They knew his name.
I didn’t aim; with Discordance, you don’t have to. I pulled the trigger, laid the shot right beneath their feet. The bullet streaked out. An instant later, it hit the wood. And an instant after that?
Well, I guess I ruined Ralp’s bar.
The spell kicked in as soon as metal hit wood. There was a flash of bright light. Then the air swelled and tore itself apart as a noise so loud it took on a rippling, shimmering shape exploded out into a sphere.
The kids were hurled aside. They flew like they had wings, tumbling through the air along with the shattered floorboards and chairs. Their screams would be drowned out by the spell if they had any breath left to make them. The girl struck the railing to the stairs and tumbled down them bonelessly. The boy skidded across the tables before coming to a halt against the wall.
When I hopped over the bar, I surveyed the wreckage. Tables were shattered, chairs were splintered, and where the bullet had struck, the floorboards had been torn up and the earth had been carved into a perfectly smooth bowl.
Discordance is a hell of a spell: not lethal, but hurts enough that you might wish it were. Imperials used to use it to suppress riots in the colonies before the riots became revolutions and nonlethal spells weren’t cutting it.
I found the kid lying next to the door, breathing shallowly. I glanced at his friends long enough to make sure they were, too. Might have been stupid to leave them like that, but I won’t have it said that I was so stupid I couldn’t think of a way to stop a bunch of punks without killing them.
Of course, they didn’t need to know that, did they?
I grabbed the kid by the lapel of his coat, slammed him against the wall, put my big, grinning gun in his face.
“Daiga tell you what this is?” I pressed the barrel up under his chin. “Daiga tell you about me?”
The kid, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, nodded feverishly back at me.
“You know what I’ve done with this, then,” I snarled. “You know I’m not going to ask you again. Where is he?”
“T-the old ruins,” he stammered. “Four hours east of here, at the foot of the mountain. I… I can show you if you—”
“I don’t.” I threw him to the ground. “I’m going to let you live, child. But you’re going to do something for me.”
“Y-yeah! Anything!”
“First, you’re going to tell me what you do for a living.”
“I’m an apprentice!” he said. “Scribe’s apprentice!”
“You need both hands for that?”
He looked at me weird. “Uh, no?”
And then he screamed as I brought the heel of my boot down on his hand and heard each finger break under it.
I suppose it would have been more poetic to make him swear to give up his life of crime. In truth, I’d tried that before in my more callow days. Enough scars and mistakes later, I learned that experience teaches best.
I didn’t kill kids, sure, but I also didn’t let them put weapons in my face and walk away unscathed, either.
“Second,” I said, leaning down. “You’re going to tell me what you’re going to tell your peacekeepers when they ask you who did this.”
Last thing you do if you want to know what a man is made of, you look him dead in the eye and listen when he says your name.
And the kid fumbled around it for a while, trying to find his way around the fear in his eyes and the pain in his hand, before he said to me:
“Sal the Cacophony.”
He sounded like he was going to piss himself.
I put my weapon away, pulled my scarf back up over my head, and made my way back out into the storm. There were going to be a lot of people here before too long with a lot of questions. I didn’t have time for that.
I had a mage to kill, after all.
THREE
THE SCAR
The rain cleared up fifteen minutes after I left Ralp’s, leaving me with the stink of damp earth and sodden grass.
Four hours later, just before dawn cringed and realized it had to look at the Scar one more day, I found the ruins.
And two minutes after that, I realized today wasn’t going to be a good day.
It had once been a fortress, I imagined—one of those collections of palisades, barracks, and towers that had once been crucial during the wars. Forts like these changed hands between the Imperium and the Revolution so frequently that no one could remember which side first built them. And after a few years of drenched autumns, freezing winters, and blazing summers had taken their toll, neither side wanted to claim the embarrassment of owning one.
Forts like these, you didn’t go to unless you had need for a ruinous, dangerous death trap of a hideout.
Daiga the Phantom, like any Vagrant, had plenty of need.
At the foot of the mountain, just like the kid said, there it was. Two big stone towers, their windows long dark and their stairs long crumbled, flanked a high stone wall, a great gash dividing it where cannon or magic had torn through it ages ago.
We came walking up to it slowly, my ears open and listening for any sound of ambush. When it didn’t come, I hopped off and took a good, long look over the ruined wreck of a fort.
“I figure he’s deep.” I pointed toward the towers. “He’s a Graspmage, so he’ll hide with things he can levitate. I bet he could pull those towers down on any mob that came looking for him. That’s the sort of effort he’s probably not willing to spend on one person, though.” I glanced back at her. “That makes sense, right?”
My mount glanced back at me. If she saw a flaw in my theory, she didn’t say anything.
Which made sense.
What with her being a giant fucking bird and all.
Four feet of legs ending in wicked talons, two feet of long, naked neck with big, angry eyes and a sharp, ugly beak, all connected by a fat sphere of coarse black feathers. Congeniality looked as mean, as dumb, and as angry as you would want a Badlander breed to look. The Scar isn’t a place for pretty birds.
At my continued stare, she let out a low gurgling sound.
“Glad we agree.”
I reached into her saddlebags, rooted around until I felt the familiar chill of three thick shells at the bottom of the bag. Thick as a rich man’s finger, made of pure silver, each one engraved with elegant bloodred script of a dead language.
Hellfire.
Hoarfrost.
Discordance.
Tried and true, with hundreds of corpses to testify. These were what you brought to fight a Vagrant. I pulled my gun free and flipped the cylinder out. I loaded all three chambers, fitting each one with a bullet, before I snapped him shut. I didn’t bother checking the sights or the hammer.
That sort of thing, the gun took care of for me.
I slipped him back into my belt, reached into the saddlebag one more time, and grabbed something limp and furry.
“Here you are, miss.” I tossed the dead rabbit to Congeniality. She watched it fall for a second before her neck went taut and her hooked beak caught the thing and started swallowing. “Not so fast, darling. Make it last.”
You can’t trust a Badlander to do much except survive. And I didn’t need this ornery girl running away, looking for food or doing anything except waiting patiently for me to kill a magical bastard. She’d take a few minutes to eat that rabbit, then at least an hour before she vomited the bones and fur back up.