Then again, he could have killed me. And we wouldn’t have been in this mess.
So, if you think about it, it’s really his fault.
A cold wind blew across the valley, sending my scarf whipping about my face. I pulled it up tighter over my head, stared down at his body, and wondered if he knew he was going to die like this when Cassa the Sorrow had pulled him into her gang.
My eyes were drawn to the great manor looming over the kingdom of cracked earth and dead trees that was the valley. Well, once-great manor. Long ago, some aristocratic Imperial fop had made it his vacation home among gentle brooks and rolling forests. War with the Revolution had found its way here, dried up the brooks, set fire to the forests, and the dilapidated estate had been left for whatever human scavengers could claim it.
Which, today, was a Vagrant whose name I had written down on a list long ago.
I’d tell you what she did to end up on that list, just like I’d tell you what that list was for. But given that I had just killed five people, I’m guessing you can probably figure it out.
I left the corpses in the dust as I walked toward the manor. My eyes drifted toward the boarded-up windows, searching for crossbows poking through the slats. But all that greeted me were shadows. Shadows and a big-ass pair of doors.
I stared at them for a moment, smacked my lips. I reached into my belt, pulled a flask free. I took a long swig and let the whiskey burn its way down my throat.
“No snipers,” I grunted. “They must have heard the bugle, though. So you figure that Cassa either doesn’t have enough weapons to go around or not enough thugs to use them. She hasn’t had time to recruit and arm herself. She came here in a hurry.”
I stared up at the crumbling, decaying manor.
“She’s scared,” I muttered.
In the cold, I could feel his warmth even more sharply than I normally could. Something burned at my hip, seething in his leather sheath. In a rattling brass laugh, the creature that always accompanied me spoke on a voice of smoke and flame.
“She should be.”
“Right.” I sniffed. “Still, she’s heard us coming. I’ll bet she’s waiting for us behind those doors, with whoever she’s got left, right?”
I reached into the sheath, pulled him free.
The Cacophony stared back at me through brass eyes.
“What do you say we knock?”
You’d call him a gun to look at him—a black hilt, a brass chamber and hammer and trigger, a barrel carved in the shape of a grinning dragon. But that’s only because you didn’t know him. He wasn’t like the crude hand cannons and gunpikes you see in the hands of fallen soldiers who thought too much and outlaws who thought too little.
The Cacophony was more than a weapon—particular in his tastes, elegant in his sensibilities, and absolute in his destruction.
“Let’s,” he hissed.
Also he talked.
So, that’s pretty weird.
I nodded, flipped his chamber open. I reached into my satchel and found a silver shell of a bullet. I ran my finger over the script on its surface.
Discordance.
Sloppy. Noisy. Perfect.
I slid the shell in. I slammed the chamber shut. I felt the Cacophony burning in my hand as I raised him and aimed him at the door.
And I pulled the trigger.
I know you’ve heard the tales about him—about the lone Vagrant’s grinning gun that shoots magic. Maybe you’ve heard the bullets that fly from him are enchanted, sorcerous, spellwritten. Maybe you’ve heard stories about what happens when that lone Vagrant pulls his trigger—laughing fires light up the sky, freezing ice blossoms in patches, walls of sound erupt and drown the screams of those people they sweep away like human trash every time the Cacophony fires.
They’re good stories.
But nothing like seeing it in action.
The shell flew from his barrel and struck the doors. Discordance erupted an instant later. The air rippled, wailing wind and cracking earth going silent in the wake of the percussive force that erupted to thunderous life. The force sent my scarf whipping about my face as a symphony was born into shrieking life. The Discordance shell tore earth apart, split timbers into splinters, sent shards of wood and rock flying as it punched a hole through the doors.
The stories you’ve heard are mostly true.
Mostly.
Loud as it was, I could still hear the screams.
The wall of sound dissipated after a moment, leaving behind a faint ringing in my ears and shattered timbers falling from the jagged hole torn through the doors. I waited a moment—for outlaws to come out with brandished blades or for a flurry of crossbow bolts to answer me—before I was convinced no one in there could kill me.
I sniffed, flipped the Cacophony’s chamber open, and fished three more shells out of my satchel: Hoarfrost, Hellfire, and… Steel Python?
I shook my head.
Not Steel Python. Just because we were trying to kill each other was no reason to get desperate.
I exchanged it for a Sunflare shell and slipped it into the chamber, slamming it shut and sliding the Cacophony back into his sheath. Sword in hand, I walked through the jagged hole, through a veil of rising dust, and into the manor-turned-fortress.
Scattered ancient opulence greeted me: overstuffed chairs that had been broken down into kindling, tables once used for decadent feasts repurposed as barricades, various portraits of various Imperial ancestors torn and turned into bedding. On either side of an extravagantly large living room, staircases rose to a balcony overlooking me. Once, before age and necessity had taken their toll, this manor must have been quite stately.
And, you know, before it was littered with bodies.
Cassa’s boys and girls lay scattered across the floor. Discordance had flung them, their weapons, and their makeshift barricade all over the room. Some lay groaning with twitching limbs, reaching for fallen swords and gunpikes. Others lay screaming, shards of wood lodged in legs or ribs from landing on a shattered banister or jagged plank. Some simply lay, motionless, soundless.
I paid them only as much attention as it took to find the least injured.
I wasn’t here for them.
I found him, a grizzled-looking older fellow, inching across the floor, using the only limb that still worked. His trembling hand reached out for the heavy arbalest lying nearby, fingers shaking. He let out a scream as my sword came down, punching through his hand.
I’d have felt bad about that.
You know, if he hadn’t been reaching for a weapon to shoot me with.
I waited for the screaming to abate to a whimper before I squatted down beside him. He looked up at me, his face mapped by a respectable amount of scars and wrinkles—no wide-eyed youth taken in with the romance of banditry. I was dealing with a veteran. Hopefully that meant this would be easy.
“Where’s Cassa the Sorrow?” I asked.
“Fuck… you…,” he spat.
But you know what they say about hope in the Scar.
It’s about as much use as a hand with a sword through it.
“He’s feeling pugnacious, isn’t he?” the Cacophony giggled from his sheath. “Draw me. Let us show him our diplomatic skill.”
I refrained from taking that advice. While I had no doubt that the Cacophony was indeed skilled in diplomacy, I also knew that his definition of diplomacy usually involved shooting people until the ones left alive gave him what he wanted. And while that was occasionally tempting, I knew a better way.