“Your wish is my command, General.”
He was right; she didn’t like it at all. By Hoartrap’s own excited admission, it was such a risky gambit he’d never heard of anyone employing it since the Age of Wonders… and if the old crackpot described it as risky, she could rest assured it was probably more like insanely dangerous. It certainly sounded like a really bad idea, the sort of thing she never would have considered a few days before, no matter how confident Hoartrap sounded. But as Ji-hyeon followed him out into the too-bright, too-cold, and far-too-loud outdoors and saw the faces of her faithful bodyguards and the countless soldiers clustered behind them, some rattled and others grimly resigned, she knew she didn’t have a choice anymore. A trapped fox will risk anything to escape the snare, even if it means gnawing off her own leg. She just prayed one leg would be enough.
“Don’t. Move. A Muss. Ull.”
Not the words anyone ever wanted to awake to, and especially when sharing a tent with Pasha Diggelby. Still, it was better than if he’d stayed silent, because Purna was just about to brush the stray hairs or whatever they were off her face when she heard his voice, and more than the words, the tone. She did as he’d suggested, not even opening her eyes, the tooting horns and hollering that began to crowd her ears now that she was good and conscious barely registering over the now-distinct sensation of tiny, prickling legs moving down her forehead. One of the twiglike limbs slipped into her nostril, hopefully by accident, and the rest of the legs went dangerously still as whatever they were attached to steadied itself. Purna didn’t breathe, but she couldn’t bally well stop her heart from pounding, or, even worse, her nose from twitching as the sneeze built with evil inevitability. She thought of herself as a cool, collected veteran of a hundred horrors, but in the moment all she could think was get it off get it off get it off get it off right now, and then her face began to contort under the pressure of the sneeze, jagged, slightly hairy legs tensing hard against her skin as—
“Gotcha!” cried Diggelby, a rough hand grazing her cheek just as Purna sneezed. “Naughty, naughty!”
Purna thought it went a long way past naughty, finally snapping her eyes open to see Digs leaning over her, clutching something in his silkmail gauntlet. It squirmed, and then she recognized it as the bright blue scorpion he and Maroto had dosed themselves with before the big battle. She hoped it was the same one that had escaped just before they’d headed out to fight, anyway, and that it hadn’t reproduced in the interim. What with everything else that had gone wrong, she had completely spaced on the venomous land lobster being loose in their tent.
“Diggelby,” Purna gasped, cold sweat belatedly beading on her brow as she squirmed off her cot, putting some distance between herself and the foolish fop clinging to a spastically twitching scorpion that barely fit in his gentle fist. “You have five seconds to crush that flipping bug before I crush the both of you.”
“Not on your life,” said Digs, snatching the cuff of the long, supple glove with his free hand and removing it with a practiced flourish, the scorpion an angrily twitching ball trapped at the end of the inside-out glove. “What kind of a tapai are you? The Ugrakari worship a scorpion messiah.”
“The biscuit we do,” said Purna, grabbing up one of her riding boots to bash the bug out of his hand. “The Raniputri might still cozy up with insect gods, but the First fucking Chamber of Ugrakar is the renunciation of superstition.”
“Renounce superstition?” Digs stumbled backward as Purna advanced on him and his arachnid-squirming glove. “Is that what you call worshipping a lich king?”
“Shows what you know—the Living Saint isn’t a lich or a king,” said Purna, swinging her boot at Digs’s wrist but going wide of the mark when she stubbed her toe on one of the remaining prizes of the pasha’s shield collection. “It’s not like he dances at festivals or anything; after he established the Last Chamber he sat down to meditate in the Cave of Amokkshan and he’s been there ever since.”
“When you’re right, you’re right,” said Digs, maneuvering around toward the flap of their tent. “Fallen Mother knows, basing your entire way of life on the teachings of an immortal wizard isn’t superstitious at all.”
“That he might not be immortal is the whole point,” said Purna, giving up the chase when she nearly stepped in Diggelby’s half-finished bowl of porridge and decided to settle for stealing his breakfast. “The monks don’t let anyone in to see him, and that’s how he remains alive forever—because nobody’s checked to see if he died. That’s the Seventh Chamber, by the way, the impossibility of knowing that which you have not experienced.”
“Well, I’m sure to someone who eats the dead that probably makes much more sense than the Chain Canticles,” said Diggelby, warily watching as she sat back down on a chest and began shoveling handfuls of his salty, malty porridge into her mouth. “That’s yesterday’s, by the way.”
“Is it?” Tasty as the mush was, she hadn’t noticed the crunchiness came from ice crystals. She set the bowl aside and licked her messy cheeks clean; one nice thing about her bloated-feeling dog’s tongue was the ease of post-meal cleanup. “And whatever you’re imagining we do with our deceased, it’s wrong, I’m sure. There’s nothing savage about it; we throw them a huge party, children running every which way with baskets of flower petals and bright-colored dyes, tossing handfuls in the air as the throat singers eulogize the dearly departed. And then they’re carefully prepared by the local Gatechef, and they give us their final gift—the strength of their flesh. It’s the only meat devout Ugrakari ever consume.”
“When you say it out loud like that, doesn’t it seem a little weird?” asked Digs as he transferred glove and scorpion into the small terrarium that had previously housed his bamboo worms, and then popped open his makeup trunk and sat down to put on his face. Ever since Purna had slacked off on wearing her signature corpsepaint Digs had suddenly found the style quite in fashion; leave it to the upper crust to always want to bite the style of the street. “And I don’t mean weird in a bad way per se, but as a wee pasha I took the Chainite sacraments like every good little Imperial noble, and I’ll be the first to admit chewing up some blood-drenched communion wafers at least borders on the superstitious. I mean, have you ever… you know, eaten someone? Like, someone you knew?”
“Of course,” said Purna nonchalantly as she shook out both boots to make sure Digs’s little friend hadn’t deposited any babies in there. “One of my first memories is my parents’ homecoming, probably because it was the only time I sat at the head of the table. My aunt and uncle love to tell the story of how just when the Gatechef brought out the first platter I jumped up and…” Purna felt an unexpected lump in her throat as she remembered Aunt and Uncle’s stern but loving faces, and how she must have shattered their hearts into a hundred million pieces with her betrayal. “… Never mind. It’s tradition, is all, not superstition.”
“Oh. Wow,” said Digs softly, and perhaps mistaking her sudden melancholy as arising from talking about the untimely death of her parents, which had happened so long ago it didn’t much bother her at all, he tried to shift the topic a stroke or two to the left. “So, yes, tradition not superstition, and perhaps not much stranger than those of the Burnished Chain, I’ll grant you, but why are the officiants called Gatechefs? It’s not like there’s a Gate in Ugrakar… or is there?”
“We all have a Gate inside us, Diggelby,” said Purna, pulling her boots on. “Thirteenth Chamber. The First Dark’s something we all must face, and we carry it with us from our first day to our last. That’s why the Living Saint named the holyfolk who cook our corpses Gatechefs—they are the ones who complete the circle. Our ancestors draw us out of the First Dark, using the alchemy of flesh to usher us into the world of mortals, and when we die the Gatechefs prepare our flesh to be taken back into eternity through the mouths of our descendants. From the bodies of our family are we born, and into the bodies of our family do we return. Homecoming.”
Diggelby considered
this as he finished applying his snow-white foundation and opened the pot on his black lip paint. “I take back what I just said, and revert to my earlier position: that is way weirder than anything the Chain practices.”
“I didn’t say I believed anymore,” said Purna, annoyed that an Imperial clown like Digs thought he had any kind of leg to stand on where ridiculous pomp and ritual were concerned.
“You didn’t say you didn’t, either!” said Digs, as though this were some great rhetorical victory.
“Yeah, well, according to the Thirty-six Chambers of Ugrakar the First Dark is at once unknowable and familiar to every mortal, a place of infinite tranquility, but the Burnished Chain is pretty fucking adamant that the only thing on the other side is straight up hell, full of devils and torment, and since a bunch of our buddies got swallowed by a Gate day before last, I know which possibility I prefer,” snapped Purna, but immediately regretted it as Digs banged his makeup case shut, his blackened lower lip beginning to tremble. Bad enough Maroto still hadn’t returned, but yesterday’s thorough canvassing of the barbers’ tents had confirmed that Hassan and Din, like so many others, had probably never walked off the battlefield. She tried to think of something to console her friend, to console herself, but came up with nuts—what would Maroto do, at a grim time like this? Probably find a distraction, be it a bad pass or a worse anecdote, or best of all, a big honking fight to take their minds off the subject of Gates and dead friends and—
“Quickly, comrades,” Choi called from the mouth of the tent, the wildborn poking her head inside to reveal a sharp-toothed grin that Purna had learned could mean only one thing: what the woman referred to as an opportunity to earn honor. “Have you not heard the song of war rising through the camp? The Thaoan regiment marches against us, and we must meet their disgraces with our tusks!”
“I did think it was a little loud,” said Purna, buckling on her kneepads as Digs slipped into his worn, stained battle caftan, “but figured I was just hungover.”
“All the more cause to move faster now,” said Choi, then asked, almost cautiously, “You have not discovered sign of Maroto, either?”
“Not yet, but if he’s not back by tomorrow General Ji-hyeon said we might be allowed to join an expedition to find him,” said Digs, kneeling over the scorpion’s terrarium again now that he had his kit on. “In the meantime, I’d better take a double dose in his honor.”
“You should come, too, if you can—with your help we’ll find our boy in nothing flat,” Purna told Choi as she stood up and cracked her knuckles. “But save the scorp for later, Diggelbugs, you heard the lady—we’re already late to the party, and I don’t want to miss a single dance.”
Not the best catchphrase, and Purna knew she could do better, but all the same she thought Maroto would’ve approved.
“You something! Oi, runt!”
Sullen opened his eyes with a groan, the few hours of sleep he’d offered his aching body not nearly payment enough after two exhausting days without rest. He’d fallen asleep propped up against the side of the blacksmith’s anvil, watching Grandfather burn, and his aching back and neck informed him in no uncertain terms this had been the worst possible bed he could’ve made for himself. The catfish-whiskered smith loomed over him, and continued in his guttural accent.
“You sleep something something not my business, something something something Cobalts something battle I cannot forge something something blade.”
It took a moment for Sullen’s numb brain to parse what Crimson words he understood from the jumble, and the horns and cries and stampeding soldiers outside the makeshift smithy translated the rest. The Cobalts were under attack, and between the far-off bugles and the new Imperial regiment that had arrived the day before, even a sleepy Sullen could figure out what was happening. They’d had one whole day off from fighting, and now ten thousand more angry Outlanders were bum-rushing the camp, when half that number probably would’ve been enough to finish the job even if most of the Cobalts were better rested than Sullen himself. And while his beleaguered friends and their fresh foes were already marching to meet one another on the valley floor, he’d been snoring on the upper end of camp. Sullen was beginning to feel kind of like his uncle—never around when people needed him.
The bleakness of the situation brought Sullen immediately to his feet, though he still felt dazed and disoriented. Knocking back the bowl of raw eggs the gruff smith offered Sullen helped a little, but while he’d raided a lot of nests in his day, the slimy, sour yolks didn’t taste like the produce of any fowl or lizard he recognized.
“Something something don’t want to know, runt!” said the smith, perhaps reading Sullen’s thoughts as he took back the bowl with a black-gummed grin—small wonder he favored such a breakfast; the shaman-blooded man didn’t have a tooth in his mouth. Sullen muttered his thanks over a sulfurous burp and, shaking his legs out, quit the smithy but quick. Although the snow had stopped and the sun was out, the morning was cold as spring on the Frozen Savannahs. Just the way Sullen liked it.
The rows between the tents were mostly empty by now save for low banks of dirty snow, though a few other soldiers came slipping down from higher up the camp. As he picked his way down the icy slope toward the confluence of horns and bugles in the still-tent-obscured valley, Sullen saw more than a few haunted faces peeping out at him from dark tents. He felt a surge of revulsion at their cowardice in hiding from the clash that was clearly about to go down, but then remembered how he must have looked to the Cobalts when he came skipping along through the lists after he and Grandfather had helped Zosia protect the plateau behind the camp. For all he knew the soldiers he saw tying up their tent flaps from the inside had fought like seawolves at the Battle of the Lark’s Tongue, and the wounds they’d incurred necessitated their sitting out this fight. Maybe, maybe not, but it wasn’t Sullen’s concern—the important thing was that he didn’t avoid what was probably shaping up to be the Second Battle of the Lark’s Tongue.
Coming around the side of a long cooking tent and entering one of the camp’s clearings where drills were run and bonfires kindled, Sullen slid to a stop in the boot-packed snow. Without much thinking about it he’d been heading straight for Ji-hyeon’s spot, but without a bunch of tents obstructing his view he could now see beyond the camp, where the curtain of smoke that had lingered around the Gate had finally been burned away by the bright winter sun. The last time he’d looked out over the valley floor he’d seen a column of swirling devils rising up from where the Gate eventually opened, an unwelcome vision someone born without a snow lion’s eyes might not have seen, but while the sight that met his eyes now was decidedly mundane it was nevertheless equally unnerving.
The hill on the far side of the vale was a bloodred wave that poured down to flood the valley floor, the Thaoan regiment even more sizable than the Azgarothian army had been. And coming out to meet this Crimson horde were a number of far, far smaller clouds of blue banners, their raggle-taggle ranks as sloppy as the Imperials’ were tight, their numbers even less than Sullen would have guessed—he had no head for figures, but it was clear that not even half the surviving Cobalts were marching out to meet their enemies. There were at least three times as many Crimson soldiers coming down already, and the torrent that breached the crest of the hill showed no sign of slowing.
Sullen’s stomach dropped. How could this battle be anything but a slaughter?
“So do we just charge in there, or go to Ji-hyeon’s tent and see if…” Sullen trailed off midsentence as he looked over his shoulder and his eyes reminded his sleep-syrupy skull that he was talking to a ghost. Sullen was on his own, and it was time he got used to that… but some habits die as hard as some men.
Looking back at the advancing armies on either side of the Gate, he tried to figure out what he should do, and knowing every moment he dallied was a moment Ji-hyeon’s danger increased wasn’t helping. If he went to her tent and she was already at the battle he would’ve wasted more precious time,
but if he just ran down into the valley he didn’t have much hope of finding her before the Imperials swarmed the Cobalts. He took an unsteady step in the direction of the command tent, then looked back at the Crimson army, reminded of when the dread huntress Janus brought her legion of blood sisters rampaging down the fjords to overwhelm the nightmare fortress of the Skeletonwitch… Well, except what was unfolding here was as real as real got, and none of that other shit had ever fucking happened outside of some singer’s imagination. But some habits don’t die, ever, maybe.
Sullen took off down the hill at a gallop, toward the imminent clash—Grandfather had always told him he needed to learn from his mistakes instead of bawling over them, and it was long past time he put that wisdom into practice. The last time he had gone toward Ji-hyeon’s tent instead of the front line, Cold Zosia had ended up strong-arming him into helping her defend their rear, and that had cost Grandfather his life…
Of course, if he’d just swung on the crazy old lady the first time he saw her, the way the Faceless Mistress had commanded, he’d still have Grandfather. Maybe the dead god of Emeritus had taken Grandfather from him as punishment for Sullen’s failure to deliver on an admittedly simple errand, using her devilish wiles to guide the weakbow’s bolt…
Would that he could truly blame Zosia or the Faceless Mistress for the old man’s death he would run with a lighter step, but Sullen knew that only one person was responsible for the tragedy, and that was the idiot grandson who rounded a corner too fast in a hotly defended camp. That failure weighed Sullen down more than his ancestor ever had in life, and he ran all the faster for it. He didn’t think he could outrun his guilt, but the sooner he got to the fight the sooner he could forget it, if only for a little while. That, and all the other burdens he carried, from not knowing what to do about Ji-hyeon to not knowing what to do about his cowardly uncle to not knowing whether he could trust Hoartrap to have even told him the truth about Craven running away to not knowing what to do about Zosia and the Faceless Mistress.
A Blade of Black Steel Page 22