Darrish the Flint.
I flipped to another page. And another name glared back at me.
Yugol the Omen.
More maps, more logs, more pages. More names.
“This is…,” I whispered, but my mouth hadn’t the words for what I was looking at.
“A gesture of goodwill,” Jero finished for me. “You’ll find there the movements of three individuals that we believe are of some interest to you, including last known residences, aliases, and acquaintances. I prefer to think of this as a gesture of goodwill. My employer considers it proof of concept, though.”
I looked up at Jero. “What concept?”
He smiled back at me, softly. “The concept that nobody is beyond the reach of Two Lonely Old Men. He was the most powerful baron of the most powerful freehold in the eastern Scar. Now he’s simply someone with a lot of money, a lot of time, and a burning need.
“You can take those papers if you’d like and use them however you see fit,” Jero said, gesturing to the papers in my hand. “Mind you, the information is only accurate up to two months ago—my employer thought it foolish to hand you everything—but it should prove adequate enough for what you want to do. You can take those papers, find those names on your list, and kill them in fairly short order.” He sniffed. “Or…”
He let that word hang in the darkness, giving way to a silence so deep I could hear the blood rushing through me, my heart pounding at the realization of what I held in my hands. And I wondered if Jero could hear it, too.
Because the smile he shot me was the sharpest thing I had ever felt.
“Or… what?” I finally asked, my voice breathless and cold.
“Or you could have more.”
He approached me slowly, his boots crunching on the scorched timbers, until he was close enough that I could see him clearly in the dark.
“You could have every name on your list. Any name you want, he can find it. No matter where they hide, no matter who protects them, no matter how far they run, Two Lonely Old Men can find them. He can give them to you.”
He raised a pair of fingers to my face. I didn’t stop him. I didn’t know why.
“You can find the people who gave you that.”
His fingers grazed the scar that ran down my right eye. And in response, I could feel it burn.
“And you can give them worse,” he whispered, “so much worse.”
And that’s when I knew what kind of man Jero was.
He had a pretty face, a sly tongue, a sharp smile—but that’s not who he was. This close, I could see the wrinkles that faintly mapped his face: the strain of a brow too often furrowed, of a mouth too often set in a frown, of eyes that had seen more than they should.
I guess it sounds clichéd to say I know a killer when I see one, but it’s true. And it’s not like I held that against him—there were, after all, many killers in the Scar and a few of them were good friends of mine.
It’s not killing that makes a man wicked or good. It’s how he carries the killings. And it’s a cruel fact of a cruel world that the wickedest and vilest of men sleep soundly and smile easily. Jero’s wrinkles told me he hadn’t slept soundly in a very long time. Whatever kills he’d made, he still carried them.
Maybe he always would.
I guess it sounds insane to say that made me trust him more, but that, too, is true. And so I met his weary gaze and I asked.
“And what does he want in return?”
His smile fell. And his eyes followed. And the weight of all those kills came down on him like stones, and when he spoke again, it was from a deep place.
“Same thing you want,” Jero said. “Revenge.”
FOUR
LITTLEBARROW
Scions.”
At his breathless whisper, Sal glanced up at Meret. She was seated on the sill of his window, as she had been since they’d arrived, staring out over the village. Beneath the soot caking her face, her smile was a broad white scar, another one to join those twisting across her face.
“Scions?” she chuckled. “I didn’t take you for religious.” She glanced over him. “Or an Imperial, for that matter.”
He wasn’t religious or Imperial. He’d only gathered as much as he had about the Scions, those fabled first mages who founded their respective arts and enjoyed immortal reverence throughout the Imperium, in idle banter with the few Imperial patients he’d come into contact with.
But the story this woman had just told him demanded some kind of response and he’d already used all the curse words he knew by the time she’d paused.
Vagrants were dangerous business. Everyone in the Scar knew that. Just as everyone in the Scar knew that when a Vagrant got within ten miles of your village, you should immediately leave and return to whatever ruin they left behind when they got bored and moved on.
For a long time, Meret had been content to let them remain precisely that: some kind of amalgamation of unpredictable wild beast and fictional haunt used to frighten children into obedience. He’d never once considered, in all his time here, that they carried the same scars as anyone else, the same pains, the same traumas…
“Trauma…,” he whispered.
“Huh?”
“The, uh, ghosts you described.” He cleared his throat, looked up from his work. “Injuries sometimes, uh, take a toll on the mind. People sometimes see manifestations or hallucinations of people, sometimes doing familiar things or acting unusually.” Suddenly very aware of her stare on him, he chuckled nervously. “I once treated a woman with a bad hip who claimed to see her husband standing in the corner a lot. It turns out the accident that injured her had killed her husband, and she was, uh… she was feeling guilty.”
Sal the Cacophony took her leg off the sill. Her boot struck the floor with a resounding crack of leather against wood. She tucked her thumbs into her belt, tilted her chin up, and regarded him through a stare as long and cold as midnight.
“Do I look like I have a guilty conscience?”
Meret knew a trap when he heard it.
He looked over the Vagrant. Tall and lean, she resembled a blade that had seen too many battles and not enough care. Her leathers—from her shirt to her boots—were caked in dried blood and dirt where they weren’t torn or ragged. And the expanses of skin they showed were decorated in injury: scratches, gashes, smears of blood from her or someone else.
Beneath those, though, older injuries clung.
She was used to moving with them, he noticed. Anyone else probably wouldn’t have noticed the way she put her weight heavier on one foot than the other, the way her right arm was more tense than the left, the squint in her right eye. The scars, old and thick, patterned her body like a map, telling him not where she’d been, but all the pains that would follow her wherever she was going.
She didn’t look guilty. But she looked like she knew regret intimately.
Of course, telling a Vagrant with a huge, fuck-off gun any of that seemed like an especially stupid idea.
“No,” he said. “But it happens a lot of ways. Even little scratches sometimes leave big wounds on someone’s heart. Or soul, or mind, or whatever you want to call it.”
Her gaze softened slightly. Her voice followed.
“How do you heal that?”