A Blade of Black Steel

by Alex Marshall

  And then Keun-ju practically threw himself to the other side of the cushion pile to be away from her, and Ji-hyeon flushed with embarrassment. He had never rejected her so harshly.

  “I… I’m sorry, Ji-hyeon, I can’t,” he said, clutching the peatfire-damp napkin to his own silk-cloaked chest and staring down at his knees. “I want to, I do! But… I’m so sorry.”

  Of course. She was being selfish, so, so selfish; his wounds were even graver than hers, and engaging in even such a tender sport as fucking would likely exacerbate his condition. Considering her own injuries, what had possessed her to even attempt such a thing? A good climax or two relaxed her like not even saam or spirits, but that alone didn’t account for her lust; perhaps having come so close to death in the last two days had filled her with a better appreciation for the little joys of being alive, and a need to taste them as often as possible, since one never knew when one’s luck would run out.

  “I… I helped Sullen work things out with a smith, for the old man’s ashes,” said Keun-ju, his voice so small it could have been trapped under a thimble. “Took most of the day, but… He’s not so bad, I guess, and he thinks the Star of you.”

  Oh gods below, did they really have to talk this out now? It was just what she fucking needed, after the day she’d had… but as soon as her annoyance came, her heavy conscience chased it off. She’d created this situation, and it was time she owned it. But before she could, he was talking again, faster, desperate, but still as softly as Fellwing ministered to her hand.

  “It’s going to be perfect, the sword he’s going to give you, but we’ll need to take in the twin you didn’t lose so the smith can know what to do, weight and everything is so important with balancing a new blade, and—”

  “I have a stupid crush on Sullen, Keun-ju, and he’s got one on me, but that hardly means we’re going to run off together tomorrow and leave you all alone,” said Ji-hyeon, but guessing from the tears now racing down to the lace edging of Keun-ju’s veil that hadn’t been the best way to open the conversation. “Shit, Keun-ju, I’m really, really tired, and I’m not thinking straight. I love you. Before either of us says another word, believe that—I love you, and I’ve never stopped loving you, even when… even when people were trying to convince me I shouldn’t trust you, even when Fennec was lying about you, I still loved you. Nothing that happened between me and Sullen came from me not caring about you, I swear!”

  “What happened between you and Sullen,” said Keun-ju, nodding to himself as though that answered all his questions, then seeming to take heart from something else she’d said. “And what about Fennec, anyway? You forgave him for… for trying to keep us apart, didn’t you? So you clearly don’t treat all traitors and liars the same…”

  “I… what?” Ji-hyeon let her head loll over to the side as she surveyed her choked-up lover. “Look, do you want to talk about you and me, and me and Sullen, or do you want to talk about Fennec and Zosia? You have to pick one or the other, because there’s no way I can stay awake long enough for both.”

  Keun-ju didn’t answer, then darted his hand out to the table and grabbed the bottle of peatfire. His other hand undid the knot on his veil, and as it fluttered down his chin he knocked back a swig of liquor in one wracked-face gulp.

  “Keun-ju, really, this is getting ridiculously dramatic. Why don’t we turn down the lamps, take off our clothes, and cuddle in bed until dawn? I promise in the morning, before I do anything else, we can talk about everything you—”

  “Fennec didn’t lie to you,” Keun-ju gasped, breathless from the booze. “I did.”

  “What are you even talking about?” Ji-hyeon snapped, desperate to have him reseal the chasm that suddenly opened up in her chest with a simple explanation. He must be referring to something stupid she, Keun-ju, and Fennec had all been arguing about at some point, some disagreement with Fennec that Keun-ju had concluded with a white lie. It would be just like him to take the slightest stretching of the truth as a high crime when—

  “I did everything he accused me of, the day you ran away from Hwabun.” Keun-ju’s voice broke but his gaze didn’t, his wet eyes meeting her widening ones. “I told your first father… I told King Jun-hwan of our plan to escape, and I led the guards to the dock.”

  Ji-hyeon just sat there, slowly absorbing his words like a limp lump of bean curd soaking up sauce. He was still looking at her and she was still looking at him, but they’d both changed in a matter of moments. Instead of contorting her insides with regret, his tear-streaked face filled her with abject disgust.

  “And you lied to me, after Zosia brought you here,” said Ji-hyeon, her voice as low as his. “You swore you loved me, and you’d never betray me, and everything Fennec told me about you was a lie. You lied to me about everything.”

  “Not everything,” he said, though he had the decency to hang his head in shame. “I have always loved you, and everything I did was to keep you safe. I swear on my life I feared that stepping into the Immaculate Gate would be the end of you—everyone knows entering a Gate is certain death, or worse! Didn’t I beg you not to, over and over again? Didn’t I urge us to flee by boat instead? I didn’t go to your first father until the very day we were to leave, and only then when you refused my final entreaty to take any route but the Gate—if I thought there was any chance it would work I never, ever would have done what I did. And even at the end, when it was clear you’d get away despite my confession to King Jun-hwan, I would have gone with you into that hellmouth, if your second father’s guards hadn’t slowed me down on the dock and—”

  “I could have killed Fennec,” said Ji-hyeon, shivering with revulsion. “I was that mad, when you came into my tent with Zosia and told me everything I wanted to hear, that of course mean old ‘Brother Mikal’ and my second father invented stories to keep us apart. Of course you didn’t go to my first father, of course you didn’t betray us. I was so furious, Keun-ju, I actually imagined shoving my sword into Fennec’s throat, and if my mood had been a touch different when I confronted him…” Ji-hyeon laughed a little at the memory. “You know, when you came back and lied to my face and cried into my hair and insisted it was all a plot, I wanted to believe so badly I stopped reasoning altogether. When I cornered Fennec and told him what you’d said, he didn’t confess to anything you accused him of, he just said that he was sorry for trying to keep us apart. And I was so upset I almost did something stupid, hurting him or sending him away, and now that I think about it he never, ever lied to me about you, not once—it’s like he’s said from the day we left, I can’t trust you.”

  “You can!” Keun-ju cried, finally looking up from the cushions at his feet. “I swear, Ji-hyeon, the whole trip with Zosia I planned out how to tell you of my deception, but when I saw you… I didn’t want to hurt you, and so in my weakness I lied, yes. And I hated myself for it, for I knew I didn’t deserve your love, which is why… which is why I had to tell you. I couldn’t bear to live with my wickedness for another moment.”

  “No, you just waited until I spread my legs for you again,” said Ji-hyeon, “until I let you recite your love poems, until, come to think of it, my second fucking father rode into camp—that’s the only reason you’re telling me at all, isn’t it? Because you’re scared if me and Kang-ho and Fennec start comparing notes we’ll see that we were right all along, that you’re nothing but an oath-breaking traitor!”

  “No,” Keun-ju whined, “I swear that has nothing—”

  “You’ve sworn enough for one night, Keun-ju,” she snapped. “The hour is late and your general requires her rest. So get the fuck out of this tent and don’t you dare come back until I call for you.”

  Keun-ju didn’t protest, quickly hopping to his feet. “Where shall I stay until—”

  “Don’t give a fuck.” It took so much to hold in her furious tears that Ji-hyeon’s chest felt like a crossbow string winched into position. One with a hair trigger. “But I better be able to find you, Keun-ju, fast and easy—if you
leave this camp without my orders I’ll see that you’re given no quarter as a traitor and a deserter, from this day until my last.”

  “My… mistress,” he said, clumsily tying his veil back into place as he bowed in farewell.

  “Not anymore I’m fucking not,” she said, desperate to wound him half as bad as he’d cut her. “You are hereby dismissed as my Virtue Guard, Keun-ju.”

  He reeled at that, as though intoxicated by his own crocodile tears, and for the faintest sliver of a moment Ji-hyeon wished he hadn’t said anything, that he’d kept the secret of his deception until his dying day. He stiffly walked toward the tent flap, as though he could bear this with dignity, but in the end he evidently couldn’t, turning back to her.

  “But… but…” Keun-ju’s eyes were so big they looked like they might fall out of his stupid lying face.

  “Yeah, like you did such a great job at that anyway,” Ji-hyeon snorted. “I should have known about you, Keun-ju, I should have known. How far can you trust a Virtue Guard who drops his vows as fast as he drops his ward’s knickers? Be gone from my sight, oath-breaker.”

  Then she turned away, not so she wouldn’t see his heart breaking but so that he couldn’t see hers. Only when the flaps rustled and she faintly heard the guards bid Keun-ju goodnight did she let the tears flow, along with a frantic scream into one of her pillows. Then she nudged Fellwing away from her aching hand, barely impressed to see fresh pink scar tissue forming over the stumps where open wounds had loomed but a little earlier. She’d have preferred it turn gangrenous if it had meant Keun-ju had stayed true.

  As she turned down the lamp and collapsed onto her bed, the bugs in her blood goaded her toward dreams, but Ji-hyeon’s agony rebuffed the soporifics. Each time she nearly escaped her anguish a new memory would flash through her aching skull, making her heart race anew. All the nights on campaign she had lain awake, unable to sleep for wondering and worrying about Keun-ju. All the times she had conjured him through her lonely fingers or instruments, and later, when she had thought of Sullen while doing the same, only to bite her lip afterward as she wondered if a part of her wanted Keun-ju to be untrue, so she might love Sullen with an unburdened heart. The joy she’d felt when her Virtue Guard burst into her command tent before even Cobalt Zosia could gain it, and the relief when he’d later explained everything away with such convincing words. The taste of her first and one true love but two nights before, as she and Keun-ju reunited their bodies in this very bed. And on and on, until Ji-hyeon allowed herself an indulgence she had long denied herself over the whole, difficult campaign, something she had not done since the night her fathers had sat her down and told her she was betrothed to Prince Byeong-gu of Othean and must leave her beloved Virtue Guard behind on Hwabun: she cried herself to sleep.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Diadem burned, and Indsorith burned with her.

  Whatever the Chainites had stung her with after the poisoned wine had subdued her now filled her veins with magma, smoke belching from her every pore as they stripped her of even her steel nipple cups and satin underthings. Indsorith fought the poison in her blood, in her brain, in the chants of the unseen choir—the smoke wasn’t rising from her skin, but from the enormous statue of the Fallen Mother that filled the apse of the cathedral, the ikon’s coronet of burning flowers blooming orange and green as pungent black waves rolled out across the vaulted ceiling. Incense, the entire effigy was formed from incense. Stinking patchouli and sweet musk. Creamy sandalwood and hot clove. Sizzling hair and boiling blood. A familiar figure writhed in the smoldering lap of the statue, burning alive against the blistering monument, and for the life of her Indsorith couldn’t tell if the screams Abbotess Cradofil emitted to join the choir were born of rapture or agony or both.

  Indsorith closed her eyes, counted to ten, opened them again. And wished she hadn’t. The scene was the same, and while the faces of the bustling clerics were blurry, the details smudged by drugs and bugs and whatever else they had given her, there could be no denying it—this was really happening. She was the unwilling participant in some heinous ritual taking place in the Lower Chainhouse. She was probably the next sacrifice.

  From the first day of her rule, Indsorith had worked tirelessly to keep the Burnished Chain in check, thwarting quiet political machinations and raging civil wars with the same diplomatic resolve. The loyal old colonels of Thao and Azgaroth had counseled her a dozen times to eradicate the whole church, but having witnessed firsthand what came of such harsh solutions she had always refused, trying and trying and trying again to make peace with the Holy See and the Black Pope, to bring harmony to a fractured Empire. When she had forced Shanatu to step down as pontiff and his teenage niece Y’Homa had assumed the Onyx Pulpit, Indsorith had thought that Crown and Chain finally had a chance of raising a future together, instead of trying to wrest it from the other’s grasp… and now she saw just how wrong she had been.

  Pope Shanatu had been a truly evil man, willing to sacrifice anything and anyone to achieve his ends, but at least he had known that to cement the reign of the Burnished Chain he had to take the Crimson Throne by legitimate methods, lest the people rise up against the religious usurpers. Stacking her cabinet with Chainite stooges to undercut her authority was one means, open and legal civil war against her rule another, but he never would have risked such a blatant coup as this. This was assassination, plain and simple… or at least she assumed it was, as she watched Abbotess Cradofil burn alive on a smoldering effigy of her presumed savior. Now that Y’Homa had come this far with her revolution, Indsorith knew that execution would be preferable to any other uses the demented pope might find for the deposed Crimson Queen.

  Indsorith swooned from the fumes billowing off the enormous incense ikon, and when she was next able to lift her heavy head she saw she might not have to worry much longer. A robed figure wearing a mask in the visage of a black goat knelt over the weak queen, a red razor held in an iron-ringed glove. Crimson steel flashed close in front of Indsorith, the light of ten thousand candles and a burning god blinding her as the sacred blade dropped with excruciating torpor until its edge found where eyelash met lid.

  The papal barbers had steady hands, shaving her with the long red razors until her ample flesh bore not a single defiant hair, then they squeezed her into the hairshirt robe of a penitent. The crowd dropped to their knees as one, and Pope Y’Homa appeared through the field of the faithful, wearing only her opal-crowned mitre and a cape of ebon satin shot with diamonds, as though she wore the night sky upon her scrawny young shoulders and the full moon upon her brow. Her naked body was etched with an arabesque of sigils both dark and fair, some long-healed scars and others freshly carved into her palimpsest of flesh. Indsorith tried to speak, or at least spit at the Black Pope’s bare feet, but she could barely keep her eyes open, tendrils of smoke curling around her throat like a noose. The mad girl kneeled in front of Indsorith and solemnly addressed her, but she couldn’t make out her meaning, the words sounded like crackling flames, like a burning city. Then Y’Homa kissed each of Indsorith’s cheeks, and receiving a crown of grey roses from a nearby cardinal, she firmly planted it on the fallen queen’s bare skull, like a garland strung atop a maypole during one of the pagan festivals Indsorith’s mother had allowed the villagers to conduct back in Junius, in her youth, before the coming of the Crimson Queen…

  The Black Pope rose back up, towering over her former regent, and a great shadow fell over them all, as though some gross leviathan had risen up out of Desolation Sound, taken wing clear over the walls of Diadem, and now swam into the Lower Chainhouse. Y’Homa turned to face whatever hulking horror approached, but Indsorith couldn’t make it out, for the surrounding bishops and cardinals rose back to their feet, too, and pressed in tight around her. They melted a blazing waxen horn to the center of her scalp, and kissed her feet with tear-stained lips. When all was ready the clerics carried her up hemlock stepladders, and using braided ropes of hair, lashed her onto t
he metal saddle at the head of the enormous wheeled idol they had dragged into the cathedral. The silver and brass idol was as long as a city block, an overtly phallic battering ram pulled not by mundane oxen but by black-scaled, fire-eyed gorgon bulls captured in the swamps of Meshugg and tamed by holy herbs that turned their toxic breath into a jasmine-sweet breeze. This was how the Last Crimson Queen met her subjects for the first time since losing the Carnelian Crown but a day before; half-blind from the mix of melting candlewax and blood drawn forth by the thorny new diadem the Black Pope had fitted for her, and weathering apocalyptic visions that she prayed were but hallucinations brought on by the potency of insect and ritual.

  Out they came from the Lower Chainhouse, boring through streets clogged with the corpse-slack faces of her subjects. Through wasp-stung lips Indsorith gave silent thanks to see that while the crowds seemed to burn, too, the chill mountain air was sobering her up. The swaying mobs had initially seemed to belch smoke into the fire-bright night, but as she lolled her head around she saw it was not the citizenry who smoldered, but the city itself: many of the precariously tall buildings that bordered the avenues were aflame, waves of embers crashing upward to warm the freezing stars.

  Yet no matter how firmly she told herself to see past the illusions of the ritual and the intoxicants, she found it nigh impossible to separate the fact from the fantasy of the nightmarish scene. The harder she focused the more convinced she was that this was all really happening, despite how impossible it still seemed. One after another figures detached themselves from the heaving masses, scaling the front of the slowly rolling contraption and ducking into the widely grinning mouth of the Deceiver that capped the tip of the lewd effigy she was lashed atop. Indsorith’s mother threw another ring of drab roses at her before wriggling into the cavity, but others went less willingly, her younger brothers tossed up and into the maw by their chanting father. Zosia appeared from the crowd, and so did Sister Portolés, each nodding to Indsorith before taking their place inside, sacrificing themselves to the hellish rites of the Burnished Chain.