situation’ and not anything else,” Cavric sighed. “I hate to interrupt but could you…”
“I don’t mind,” Ozhma chirped. “I can wait.”
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“She probably should,” Cavric interjected, his voice just a touch too chilling. “Really.”
Sal didn’t miss the warning in his voice. Neither did Ozhma.
“All right, then.” Sal’s large chair groaned as she pulled herself out of it and stomped toward the door. “Stay here.”
She faltered in mid-stride. Ozhma froze as Sal stood beside her, the shadow cast by the flickering light falling over her. She flinched when Sal raised a hand. But when it landed on her shoulder, it felt… like it belonged there.
“Thank you, Ozhma.”
She squeezed Ozhma’s shoulder gently. And then she was gone.
The door slammed. The two of them disappeared. And Ozhma was left alone in the room. She touched the warm spot where Sal had squeezed, found that without the Vagrant’s presence, she was getting slightly anxious.
What was going on upstairs? she wondered. What had Cavric meant by what he said? What could be bad enough that it required Sal to be up there herself? Had the emissaries returned? Did they have more time? Were they about to attack even now? Should she be running? Staying? Crying?
She exploded out of her chair, started pacing, started pulling at the collar of her shirt. It was too hot down here. She’d spent too long here. Too long in this room. This room that shouldn’t even be here.
That last thought sank in, slowed her feet as her shoes clacked across the hardwood floor. She found herself contemplating her surroundings—the pelt rugs, the nice tables, the exquisite chair Sal herself took. The polished wood and moody furnishings would be out of place anywhere in the Scar, let alone the cellar of a war-torn city. And yet here they were. Sal’s throne stood in the middle of a beautiful living room deep underground with perfect furniture, perfect lighting, and…
One door.
One plain, boring door at the very back of the room. So ordinary and unassuming that Ozhma had barely looked at it throughout this entire time. But now, her eyes fixed on it, its ordinariness too glaring to ignore.
She stared at it. And the longer she stared, the bigger it seemed to grow. And the more certain she felt about what was behind it.
She took a step forward.
Sal would kill her for this. Maybe slow. Maybe quick.
But she kept walking.
She didn’t know if she was ready to face it, if she’d even survive.
And she kept walking.
But so much had died for this door, so much had bled for this door, she had to know. For herself. For everyone she was trying to help.
She put her hand on the knob. The knob put its hand on her. She couldn’t explain how—the metal shifted, grew warmer, reached back for her. And when she held it, she found she could hear it. Like a heart beating. Like a voice whispering.
Inside her.
She should turn back, she knew. She should run back to Rudu and tell him to take her far away from here. She should try her hardest to forget everything about this place.
But there were a lot of things she should do that she would never end up doing, she knew.
This was one of them.
She opened the door. She stepped inside. Her hand left the knob. The door shut itself gently.
Darkness swept over her. It crawled like a living thing, reached for her with great sheetlike hands and drowned her in a lightless, soundless space. She held her breath, realized after a time that she no longer needed it. A silent wind blew across her face from nowhere.
“Hello?” she asked.
It echoed a hundred times over. She shut her hands over her ears, winced at the sound of her own voice reverberating back against her. And then, just as suddenly, it stopped. She dared to release her ears. She looked around the darkness, so painfully silent without the sound of her breath.
“Hello,” something replied.
She swallowed hard, reached behind her, and found the doorknob was no longer there. Neither was the door. There was no point in turning back now, though the option to do so had been nice. But without that, she found herself walking.
This room should have been no bigger than a closet, but she counted at least forty paces. Then four hundred paces. Then four thousand. Then she lost count. Both of her paces and of time. How long had that taken? A few seconds? A few hours? She couldn’t remember. Or tell where she was. A cave? A forest?
Grass crunched beneath her feet. But that was impossible. She looked down and saw only darkness. Until she blinked. When she opened her eyes, she stood upon a bleak field the color of ash. Far away, hounds bayed and loped beneath roiling clouds on human hands. Lightning in brilliant prismatic blues and oranges clove the sky, their electricity twisting into the shapes of living creatures. They reached for each other, shrieking as their light burned one another. The sound echoed into Ozhma’s bones.
She started running. The field of gray grass beneath her rippled with every step. Her feet began to get caught in it. She sank into the ground, struggled to escape, found herself plunged into a brackish sea. She descended, breathless, through liquid that flowed through her as surely as she flowed through it. In the abyss surrounding her, she saw faces of ancient creatures calcified into baleful frowns peer out of the darkness, regard her with disinterest, and fade.
She opened her mouth to scream. The sound that emerged was a wailing shriek that tore through the ocean, split it apart, and left only empty darkness behind. She tumbled through the void, landed hard on stone. Angry cliffs rose up around her in fierce crags of deep, offensive purple. Great masses crawled through valleys the size of continents, their mutable flesh quivering and shedding itself over and over to birth horrific monstrosities that became more gruesome with each stride, faces both human and inhuman emerging from liquid shimmering flesh to speak a word or make a face before returning back into the mass, cysts reclaimed by the body.
Panic surged through Ozhma. And as though she’d just screamed at the top of her lungs, the creatures in the valleys stared up toward her. Millions of eyes opened across a sea of living darkness. Mouths opened and screamed back at her.
The earth collapsed beneath her, disappeared. She plummeted into a void of echoing screams. Her body felt like it was shattering just by being here, like every time the land changed, it took part of her with it. She shut her eyes. She shut her ears. She curled up tightly and drifted and hoped it would be over soon.
Something flickered past her.
Small, shimmering, and eel-like in its undulation. A ribbon of pale light, alive and writhing purple and pink through the infinite dark. She found herself fascinated by it. And, soon, found herself following it. She hurried to keep up as it sped through the endlessness. More joined it, until the dark was alive with these creatures, these living lights, coiling and writhing and dancing in a whirlpool.
“Beautiful,” she whispered.
And, to her surprise, she heard her own voice.
“They are.”
And someone else’s.
A woman had appeared before her. Short. Small. Dark eyed, dark haired, dressed simply with her hair hanging loose around her shoulders. Her small hands rested on her knees. Her face was expressionless. And her eyes were locked on a box.
A simple brown box. Its lid closed. Unadorned with anything, even a lock.
Yet Liette stared at it as if it were trying to kill her.
Perhaps it was.
“Oh.” Ozhma’s voice came out as a whisper. “I’m—”
“Ozhma Tenstead. Child of Ozhvur and Kesme. Born in a quiet room to a midwife. Her name was Seletha. She feared that she would die alone and she did. She was buried at the edge of town in a grave whose headstone fell away. When people walk over her, they feel an intense regret and don’t know why.”
Ozhma stood still, watching Liette as she remained there, staring at the box still. The lights dissipated and rejoined overhead, like a school of fish being plucked apart by a slow and lazy predator.
“Apologies,” she said. “That was not me. It’s just what happens in this place. Knowing one thing means knowing many things.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I am aware. I would explain, but that would end poorly for both of us. I hope you understand that, at least.”
“I believe you,” she said, because she had no other choice.
“You should not be here,” Liette said. “But I knew you would come.”
“I had to.” There was something wrong with her voice here, Ozhma thought, something wrong with her mind. The trepidations and fears that normally danced on her tongue with each word were leaking out of her, a glistening purple ichor that bled out of the corners of her mouth. “I had to see for myself.”
“Whether this was worth it? All the blood? All of Sal’s story?”
She did not want to say it. But the ichor bled dry and she found she couldn’t lie. She couldn’t remember what a lie was. “Yes.”
“Whether I am worth it?”
A pause. An eternity.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And I don’t think it matters.”
“I agree.”
Liette’s left eyebrow twitched. A city sprang up around them: houses and people and bustling talk. A moment passed. It exploded into flames, blackened bodies fleeing through the streets. Another moment, it became a placid lake. Damp soil blossomed beneath Ozhma’s feet.
“Where are we?” she asked. But even that felt strange. She should have sounded more desperate, shouldn’t she?
“It does not have a name. Nor do the people that live here. Not really. The one we have for them isn’t the right one. It is not big enough to contain them.” Liette kept her voice slow, even, neutral. “You should be careful here. They hear every feeling.”
“I’m not sure what that means.”
“Does that bother you?”
“It doesn’t.” But it should have.
“This place takes away things,” Liette said. “Curiosity is one of the first to be lost. You should leave.”
“I should, but—”
Something stirred inside her. The darkness rippled, recoiled, inched forward—a slug drawn to water.
“Do you want me to stay?”
Liette stared silent at the box for a moment. “Yes.”
Ozhma stood beside her, hands folded behind her back, and looked to the box. And within the box, she could feel something looking back at her. And she knew who it was.
“If it isn’t safe for me, it isn’t safe for you,” she found the courage to say. “Sal needs you. She’s breaking herself for you.” She looked at the box again and cringed. “But maybe you’re breaking yourself for her, too.”
A pang of regret stirred within her at her words. Just a fleeting feeling, born and dead in an instant. And in that instant, she became aware of something—something terrifyingly large, something terrifyingly old—stirring in response to it.
Somewhere far away. Something turned its gaze toward her.
A hand shot out, clasped her wrist. Liette’s focus with the box remained unbroken. Her voice went frighteningly soft.
“They hear every feeling.”
She released Ozhma’s wrist, placed her hands on her lap.
“I once thought I was breaking myself for her, too. I don’t think I realized that wasn’t true until I came here.” She focused on the box. Resentfully, it focused back on her. “I called him such a burden, spoke of him so dismissively. He caused her so much pain and she refused to get rid of him and the solution was so obvious to me I couldn’t understand why she didn’t just leave him behind.”
She smiled softly. Something far away stirred. Her face fell again.
“So I ignored him. I pretended he didn’t exist. That he was just an inconvenient tool I would find my way around, like any other. I thought I was doing what was best for her. But that wasn’t true, either. I ignored him because I was afraid of him, of what he did to her, of how little I knew about him. I ignored him because I didn’t want to face him and how much he was a part of her. And he just kept hurting her. And he just kept growing.”
Ozhma looked to the box. Only briefly.
“You can hear him?”
“Only in this place.”
“What does he talk about?”
“Himself, mostly,” Liette observed. “He doesn’t boast as much as I thought he might. He is emotional. He talks of pain and fear—often his own. He speaks of things he’s terrified of and the things he’s prepared to do to escape them.” She blinked. The box stirred. “It scares me knowing how much I agree with him.”
“You couldn’t have known. From what she’s told me, no one could have.”
“Maybe that’s true. Or maybe I could have tried. Maybe I could have learned more, saw more about what it did to her. Maybe I could have been less afraid of him.” She closed her eyes briefly. The box rumbled. “Maybe then he wouldn’t have gotten so strong.”
“I don’t think it matters.”
“I agree.”
Ozhma let her eyes linger on the box. Too long. Every now and then she saw it move—or did she? Sometimes, when she unfocused her eyes, she could almost see it opening, almost see a brass-colored hand reaching out from an impossibly small space, to snatch one of these twinkling lights, writhing in its grip, before dragging it back into the box and letting the lid snap back shut.
Then she would blink and it would be just a box again.
“Is he really getting stronger?” she asked.
“He is.”
“Is it as bad as Sal said it would be?”
“It is.” Liette glanced at her briefly. The box whispered. “Does that frighten you?”
“Yes.” Ozhma swallowed hard. The fear was muted inside her, and without animal panic, she found she could look at it clearly. “I’m scared of what will happen because of me. Because of what will happen because of what I didn’t do. And I’m scared of what will happen to me.”
“I am, too.”
Something quivered inside Ozhma’s throat. “Is it going to be okay?”
“I don’t know that.”
“But Sal said you were smart. She sounded so sure of whatever you were sure of. If anyone would know, it’d be—”
“Be careful,” Liette whispered. “They’re listening.”
“I’m sorry!” she all but shouted. The panic came crawling back, wailing and trapped inside her. “I’m sorry but I’m really scared and I need to know! Please, can you tell me—”
A great groan coursed through her, a pressure coming down from all around her—as though existence itself had just sighed. Somewhere, so far away she couldn’t even contemplate the distance, clouds began to roil. Painful prisms of colors swirled within. Hateful stars winked into existence.
Within the flashes of color, she saw a massive silhouette stir. A colossal head turned toward her. A great and ancient eye opened.
It heard her.
It heard her fear.
“You can’t stay here anymore,” Liette said. She was looking at Ozhma now. And Ozhma felt herself frozen in place by her gaze. “It knows you’re here.”
She tried to protest, but couldn’t speak. The thing in the darkness took one miles-long stride toward her. Liette raised a hand.
“I need you to tell Sal something for me. Tell her that it doesn’t matter and to keep going. You’ll remember that much, at least. And tell her…”
She paused, smiled.
“Never mind. She knows. Goodbye, Ozhma. I don’t dare hope to see you again.”
And Ozhma was flung. Liette, the box, the thing—all of them shrank before her as she was hurled backward at impossible speeds. Worlds raced around her as she went flying—the burned-out husk of a once-great city, the frenzied skies alive with airships, the walls of flame where people shrieked and screamed—and on and on, flying through lifetimes in the blink of an eye, until she arrived.
Precisely back where she was.
Back in the room at New Vigil. Back at the closet door. Back with her hand on the knob, thinking she should turn away.
And, without knowing completely why, she did.
Something about the door—its offensive ordinariness, perhaps—made her feel unsettled just touching it. Whatever was behind there, Sal clearly meant to remain behind there. Wiser to leave it be, Ozhma thought.
And while she didn’t always listen to her wisdom, this time she did.
Which was fortunate, as the other door slammed a moment later.
“Hey. You aren’t poking around my closet, are you?”
Sal stood, a tray with pitcher, glasses, and assorted food tucked under her arm, a furrowed brow locked on her.
“Oh.” Ozhma backed away, her hands held up. “No. No, I wasn’t. I was just—”
“Trying to see what kind of smallclothes I wear. I know.” Sal stalked over to her, leaned down low, and sneered. “Well, I’ll tell you what I tell everyone who goes poking around in Sal the Cacophony’s forbidden closet. I don’t wear any.”
A chuckle. A slap on the back that sent Ozhma sprawling a couple of feet. Sal jerked the door open, revealed a heap of dirty clothes and discarded boots.
“I’m just fucking with you. It’s where I put my old shit.”
“But…” Ozhma started to protest, but why? What had she really expected to find there? “Wait, where have you been? What did Cavric have to say?”
“Important things. Here. Eat first.”
Sal dropped the tray. Wine and tea sloshed in their pitchers. Cheeses—expensive cheeses, and Ozhma fucking knew—and tasty-looking dumplings in bowls of sauce quivered alongside desserts and confections as it hit the table. Sal plucked up a dumpling, popped it in her mouth, talked through it like that wasn’t something only an animal does.
“You seemed like a girl who likes sweets, so I grabbed whatever we had of that,” she said. “No judgment, of course. Cheese gives me gas, but I figure why not?”
“Wait, wait.” Ozhma rubbed her temples; something about this felt not right. “Where is this food coming from? Don’t the soldiers need it?”
“No. It’s just going to go to waste if we don’t eat it. So don’t sweat—”
“Sal.” Ozhma interrupted, held her gaze. “Tell me what happened.”
Sal’s face twitched, like she wanted to punch her. Then it screwed up, like she tried to come up with a lie that just wasn’t coming together in her head. Then it finally fell as she sighed.
“Torle of the Void is here,” she said.
Ozhma held her breath.
“Or he will be here. Tomorrow. And…” She held out her hands, helpless. “I mean, do you know how to fight him?” At the silence that followed, she grunted. “Exactly. So we might as well eat up. We’re fucked.” She ate another dumpling, spoke through another full mouth. “I’m fucked, anyway. You can still leave.”
“Wait, what?” Ozhma shouted. “What does that mean ‘you’re fucked’? What are you going to do? What do we do now?”
“There is no ‘we,’ you dumbfuck,” Sal said. “You and I are going to eat whatever makes us almost happy, then you’re going to go with Rudu and get the fuck out of here while I do what I always do when I fight someone with limitless magical potential.” She plucked up another dumpling. “That is, I’m going to die horribly and be buried alive beneath the earth with everyone else. Fuck, these are good.”
“But what about the plan? The gun?”
“I didn’t ever have a plan. Just a hope that shit would work out,” Sal replied, chuckling in the way people chuckle when things aren’t actually funny. “And it didn’t. The gun was just—”
“But Liette!” Ozhma continued to protest, not quite knowing why. Nor really knowing why Liette’s name came to mind. “What about her? What about everything she’s doing? You can’t just give up while she’s not!”
Sal’s eyes went wide, as if she’d just been struck. Ozhma honestly never thought she’d see the Vagrant make such a face.
“Who told you what Liette’s doing?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ozhma replied. “Keep going.”
Sal narrowed her eyes. “Who told you to say that?”
“You know.”
Ozhma knew that was true. And nothing else. She didn’t know who had told her to say that. Or even what she had just said. The words had simply fallen out of her mouth on reflex. As easily as any other word.
Only these felt right. Impossibly right.
“Keep going, huh?” Sal shrugged, popped the dumpling in her mouth. “All right. Well, I guess I should tell you how we came to New Vigil, then.”