- Book info
- Sample
- Media
- Author updates
- Lists
Synopsis
A deal struck in a dark place set an outlaw mage on the path to revenge. And now that it’s led to places even darker, she and everyone she knows may pay the price for her bargain in the final novel of “an unforgettable epic fantasy” trilogy (Publisher’s Weekly).
Sal the Cacophony has made few friends, but many enemies. Many, many enemies. When her magic was taken from her, she cried out for revenge. And a power she never understood promised her vengeance. A deal for a bloody price was made.
And now the bill has come due.
In one of the last free cities of the burned-out ruin of the Scar, Sal’s many foes—old and new—have hunted down her and her few allies—willing and otherwise -- and all her plans to save them might not be enough.
One last stand. One more story. One final blade to be drawn.
Sal the Cacophony has made few friends, but many enemies. Many, many enemies. When her magic was taken from her, she cried out for revenge. And a power she never understood promised her vengeance. A deal for a bloody price was made.
And now the bill has come due.
In one of the last free cities of the burned-out ruin of the Scar, Sal’s many foes—old and new—have hunted down her and her few allies—willing and otherwise -- and all her plans to save them might not be enough.
One last stand. One more story. One final blade to be drawn.
For more from Sam Sykes, check out:
The Grave of Empires:
Seven Blades in Black
Ten Arrows of Iron
Three Axes to Fall
Bring Down Heaven:
The City Stained Red
The Mortal Tally
God's Last Breath
The Affinity for Steel Trilogy:
Tome of the Undergates
Black Halo
The Skybound Sea
Release date: December 6, 2022
Publisher: Orbit
Print pages: 608
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Reader buzz
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
Author updates
Close
Three Axes to Fall
Sam Sykes
Ozhma was not having a good day.
The inn had been out of breakfast potatoes. She’d had to change a wagon wheel an hour out of town. And now she was being asked to prevent thousands from dying needlessly in a hellstorm of flame and fury.
She hadn’t even worn the right shoes for it.
Her nice little red boots were made for dazzling buyers, charming customers, and not—as she specifically said when she joined Avonin & Family Whiskeymakers—trekking her magnificent ass up an incredibly steep cliff.
Maybe not specifically, but she was sure that cliffs were covered in the reasonably long list of places she would not haul her ass. But then, she reasoned, she was pretty sure she’d never have agreed to be escorted up a cliff by the threat of painful death should she not.
“Listen, you want to sit still back there?”
And yet…
She glowered up from beneath her hat—her very, very sweaty hat—at the back of the man’s messy head of hair. Man was as close a descriptor as she could decide on for him—he was male, tall, and with the lean fighting muscle she liked so well, but the rest of him was a mystery.
His clothes were an ill-fitting shirt and baggy trousers, cinched in some vague attempt at the Imperial style by a thick cloth sash. An immense amount of skin, marred by scars and a tattoo of a thick tree trunk, was on display—which she didn’t mind—but his long brown hair was a greasy mess, a match for his stubble-caked face—which she did mind.
He looked like a bandit. She’d have been happy to call him one. But bandits rarely smelled so strongly of silkgrass, and the pipe dangling from his lip positively reeked. And no bandit she had ever heard of carried a thick piece of wood at their hip instead of a sword.
“Not to complain or anything.” The man exhaled a cloud of smoke that coiled over the crown of his head to blow back into her face. “Actually, a lot of people—including me—are going to die if you fuck this up. So I guess I do mean to complain a little.”
“Wow, what amazing advice,” Ozhma replied, her breath heavy with nerves. “This entire time, I’ve been wondering what I could possibly do to make your life easier.” She glowered at the back of his head as hard as she could—he couldn’t see it, but she damn well hoped he would feel it. “Need I remind you, sir, that I am doing a service for you.”
“You’re doing it because we’re dead if you don’t.”
“That doesn’t make it not a service. And, if you hadn’t noticed”—she gestured to her own short, chubby, and impeccably dressed self—“I’m not particularly built for this.”
“I had noticed, actually.” He struggled to cast a glare over his shoulder at her. Which, considering their position, was difficult. “Why the fuck do you think I agreed to carry you? Your perfume isn’t that nice.”
Ozhma furrowed her brow. “It’s not like I enjoy this, either. I left a lot—and I must stress a lot—of whiskey back with my wagon that I would hate to lose while I’m doing this favor for you.”
“I told you I’m good to cover whatever you lose.” The man snorted twin plumes of smoke out his nostrils. “Your war profiteering won’t suffer.”
Despite everything else about him, Ozhma had actually been rather close to liking him before he said that. But the words did not so much cut her as fashion themselves into a huge fucking axe and embed themselves in her back.
It wasn’t the first time she’d been accused of that. How could it be? Once the Borrus Valley exploded, the rest of the Scar wasn’t far behind. There wasn’t a freehold, a town, a hamlet, or even a fucking hovel between here and the Valley that hadn’t been wracked by the Imperium’s and Revolution’s latest cock-measuring contest.
Nor was there anything new about that. Being crushed between the two powers was something every Scarfolk expected.
Normally.
But that had been before. Before the Valley and the Ten Arrows. Before the Imperial retaliation. Before the Revolution started conscripting every civilian they could find and forcing them into battlefields their bones would decorate and before the Imperium started burying entire towns alive.
And normally, she could let his words slide.
Normally.
“NO!”
But not today.
Her hands curled into fists around his clothes. Her thighs squeezed around his middle. Her entire body shook so hard upon his back that he had to stop and find his footing again.
“Take it back,” she said.
“Huh?”
“I am not a war profiteer. Take it back.”
“Look, we don’t have—”
“Take it back,” she said, making to hop off of his back, “or I’ll leave. You can do whatever you want about that, but neither you nor I will go one step farther unless you take. That. Back.”
There were many, many important lessons one learned in the Scar and almost all of them revolved around not angering things that could kill you. Not angering a tall, muscular, drug-addled son of a bitch with a weapon was number six. But there were also many, many things a woman like Ozhma was ready to get angry over.
And one of those things was letting someone else tell her what she was.
“All right, fine. I take it back.” He sighed, adjusted her on his back. “You’re a fucking saint for doing this. I’ll erect a damn statue of you and tell my grandchildren of your grace. Fuck me, sorry.”
Ozhma beamed, her mouth falling open in delight. “I didn’t know you were a grandpa!”
“I’m not. Can we go?”
“Oh, sure.”
Immediately assuming someone’s sincerity was not necessarily a hard lesson she’d learned, but it just made her life a little easier and also he was a tall, muscular, drug-addled son of a bitch with a weapon.
“And not that I’m trying to bring it up again,” he said, “but there’s a lot riding on us getting to the top of this mountain soon, so I’ve got to ask… is there anything that would make it go faster?”
She paused, thinking. “I always find trips seem shorter with a little pleasant chatter.”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“Well, why not? You’re asking me to help with a task whose exact nature you can’t tell me but which has a lot riding on it. I can accept that, but it seems just plain rude for you to ask that of me and not even tell me your name.”
Ozhma had only recently been promoted to representative-at-large in the company, but she’d found a truth that spanned across the many townships and cities she’d visited: be it Revolutionary, Imperial, Haven, or worse, people bought things the same way. The currencies changed—sometimes it was whiskey, sometimes it was trust, sometimes it was patience she asked for—but the sale was always the same.
And it started the same way in the man’s bristly face. Reluctance melted away into a sigh of smoke and exhaustion and—dare she hope—just a little kindness.
“Rudu,” he said.
“There,” she began to say, “now—”
“Rudu the Cudgel.”
Her lips puckered as those last two words sank into her.
The Cudgel.
The tattoos. The weird clothes. The bizarre weapon.
Holy shit, she told herself as her eyes widened and her brow glistened, holy shit, he’s a fucking Vagrant.
“That make you nervous?” Rudu asked.
“NO, WHY WOULD IT?” Ozhma shouted nonchalantly.
“If I wanted to hurt you, I wouldn’t be carrying you, would I?” He grunted, adjusted her on his back. “And if you didn’t want to hurt me, you could sit up a little, for fuck’s sake.”
“Right, I… I trust you,” she said and somehow believed it, a little. “It’s just… you weren’t kidding, were you?”
He took a deep drag of his pipe. “I wasn’t.”
“People are in danger?”
He held his breath. “They are.”
She swallowed, afraid to ask. “Vagrant danger?”
Rudu exhaled a shimmering cloud, pointed skyward with his chin. “What do you know about what’s on the other side of this cliff?”
She followed his gaze. The horizon of the Nails’ towering cliffs and mesas was stained dark here and there, the sound of distant earth shifting a bare whisper from this far away.
“It’s… New Vigil, right? The city?”
Rudu let out a bleak chuckle. “Yeah, it might have been that, at one point. Before people decided it was worth fighting over, anyway.”
Ozhma wrinkled her nose. “Fighting over? Really?” She glanced around the desolate cliffs. “Isn’t it out in the Nails? The place people very specifically avoid because it very plainly is not worth killing over?”
She herself had only traveled this close to the forsaken land because it cut a few hours off her journey. And because no one—a broad group including bandits, armies, and herself—thought it was worth fucking much. Ideal traveling, if you kept your eyes open.
“I didn’t say it was worth killing over.” He sucked on his pipe, let out a cloud of shimmering pink smoke. “I said it’s worth fighting over.”
Ozhma grimaced a little. “Uh, can you… maybe explain the difference?”
“Many years and wizard drugs ago, I could have.”
Ozhma’s chest tightened. She swallowed something bile-bitter. She tried to take a deep breath and tasted only the rancid reek of Rudu’s pipe smoke.
And for the first time since she’d taken this job, Ozhma began to think that, perhaps, things were getting out of hand.
It was a chilling thought. She hadn’t exactly lived a dangerous life—her parents had died horribly after she’d moved out, which by the standards of the Scar was considered lucky—but she’d never before felt that there was something she couldn’t handle. She’d learned how to run the family business, how to fend off debtors, how to stretch a piece of metal to its utmost limit, all before she was fifteen.
Honestly, even when her wagon had been stopped by a scruffy-looking weirdo who reeked of drugs and looked like he’d just mugged a beggar for his clothes, she hadn’t panicked. This was, after all, the same Ozhma who’d been waylaid by bandits three weeks ago and walked away having sold them some very fine whiskey and not had her head chopped off.
That was it, wasn’t it? she asked herself. That was the moment you thought you could handle anything, be it bandits or debtors or… or… Her eyes drifted toward Rudu. Or a fucking renegade mage high off his fucking ass on silkgrass asking you to handle a city—a whole fucking city—of people who are about to die and… and…
She glanced down the long and winding path that led back to the road, back to her wagon she’d carefully hidden, and back to Miss Malice, the ornery bird who pulled it that she’d left grazing on seed. She could make it there, she thought, and maybe pretend this hadn’t happened. She could force herself not to look back or think about it or ever acknowledge it. She could return to the office, tell them it was just another boring delivery, take a week of vacation to drink enough that the entire thing would one day be a vomit-soaked blur. All she had to do was run.
Well, not run, she told herself as her body began to sweat at the very idea of it. You could… I don’t know, tumble down? Roll? Jump? She squinted. Actually, no, all those would probably end in… like, dying. And there’s no guarantee that—
“You all right back there?” Rudu interrupted.
She didn’t know how to answer that. Not anymore. She didn’t know how to talk to a Vagrant. She’d never met one; she’d heard stories and they all ended the same way.
There were two outcomes to an encounter with a Vagrant: you either gave them what they wanted or you gave them what they wanted and they ripped your soul out, imprisoned it in a skull, and carried it around as a toy for all eternity.
That last one probably wasn’t true. But maybe it was? She had no idea. She’d never even met a legal mage, let alone a Vagrant. She wasn’t ready for this. She wasn’t capable of this. She was a sales representative! In the deep Scar! She sold whiskey to hicks! She couldn’t have this many people relying on her.
How many people were they even talking about? A hundred? A thousand? How many people were in New Vigil? How many hicks and drunks and shopkeeps and merchants and… and…
And people just like Mom and Dad.
A worm of a thought. It burrowed into her brain, that thought, made her think of the hard times. The times when sales were slow, when shipments were lost, when they had to come together and think of what keepsake to sell next.
The times when, somehow, no matter how bad things got, they still managed to feed her and give her nice clothes that she asked for, and that one week where they’d had Dad’s terrible dumplings because she loved them so much…
She didn’t know how many people were in New Vigil.
But there were probably a lot of them that knew hard times.
And, with a resigned sigh, Ozhma knew what her answer was.
Ozhma had seen exactly one weapon of war in her life.
Plenty of weapons—swords, hand cannons, the odd eviscerator-spoon here and there—but only one weapon made specifically for killing a lot of people in a short amount of time.
They’d called it the Journey of Four Thousand Indefatigable Strides. But that was really hard to remember, so most had just called it by the name she would hear often, spoken in the same hushed reverence one speaks of monsters.
Tank.
A great beast of metal armor and belching severium smoke, iron crab legs picking through the hills beyond her home, a horror of a cannon attached to the top of it. She remembered its great metal shudder when it came to a stop, the smoke-tinged hiss as it settled down and its iron hide split open to release soldiers into her city. They’d only come to restock, the gun had never even pointed in her direction, the whole affair had taken only an hour.
One hour with a tank had given her nightmares for years.
“Oh, my sweet heavenly fuck.”
Dozens of them sprawled before her.
She had the fleeting idea that they looked like toys from so high up here, iron soldiers scattered across the plains far below. Yet the blackened scars where their still-steaming guns had fired and the pall of severium smoke that hung around them, mantles on a war god’s shoulders, was thick. Some lay splintered into metal shards and smoldering wreck, the charred remains of their crews scattered like ashes.
It was a sight that made her breath catch in her throat. A horrifying sight. An awful sight.
And they were by far the least alarming thing.
She couldn’t call the marching flatlands a battlefield. Rather, the sight reminded her of a butcher’s shop: a mass of tangled iron machines and red meat and odors.
The scars of battle had worn away the land, the grasses chewed up beneath the treads of tanks and the churn of machine wheels, the trees sundered by gunfire. The sky fared no better, colored by smoke and the crackle of lingering lightning, decorated here and there with weapons and projectiles that hung lazily in the air and drifted idly by, punctuated by a blast of unearthly flame or the glow of violet eyes beneath.
She’d never met a mage before today. But she knew what magic looked like.
She just never thought it would be this horrible.
At the center of the disaster stood a great towering Marcher tank mounted upon treads, smoldering like a colossal torch. Across the stained and ruined land, the bodies lay: their uniforms and corpses indiscernible from flame, soldiers lay twitching beside smoldering machinery, purple flames burned impromptu pyres. Looming over it like a morbid specter, an airship—a horrific mass of wood, metal, and engine—hung over the battlefield, its engines filling the sky with the sound of locusts and its cannons poised at its railings.
Her mind went numb at the sight of it. The smell of shit and blood and metal and severium powder on the breeze. She didn’t even notice that the bodies of the two armies weren’t pointed toward each other.
Their aggressions were turned to the looming shadow at the edge of the plains, the great city of fire-scarred walls and ominous iron gates, whose battlements trailed smoke and were painted with dried blood.
“Is that…” Ozhma craned to get a better look. “Is that New Vigil?”
“Yes,” Rudu grunted, glaring up at her. “You fucking mind?”
“Oh!” Ozhma looked down at him and smiled sheepishly. “Sorry.”
She scooted back down to a comfortable position, draping her arms around his neck as he readjusted his grip on her legs and pulled her a little firmer onto his back. With a grunt of complaint, he continued carrying her up to the top of the cliff.
She didn’t take offense at his ire, but it did surprise her. Grassheads, in her experience, tended to be fairly relaxed after two bowls and catatonic after four.
Rudu had just finished his eleventh.
And he was still stressed.
She couldn’t blame him, she supposed. If she had previously seen the wreckage of the plains below, she’d probably need to smoke a lot, too.
Hell, it was probably only because she was downwind from him and his pipe that she wasn’t completely losing her shit over the span of their trek.
“What happened?” she asked, breathless. “What the fuck happened?”
“What’s it look like happened?” Rudu asked.
“Like hell took a shit on earth.”
“Whoa. That’s pretty good.” Rudu puffed on his pipe. “I was going to say that the Imperium and the Revolution both want that city bad enough to attack it at once and divide it up later, but I like yours better.”
“What do you mean? The Imperium and the Revolution have been trying to kill each other for longer than I’ve been alive. What could make them do that?” She blinked. “Hang on, the Imperium and the Revolution? Guns and wizards? Pointing in the same direction? How the hell is that city still standing?”
“They called a ceasefire last night,” he replied. “The dumb bastards behind those walls won’t give up. But the dumb bastards in front of those walls won’t stop killing each other. So now a bunch of dumb bastards, including you and me, are going to try to sort this shit out.” He exhaled a large cloud of smoke. “One day is all anyone is willing to wait. Come tomorrow, if negotiations don’t work, they’ll just level it and fight over the crater.”
“Well, that’s just ridiculous. You can’t have a ‘leveled’ field and have a crater, since a crater is a depression.”
“That is not helpful.”
“Grammar is always helpful,” Ozhma said, without pausing to ponder why she didn’t have many friends. “But, anyway, that’s good, right? Negotiations? Negotiations are good. Negotiations means people at least want this to end well.”
“Maybe. But ‘well’ for you and ‘well’ for two nations with enough guns and magic to wipe their ass with civilization are two very different things.”
“Okay, yes, true, but let’s… try to stay positive,” she said, wincing. “If people are willing to talk, then people are willing to listen. And if you can do both, then you can get done whatever needs to get done.”
“Huh. That’s pretty insightful.”
“Thank you. My mom used to say it,” Ozhma said, beaming. “So if they’re willing to talk, then you just need an envoy who’s willing to talk. Who are you sending?”
“You.”
“Oh! Neat.”
The next few seconds before Ozhma, blissed out on secondhand silkgrass, realized what he had just said would be some of the happiest of her life.
“Wait, what?”
“We’re here.”
It had either been the drugs or the sheer, desperate denial she was using to keep herself together, but without realizing it, they’d arrived at a camp. The road sharply leveled out onto a flat cliff that overlooked the plains, providing a view of the carnage. Military tents had been erected—self-serious blue of the Revolution a wary distance from the gaudy violet of the Imperial pavilion—and the air was alive with activity.
Messengers and clerks in Revolutionary uniforms rushed to and fro, delivering documents to a small fleet of overworked scribes who busily translated them into scrolls to be sent by messenger birds. Imperial mages sat in deliberate circles, their eyes aglow with their power as they stared into pools of water in which images of cityscapes and blood-soaked fields flashed. Multiple people with multiple medals of distinguishment argued, red-faced and furious.
But no one was killing each other.
Which, while ideal so long as she was in the thick of this, was nonetheless bizarre. She could fathom, with a little creative thinking, a cause that would convince the Imperium and Revolution to choose not to attack each other. But the idea of the two actually setting up camp together to talk damn near broke her brain.
Just like the fall from Rudu’s back damn near broke her ass.
“Hey!” She clambered to her feet, rubbing her amazing rear end. Rudu seemed to neither notice nor care, waving for her to follow as he entered the camp.
She hurried to stay close to him. As menacing as she’d once found him, Rudu now seemed like a big, sweet, drug-addicted puppy in comparison to the people surrounding her. Revolutionary commanders wielding bizarre weapons snarled at Imperial mages, glowing eyes impassive beneath their cold metal masks. These were people used to killing, used to not being bothered by killing. And, one by one, each and every one of their cold, appraising eyes fell to her.
Silence followed her through the camp, the heated arguments and the concerned chatter dying as the camp’s inhabitants watched her go. It unnerved her to be watched by people carrying steel. Always had. People like that had a way of looking at you—you caught it, if you paid close enough attention—like they were considering all the ways they could take you apart.
She abandoned any thoughts of running, then and there. She couldn’t bear the idea of even turning around. She couldn’t see their eyes; she couldn’t know what they were thinking.
“You’re late.”
But in another second, she did anyway.
She came to a paralyzed halt beneath a stare hewn and sharpened to cold iron knives. A hard-faced woman, features sharp enough to carve the skin off a serpent, with a proud jaw framed by black hair cropped in military fashion. A match for her short-cut blue coat adorned by stylish medals affixed to the lapel. The dried grime of battle lay upon her like it would on a blade: fittingly.
The arcane command structure of the Revolution made Ozhma’s head hurt to even think about, but she knew an officer when she saw one. They didn’t give big, fuck-off swords like that to just anyone, after all.
“Can’t be late if I didn’t tell you when I’d be back,” Rudu replied.
The woman narrowed her eyes. “You informed my aides that you were going out to”—she paused to cringe—“‘find some turd to flush down this particular shitter.’”
“And I found one,” Rudu replied.
“HEY!” Ozhma snapped.
Ozhma swallowed hard as the woman leaned over her, her terrifying face made even more terrifying by the hard shadow painting it.
“And you are prepared to accept this duty?” she asked, her voice as severe as her stare. “To accept the burden of negotiation and the lives that shall endure or end by your decisions?”
Ozhma blinked. “Um…”
The woman glared at Rudu. “You did not tell her?”
“Didn’t have time,” Rudu replied as he lit another bowl. “Gave her the basics: city, killing, lot of people dying because of you, that sort of thing. If I told her any more, I didn’t think she’d come.”
“Imbecile,” the woman hissed. “You dare bring a civilian into this without being clear to her of the dire nature of—”
“I want to help.” Ozhma tried to sound how she thought boldness ought to sound like. “I… I heard enough. If there are a lot of people…” She stood as imposing as someone of her stature could muster. “Then I want to try.”
The woman’s gaze softened, if only just a little. But beneath the iron layer of anger was a steel layer of discipline. She stood rigidly for a moment and offered a deep, formal bow.
“You have the gratitude of the Glorious Revolution of the Fist and Flame and of its Great General, madam,” she said. “And you have the honor of addressing Cadre Commander Tretta Unbreakable, servant of the Great General and his will in these circumstances.”
“Uh… hi?”
Tretta spun on her heel, began stalking toward the center of the camp and a wide pavilion set up there. She didn’t even bother to gesture to follow; she merely kept talking and left Ozhma scrambling to catch up to her.
“I will be as brief as I am able,” Tretta said. “The city of New Vigil is presently under the occupation and control of forces hostile to the Revolution. Revolutionary citizens are held within.”
“Among others,” Rudu added from behind.
“Others?” Ozhma asked.
“We have knowledge of Imperial, Scarfolk, and various freehold citizens behind the walls, as well,” Tretta replied, “but the bulk of the population is made up of Revolutionaries.”
“Lapsed Revolutionaries. Deserters.” Rudu offered a bored shrug to Tretta’s bare-toothed snarl. “You said she needed to be informed.”
“There is no such thing as a lapsed Revolutionary, merely Revolutionaries waiting to be returned to the embrace of the Great General.” She sucked her anger in back behind clenched teeth. “Regardless of affiliation, the citizenry present is unarmed and vulnerable. Our attempts to decisively take the city ended… un-ideally.”
Ozhma glanced back over the cliff to the horror on the field below. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“In the interests of reducing further casualties, we called for a ceasefire and the enemy agreed,” Tretta said. “We are not so naïve as to believe that treating directly with the enemy would result in anything other than carnage, hence mutual terms have been decided upon that envoys shall act in our stead, such as yourself.”
Ozhma’s head bobbed along, heavier with every word that sank into it. “Right. Okay. So I’m… an envoy. Okay. An envoy is a representative. I’m a sales representative. That’s basically the same thing. Basically the same thing. Basically the same thing.” She smacked her lips, wondering which word she would have to emphasize to believe it. Instead, she settled for looking to Rudu. “Right?”
“Oh. Yeah, no, just think of it like a sale except instead of making money, you’re trying to keep a small city full of people from becoming a pile of ash.” He tapped his bowl out on the heel of his sandal. “But yeah, basically.”
“Right. Good. We agree. Good. Great. Good, good, good.”
“It would be difficult to overstate the danger you’re walking into,” Tretta said as she came to a halt outside a lavish Imperial pavilion. “Only in the direst circumstances against the vilest of foes would we override the Revolutionary Mandate.” A grotesque centipede of an expression crawled across her face. “I truly never thought there would be such a day. Or a foe.”
She pulled back the pavilion’s curtains, exposing a decadent interior of exquisite furniture and hardwood flooring. The military accoutrements—the maps pinned to tables, the scattered documents and open manuals, the minuscule troops on the table—only served to heighten the room’s wonder. It was as though someone had simply magically transported an entirely furnished war room into the middle of nowhere and—
Oh, right, Ozhma thought suddenly. Mages.
If anything could diminish the room’s splendor, that distinction belonged to the pavilion’s sole occupant.
A woman, short and spear-slim, stood at its center. Her Imperial military coat and the longsword at her hip suggested she belonged there, but only just. Her hair, Imperial ivory, hung in greasy tatters, her figure stood slouched and defeated, her uniform looked as though she hadn’t taken it off in days. Bruises and scratches that had yet to be healed—or cleaned—dotted every inch of skin.
“The Three’s representative has been selected.” Tretta gestured to Ozhma, who stood trying to squint into the war room. “You represent Imperial interests here. Do you have any questions before she departs?”
The white-haired woman turned around and Ozhma cringed. Exhaustion colored every inch of the woman’s face a ghastly pale. Her chapped mouth and tear-stained eyes both hung slack, resignation exploded across her expression, as though exhaustion, horror, sorrow, and anger had battled it out and her face had simply collapsed under the weight of them all.
Whatever war this woman had fought, she’d clearly lost.
“This woman?” she asked, weary voice a match for her face. “You want to send a civilian in there?” She managed a glimmer of incredulity for Tretta and Rudu. “To her?”
“Hey, your envoy had a dick-nose but I didn’t say shit, did I?” Rudu snapped back.
Some fragment of emotion, some edge gone dull, scraped across her face, desperate to come loose. But it, too, fell beneath the weary weight on her face and disappeared.
“Send whoever, do whatever,” she said, turning her back to them, “I don’t care anymore.”
Ozhma didn’t realize she had been holding her breath until the curtain fell. The chill that slid over her was hard to shake off as Tretta turned and began to lead the way once again.
“She seems…” Ozhma struggled to find the word. “… Nice?”
“Our Imperial counterparts in this plan are less optimistic than we are,” Tretta said, her voice hardening. “Their leader has yet to arrive. Their commanding officer w
The inn had been out of breakfast potatoes. She’d had to change a wagon wheel an hour out of town. And now she was being asked to prevent thousands from dying needlessly in a hellstorm of flame and fury.
She hadn’t even worn the right shoes for it.
Her nice little red boots were made for dazzling buyers, charming customers, and not—as she specifically said when she joined Avonin & Family Whiskeymakers—trekking her magnificent ass up an incredibly steep cliff.
Maybe not specifically, but she was sure that cliffs were covered in the reasonably long list of places she would not haul her ass. But then, she reasoned, she was pretty sure she’d never have agreed to be escorted up a cliff by the threat of painful death should she not.
“Listen, you want to sit still back there?”
And yet…
She glowered up from beneath her hat—her very, very sweaty hat—at the back of the man’s messy head of hair. Man was as close a descriptor as she could decide on for him—he was male, tall, and with the lean fighting muscle she liked so well, but the rest of him was a mystery.
His clothes were an ill-fitting shirt and baggy trousers, cinched in some vague attempt at the Imperial style by a thick cloth sash. An immense amount of skin, marred by scars and a tattoo of a thick tree trunk, was on display—which she didn’t mind—but his long brown hair was a greasy mess, a match for his stubble-caked face—which she did mind.
He looked like a bandit. She’d have been happy to call him one. But bandits rarely smelled so strongly of silkgrass, and the pipe dangling from his lip positively reeked. And no bandit she had ever heard of carried a thick piece of wood at their hip instead of a sword.
“Not to complain or anything.” The man exhaled a cloud of smoke that coiled over the crown of his head to blow back into her face. “Actually, a lot of people—including me—are going to die if you fuck this up. So I guess I do mean to complain a little.”
“Wow, what amazing advice,” Ozhma replied, her breath heavy with nerves. “This entire time, I’ve been wondering what I could possibly do to make your life easier.” She glowered at the back of his head as hard as she could—he couldn’t see it, but she damn well hoped he would feel it. “Need I remind you, sir, that I am doing a service for you.”
“You’re doing it because we’re dead if you don’t.”
“That doesn’t make it not a service. And, if you hadn’t noticed”—she gestured to her own short, chubby, and impeccably dressed self—“I’m not particularly built for this.”
“I had noticed, actually.” He struggled to cast a glare over his shoulder at her. Which, considering their position, was difficult. “Why the fuck do you think I agreed to carry you? Your perfume isn’t that nice.”
Ozhma furrowed her brow. “It’s not like I enjoy this, either. I left a lot—and I must stress a lot—of whiskey back with my wagon that I would hate to lose while I’m doing this favor for you.”
“I told you I’m good to cover whatever you lose.” The man snorted twin plumes of smoke out his nostrils. “Your war profiteering won’t suffer.”
Despite everything else about him, Ozhma had actually been rather close to liking him before he said that. But the words did not so much cut her as fashion themselves into a huge fucking axe and embed themselves in her back.
It wasn’t the first time she’d been accused of that. How could it be? Once the Borrus Valley exploded, the rest of the Scar wasn’t far behind. There wasn’t a freehold, a town, a hamlet, or even a fucking hovel between here and the Valley that hadn’t been wracked by the Imperium’s and Revolution’s latest cock-measuring contest.
Nor was there anything new about that. Being crushed between the two powers was something every Scarfolk expected.
Normally.
But that had been before. Before the Valley and the Ten Arrows. Before the Imperial retaliation. Before the Revolution started conscripting every civilian they could find and forcing them into battlefields their bones would decorate and before the Imperium started burying entire towns alive.
And normally, she could let his words slide.
Normally.
“NO!”
But not today.
Her hands curled into fists around his clothes. Her thighs squeezed around his middle. Her entire body shook so hard upon his back that he had to stop and find his footing again.
“Take it back,” she said.
“Huh?”
“I am not a war profiteer. Take it back.”
“Look, we don’t have—”
“Take it back,” she said, making to hop off of his back, “or I’ll leave. You can do whatever you want about that, but neither you nor I will go one step farther unless you take. That. Back.”
There were many, many important lessons one learned in the Scar and almost all of them revolved around not angering things that could kill you. Not angering a tall, muscular, drug-addled son of a bitch with a weapon was number six. But there were also many, many things a woman like Ozhma was ready to get angry over.
And one of those things was letting someone else tell her what she was.
“All right, fine. I take it back.” He sighed, adjusted her on his back. “You’re a fucking saint for doing this. I’ll erect a damn statue of you and tell my grandchildren of your grace. Fuck me, sorry.”
Ozhma beamed, her mouth falling open in delight. “I didn’t know you were a grandpa!”
“I’m not. Can we go?”
“Oh, sure.”
Immediately assuming someone’s sincerity was not necessarily a hard lesson she’d learned, but it just made her life a little easier and also he was a tall, muscular, drug-addled son of a bitch with a weapon.
“And not that I’m trying to bring it up again,” he said, “but there’s a lot riding on us getting to the top of this mountain soon, so I’ve got to ask… is there anything that would make it go faster?”
She paused, thinking. “I always find trips seem shorter with a little pleasant chatter.”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“Well, why not? You’re asking me to help with a task whose exact nature you can’t tell me but which has a lot riding on it. I can accept that, but it seems just plain rude for you to ask that of me and not even tell me your name.”
Ozhma had only recently been promoted to representative-at-large in the company, but she’d found a truth that spanned across the many townships and cities she’d visited: be it Revolutionary, Imperial, Haven, or worse, people bought things the same way. The currencies changed—sometimes it was whiskey, sometimes it was trust, sometimes it was patience she asked for—but the sale was always the same.
And it started the same way in the man’s bristly face. Reluctance melted away into a sigh of smoke and exhaustion and—dare she hope—just a little kindness.
“Rudu,” he said.
“There,” she began to say, “now—”
“Rudu the Cudgel.”
Her lips puckered as those last two words sank into her.
The Cudgel.
The tattoos. The weird clothes. The bizarre weapon.
Holy shit, she told herself as her eyes widened and her brow glistened, holy shit, he’s a fucking Vagrant.
“That make you nervous?” Rudu asked.
“NO, WHY WOULD IT?” Ozhma shouted nonchalantly.
“If I wanted to hurt you, I wouldn’t be carrying you, would I?” He grunted, adjusted her on his back. “And if you didn’t want to hurt me, you could sit up a little, for fuck’s sake.”
“Right, I… I trust you,” she said and somehow believed it, a little. “It’s just… you weren’t kidding, were you?”
He took a deep drag of his pipe. “I wasn’t.”
“People are in danger?”
He held his breath. “They are.”
She swallowed, afraid to ask. “Vagrant danger?”
Rudu exhaled a shimmering cloud, pointed skyward with his chin. “What do you know about what’s on the other side of this cliff?”
She followed his gaze. The horizon of the Nails’ towering cliffs and mesas was stained dark here and there, the sound of distant earth shifting a bare whisper from this far away.
“It’s… New Vigil, right? The city?”
Rudu let out a bleak chuckle. “Yeah, it might have been that, at one point. Before people decided it was worth fighting over, anyway.”
Ozhma wrinkled her nose. “Fighting over? Really?” She glanced around the desolate cliffs. “Isn’t it out in the Nails? The place people very specifically avoid because it very plainly is not worth killing over?”
She herself had only traveled this close to the forsaken land because it cut a few hours off her journey. And because no one—a broad group including bandits, armies, and herself—thought it was worth fucking much. Ideal traveling, if you kept your eyes open.
“I didn’t say it was worth killing over.” He sucked on his pipe, let out a cloud of shimmering pink smoke. “I said it’s worth fighting over.”
Ozhma grimaced a little. “Uh, can you… maybe explain the difference?”
“Many years and wizard drugs ago, I could have.”
Ozhma’s chest tightened. She swallowed something bile-bitter. She tried to take a deep breath and tasted only the rancid reek of Rudu’s pipe smoke.
And for the first time since she’d taken this job, Ozhma began to think that, perhaps, things were getting out of hand.
It was a chilling thought. She hadn’t exactly lived a dangerous life—her parents had died horribly after she’d moved out, which by the standards of the Scar was considered lucky—but she’d never before felt that there was something she couldn’t handle. She’d learned how to run the family business, how to fend off debtors, how to stretch a piece of metal to its utmost limit, all before she was fifteen.
Honestly, even when her wagon had been stopped by a scruffy-looking weirdo who reeked of drugs and looked like he’d just mugged a beggar for his clothes, she hadn’t panicked. This was, after all, the same Ozhma who’d been waylaid by bandits three weeks ago and walked away having sold them some very fine whiskey and not had her head chopped off.
That was it, wasn’t it? she asked herself. That was the moment you thought you could handle anything, be it bandits or debtors or… or… Her eyes drifted toward Rudu. Or a fucking renegade mage high off his fucking ass on silkgrass asking you to handle a city—a whole fucking city—of people who are about to die and… and…
She glanced down the long and winding path that led back to the road, back to her wagon she’d carefully hidden, and back to Miss Malice, the ornery bird who pulled it that she’d left grazing on seed. She could make it there, she thought, and maybe pretend this hadn’t happened. She could force herself not to look back or think about it or ever acknowledge it. She could return to the office, tell them it was just another boring delivery, take a week of vacation to drink enough that the entire thing would one day be a vomit-soaked blur. All she had to do was run.
Well, not run, she told herself as her body began to sweat at the very idea of it. You could… I don’t know, tumble down? Roll? Jump? She squinted. Actually, no, all those would probably end in… like, dying. And there’s no guarantee that—
“You all right back there?” Rudu interrupted.
She didn’t know how to answer that. Not anymore. She didn’t know how to talk to a Vagrant. She’d never met one; she’d heard stories and they all ended the same way.
There were two outcomes to an encounter with a Vagrant: you either gave them what they wanted or you gave them what they wanted and they ripped your soul out, imprisoned it in a skull, and carried it around as a toy for all eternity.
That last one probably wasn’t true. But maybe it was? She had no idea. She’d never even met a legal mage, let alone a Vagrant. She wasn’t ready for this. She wasn’t capable of this. She was a sales representative! In the deep Scar! She sold whiskey to hicks! She couldn’t have this many people relying on her.
How many people were they even talking about? A hundred? A thousand? How many people were in New Vigil? How many hicks and drunks and shopkeeps and merchants and… and…
And people just like Mom and Dad.
A worm of a thought. It burrowed into her brain, that thought, made her think of the hard times. The times when sales were slow, when shipments were lost, when they had to come together and think of what keepsake to sell next.
The times when, somehow, no matter how bad things got, they still managed to feed her and give her nice clothes that she asked for, and that one week where they’d had Dad’s terrible dumplings because she loved them so much…
She didn’t know how many people were in New Vigil.
But there were probably a lot of them that knew hard times.
And, with a resigned sigh, Ozhma knew what her answer was.
Ozhma had seen exactly one weapon of war in her life.
Plenty of weapons—swords, hand cannons, the odd eviscerator-spoon here and there—but only one weapon made specifically for killing a lot of people in a short amount of time.
They’d called it the Journey of Four Thousand Indefatigable Strides. But that was really hard to remember, so most had just called it by the name she would hear often, spoken in the same hushed reverence one speaks of monsters.
Tank.
A great beast of metal armor and belching severium smoke, iron crab legs picking through the hills beyond her home, a horror of a cannon attached to the top of it. She remembered its great metal shudder when it came to a stop, the smoke-tinged hiss as it settled down and its iron hide split open to release soldiers into her city. They’d only come to restock, the gun had never even pointed in her direction, the whole affair had taken only an hour.
One hour with a tank had given her nightmares for years.
“Oh, my sweet heavenly fuck.”
Dozens of them sprawled before her.
She had the fleeting idea that they looked like toys from so high up here, iron soldiers scattered across the plains far below. Yet the blackened scars where their still-steaming guns had fired and the pall of severium smoke that hung around them, mantles on a war god’s shoulders, was thick. Some lay splintered into metal shards and smoldering wreck, the charred remains of their crews scattered like ashes.
It was a sight that made her breath catch in her throat. A horrifying sight. An awful sight.
And they were by far the least alarming thing.
She couldn’t call the marching flatlands a battlefield. Rather, the sight reminded her of a butcher’s shop: a mass of tangled iron machines and red meat and odors.
The scars of battle had worn away the land, the grasses chewed up beneath the treads of tanks and the churn of machine wheels, the trees sundered by gunfire. The sky fared no better, colored by smoke and the crackle of lingering lightning, decorated here and there with weapons and projectiles that hung lazily in the air and drifted idly by, punctuated by a blast of unearthly flame or the glow of violet eyes beneath.
She’d never met a mage before today. But she knew what magic looked like.
She just never thought it would be this horrible.
At the center of the disaster stood a great towering Marcher tank mounted upon treads, smoldering like a colossal torch. Across the stained and ruined land, the bodies lay: their uniforms and corpses indiscernible from flame, soldiers lay twitching beside smoldering machinery, purple flames burned impromptu pyres. Looming over it like a morbid specter, an airship—a horrific mass of wood, metal, and engine—hung over the battlefield, its engines filling the sky with the sound of locusts and its cannons poised at its railings.
Her mind went numb at the sight of it. The smell of shit and blood and metal and severium powder on the breeze. She didn’t even notice that the bodies of the two armies weren’t pointed toward each other.
Their aggressions were turned to the looming shadow at the edge of the plains, the great city of fire-scarred walls and ominous iron gates, whose battlements trailed smoke and were painted with dried blood.
“Is that…” Ozhma craned to get a better look. “Is that New Vigil?”
“Yes,” Rudu grunted, glaring up at her. “You fucking mind?”
“Oh!” Ozhma looked down at him and smiled sheepishly. “Sorry.”
She scooted back down to a comfortable position, draping her arms around his neck as he readjusted his grip on her legs and pulled her a little firmer onto his back. With a grunt of complaint, he continued carrying her up to the top of the cliff.
She didn’t take offense at his ire, but it did surprise her. Grassheads, in her experience, tended to be fairly relaxed after two bowls and catatonic after four.
Rudu had just finished his eleventh.
And he was still stressed.
She couldn’t blame him, she supposed. If she had previously seen the wreckage of the plains below, she’d probably need to smoke a lot, too.
Hell, it was probably only because she was downwind from him and his pipe that she wasn’t completely losing her shit over the span of their trek.
“What happened?” she asked, breathless. “What the fuck happened?”
“What’s it look like happened?” Rudu asked.
“Like hell took a shit on earth.”
“Whoa. That’s pretty good.” Rudu puffed on his pipe. “I was going to say that the Imperium and the Revolution both want that city bad enough to attack it at once and divide it up later, but I like yours better.”
“What do you mean? The Imperium and the Revolution have been trying to kill each other for longer than I’ve been alive. What could make them do that?” She blinked. “Hang on, the Imperium and the Revolution? Guns and wizards? Pointing in the same direction? How the hell is that city still standing?”
“They called a ceasefire last night,” he replied. “The dumb bastards behind those walls won’t give up. But the dumb bastards in front of those walls won’t stop killing each other. So now a bunch of dumb bastards, including you and me, are going to try to sort this shit out.” He exhaled a large cloud of smoke. “One day is all anyone is willing to wait. Come tomorrow, if negotiations don’t work, they’ll just level it and fight over the crater.”
“Well, that’s just ridiculous. You can’t have a ‘leveled’ field and have a crater, since a crater is a depression.”
“That is not helpful.”
“Grammar is always helpful,” Ozhma said, without pausing to ponder why she didn’t have many friends. “But, anyway, that’s good, right? Negotiations? Negotiations are good. Negotiations means people at least want this to end well.”
“Maybe. But ‘well’ for you and ‘well’ for two nations with enough guns and magic to wipe their ass with civilization are two very different things.”
“Okay, yes, true, but let’s… try to stay positive,” she said, wincing. “If people are willing to talk, then people are willing to listen. And if you can do both, then you can get done whatever needs to get done.”
“Huh. That’s pretty insightful.”
“Thank you. My mom used to say it,” Ozhma said, beaming. “So if they’re willing to talk, then you just need an envoy who’s willing to talk. Who are you sending?”
“You.”
“Oh! Neat.”
The next few seconds before Ozhma, blissed out on secondhand silkgrass, realized what he had just said would be some of the happiest of her life.
“Wait, what?”
“We’re here.”
It had either been the drugs or the sheer, desperate denial she was using to keep herself together, but without realizing it, they’d arrived at a camp. The road sharply leveled out onto a flat cliff that overlooked the plains, providing a view of the carnage. Military tents had been erected—self-serious blue of the Revolution a wary distance from the gaudy violet of the Imperial pavilion—and the air was alive with activity.
Messengers and clerks in Revolutionary uniforms rushed to and fro, delivering documents to a small fleet of overworked scribes who busily translated them into scrolls to be sent by messenger birds. Imperial mages sat in deliberate circles, their eyes aglow with their power as they stared into pools of water in which images of cityscapes and blood-soaked fields flashed. Multiple people with multiple medals of distinguishment argued, red-faced and furious.
But no one was killing each other.
Which, while ideal so long as she was in the thick of this, was nonetheless bizarre. She could fathom, with a little creative thinking, a cause that would convince the Imperium and Revolution to choose not to attack each other. But the idea of the two actually setting up camp together to talk damn near broke her brain.
Just like the fall from Rudu’s back damn near broke her ass.
“Hey!” She clambered to her feet, rubbing her amazing rear end. Rudu seemed to neither notice nor care, waving for her to follow as he entered the camp.
She hurried to stay close to him. As menacing as she’d once found him, Rudu now seemed like a big, sweet, drug-addicted puppy in comparison to the people surrounding her. Revolutionary commanders wielding bizarre weapons snarled at Imperial mages, glowing eyes impassive beneath their cold metal masks. These were people used to killing, used to not being bothered by killing. And, one by one, each and every one of their cold, appraising eyes fell to her.
Silence followed her through the camp, the heated arguments and the concerned chatter dying as the camp’s inhabitants watched her go. It unnerved her to be watched by people carrying steel. Always had. People like that had a way of looking at you—you caught it, if you paid close enough attention—like they were considering all the ways they could take you apart.
She abandoned any thoughts of running, then and there. She couldn’t bear the idea of even turning around. She couldn’t see their eyes; she couldn’t know what they were thinking.
“You’re late.”
But in another second, she did anyway.
She came to a paralyzed halt beneath a stare hewn and sharpened to cold iron knives. A hard-faced woman, features sharp enough to carve the skin off a serpent, with a proud jaw framed by black hair cropped in military fashion. A match for her short-cut blue coat adorned by stylish medals affixed to the lapel. The dried grime of battle lay upon her like it would on a blade: fittingly.
The arcane command structure of the Revolution made Ozhma’s head hurt to even think about, but she knew an officer when she saw one. They didn’t give big, fuck-off swords like that to just anyone, after all.
“Can’t be late if I didn’t tell you when I’d be back,” Rudu replied.
The woman narrowed her eyes. “You informed my aides that you were going out to”—she paused to cringe—“‘find some turd to flush down this particular shitter.’”
“And I found one,” Rudu replied.
“HEY!” Ozhma snapped.
Ozhma swallowed hard as the woman leaned over her, her terrifying face made even more terrifying by the hard shadow painting it.
“And you are prepared to accept this duty?” she asked, her voice as severe as her stare. “To accept the burden of negotiation and the lives that shall endure or end by your decisions?”
Ozhma blinked. “Um…”
The woman glared at Rudu. “You did not tell her?”
“Didn’t have time,” Rudu replied as he lit another bowl. “Gave her the basics: city, killing, lot of people dying because of you, that sort of thing. If I told her any more, I didn’t think she’d come.”
“Imbecile,” the woman hissed. “You dare bring a civilian into this without being clear to her of the dire nature of—”
“I want to help.” Ozhma tried to sound how she thought boldness ought to sound like. “I… I heard enough. If there are a lot of people…” She stood as imposing as someone of her stature could muster. “Then I want to try.”
The woman’s gaze softened, if only just a little. But beneath the iron layer of anger was a steel layer of discipline. She stood rigidly for a moment and offered a deep, formal bow.
“You have the gratitude of the Glorious Revolution of the Fist and Flame and of its Great General, madam,” she said. “And you have the honor of addressing Cadre Commander Tretta Unbreakable, servant of the Great General and his will in these circumstances.”
“Uh… hi?”
Tretta spun on her heel, began stalking toward the center of the camp and a wide pavilion set up there. She didn’t even bother to gesture to follow; she merely kept talking and left Ozhma scrambling to catch up to her.
“I will be as brief as I am able,” Tretta said. “The city of New Vigil is presently under the occupation and control of forces hostile to the Revolution. Revolutionary citizens are held within.”
“Among others,” Rudu added from behind.
“Others?” Ozhma asked.
“We have knowledge of Imperial, Scarfolk, and various freehold citizens behind the walls, as well,” Tretta replied, “but the bulk of the population is made up of Revolutionaries.”
“Lapsed Revolutionaries. Deserters.” Rudu offered a bored shrug to Tretta’s bare-toothed snarl. “You said she needed to be informed.”
“There is no such thing as a lapsed Revolutionary, merely Revolutionaries waiting to be returned to the embrace of the Great General.” She sucked her anger in back behind clenched teeth. “Regardless of affiliation, the citizenry present is unarmed and vulnerable. Our attempts to decisively take the city ended… un-ideally.”
Ozhma glanced back over the cliff to the horror on the field below. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“In the interests of reducing further casualties, we called for a ceasefire and the enemy agreed,” Tretta said. “We are not so naïve as to believe that treating directly with the enemy would result in anything other than carnage, hence mutual terms have been decided upon that envoys shall act in our stead, such as yourself.”
Ozhma’s head bobbed along, heavier with every word that sank into it. “Right. Okay. So I’m… an envoy. Okay. An envoy is a representative. I’m a sales representative. That’s basically the same thing. Basically the same thing. Basically the same thing.” She smacked her lips, wondering which word she would have to emphasize to believe it. Instead, she settled for looking to Rudu. “Right?”
“Oh. Yeah, no, just think of it like a sale except instead of making money, you’re trying to keep a small city full of people from becoming a pile of ash.” He tapped his bowl out on the heel of his sandal. “But yeah, basically.”
“Right. Good. We agree. Good. Great. Good, good, good.”
“It would be difficult to overstate the danger you’re walking into,” Tretta said as she came to a halt outside a lavish Imperial pavilion. “Only in the direst circumstances against the vilest of foes would we override the Revolutionary Mandate.” A grotesque centipede of an expression crawled across her face. “I truly never thought there would be such a day. Or a foe.”
She pulled back the pavilion’s curtains, exposing a decadent interior of exquisite furniture and hardwood flooring. The military accoutrements—the maps pinned to tables, the scattered documents and open manuals, the minuscule troops on the table—only served to heighten the room’s wonder. It was as though someone had simply magically transported an entirely furnished war room into the middle of nowhere and—
Oh, right, Ozhma thought suddenly. Mages.
If anything could diminish the room’s splendor, that distinction belonged to the pavilion’s sole occupant.
A woman, short and spear-slim, stood at its center. Her Imperial military coat and the longsword at her hip suggested she belonged there, but only just. Her hair, Imperial ivory, hung in greasy tatters, her figure stood slouched and defeated, her uniform looked as though she hadn’t taken it off in days. Bruises and scratches that had yet to be healed—or cleaned—dotted every inch of skin.
“The Three’s representative has been selected.” Tretta gestured to Ozhma, who stood trying to squint into the war room. “You represent Imperial interests here. Do you have any questions before she departs?”
The white-haired woman turned around and Ozhma cringed. Exhaustion colored every inch of the woman’s face a ghastly pale. Her chapped mouth and tear-stained eyes both hung slack, resignation exploded across her expression, as though exhaustion, horror, sorrow, and anger had battled it out and her face had simply collapsed under the weight of them all.
Whatever war this woman had fought, she’d clearly lost.
“This woman?” she asked, weary voice a match for her face. “You want to send a civilian in there?” She managed a glimmer of incredulity for Tretta and Rudu. “To her?”
“Hey, your envoy had a dick-nose but I didn’t say shit, did I?” Rudu snapped back.
Some fragment of emotion, some edge gone dull, scraped across her face, desperate to come loose. But it, too, fell beneath the weary weight on her face and disappeared.
“Send whoever, do whatever,” she said, turning her back to them, “I don’t care anymore.”
Ozhma didn’t realize she had been holding her breath until the curtain fell. The chill that slid over her was hard to shake off as Tretta turned and began to lead the way once again.
“She seems…” Ozhma struggled to find the word. “… Nice?”
“Our Imperial counterparts in this plan are less optimistic than we are,” Tretta said, her voice hardening. “Their leader has yet to arrive. Their commanding officer w
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
