Colonel Tatha Vindictive stared out over thirty-odd men and women of the Revolution and met their resolute stares through the only eye left uncovered by the bandages wrapped around his seared face.
“Understand this,” he said with a pained wince, voice creaking. “The Great General, guided by his profound wisdom, bade us come witness the demise of the Freemaker above all else. He, endless as he is, knew that our duty to cleanse the Scar of the hated Imperials could rest a moment to address a greater threat and see a purveyor of inferior machinery put to an end.” His stare hardened. “Do you think the Great General a fool?”
“The Great General is wise beyond years, courageous beyond time!” the Revolutionaries barked in short order.
“This remains the case. Despite the day’s…”—he paused to touch a finger to his bandaged face—“misunderstanding, our orders remain clear. The Freemaker perverts the wisdom of the Great General and disrespects the Machinations of the Revolution. Will you stand for this insult?”
“The Glorious Revolution is implacable, unstoppable, irrevocable!”
“Just so. The decadent Imperials, if they can pry their lips from their wineglasses long enough, may try to impede us. We shall prevail.” He raised a hand in benediction. “As the Great General vests authority in me, I so vest it in you to carry out the Revolutionary mandate. Search whatever house you suspect of sheltering the Freemaker. Silence anyone who may speak against you. Execute those who seek to impede you, Imperial or otherwise.”
“Even civilians, sir?”
The boisterous reply was cut off by one of the Revolutionaries at the front of the squadron, a young-looking woman who lowered her gunpike and cast a curious look at the colonel.
“Sir, were we not instructed to demonstrate to the city that the Revolution is here for their protection?” she asked. “How can we tell them this while also tearing their home apart?”
Colonel Tatha Vindictive stared out over this single woman with his one good eye. He opened his mouth as if to speak, paused, then sighed. And without another word, pulled a hand cannon from his belt and emptied a shot into her skull.
“You have your orders.” He flipped the chamber open, let the spent severium shell fall onto the street next to the dead woman. “Ten thousand years of toil demand your penance.”
“Ten thousand years!” the Revolutionaries barked and, with not a single glance spared for their dead comrade, turned and fanned out into the streets.
I felt a vague urge to scream—if only so someone would do so on the woman’s behalf—but I didn’t want to give my hiding spot away.
The knowledge of what they did to their enemies bade me hold my tongue.
From the alleyway I watched one set of pursuers disperse. I glanced up into the night sky and spotted the other. Mages, carried on the lilting song of the Lady, sailed through the sky like clouds. Angry little clouds who could spit frost and fire and whatever else the Lady gave them. They swept over the heads of the Revolution, over the citizens fleeing to get inside, violet-tinged scowls searching through the city.
Since their rebellion from the Imperium, no fewer than two generations of Revolutionaries have been born, sent to fight, and then buried in the Scar. Hating Imperials began as a necessity and became a tradition. Likewise, the mages of the Imperium have looked down upon the nuls—figuratively and otherwise—since they first heard the Lady’s song.
Granted, the colonial wars had been over for ages, but the two never shied away from killing each other and whatever stood between them. So it was more than a little unusual to see them united—or at least abstaining from violence—in a common cause.
But I guess I’m just that much of an asshole to warrant it.
Or at least I hang around that kind of an asshole.
Specifically, the kind of asshole who completely ignores the threat of imminent death and the extremely polite Vagrant watching the fucking alley so that they don’t both die while she does… does…
“What the fuck are you doing over there, anyway?” I hissed to the woman kneeling over some crates.
Twenty-Two Dead Roses in a Chipped Porcelain Vase continued to sift through the crates, pushing various discarded cloths and other trash aside, not even looking up at me as she did.
“Well,” she said in a very I-don’t-even-give-a-shit-that-freaky-flying-people-are-looking-for-me tone, “I appear to be sifting through garbage, so I am either possessed of an exceedingly unusual fetish or—”
“Or you’re searching for something,” I finished for her, rolling my eyes.
“Careful. If you say more smart stuff like that, I might fall in love.” At this she shot me a rather charming smile. An insufferable one that made me kind of want to punch her, but still charming. “Whatever else my pursuers may want of me,” she continued, looking back to the crates, “I won’t be able to give them the proper answer until I find my tools. I managed to hide some around here before I was captured.”
“Right.” I glanced up as the shadow of a mage swept over me and disappeared over a rooftop. “So, ‘pursuers’ seems a little too tame for the small army that’s been sent to kill you.” I looked back to her. “What the fuck did you to do to piss them off so bad, anyway?”
She paused, her eyes growing hard behind her glasses. Her voice came out as a hushed, reverent whisper.
“I took the oath.”
And that gave me pause.
I’d heard about the Freemaker’s Oath, in drunken whispers and smugglers’ stories. I didn’t know much more than the name. No one did. The Freemakers, hunted as they are by the Imperium, the Revolution, and basically everyone else who would rather a lot of people with a lot of knowledge be dead, are understandably protective of their methods.
But I knew a few things.
I knew the oath forbade Freemakers from interfering with each other. I knew it demanded they accrue knowledge at all costs but forbade anyone from telling them how to use it. I knew that they shed their old names to join the organization.
I wonder who she had been before she became Twenty-Two Dead Roses in a Chipped Porcelain Vase.
“Understand,” she continued, “that our work is easily misunderstood by the small minds of this world. They find the notion of dedication to a greater idea, not an emperor or a general, to be terrifying. They call us mercenary intellects, peddlers of what mayhem our work creates.” Her eyes blazed behind her glasses. “When, in fact, those puerile minds who stand in my way have simply gazed upon the same future I have and seen a world that all their fear and hatred could not control, and they find this adequate cause to try to kill me.”
I stared at her for a long time. I idly scratched an itch on my flank.
“No, seriously, though,” I said, “how much did you steal from them?”
“Okay, you can’t own knowledge, so I can’t have stolen anything, can I?” she snapped at me. “Whatever else they say, they can’t—ah, here we are.”
She pulled free a thick leather satchel from beneath a pile of ratty discarded hides. She pried it open, the glisten of glass greeting her as a number of vials, spheres, and baubles rattled around inside. She looked them over, lips moving frantically as she counted each of them, eyes widening with realized horror.
“Where is it, where is it, where is it,” she muttered. “The solution I need isn’t here. I know I packed it. Someone must have taken it.”
“They look a little like liquor, don’t they?” I asked. “Maybe a drunk took them.”
She stared at me as though I had just slapped her dead mother with her dead puppy. “How is the notion of a backwater lackwit guzzling years of work supposed to soothe me in the slightest?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s possible, isn’t it?”
“The ones missing are mostly explosive, so I guess we’ll know as soon as we hear someone turn into an eruption of gore and—”
Darlings.
She froze up, eyes positively enormous behind her glasses. She whirled around, searching for the source of the sudden voice. I don’t think she was at all soothed to realize that it was coming from inside our heads.
The voice of the Imperium speaks to you.
“What is that?” the Freemaker whispered. “Is that a ghost? Are ghosts real?”
I held up a hand. “Telepathy. Relax.”
“Relax? At some strange woman inside my head?”
“It’s not her, it’s just her voice. She’s sending it to everyone in the city, so it can’t be that refined. She can’t tell where we are.”
“How do you—”
I pressed a finger to my lips. I wasn’t in the mood to answer her questions. Also, trying to have a conversation while someone’s voice is babbling inside your skull is pretty fucking annoying.
While we’re certain most of you are lovely people, we cannot help but notice that many of you were rather unhelpful in our pursuit of the rogue Freemaker and, recently, the uncouth Vagrant who released her.
Olithria’s voice. Somehow it was even worse when it wasn’t coming out of a face I could smash my gun into.
Let’s see if we can’t make a better impression this time, hm? If you see a short woman with black hair and large glasses, do let us know. And if you happen to see a scarred woman showing too much skin and sporting tacky tattoos—
“HEY!” I cried out.
—simply run to your roof and scream. We will hear you. If you can’t manage that, at least stay in your homes and out of our way. We wouldn’t want anything unfortunate to happen, would we?
“What does she mean by ‘unfortunate’?” the Freemaker whispered.
“What the fuck do you think a woman who can break the earth in two with her hand means by ‘unfortunate’?” I snapped back.
And if the offending parties happen to be listening… do make it easy on yourselves and surrender, hm? Your associate’s execution may not have happened today, but we do have him in our custody still. We could be compelled to release him, if you cooperate. If you don’t by—oh, let’s say dawn—I’ll be very happy to see him dead in your stead and we’ll simply kill you anyway. Let’s be reasonable about this, shall we? You know how to find us.
Zanze. She had Zanze.
But did she know she had him? Or did she just assume he was some henchman of the Freemaker’s? A lover or a husband or something else she could use as leverage?
Or did she know I was looking for him? That his was a name on a list I wholly intended to cross off before my next sunrise?
Did she know just how many people I would kill to put him in the earth?
Someone did. And he was whispering to me in a burning voice.
At my hip, the Cacophony seethed with such heat that I could feel him through the leather of his sheath. He couldn’t read my thoughts—despite being a magic gun—but he knew what I was thinking—possibly because he was a magic gun.
He was reminding me what we had come here for.
And that we couldn’t afford distractions.
Smart thing to do, he reminded me, would be to leave now. Track down Zanze, let the people wise enough to stay out of my way live, take out the rest as they came. This Freemaker was a shrewd girl—fuck, they don’t let you join the Freemakers without knowing the names of chemicals that people don’t even know exist—she could take care of herself. I could leave her, find Zanze on my own, hope everything worked out.
And I would have. Honestly.
But every time I closed my eyes, even to blink, I could still see her smile.
“Listen.” I sighed, rubbed the back of my neck. “You don’t need this. Come with me, I’ll find you a way out of the city, and then you can—”
“No.”
I blinked. She was standing there, in front of me, hugging her bag to her chest and with both feet planted like roots. She had looked so delicate when I had seen her that afternoon, a fragile thing of porcelain and silk that someone wanted desperately to break. Now she stood there, staring at me resolutely behind those glasses.
Fuck me, had her eyes always been that big?
“I can’t leave Talmin behind.”
I blinked. “Who?”
It hit me a second later. Zanze. She didn’t know his real name—of course, he wouldn’t have given it to her. But she didn’t know his real face, either. She didn’t know what he truly was.
“Listen,” I said, “they had him on the gallows—”
“Scaffold.”
“Huh?”
“A gallows is used only to execute people via hanging. We were about to be beheaded, so they had him on a scaffold.”
How does someone so cute make me want to punch them so many times?
“Whatever. He was being executed for a reason. He’s not a good—”
“I don’t care,” she said. “They put him there because he helped me. He smuggled in ingredients for me, never hurt anyone, and they want to kill him for it. They took Eresan’s head because of me. I won’t let them take his, too.”
“This is the Scar, honey,” I replied. “Chances are he was going to end up on the wrong end of a noose eventually.”
Her face screwed up, trying to contain the anger flashing across it. And then it exploded. Behind her glasses her rage was magnified to the point that I could see the veins inching across the whites of her eyes.
But when she opened her mouth, it was to take a deep breath. She slowly removed her glasses, cleaned them, and stared at herself in the reflections of the lenses.
“The oath,” she said.
“Oh, come on.”
“Article fifteen, item two,” she replied. “‘Any willing associate to a Freemaker must be justly compensated for their investment. No Freemaker shall ever willingly forsake an associate, including an aide, an assistant, a test subject, or a specialist.’”
“Right.” I rubbed my eyes. “Which one of those is he?”
“All four, depending on my needs. Regardless, I can’t leave him behind without being expelled from the Freemakers—which, in Freemaker terms, means getting shot in the head.” She replaced her glasses, straightened them on her nose. “So I suggest we get going.”
“Wait, what?” I normally didn’t like sounding so incredulous, but really. “What’s all this we shit?”
“You can’t expect me to get him myself, can you? I know where he’s being held. I know its defenses, but I’m no match for a group of madmen bristling with magic and another group of madmen bristling with a lot of gunpikes and—” She caught herself, held up a finger. “Sorry, madmen, madwomen, and other individuals who remain mad.”
Now, all of that certainly sounded like very good reasons not to go, at least to me. But before I could say it, before I even knew it, she was standing close to me, looking up at me. I had never noticed that she was shorter than me before.
“And who else could protect me from all that but Sal the Cacophony?”
She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. I didn’t look away. She raised two fingers to my face. I didn’t stop her. And she whispered—to herself, to me, to someone I didn’t know.
“Do the stories say,” she whispered, “how you got these scars?”
And I didn’t answer her.
Her fingers alighted on my cheek, quivering, like she was hesitant to touch me. Her skin felt cold on mine, like a breeze through a broken window. I don’t know why I didn’t stop her—maybe I wasn’t sure what was happening, maybe I was just taken aback by this slip of a woman touching me, maybe something else.
But I stood there. I stared at her. And I let her run her finger across the long, jagged scar on my cheek. Down to my jawline. Past that, to my neck. And down to my collarbone.
And then some part of me started screaming.
My hand shot up, caught her by the wrist, pried her hand away. Her breath escaped her in a gasp. In her glasses I could see my eyes, the color of ice, reflected back at me.
“And who said I was going to help you at all?” I asked.
She blinked. “Well, why did you help me escape the scaffold?”
Because I was aiming for the guy you wanted to save.
Somehow that didn’t sound like something comforting to say.
But this didn’t seem like the right time to tell her exactly why I was out to kill this guy. Nor did I have time to tell her exactly why his name was on my list. The Cacophony seethed at my hip, reminding me of the wisdom of just leaving her behind.
… But she had said she knew where he was being held.
And they had said they were going to execute him by dawn if we didn’t get to him first.
And being led right to the man I was looking to kill seemed a lot easier than searching for him amid a city crawling with the aforementioned madmen with their magic and explosives and possibly magical explosives.
I made my decision.
And the Cacophony, in a bright searing pain that lanced into my hip, made his displeasure known.
“Okay,” I said, biting back my wince. “So, theoretically, if I were to agree to help you, I’d—”
“Perfect. Glad we agree.” She pushed past me, ignoring my protest and my attempt to grab her as she brazenly strode into the street that had just recently contained dozens of people eager to kill us. “Now, the prison we were held in is back this way, but—”
She was cut off as I seized her by the shoulder and dragged her back into the alley. She let out a protest, muffled by my hand. She followed my pointed finger skyward as a mage flew past, silent but for the fluttering of his cloak as he scanned the street and moved on.
“Granted, I only know the one Freemaker, but I’ve learned two things about them.” I held up two fingers. “They’re supposed to be brilliant, and they’re wildly protective of their own. If the first is true, then you’ll stay back and let the woman with the big fucking sword lead the way because if the second is true, I’d rather not have a group of vengeful, secretive weirdos blaming me for the death of Twenty-Two Roses in a Chipped Porcelain Vase.”
I slowly released my hand from her mouth. She regarded me thoughtfully for a moment.
“And, in return, I have two articles of concern of my own.” She held up two fingers. “If you’re going to touch me like that, warn me first. And this will take all night if you keep using my name like that.”
“Well, what else am I supposed to call you?”
She brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. And she looked at me, more shyly than a woman that pristine ought to be able to. And she gave me a smile that would one day ruin my life.
“Call me Liette.”