“Kang-ho?” Maroto tried not to show his surprise, and figured he did an adequate job—he might not be able to sing, but he could act the pants off anyone, when he felt the need. “Suppose he must be quite the local hero in the Isles. He’s one of the Five Villains, right?”
“Is or was?” asked Bang, a shrewder critic than he’d anticipated.
“I don’t know much about how the tale ends in Immaculate songs…” said Maroto, and then was pulled from the fire by Niki-hyun.
“You remember,” she told Dong-won, “that’s the regiment he’d start in about, every time we sighted the western shore on the way down to the Dominions.”
Dong-won tried to shush her but the damage was done.
“Sailed with the dread seadog Kang-ho, did you?” A terrible thought occurred to Maroto, one that damped what little fun he’d been having with the Immaculates. “Was he on board? Did he go down with the Queen’s Sneak?”
“Queen Thief, and no, I never had the pleasure of sailing with that particular living legend,” said Bang, though the warning look she gave Niki-hyun hinted at an interesting song. He was just relieved to hear that the one Villain who had always done all right by him was still drawing breath. Probably. What a shame Kang-ho had never joined his daughter; it would’ve been something to have the whole crew back together, if only for a night… “You were telling us of indomitable Azgarothians and your plucky band of ten thousand nobody-we’ve-ever-heard-ofs?”
“Sure I was,” said Maroto, getting up with a groan and hobbling over to the pile of green coconuts the Immaculates had cut down. It was a careful dance, with coconuts—they had the only drinking water you could trust on a new shore, but if you gulped down too much too quickly you’d soon be putting out more than you took in, and not in a pleasant fashion. “Craziest fight I’ve ever come through. The Imperials went totally apeshit, killing each other instead of us, eating people alive, and all the while this rank smoke was rising from the field, till you couldn’t see the shield in front of your face.”
“That so?” Bang asked as Maroto returned to his seat. “You wouldn’t happen to have a strong taste for drink or bugs, would you, Useful?”
“Too strong for my own good where the crunchy crawlers are concerned, and just right when it comes to drink, but that wasn’t it,” said Maroto, and because he knew his tale was too wild to tell any other way but straight, he caught himself and amended the story to include all the gory details. “Well, I’d had a sting or two beforehand, but it wasn’t just that. Unless you’ve heard of a bug trip so potent it’ll open a Gate under your feet and catapult you clear to the Sunken Kingdom.”
“Jex Toth,” said Niki-hyun, and when both Bang and Maroto looked at her, she looked down and said, “That’s what they called the kingdom before it sank, and it ain’t sunk no more, so…”
“Let me get this straight,” said Dong-won, apparently not interested in semantics. “You’re telling us you fought some Imperials down in the Empire, then you went into a Gate in a place where everyone knows there ain’t no Gate, and Woo-chi’s your uncle you land on the Sunken Kingdom.”
“On Jex Toth,” said Maroto, winking at Niki-hyun, “and Woo-chi’s who now?”
“It’s an expression,” said Dong-won, crossing his ink-sleeved arms. “Point being, your song’s got more holes than a customs agent’s pockets. You keep telling us this place’s crawling with giant monsters, so how come instead of getting et you swam in on the tide, same as us? And why’d a smart guy like you jump into a Gate?”
“I may have had some help going into the Gate,” said Maroto irritably. “Yesterday. And after spending a bad night on the headland I may have had some help going over the cliffs into the sea, too, by those very beasties. Lucky for you that I did, or you wouldn’t be enjoying my company.”
Dong-won snorted, but Bang said, “Well, I count it lucky that he brought my pipe back. How’d you pull that trick, Useful, did you bat those pretty eyes of yours at one of the sea monsters who wrecked my ship? Maybe employ that quality cocksmanship we’ve heard so much about to trade your stiff piece of meat for my stiff piece of briar?”
“Didn’t see no monsters,” said Maroto, unable to stop himself from momentarily reliving the experience of sinking down into the cold, lightless reaches of what he now knew to be the Haunted Sea. He didn’t need his consummate acting skills to shudder convincingly. “Was just bobbing under the surface and I caught it in my teeth, luck is all, like you said. But back to your ship going down—how’d that happen, exactly? I didn’t think even Immaculate pirates were brave enough to sail into the Haunted Sea.”
“They gutted us from below,” said Bang, solemn as an alms-begging monk now that she was talking of her tragedy instead of mocking his. “These… things, great, big… things. With pincers and hooks and all plated in shell, but it was a soft sort of shell, your cutlass passed right through it… The queer part was they scarcely noticed us, even as we tried fending ’em off. All they wanted was to take the ship apart, plank by plank and bolt by bolt, but then our lookout, Hae-il, he must’ve come to in the crow’s nest and lost his senses, because he cast his signal lantern at one of ’em, and then the whole ship went up in flames. We carry a lot of rhum…”
Bang turned her face from the fire, but not before Maroto saw a familiar shimmer in her eye.
“We carried a lot of rhum,” she said, quieter now. “I dove over the rail just as she blew, and even then I barely made it ashore, the water just teeming with… things. Different than the ones that boarded us, smaller and meaner and hungrier. Sharks that weren’t sharks and devilfish that were more to the devilish than the fishy, if you follow.”
“I lost my boot and most of a toe,” said Niki-hyun, which explained her limp when she’d helped Maroto up from the shore. “And my sister.”
Dong-won didn’t say what he’d lost but from the wracked frown on his face as he abruptly stood and turned away from the fire, looking out to the moonlit sea, Maroto supposed it had been a someone rather than a something. It got quiet around the fire, and then for some reason the words came spilling out of Maroto’s mouth, like steam released from the boiling cauldron of rage and grief where his heart used to be.
“I lost people yesterday, too. A couple might’ve turned up after I left… gods and devils, but I hope Choi is all right, and Din and Hassan, and my kinfolk, of course. Purna, though…” His throat closed near as tight as his eyes, but he had to say it, because one of the many things that girl had taught him was that pain was a poison, and if you didn’t let it out it would grow and grow until it was all you had; that was how he’d treated Zosia’s memory all those years, not as something cherished and warm, but as an ugly, cold weight in the center of his soul. He would never, ever let Purna become that; instead he would share the glory of her song with anyone who would listen, not just until the day he avenged her but to the day he died. “Her name was Purna Antimgran, Thirty-ninth Tapai of Ugrakar, and she saved my sorry life more than once. She was clever and quick and more fun than you ever had in your sorry life, and she died because I was fucked up on bugs when I should’ve been protecting her. She was my best friend, maybe the best person I ever met, brave and loyal and utterly mad, and she died because she trusted me. She’s dead, and I was betrayed by my oldest friends, and now I’m here, and that’s my whole fucking song. I told you I couldn’t sing.”
It was even quieter, only the waves and the hissing of damp wood thrown on hot coals breaking the stillness. Maroto opened his eyes and wiped away the tears, because even with her pale, shuddering body bleeding out in his mind every time he thought he’d got a handle on his shit, just talking about her chased that awful image away, let him remember her the way she was before he’d gotten her dead. She’d have fucking loved this, stranded on the Sunken Kingdom and hunkered around a campfire with real pirates, and he laughed a snotty, tear-clogged laugh to picture her sitting beside him, cracking wise and coconuts in equal measure. Wave after wave broke upon the black
sand, and Maroto looked out at a sight no citizen of the Star ever had, not in his time nor his father’s nor any living folk’s, not since the Age of Wonders: the stars lighting up over a tapestry-perfect beach on Jex Toth.
“I think…” Bang said carefully. “I think the crab’s all right to eat, people.”
“Eh?” Maroto turned back to the Immaculates and saw them ravenously cracking into the electric blue crabs they’d roasted some time before but apparently hadn’t touched the whole time… other than the crab claw Bang had tossed him. The tumblers clicked into place. “Oh. Well, fair’s fair, but I’m last in line far as testing fresh water and such goes, then.”
“Initiation test,” said Bang, tossing him a spindly leg and keeping the rest for herself. “From here on out, we all draw straws when something’s in question.”
“And let me guess who holds them,” said Maroto, breaking into the leg and getting a mouthful of shell and a matchstick’s worth of meat.
“That was some song,” said Dong-won, still standing as he split a carapace between his thumbs. “But there is no Thirty-ninth Tapai of Ugrakar.”
“What?” Fast and foreboding as lightning over a clear sky, Maroto slipped into his battle calm. Used to be he had to be in the thick of it for that hyperawareness to take hold, but here it was, and he was so disappointed he could have wept. The big man hadn’t seemed so bad, but absolutely nobody got to besmirch Purna’s memory and walk away with their lying mouth intact.
“Either your friend’s a liar, or you are,” said Dong-won casually, but as Maroto floated slowly to his feet the pirate must have caught a whiff of his impending arse-beating and changed his tune but fast. “Ask Niki-hyun, you don’t believe me—our old boss’s hubby was half-Ugrakari, so we had to learn all sorts of titbits about the place so’s not to embarrass him or us. Ugrakar’s got thirty-six Tapais, just like their Temple’s got thirty-six chambers—one for each noble house, and the Living Saint who founded ’em. Common knowledge to anyone with a real connection to the place.”
Maybe the burly pirate was speaking true and maybe he wasn’t, but that was irrelevant to Maroto as he stepped calmly around the fire. That jab about having a “real connection” just earned this loudmouth one of Maroto’s patented scars, which were apparently all the rage down in the Serpent’s Circle. Best of all, he wouldn’t even have to pay for it. Niki-hyun and Bang began rising, too, but it was far too late for anyone to save Dong-won, barring something truly fucking calamitous like a giant monster running up on them.
Some lugs have all the luck.
The jungle had fallen utterly silent, when Maroto knew firsthand from his wretched night in the eucalyptus that this place was a regular Tennegarian concert hall of shrieks, howls, chirps, splashes, and swishing underbrush. Wild places only go that still when a predator stalks, and a dire one at that. The starlight shifted on Dong-won’s slowly jawing mouth, the pirate still talking his shit, and Maroto’s head snapped around to see the attacker moving through the underbrush behind him.
Except there was no underbrush behind him, nor an attacker disturbing the shadows as it crept forward. There was just the open beach leading down to the water, but the slippery shadows deepened over the pirates’ firelit faces, wavering like palm fronds…
Maroto’s eyes rose up, up up up, even as his arms lashed out in either direction, one hand pushing Bang into Niki-hyun and the other shoving Dong-won arse over teakettle. Maroto was diving over the fire, but seemed to be getting there in no kind of a hurry, the humid air turned to treacle, and his sluggish eyes finally caught the moon-slick edge of one of the enormous ivory wings that propelled the thing down upon its prey. It fell upon him, fast as sin, even as Maroto tumbled through the air with the speed of grass growing in a shady plot… and then it snatched him, crushing the wind from his frail mortal form as it drove him into the burning sand at the edge of the fire.
Then it was gone. Maroto spit up hot sand, scrambling away from both fire and starlight long before his rattled skull even realized that the monster hadn’t actually touched him, that it was the force of its beating wings alone that had slapped him out of the air. As he slithered past the barrier palms and into the closeness of the jungle, he looked back. It wasn’t to make sure the pirates were following his sterling example, because his brain wasn’t up to thinking anything nearly that coherent, but just to make sure it wasn’t right on top of him again.
It wasn’t, the horror skimming out over the waves now, but when he saw its outline against the night sky, the amorphous, airborne behemoth white as sun-bleached bone, he felt more than a little like a field mouse sneaking a peek at an owl. The sight of it plunging into the surf and rising with what might have been a dolphin or a shark grasped in its slithering train of tendrils did little to dispel the sensation.
Far as sensations went, though, being in fear for your life beat apparently running into a mangrove tree at full tilt. He bounced backward, and for a moment there it really seemed like fright alone would keep him upright and moving. Sometimes not even terror is enough, and Maroto ate sand for the second time in a few dozen seconds. Though every fiber of his being wanted him to wriggle deeper into the shadowy undergrowth, all he could do was dimly register that the grit in his mouth was a little earthier and damper here, back from the beach a bit. Then the boughs overhead spread with sadistic slowness, and the shadow, the pale shadow…
“I take back what I said,” Dong-won hissed as he held back the branches so Bang and Niki-hyun could reach Maroto. “You are useful.”
“And let’s try to keep him that way, yeah?” whispered Bang, helping Maroto to his feet. In low tones that did nothing to hide the quaver in her voice, she said, “After lengthy consideration of your proposal, Useful, I have decided to suspend all nocturnal fires for the foreseeable future. Hiding deeper in the jungle also seems prudent. Any other advice you might offer to your captain during this unprecedented period of open suggestions?”
“Aye, Captain Bang,” Maroto wheezed. “I suggest we all shut the fuck up till dawn.”
Her gilded teeth flashed in a patch of starshine, and though it may have just been a taut branch snapping back across as they helped one another hobble deeper into the dense undergrowth, Maroto thought the pirate captain might have swatted his rump.
CHAPTER
15
When the sawbones finally let Ji-hyeon leave the medical tent for the second time in twenty-four hours, her ass was about the only part of her neither bruised nor broken, nor swollen from injury or insect. Her left hand, as she’d surmised from the gross clicking sounds it made when she moved it, was broken in several places. The raw fucking agony that had slowly but surely replaced the queasy lightheadedness of Diggelby’s bug was also something of a giveaway; she’d known it must be bad indeed, to even begin to compete with the hurt that radiated outward from where her nose had been. Of course, the barbers told her it was still there, but she wasn’t convinced, and declined their offer of a mirror. The expression on her second father’s face had been enough to convince her that she didn’t really need to know exactly how bad she looked, on top of feeling as bad as she did.
What a garbage day, and, as Fennec reminded her when he ambushed her on the way out of the white tent, it still wasn’t over—she had her interrupted morning meeting with her cabinet to resume, albeit several hours later than originally planned. And down a member of said cabinet, too, but Fennec was too polite or too cautious to bring that up, though if he knew enough to find Ji-hyeon at the barbers’ tents he certainly knew what had precipitated her arrival there.
“Obviously you’ll go over the main points with the principal captains,” Fennec said as he, Ji-hyeon, and Choi slipped their way up through the dark camp, the snow still steadily falling and the refreezing slush turning the avenues between the tents into frozen creeks. “But if there was anything you wanted to run past me in private, I would be happy to offer my counsel.”
“Yeah, okay,” said Ji-hyeon, and in the shimmer
ing torchlight bouncing off the snow and ice she saw him perk up. It had been so long since she’d taken him into her confidence that he probably made the noises out of habit rather than expectation. “Do I execute her? I feel like I kind of have to, now.”
“Well…” He didn’t look so happy to have her boxed ear anymore. “You don’t have to do anything.”
“Not an answer, Fennec.”
“That she went behind your back is certainly cause for concern—”
“Goes, Fennec. Not went, goes. Constantly. Murdering prisoners is fucking psychotic, but right now I’m less worried about her owlbatshit bloodlust than I am about her trying to run things under my roof.” Floaty and nice as the centipedes had made her, the specter of Zosia didn’t bring Ji-hyeon down from the clouds so much as darken them into charged and flashing thunderheads. “She and Hoartrap convening about the new Gate and Jex Toth and everything before I’ve even heard word one about it is so fucking wrong I could spit, but do you know who else Zosia talked to before she told me?”
Fennec thought about it. “Singh?”
“What? No! Not that I know of, anyway, but I wouldn’t be surprised—she told brotherfucking Colonel Hjortt!” Ji-hyeon nearly slipped but Choi caught her elbow, allowing Ji-hyeon to continue instead of breaking something new on the frozen ground. “Zosia swore an oath to serve me, and I find out she’s sharing the most crucial intelligence of this whole campaign with the enemy commander before I’ve even heard about it! What the fuck is that?”
“A very big problem, as you say,” said Fennec. “It’s even worse than I suspected.”
“Oh goodie! I wonder what the shit you’re hinting at, Fennec—could it possibly be something your beat-up, bug-stung general would rather hear about directly than have hinted at all fucking night? Hmmmmm?”
A Blade of Black Steel Page 17