Dream of the Falling Axe by Sam Sykes

Author:Sam Sykes [SYKES, SAM]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2023-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

NINE

Elsewhere

Nothing survives a war.

I don’t say that to be a dramatic, it’s just a truth. The most fundamental truth of conflict.

And it doesn’t matter who wins. When the defeated are ground underfoot, so too are whatever righteous or sensible reasons they had to pick up arms. When the victors throw rose petals for themselves, they bury all the ugly and wicked things they did to win. Battles become ballads. Scars become stories. Everyone eventually comes to agree on and believe in an acceptable version of things that keeps them sufficiently solemn without keeping them from sleeping at night.

Most of them do, anyway.

I certainly did, back then.

I try to cut myself some slack about it. I wasn’t just a soldier, I tell myself, I was Red Cloud. And while Red Cloud was my name, it wasn’t my name alone. Other people had a right to it, I thought—the Empress, the soldiers, the enemy. It meant things to them that it didn’t mean to me, and they wanted it to be the name of someone who could make war as palatable as they wanted.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I believed everything they told me.

But I believed a lot of the things I shouldn’t have believed.

Like the idea that this was one of those wars.

I was still believing it when I found myself in Ronat’s Regret five days after I was supposed to leave. There was a battle raging across the Scar—people I knew were bleeding, dying, and I wanted to be there to avenge them while my blood was still hot.

I’d awaited word from high command. Then I’d sent word to high command. And on that night—the night I think things really went wrong—I was in the midst of writing a very, very swear-laden retort to high command.

“Not until the mission is complete” was the official line for why I couldn’t leave that fevered hole of a city. Ronat’s Regret was ready to explode, and it falling to Revolutionary sentiment would have been a disaster that could change the course of the campaign. People in charge love fantasies like that—that you can predict and control a war like it’s a well-fed dog. Maybe I did, too.

But at the time, I was thinking only of all the shit I was being prevented from doing because some asshole just couldn’t be nice and break under horrific torture like everyone wanted.

A muffled shriek broke my concentration. I looked up from writing, my eyes drifting to the great doors of the warehouse, waiting for a too-curious asshole to come looking for the scream they’d just heard.

I held my breath, like I did every time she screamed.

And just like every time she screamed, no one came.

I suppose I hadn’t much to worry about, in hindsight. The city was on fire in the days after Agitator Vigorous, the Revolution’s best weapon in this region, had disappeared. The well-organized mobs that had all but seized control of the city proper were being broken down by emboldened peacekeepers.

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