Mercurial Page 2

  The Destroyer shrugged one shoulder, then lifted a hand, summoning a foot-tall flame with no visible effort. The light of it glinted off Sarai’s silvery crown and was swallowed up by the Destroyer’s black one. “It’s not as if I can’t protect myself.”

  Sarai clucked her tongue chidingly and raised her palm toward the flame, using her own magic—the ability to manipulate air—to create a vacuum that smothered it. The Destroyer dropped her hand and let the last few sparks die. The darkness washed over her expression again.

  “If you truly think you can protect yourself so well,” Sarai said, strolling over to join her sister at the railing, “then will you finally get rid of that one?”

  That one. She meant Tal. He didn’t look, instead continuing to scan the remnants of the city for potential enemies. He couldn’t quite tamp down the hope that stirred within him, though.

  “No. He’s mine,” the Destroyer said, a note of finality in her voice. Tal’s hope died. He clenched his jaw, being sure to keep his face turned away from the pair.

  He shouldn’t have hoped. He should have known better by now. Even if the Destroyer was willing to dismiss him, his oath couldn’t be so easily lifted. Some of the more malleable metals, in the hands of a skilled Smith, could be convinced to give up the promises they held within themselves. Gold or even copper could sometimes be reasoned with. But never iron. It would force him to stay close to the Destroyer and protect her for the rest of his life.

  In any case, he was sure that the empress hadn’t been suggesting he be freed from his oath anyway. When she suggested “getting rid” of him, she’d been alluding to a more permanent solution. He and the Destroyer didn’t spend much time in the empress’s company, but she never had liked Tal. And bad things usually happened to anyone Sarai didn’t like.

  A shadow moved in the darkness between train cars. Tal’s hands went to the hilts of his dual blades. He strained his eyes but couldn’t make out any further movement. Likely it was just a feral cat. Or, less likely but still possible, a villager who had survived the city’s punishment. He hoped it wasn’t the latter. Survivors were to be hauled back to the Alloyed Palace to face a mockery of a trial for whatever offenses their city had committed—in this case, supporting the rebel Saints—which would almost certainly end in a far worse death than being instantly incinerated, as most of the townspeople here had been yesterday.

  “As you wish,” the empress said, good-natured puzzlement in her tone as she conceded to Tal’s survival. She leaned against the railing and reached out to brush a stray curl away from her sister’s cheek. “You had another nightmare?” she asked.

  The Destroyer turned her face away, gazing over the rubble of the city. The dawn was breaking in full now, the murky light sharpening, defining the shadows in unforgiving lines and angles. “I’m fine,” she told her sister.

  Sarai pursed her lips in concern. “I’ll send for the Lord of Copper. He can do your next treatment on our way home today.”

  The Destroyer’s answering smile was thin. “Another injection? There’s no need for me to worry about assassins after all, when you’re the one constantly poking holes in me.”

  The darkness between the train cars shifted again. This time, in the growing bluish light, Tal was able to make out a human form—and the flash of a bronze mask.

  Heart suddenly pounding, he drew his weapons. A bronze mask meant a Saint, one of the zealots trying to overthrow the ruling class. Their assassins had been growing bolder than ever lately. Last month, one of them had succeeded in killing a lesser lady of the Platinum family. Maybe, just maybe, this one might be better than Tal. Maybe this one might be able to kill the Destroyer.

  He tried to tamp down the hope. As ever, he didn’t succeed.

  The Saint was closer to the Destroyer than he was. By the time Tal started running, the assassin—a girl, or perhaps a young woman by the way she moved, with brown skin and dozens of long black braids—was already a step ahead of him. A gleam of metal was in her hand, flashing orange with the light of sunrise. She was completely silent and as quick as a mooncat.

  He tried to slow his steps. Just a touch, barely enough to matter. It didn’t work. His oath demanded his best effort, shoved him forward as surely as a battering ram between his shoulder blades. He reached the Destroyer first, just as she turned to see what the commotion was.

  The Saint pulled her dagger back for the final lunge. She lifted off on her left foot and stabbed forward. The Destroyer inhaled sharply, the empress behind her just now looking to see what was the matter, as Tal flung himself between his charge and the assassin. He sliced one of his blades upward and the other one out.

  His left sword clanged against the lifted dagger. The small weapon spun away from the girl’s grip, flying uselessly into the ash of the city below. His right sword cut through the Saint’s shoulder, meeting bone. She gave a muffled cry of pain—which made Tal pause for half a second, trying to understand why the girl’s voice had sounded faintly familiar. But the girl didn’t slow, instead pivoting her momentum into a sideways tumble that took her between the bars of the railing. She landed nimbly on the street below. A charred piece of wood, which might have been a door, crunched beneath her.

  The Destroyer’s expression darkened in anger. She lifted a hand toward the Saint, who had found a nearby well and was now hauling herself over its edge, likely in an attempt to escape through the underground aqueduct that fed it.

  She wouldn’t escape. The Destroyer would stop her. And then she would kill her, slowly and painfully, her normal businesslike ruthlessness made outright cruel by the attempt on her life. Tal would hear the assassin’s oddly familiar voice—perhaps she was someone from his home village in the mountain ward—scream again and again.

  Rational thought left him, replaced momentarily by an instinct he couldn’t deny any more than he could deny his metal-sworn oath. He dropped his swords. He leapt forward. He grabbed the Destroyer’s uplifted hand in both of his. The flame was just starting to erupt from her palm, and instead of lashing out at the Saint across the street, it cracked into his own palm like a barbed whip. Agony arced through him. He gasped beneath the twisting weight of it and then locked his jaw, trying desperately not to scream.

  The Destroyer’s head snapped toward him, her eyes wide with shock. He hadn’t tried to step between her and her victims since those first few excruciating weeks. Her startlement took her focus away from maintaining the fire in her hand and the flame snuffed out. The two of them stood there for a second longer, staring at each other over their interlocked hands, until the empress stepped around her sister and slapped Tal hard across the face.

  His head snapped sideways with the force of the blow, making him lose his grip on the Destroyer. He staggered to one knee. The empress, like most Smiths, was much stronger than she looked.

  “You should’ve made him swear to respect you as well as protect you,” Sarai said, disapproval sharp in her tone. “How dare he touch you without your permission?”

  Tal stayed on the ground for a moment. He looked at the back of his left hand, the one that he’d used to snuff out the flame. No silvery blood dripped from it. The injury must’ve been instantly cauterized. He could hardly fathom what he’d done, what a massive risk he’d taken, unless he thought that perhaps deep down he’d wanted to finally be discovered as a silver Smith and executed. That, at least, would be one way out of his oath.

  He turned his hand over, but he couldn’t bear to look at his palm and averted his eyes at the last moment. When he looked away, though, his gaze landed on the Destroyer instead.

  She was staring at him. Her hand was still raised as it had been a moment ago, her long, delicate fingers curved slightly, like a pianist who’d been about to play a familiar melody. It was several long heartbeats before she lowered her arm. He couldn’t tell what emotion was flickering in her eyes. Usually he was good at reading her—he had to be—but now her expression was like a candle guttering in the wind, shifting too
quickly between rage, shock, and something strange and wild that he couldn’t quite name.

  Grasping the railing with his good hand, he climbed slowly to his feet. He cradled his burned hand against his body. He could feel his oath winding through him, tugging him toward the well, toward the threat against the Destroyer. He’d kept the Saint from being tortured to death, but now he would have to hunt her down and kill her himself.

  He swallowed and finally managed to pull his gaze away from the Destroyer’s. As if that connection had been the one thing keeping his pain at bay, the agony rushed in all at once, and he bowed over his hand with a long, hissing exhale.

  He would not scream. Not in front of these two.

  “You will go kill the assassin yourself,” the Destroyer said at last, her voice as unreadable as her expression. Her words were half a question, half a flat order.

  Unable to speak without crying out, he nodded.

  A rustle of fabric. A shimmer of something coppery and gleaming, stopped up in a small bottle. Tal lifted his head to see the Destroyer holding out both her hands toward him. One held the bottle, and the other was empty, waiting.

  Sarai clucked her tongue. “You’re going to use your personal healing tincture on him? You’re going soft.”

  The Destroyer quirked one eyebrow. “No one has ever accused me of softness.”

  Sarai shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, true enough.

  The Destroyer inclined her head at Tal, still waiting. He eyed the vial in her hand. It was a general-use healing tincture, which every Smith carried so they could heal their injuries quickly enough to avoid the risk of the rust phage, an infection that could kill those with metal in their blood. He didn’t know why she would offer it to him. He’d been injured in her service before, and had never merited such treatment in the past.

  But there didn’t seem to be a good enough reason to turn the medicine away, so he forced himself to hold his injured hand out. It shook when he laid it in hers. She pulled his fingers open—he couldn’t stop a short cry of pain then—and poured half of the little bottle over the injury on his palm. The pain instantly abated, his charred flesh flaking away, new pink skin growing rapidly beneath it.

  The Destroyer re-stoppered the bottle. “I can get more from Albinus,” she said to her sister, using the name of the Lord of Copper, who was also their cousin. “Meanwhile, Tal can’t hunt down an assassin with only one hand.”

  “You’ll come inside, then?” Sarai asked. “To your treatment?”

  The Destroyer tucked the bottle away in the pocket of her dress. “After a proper breakfast, yes.” Without looking at Tal again, she turned and gracefully climbed the stairs back into the train. Within the bronze monstrosity, which was Smithed for protection as well as movement along the magicked rails, she would be safe from any further attempts on her life.

  Tal looked down at his hand. The tincture she’d used on him had flakes of Smithed copper—the metal of healing—in it. When he brushed away the bits of metal and charred skin, his palm looked good as new.

  He can’t hunt down an assassin with only one hand.

  Briefly, he allowed his eyes to slide shut in despair. He tilted his head to the sky. He didn’t pray, because he hadn’t prayed in over a year and refused to start up the useless practice again now, but he did allow himself a few heartbeats of peace. Of stillness, before he had to go kill another of the Destroyer’s enemies.

  He could barely remember what it had been like for him before the oath. He couldn’t quite grasp the depths of his own naivety in swearing it. It felt as if an entirely separate person had presented himself on the palace’s great porch that day. The boy he’d been had trusted—impossibly, unfathomably—in a god who had promised to use him as an instrument of salvation for the whole empire. Instead, Tal had become an instrument of death to his own people, and to his own soul. He would never forgive his god. He would never forgive himself.

  Tiny flakes of ash dusted onto his eyelashes like snow. The warmth of the still-burning train station brushed across one side of his face, while the cool of dawn feathered over the other. He inhaled. Exhaled.

  And then he picked up his swords, leapt over the railing, and followed the Saint.

  TAL MOVED THROUGH THE BRICKED-OVER AQUEDUCTS with a grim sense of purpose. He focused on where he put his feet—avoiding the puddles of stinking water, avoiding the loose rubble that might shift beneath his boots—so that his journey through this silent underworld wouldn’t be tracked by his prey. He’d been on the assassin’s trail for nearly half an hour now, a quiet chase that had led him through a maze of tunnels and sewers and half a dozen seeming dead ends. The Saint was good. But she wasn’t quite as good as Tal.

  The spots of blood Tal had been following led through a shallow spot where brackish water pooled atop the bricks. Tal stepped around it, then knelt to examine a smudged print at its far edge. It was wet, less than a few minutes old, but it was smaller than the prints of the assassin. Which meant someone else was down here. Slowly, he turned his head.

  Speckles of sunlight speared through the dark from the places in the tunnel’s ceiling where bricks were missing. The light was hazy and gray, filtered through the still-settling rubble of the city above, but it was enough to illuminate the shapes of the several dozen townspeople who were huddled in a side tunnel. Their clothing was smeared with soot, their faces gaunt with fear. They stood motionless like rabbits before a wolf.

  The group stared at Tal. He stared back. A part of him, bone-deep and hidden, wanted to shrink away from the looks in their eyes. The only concession he could make to that part of himself was to glance back down at the puddle, bowing his head for the space of an exhale. It was meant to be a respite. Instead, he was faced with his own reflection.

  A tumble of dark hair. Impassive green eyes. Lean muscles, dark clothes. A thin slant of lips—an expression that reminded him too much of the lady he defended. He looked away.

  Then he stood and faced the group. He put a finger over his lips, signaling them to silence. Disbelieving hope flickered in their eyes. Not a single one of them moved or even breathed as he stepped further into the main tunnel, and further from them.

  The Destroyer had ordered that any survivors be arrested. But he’d only sworn to protect her, two years and a lifetime ago—not to obey her.

  A shadow rustled ahead of him. A gleam of steel flickered in one of the beams of ashy light, the only warning of an expertly-thrown dagger that was now spinning toward Tal’s chest. In an instant, Tal’s dual blades were in his hands, and he angled one outward even as he dove to the side. Clang. Metal struck on metal. The hilt of Tal’s left sword jerked painfully against his hand with the impact, but the dagger clattered harmlessly to the ground rather than spearing through his ribs. Picking it up and tucking it into his belt—because he knew better than to offer an opponent the chance to re-arm herself—Tal moved cautiously toward the shadow on the far side of the aqueduct.

  “Damn,” said a weak female voice, again faintly familiar though he still couldn’t quite place it. “That was…my second favorite blade.”

  Tal didn’t slow. He stepped over a smear of blood. It shone dully against the bricks and all over the assassin’s arm, which the girl was now cradling against her chest. The red-brown shade matched the blood that had begun to dry on the edge of one of Tal’s swords.

  The girl shoved herself backwards, muffling a curse when the movement jostled her injury. He couldn’t see much more of her than her clothes, her skin—a few shades browner than Tal’s own—and her tightly-curled, dark hair. Her face was hidden beneath her mask of rough, unworked bronze. He didn’t ask who she was. It would only make this worse.

  The assassin was panting now, trying to shove herself to her feet. “They said you were unstoppable,” she admitted. “I have to say, I didn’t believe it till now.”

  “I’ll make it quick,” was all Tal said in response. It was the only thing he could offer her. His tone sounded empty, betraying
not even a shred of the bitterness that ate away at him. Every time he had to hunt down another of the Destroyer’s enemies, every time he had to kill someone he would rather help, it ripped out another little piece of his soul. Someday, he reasoned, he would run out of pieces, and then it wouldn’t hurt anymore.

  He raised a sword. He spared a brief, regretful thought for the townspeople hidden in the tunnel at his back, hating to have so many witnesses see him this way. Then he swept the sword toward the girl’s neck in a quick, fatal arc.

  The girl ripped off her mask and thrust it forward like a shield. As she did, she shouted something. The clash of the sword hitting the mask obscured most of the word. Sparks erupted where the unforged metal met the steel of Tal’s blade, blinding him for a moment, and he jerked back to a defensive pose as he blinked the spots away. The girl wasn’t attacking, though. The force of the blow had knocked the mask out of her hands, and it now lay face-up in the puddle, brackish water seeping through one eyehole.

  It was then that Tal’s mind began to register what it was the girl had said when she’d lifted her mask. Tal. His name.

  He peered into the shadows before him, a strange tincture of dread and hope trickling through his veins. It had been a long time since anyone but the Destroyer had called him by name. Many nights, he’d lie awake fantasizing about what it would feel like to see a friendly face, to hear his name on the lips of someone he didn’t hate with every fiber of his being. But if the girl before him knew Tal in more than just the vaguely familiar way he’d expected, it would only make this infinitely harder and more painful than it would have been otherwise. Because the assassin had attacked the Destroyer, and Tal could even now feel his oath ghosting through the hollow spots between bone and muscle, ready to take hold and compel him to end the girl’s life if he refused to do it of his own volition.