I ran through a hallway, blinded by smoke. My new wounds fought with my old scars for the right to kill me first. My lungs were full of smoke, my head was full of drugs, I was leaving an awful lot of blood on the floor behind me—but I was still running, I was still breathing, I was still alive.
I’d been through worse.
And if my skull stopped ringing anytime soon, I’m sure I could think of when.
At the very least, I’d shaken pursuit—five minutes of running through the halls and I couldn’t hear any. Granted, it’d be hard to, over the screaming and all, but I had bigger problems on my mind.
The halls of the manor were big by design. Birds hated to be cramped and Oyakai were bigger than most—all I had to do was follow the halls large enough to allow a giant, surly bird to walk through. And, if this was anything like the home of your average Imperial rich asshole, there would be a rookery somewhere high enough to allow the birds to take flight. If Tuteng and Jero hoped to get them out, they’d head for those.
That made sense… didn’t it?
It was hard to think. I’d been hurt too much, lost too much blood, inhaled too much of the Firelung—I wasn’t sure what made sense anymore. I wasn’t sure why I was here, now that I knew Two Lonely Old Men had lied to me, now that I had been responsible for so many people dead, now that…
“Running again?”
No screaming. No songs. No fire. I heard her voice clearly.
Ahead, through the coiling smoke, I saw her. Small, slight, smiling. Too good to be here, in this wretched place, yet she looked at me with those gentle eyes, like she didn’t even notice the blood painting me.
“Darrish?” I whispered.
No, I told myself. Another ghost. The drugs. The wounds. Something. She’s not real.
She wasn’t real.
So why wasn’t I running?
“This is familiar, isn’t it?” Darrish came walking toward me, unfazed by the cinders drifting through the air, unbothered by the red on my hands. “Fire at your back, bodies in your wake, hoping that if you run fast enough, you can escape the fire you set?”
“You’re not real,” I whispered as she approached.
“I’m not?”
She raised a hand, pressed it to my cheek like she used to back then. Back when I would come limping to the barracks after a mission had gone wrong, back when I would hang my head and stand for hours in front of her door before knocking, back when she would hold me and stroke my hair and tell me that it was all worth it…
It felt the same now as it did then. Warm. And so soft.
“Don’t I feel real?” she whispered, her hand sliding down my cheek. “Wasn’t I real when you came to me all those nights?”
“You were real when I looked to you, the night Vraki took my power,” I snapped, snatching her wrist and pushing her away. “You were real when you did nothing to help me. You’re not real now.”
“Maybe. But maybe I was never real to you,” she said. “Maybe I was always just a pleasant dream you could come back to when you ran from the bodies you left on the field as Red Cloud. Maybe I was something you could run away from when I needed you.”
Her words cut me, but there was no malice in that smile. She wasn’t capable of it. Even if she wasn’t real.
And she wasn’t… was she?
“Sal the Cacophony,” she chuckled. “Vagrant. Killer of men and monsters. Wielder of the Mad Emperor’s Legacy. But no story ever talks about how much running away you do, does it? So, what are you running from this time?”
“Nothing.”
She looked over my shoulder. “Looks like an impressive fire. Not your best, but it’s up there.”
“I’m not running.”
“No? Where are you going, then?”
I shouldn’t talk to her. I should be moving. She wasn’t real. She wasn’t.
“Birds,” I growled, starting to trudge forward. “We get the birds, we get the Relic, we end the war.”
“Scions, but we’re altruistic, aren’t we?” she giggled, walking slowly backward to stay ahead of me, hands folded demurely behind her back. “Are you doing this all out of the goodness of your heart?” She canted her head to the side. “Or is it just to kill me?”
Don’t talk to her.
“That’s what this is all for, right? All these fires you set—they’re just to get to the names on your list, to kill them.”
Keep moving.
“Because nothing feels normal knowing we’re out there, does it? Whiskey doesn’t taste good, kisses aren’t sweet, nothing seems right. Nothing except killing us. Every last name on that list.”
She’s not real.
“All the fires are worth it for that, right? Just like all the fires back then were worth it, so long as you got to keep coming back to me. You’ll keep burning and burning and it’s fine, so long as you can keep ahead of the smoke.”
She’s NOT real.
“And when you’re done, Salazanca, and the last name is crossed out on your list, are you just going to keep moving ahead of the fire? Or are you finally going to stop, turn around…”
SHE’S. NOT. REAL.
“And see the ashes you left behind?”
Darrish stopped. She raised a hand and pointed over my shoulder.
I shouldn’t have turned around.
But I did.
Flames lapped the hall behind me from doorways, red tongues from black maws belching smoke. There, standing frail and delicate and fleeting as ashes on the wind, I saw another woman.
She stared at me, with big eyes behind big glasses, and terror on her face. She raised a hand to me and whispered.
“Sal…”
I raised a hand to her.
And screamed.
“LIETTE!”
The flames swallowed her. She disappeared. Only ashes were left behind.
“The fire’s getting warmer, Salazanca,” Darrish chuckled behind me.
I shouted, flicked my shield out, ready to whirl and smash it across her face. But when I turned to her, she was gone. In her place stood a charred husk of a human, blackened but for the broad smile painted across her sunken face.
“Better run.”
I blinked.
She was gone. Liette was gone. Neither had been real.
But the fire had been. And it wasn’t gone.
I kept going. Stopping had given my body a chance to realize how tired it was. Every step was punctuated by a wince, a hack, an ache that would revisit me every morning until the day I died. Assuming I made it out.
But I kept going. Pursued by fire and smoke, I kept going until the great hall gave way to a great doorway that gave way to an immense room.
Cold wind buffeted me as I stepped in, plastering the blood and sweat to my skin. Nests, perches, toys, and the grisly remains of large animals that had been the birds’ meals scattered the wooden floor. The rookery’s northern wall was completely gone, replaced by a pair of gigantic doors that had been blown off its hinges, glowing sigils etched into its edges.
A Spellwright’s sigils. But where was the Spellwright?
“Is it looking at me? Oh, Scions, I think it’s looking at me.”
Ah. There.
The Oyakai stood huddled upon the floor, unfazed by the apparent destruction of their home or the death of their previous master. They crouched around Tuteng, the Rukkokri taking a moment to press his horned brow against each of their heads, whispering words I couldn’t hear over the sound of someone screaming.
“I can’t! I can’t!” Urda stood in the grip of Jero, who was attempting to shove him toward one of the crouching birds. “It’s… it’s dangerous!”
“You just took a magical doorway from nowhere into the middle of a gigantic manor on fucking fire,” Jero snapped as he struggled with the wright. “How the hell is a bird more dangerous than that?”
“It’s unsanitary! What if it pecks me? What if it scratches me? I could get diseases! Like…” He swallowed hard. “Featherwretch.”
“That’s not a real thing!”
“You don’t know that! Nobody knows that! This is completely uncharted territory! I refuse to be the first patient to die of—”
“Fucking move it along already, Mayor Shitshoes.” Yria shoved Urda toward the bird with the only arm that still worked. The portal magic had taken too much out of her—her right arm hung dead at her side, her left leg dragging behind her as she stalked after her brother. “My arm’s fucking shot to hell, so you’re gonna have to drive this thing.”
“H-how? I’ve never even touched a bird!”
“Tuteng has handled it,” Jero replied. “Just hold the reins and get the fuck on!”
“Th-there must be another way!” Urda protested. “There has to—”
Yria’s hand shot out as she took her brother by the collar and forced him to look at her.
“What’d I tell you after Mom died?” she asked.
He stared at her, eyes quivering. He swallowed hard, nodded. She nodded back, released him. With only the faintest of whining sounds, they pushed him into the beast’s saddle. With a grunt of effort, he helped Yria up behind him.
“Meet at the rendezvous. We’ll be right behind you.” He glanced to the Clansman nearby. “Tuteng!”
The Clansman’s brows furrowed beneath his horns as he met the bird’s stare. He gave the creature a brief pat on its beak and a whisper. The creature closed its eyes, rose on its long legs, and started sprinting toward the blown-off doors.
Urda’s protests were lost in the cry of the bird as the Oyakai spread its wings, leapt from the floor, and took flight into the night. Coiling smoke and falling snow parted before it, as though afraid of sullying such a creature. They did not resume until the Oyakai’s dark feathers disappeared into the night.
“Okay.” Jero wiped sweat from his brow. “We’ve got to get the rest of them—” He turned. And saw me. “Ah, shit.”
His eyes didn’t go wide with shock. His mouth didn’t fumble for excuses. He stared at me, worry etched in his wrinkles, with wary disbelief. I’d seen that look before, in the hundred eyes of a hundred faces of a hundred people who thought me dead, right before I put a sword through them.
“Sal,” he whispered my name as I approached. “You made it.”
“Yeah.” I wiped blood from my face with the back of my hand. “I’m good at that, turns out.”
I didn’t recognize the man staring at me, this mess of wounds and wrinkles like scars. I didn’t see the man with the soft eyes that had met me on a cold night in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t find the man with the nice smile who had poured me wine and sat with me and pretended we were both normal. I had no idea where the man was who had traded with me, in quiet words that only people like us spoke, the secrets we kept close as our cuts.
This man—this man with every muscle drawn taut, bristling with pain and fear—I didn’t recognize.
But that look… that wild-eyed, ready-to-kill look…
I knew that look.
“Listen,” he whispered, letting out a breath. “I need to tell you—”
“You need to shut up,” I replied. “And you need to get out of here.” I gestured back toward the rising smoke. “Everyone does.”
He opened his mouth like he wanted to say something. I narrowed my eyes like he really shouldn’t. Whatever he had to say, I wanted to hear when I was in better shape to strangle him.
Instead, he nodded weakly and gestured toward one of the Oyakai. He held out his hand to help me up into the saddle. I stared at him until he withdrew it. And then withdrew ten more paces.
I reached up to grab the bird’s saddle. Pain flared inside me—pain from the drugs, the burns, the wounds. I gritted my teeth, bit them back.
“Leaving so soon?”
But wouldn’t you know it, that’s when I found another pain in my ass.
His voice came as languid as his stride, a slender man strolling into the rookery as though he were leaving a nice restaurant and not a manor filled to the brim with flame. His clothes were shredded, torn by the dozen wounds and singed by the dozen burns across his body. Yet for all that, his gaze was steady and unbothered beneath the bony plate jutting from his forehead.
Dalthoros.
For a minute there, I thought I was really going to get out of here without some last-minute birdshit like this.
“Personally, I can forgive the mess you made.” He brushed ashes from his bare shoulder. “Really, I lament the loss of the artwork more than the loss of the nobles you slew. However.”
He narrowed his eyes. Purple light flashed behind them. The Lady Merchant’s song rose, clear as a bell over the sound of flame.
He was a mage.
Of course he was a mage.
Why the fuck wouldn’t he be?
“The captain is of the belief that all citizens of the Imperium, no matter how foppish, are worthy of her protection. It is the mandate of her rank as Sword of the Empress and the mandate of our mission here.”
His skin rippled like water. Across his body, his wounds began to close themselves shut. The reddened flesh of his burns returned to a healthy pink. In the span it took me to realize how deep the shit I was in went, he stood up, hale, hearty, and ready to fight again.
A Mendmage.
A fucking Mendmage.
He was fresh, I was wiped. He was strong, I was weak. And even if I did manage to somehow muster the energy to give him a bloody nose, he could regenerate in the blink of an eye.
My skin burned, my blood burned, my skull burned. Yet somehow, I felt something very cold settle in the pit of my belly.
“An insult to the Imperium, I can handle.”
Dalthoros started walking toward me. I set my feet.
“An insult to the Empress, I do not mind.”
He raised his sword. I flicked my shield out.
“But an insult to the captain?” He shook his head. “That I cannot abide. Whatever Vagrant god you believe in, I suggest you make peace with, for I shall leave nothing to—”
He didn’t finish that sentence.
Well, he did, but I’m not sure the gurgling noise he made when five delicate fingers wrapped around his throat counted as words.
The hand on his neck was joined by another that seized his ankle. His eyes bulged out in confusion, his mouth struggling to find the breath to scream as he was hoisted into the air. Terror bloomed across his face as he was leveled like a javelin at the wall.
And promptly hurled.
His body struck the stone. There was a thick, wet snapping sound. He crumpled bodily to the floor, where he lay.
Agne, covered in soot and stains, glanced from the man she had just hurled back toward me.
“Sorry,” she said. “Were you and he about to do a thing?”
I blinked at the crumpled mess that had been Dalthoros before shaking my head.
“No, I’m fine.”
“Good, good.” Agne stalked forward and I could see there wasn’t a scratch on her. She approached a larger Oyakai with deep azure feathers. “I’m taking this bird, if no one minds.”
After that, she could have taken my virginity and I wouldn’t have minded.
We mounted in short order, Tuteng at our head. He waved a hand. The Oyakai responded to whatever strange power he had, taking off at a run. One by one, the birds leapt into the air. One by one, they spread their wings.
And we took flight.
The smoke and heat fell away. The night air, cold and sweet and painfully clean, hit my face, filled my lungs. Snow fell and melted upon my skin and the pain melted with it. I breathed so deep I thought I might faint and fall off the bird’s saddle.
But I didn’t. I flew out into the night, behind the rest of the birds we had stolen, ahead of the fire I had set. With every breath I took, I whispered into the wind.
“I made it.”
After everything, every lie, every wound, every shitty thing I did, we had done it. The birds were ours. The plan was secure. I was alive.
Somehow.
I looked over my shoulder. The fires had consumed the manor entirely, lighting up the night sky like a funeral pyre. And at its center, unbothered by flame or the carcasses blackening around its feet, the effigy stood.
Its empty gaze was canted upward. Its single eye, cold and blue, was fixed upon me. Its red heart beat.
Perfectly in tune with mine.