A Blade of Black Steel

by Alex Marshall

  Maroto’s last stand didn’t stay standing for long, the damn dirty ape-dogs taking him to the ground and working him over. Credit where due, as soon as he stopped fighting back they stopped clubbing him, and as he drooled blood and groaned they hoisted him up and carried him away into the jungle. Behind him, he saw the chief and the mock-Maroto ape-monster doing an admittedly fleet dance on the bank of the pool, shaking their rumps as they chanted.

  “Maroto, yeah, Maroto, yeah!”

  After that things got remarkably worse. Even en masse the creatures couldn’t keep him high enough off the ground, so his head and arse kept banging into roots and downed trees, and his raggedy armor of padded vest and banded skirt offered scant protection from the errant thorns and nettles. At an opportune moment he tried to wriggle free, but that only resulted in another beating, so he limply allowed himself to be carried steadily between the trees and soggy dells until they abruptly descended into a dark grotto, which soon gave way to a lightless cave. In here the air was closer, hotter, saltier, the chirps of his captors echoing through unseen tunnels and the quasi-human stench of their manky bodies making it hard to think straight, and now when he bonked his noggin it was on damp limestone instead of mossy logs. If all this ended at some weird feast with him as the guest of honor he was still prepared to forgive their shoddy treatment of him as an initiation ritual, but he wasn’t holding his breath.

  They returned to light after what seemed like forever, and it must’ve indeed taken ages because by the time his eyes had adjusted and he had taken in the blue sky and green sea they were already swinging him back and forth in their arms, with obvious intent. The devil came alive in Maroto then, because if he was going to die then he’d damn sure take a few of them with him, but it was too late. Before he could get a hand on a hairy wrist or bite into a mouthful of fur they’d released him, and Maroto went sailing off into the heavens.

  But only for a few seconds, like. After that, gravity caught him in her steady grasp and the natural balcony of stone that stuck out of the cliff face was lost to sight, and the crowd of dancing, laughing ape-monsters with it. Small mercy, sure, but he’d take what he could get. He was falling so fast he could feel the wind in his eyes, at the back of his throat, and he tried to twist in the air to avoid landing on his stomach like the last time. That he actually had the time to accomplish this small feat did not bode well, no it did not—as his gaze passed from the cliff zipping past to the crashing waves coming up to greet him, he saw he still had a few seconds to consider his imminent demise.

  This was the time for a man to contemplate his life, to weigh his victories against his failings, alone with his actions at the end of everything.

  Instead he cleared his mind, closed his eyes, and took a very deep breath, because at heart Maroto was an optimist.

  Landing in that shallow pool had felt like dropping onto a rock; hard, yes, but also neutral. By contrast, coming down feet-first into the sea bore a remarkable resemblance to having mauls smash into his heels, and as Maroto shot deep into the surf he was sure his legs had snapped like chicken bones in the hands of a hungry glutton. He kept going, deeper and deeper, and as he opened his eyes he found himself boring down farther than the sun’s rays. That was symbolism for you, Maroto Devilskinner diving to the places that not even the light could reach. Question was, now that he was slowing fast, was there any way he could come back up to the surface before his lungs gave out?

  Only one way to find out. Maroto swam for it, his every limb throbbing, the air in his lungs already forcing itself out with him barely started on his long climb to the surface. He resolutely tried to keep his mind from what aquatic horrors might be swimming up beneath him in the inky depths, but didn’t do a good job of it. Something hard brushed into his cheek, and having few other options he bit at it, hoping to dissuade whatever it was from investigating further. His teeth closed on a thin piece of smooth wood or bone, and he locked on to whatever flotsam had drifted his way, because a man with absolutely fucking nothing will cling to anything, at least until he can have a gander at it and judge its worth. It wasn’t big, whatever he’d caught, and having more important matters on his mind, he focused on swimming all the harder. Up he went, lungs on the verge of implosion, but relieved to feel his arms and legs obeying him, however reluctantly—he might drown, sure, but if he did he’d do so knowing it was through no fault of his own.

  For the second time that morn Maroto felt his raw cheeks plow up into the air and light, and keeping a firm grip on his unknown prize he gasped through his teeth. Looking down at it, he saw that of all the countless treasures of the deep he’d bumped into a pipe, and blowing out through it launched a tiny fountain of sodden tobacco and bilge into the air. Oh, but it was a fine thing to see those high cliffs and know that not only had the ape-monsters failed to kill him, but they’d inadvertently given him a new piece of briar for his trouble… but it would be finer still to contemplate his success on dry ground. Scanning about, he saw that the rocky cliffs yielded to a black beach a ways over there and, keeping a soft but steady chomp on the horn stem of the pipe, he started swimming.

  It was farther than it had looked, and every stroke he expected some dagger-filled mouth or clammy claw or overly familiar tentacle to close about him, but at long last his numb arm slapped down into sand, and then the other, and then the wave he rode rolled back out, leaving him floundering on the shore. When standing proved too much for his jelly-filled legs he settled for crawling, blind but for the floor of black grains shot with seashells that wavered beneath his weary brow. Onward he went, dragging himself when crawling became too much, until the surf no longer tickled his toes, and he collapsed panting on the warm sand. It felt soft as any pillow against his cheek and, listlessly looking down the shoreline, he saw blue crabs and black gulls and all the other little hints of supper that fill a hungry castaway with hope and joy. Against all odds, against all comers, Maroto had once again saved his own hide, since no god nor devil would do it for him.

  “There’s something you don’t see every day,” said an Immaculate voice from somewhere far away, but then a boot filled his vision and he realized he had his good ear planted in the sand. Another boot rolled him over on his back, which at least let him hear better. Through the blinding sunlight he saw a bedraggled Immaculate woman peering down at him, two more figures silhouetted behind her. He tried to speak but all that came out was another toot of sandy slurry from the end of the pipe he still held between his teeth.

  “This just gets better and better!” cried the Immaculate girl, glancing back at her fellows. “Take a look, this ugly merman’s been good enough to bring me back my pipe!”

  CHAPTER

  6

  In Diggelby’s posh tent, Purna turned the barrel-shaped bowl around in her hand, inspecting the small letters engraved into the underside of the pipe. An M and a Z, etched into the briar with a sure hand. This was some juicy material history right here: the Cobalt Queen had carved this pipe for her captain a lifetime before Purna had even met Maroto… before things had gone tits up between the old friends. It was heartbreaking, it was, to think how intently Purna had plotted to bring them back together, to repair those frayed bonds, only to be the catalyst for their final sundering.

  “Nothing else?” she asked Digs, not looking up from the rusticated bowl of the pipe.

  “Not really,” said Digs, sounding as run-down and heartsick as she was. They sat together on the cot where she’d finally escaped her fevered nightmares, awaking to a world every bit as mad as her dreams. “A few weapons, a few fewer coins, a few more empty bottles, and enough dirty laundry to launch a stench offensive against half the Empire. I didn’t even see a tubāq pouch or tools, just the pipe. Our fearless commander, the greatest hero of our age, left behind less of a legacy than a common thug.”

  “One, he’s probably not dead so stow the sob song already,” said Purna, sitting up straighter on her mountain of bedding to better boost her noble friend out of the d
oldrums they both stewed in. “Two, a legacy’s not the same thing as an inheritance, and even if he didn’t leave a nest egg for the poor and the needy of the Star he left the world something far more valuable: us. And third, I wasn’t asking if there was anything more in his tent, I was asking if you remembered anything else from their fight.”

  “Oh,” sniffed Digs, pacing around the tent that had always seemed so cramped to Purna when Hassan and Din were still around to share it. “No, it’s all a blur, like I told you. They were fighting, I was trying to stop you from bleeding to death—without any help whatsoever, I should point out—and to be perfectly frank I may have still been a teensy bit tipsy at the time. After it became obvious Captain Zosia’s devil wasn’t going to help you I had a heart-to-heart with Prince, and the next thing I knew… well, it doesn’t bear repeating. Maroto was gone by the time it was all over, and Zosia told me he’d gone off somewhere with Hoartrap. And that’s that, simple as sin.”

  “Simple’s the word,” said Purna, scratching at the bristly poultice they must have adhered to the wound on the back of her thigh. Digs and his talk of Prince being a devil who’d melted into her leg was straight up bug-talk, obviously, but anything that helped him come to terms with losing both his dog and his friends on the battlefield was peachy with her. She still hadn’t brought herself to look under the sweaty sheets at what the barbers had done to her, but whoever had fixed her up must’ve been a butcher, ’cause it felt like there were dozens of threads holding her thigh closed, and they itched constantly. Annoying, but not as bad as her tongue, which was so swollen from whatever bugs they’d dosed her with that she couldn’t enunciate very well, or close her mouth for more than a minute before she felt orally claustrophobic… but otherwise she felt fine. No, that wasn’t it—she felt better than fine, like she’d just got back from a weeklong retreat to the bath palaces of the Serpent’s Circle. “I tell you what, Digs, soon as the sawbones says I’m good to walk we have a chat with General Ji-hyeon, and Zosia and Hoartrap for that matter. And if the gang isn’t back by then, we ask for permission to track down Maroto, Din, and Hassan—pour out a bottle for them if they bought it in the battle, or pour them three if they somehow made it out.”

  “Capital,” said Digs, wiping his nose on a gilded sleeve, and Purna congratulated herself on a job well done—until they found out for sure what happened to the others, it fell to her to keep the emotional pasha from falling apart. “But what’s that about a sawbones and you walking places?”

  “Don’t tell me you got clocked in the ear, too—did the barber who worked on me say how long it’ll take for the stitches to come out? And you’ve chewed a basket or two of creepy-crawlies in your day, so how long do you think’ll it be till the swelling goes down? Feels like I’ve a mouthful of a fat man’s undergarments.”

  “Stitches?” Digs looked genuinely confused. “Swelling? Purna, I don’t… I don’t think you were listening, there wasn’t a barber, it was just Prince. The doctor who looked at you turned grey and said we’d be better off taking you to a priestess.”

  “Har har,” said Purna, wiping a snail trail of drool from her chin. “This is no time for pranks, Diggelby; the sooner I’m able to walk the sooner we can find our friends so—”

  Digs had fished out the compact looking glass he used for snorting rails of caterpillar powder and snapped it open in front of her. Purna drew back in horror, then laughed nervously. It sounded an awful lot like a growl. Commanding him to hold the mirror steady, she leaned in close and tried to remove whatever gross black leech they’d applied to her tongue… and after a few moments of poking and prodding confirmed that her life had indeed become a waking nightmare, screamed at the top of her lungs.

  They must have heard the howl that came out clear across camp.

  “As I was saying—”

  “Silence!” barked Purna, throwing off her blankets and twisting around to look at the back of her thigh. All those Raniputri meditative stretches her aunt and uncle had forced her to learn now paid off, because she was clearly able to see there wasn’t any kind of weird poultice stuck to her leg, but a patch of white fur blooming out of her skin. Not just fur, either: dog fur, the same exact ivory shade as Prince’s. Maroto had been right all along, then: devils were real, and they could indeed grant the desperate wish of their master. “Diggelby. You did this.”

  “I saved your life,” Digs said warily, backing away across the tent as Purna hopped out of bed naked as the day she was born. There was no soreness in her leg, despite being stabbed the day before, and she hunkered down to leap at Digs. Seeing what she was about, he tried to flee the tent, wailing, “I saved your life!”

  Purna took him to the ground in a trice, pressing him between her arms and legs, and her heavy mouth lolled over his lace-trimmed throat. His eyes were wide as he stared up at the monster he’d created, and she went in for the kill. Pasha Diggelby screamed, but there was no one left to save him.

  “Why…” he blubbered as Purna dragged her slobbery tongue up one cheek and down the other, making sure to wriggle the tip into his nostril on the return path. So she had a dog tongue now. That was something different. “Why, Purna, whyyyyyy?”

  “Just my way of saying thanks,” she told him as she relaxed her grip and let him wriggle away from her embrace. Sticking her new tongue out to its full length, she could clearly see it wagging in front of her face even without a mirror. At least she’d be popular with the ladies, and certain gentlemen. Those with a strong stomach.

  “You are so common,” said Digs, wiping his face and then dusting himself off. “If you’re well enough to… to be disgusting, I daresay you’re well enough to put on some fucking clothes and help me find our chums.”

  “Right-o, old bean,” said Purna, craning her neck to see if she’d been granted a tail or anything else even remotely cool as part of her unorthodox healing. Nothing, and a quick sniff of the stale air of the tent confirmed her nose didn’t seem improved from the icky transformation, either. Oh well, it could be worse—at least she wouldn’t have to tailor her wardrobe to accommodate her changes. “Why don’t you slip into something more flattering? If we’re going to be asking the general for a boon you don’t want to show up covered in devil slobber.”

  Purna tried to make the most of it on their hunt through the busy camp, but even after donning dark leggings to conceal her furry thigh she couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone was staring at her panting tongue. It could be much, much worse—what if Digs’s devil had been some sort of bird? Oh, or a crustacean? Ew. Ew ew ew. And besides, wildborn like Choi lived every day of their lives facing the same scrutiny, and often with far more visible… mutations? Transitions? Come to think it, she had no idea what the proper term for her condition was. She wasn’t wildborn, obviously, because she hadn’t come out of her dearly departed mother this way, but it wasn’t like there was a term for postpartum wildness. Or was there and she’d just never bothered to learn it? Purna considered herself a thoroughly modern sort of person, progressive, even, and it made her burn with embarrassment to realize that she might have even met individuals who were in the exact same boat she was, only to assume they were different by birth… Hold on a tick, for all she knew even Choi wasn’t born wildborn, so to speak. Maybe she was the victim of the same sort of unfortunate tragedy as Purna!

  Victims. Unfortunate tragedies. That was the exact sort of shitty language Purna had always railed against when discussing the wildborn, back before she’d been cursed with a devil dog’s tongue.

  Cursed? There she went again! Or was it okay to think about things this way, since she was now a part of the unjustly maligned group? Sort of? Maybe? Urgh!

  “She what?”

  General Ji-hyeon’s voice carried from a few tents away, and exchanging silly faces she and Digs broke into a trot—from her hostile tone it seemed unlikely the general would remain in the same spot for long. They came around the side of the command tent fast enough that the armed guards had their
steel half-drawn before Ji-hyeon noticed the new arrivals and waved down her bodyguards. Behind the four intimidating goons, the general was huddled in with a weird trio: her veiled boy toy, Maroto’s sour turd of a nephew, and Hoartrap the Touch. Not a one seemed remotely interested in welcoming Purna and Digs to their private party, but Purna had crashed far more exclusive bashes in her day.

  “Top of the morning, General, Digs and I were just—”

  “Not now,” said the general, turning back to her hushed meeting. Two of the bodyguards deliberately placed themselves in Purna’s way.

  “Come on,” Digs hissed, tugging on the vermilion sleeve of Purna’s doublet, but there wasn’t a beggar’s chance she was being turned down so coldly, not after sacrificing her very humanity for this woman.

  “Yes, now, if you please,” Purna said in her most imperious voice, though the effect was somewhat compromised by her need to bob her head around to see the general past this great armored oaf. “Diggelby and I are on a desperate errand, a matter of life and bloody death, in your name, but we can’t get on with it until we’ve reported to our general, can we?”

  The general slowly turned away from her conversation, the camp seeming rather quiet all of a sudden, save for the creaking of the bodyguard’s armor as she looked over her shoulder, presumably waiting on the order to dent Purna’s brainpan. Hoartrap sniggered and, with the solemn silence good and bally well dashed, the general rubbed at her eyes with her one good hand, the other looking a proper fright of bloody gauze.

  “I’ll grant you one breath’s worth of blather,” said General Ji-hyeon. “Come on, be quick about it.”

  “With the immediate Imperial conflict resolved, Pasha Diggelby and myself seek permission to break ranks and launch a private search party for Maroto, Din, and Hassan,” said Purna, and though she’d already exhausted her breath, added for the sake of clarity: “You know, our people?”