A Blade of Black Steel

by Alex Marshall

  There was a pattern there, and another constant, too: whenever he got stuck on one problem he found another one to focus on, like this here more niggling issue of a giant enemy army coming down to kill the girl he loved, and everyone else in the area besides. These Thaoans needed dealing with, sure, but this tendency of Sullen’s to save his worries for another day had led to his acquiring a great heaping pack of night soil to cart around, and if he ever hoped to be free of it he needed to start resolving his old issues instead of burying them under fresh ones. The things folk figure out about themselves when they’re in no position to do anything about it.

  As Sullen splashed through the slurry around the broken palisades and saw the Crimson flood still pouring down the far side of the valley, he supposed he might not have to carry all his shame and indecision much farther, anyway. He had never seen so many soldiers in all his days and, unlike in the songs, fights this one-sided tended to be as ugly as they were quick. Well, if only one of the old legends proved true, Sullen prayed it was that of Old Black and her Meadhall, where he could lay his burdens at the door, go inside, and raise a horn of good snowmead with Grandfather. He’d soon find out, more likely than not.

  For the first time all morning Sullen cracked a smile, and picked up the pace.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Ji-hyeon gritted her teeth, then cut that shit out with a wince when a flash of pain ignited her jaw; with all the bugs and saam in her system, she’d managed to forget that she’d knocked a tooth loose fighting the Azgarothians and now the fucking thing was hurting like hell; or maybe Zosia had done it, she couldn’t remember anymore. She looked down at the wide black expanse beside her, the oily surface of the Gate as menacing as a carpet of coiled vipers. Two days ago she might have been standing right here on the battlefield when the fucking thing opened beside her, and yesterday she had brawled with Zosia on its shore. If she managed to live out the day, she’d make a point of not coming back to this damn place tomorrow—she was beginning to feel like one of the Sisters of Sleep who laid out steaming bowls of black rice and harpyfish incense on the stoop of the Immaculate Gate each morning. The one time Ji-hyeon had seen the blindfolded nuns marching across the dawn pumpkin fields with their grey-ribboned robes billowing around them like jellyfish mantles, she had found the ancient practice extremely creepy, but it was positively quaint compared to what Hoartrap was now doing on the bank of this Gate.

  Fellwing flapped her wings in Ji-hyeon’s face, distracting her from the naked white giant and the cluttered, makeshift altar he had fashioned atop his wicker-framed pack. She hissed at her devil to calm down, the little owlbat fluttering frantically around her head, buffeting her aching cheeks with leathery wings. Ji-hyeon wasn’t happy about going ahead with the warlock’s scheme, either, but unless the Thaoans halted in the next thirty seconds Hoartrap wouldn’t even have time to complete his sorcery before they were all overrun…

  Yet even as the fear yawned as wide as a Gate in Ji-hyeon’s stomach, the Crimson cavalry stopped a scant fifty yards in front of her and her small retinue of guards, the Thaoans slowing their roll in a big damn hurry as the Cobalt riders created a long line by fanning out on either side of the Gate. Chevaleresse Singh’s hundred-odd remaining Raniputri dragoons and the fifty or so of Captain Kimaera’s cavalry who had survived the Battle of the Lark’s Tongue didn’t make for a very intimidating front, but it would have to do until the few thousand remaining foot soldiers caught up with their general, or Hoartrap delivered what he’d promised. Holding any able-bodied soldiers in reserve for defense or reinforcement wasn’t even an option; the Cobalt Company didn’t have enough capable killers to defend a castle, forget an encampment whose pickets had already been dashed lower than the army’s morale.

  Beyond the flapping fan of her agitated devil’s wings, Ji-hyeon watched the far tighter line of three hundred Imperial riders hold their places in the fetlock-deep snow. The chargers were too well trained to stomp or whinny; if not for the blasts of steam jetting from their nostrils they could’ve been statues. The massed Thaoan infantry remained hidden behind the cavalry’s imposing front, and Ji-hyeon let herself hope the war was not yet lost, that their rows would part and her second father and Colonel Waits would emerge to convene with the Cobalt general, their bluff called. No movement, save an angry red sea of flapping pennants held back by the dike of cavalry. Crafty Kang-ho, they called her father, the one who always told her to lead from the rear—if he came riding out the day was saved, but if he remained with the Thaoan command they were as good as dead… unless Hoartrap was able to perform a feat that had not been accomplished in five centuries, an act of ancient witchery apparently so potent that not even he had ever seriously considered attempting it before.

  Ji-hyeon glanced over her shoulder to where Choi and Sasamaso should have been waiting just behind her, but of course only her Honor Guard was there on her left flank, the Crowned Eagle chevaleresse who would usually have been on her right gone forever, along with so many others. Fennec held the woman’s place now, not looking too happy about it. Nor should he, given the size of the boots he was expected to fill; Chevaleresse Sasamaso had been wise and kind, ferocious in battle and loyal as any devil, and now she was lost to the First Dark and whatever horrors dwelled there… horrors that she had given Hoartrap permission to court in hope of receiving their aid. As Ji-hyeon looked back to where the nude sorcerer knelt over his rituals, Fellwing finally left her alone, shooting high into the cold north wind, away from the Gate and the tattooed, sweaty ogre who cooed softly to himself or the dark portal, it hardly mattered which. His pale arms were buried to the elbow in a plain burlap sack he had laid out on his altar, something squealing and hissing from within.

  “General—” Fennec began, voice high and strained, but he was cut off as the Imperial bugles blared, all in a row, so close Ji-hyeon imagined the cold draft against her puffy cheek came from the horns. It was the signal to attack. Instead of turning to face the Thaoan regiment as they began their charge she looked farther back, past the pale devil in human form she had loosed to work his wiles upon this world, past her two oldest guards, to the decimated infantry limping after their general even now, following her back to the very place where they had lost all their friends, their comrades, their hope. She wanted to be proud of these brave ones who still answered her horn, wanted to sit high on her horse and salute them with her one remaining sword held high in her one solid hand… but all she could muster was pity for their doomed fate, guilt and sorrow replacing fear as she tried to pick out Sullen’s bulk or Keun-ju’s lithe gait amongst the yet-distant figures. She didn’t see them, only bland, shambling corpses who didn’t even know they were dead yet, the Imperial cavalry now so close she could feel their pounding hooves reverberating up through those of her mount.

  Oh, how she had wanted to see Sullen before it came to this, her inevitable final blunder, but there hadn’t been time for that, nor had there been occasion to confront Keun-ju again, nor her second father, nor to see her sisters or their first father or so many others; there wasn’t time for anything ever again, not even Hoartrap’s sorcery, and now fear and guilt were squeezing her so tightly between them that she thought she might be sick, but it could have just been the bugs or the faint buzzing of the Gate. Had it always made that sound and she had been too busy listening to the riot of the world to notice, or did it emit its call only when it was summoning home the newly dead?

  Her guts pinched, and despite the cloud of saam in her head and the numbing toxins in her blood she started out of her reverie, because she might be about to die but she wasn’t dead yet—she couldn’t imagine any gods, however capricious, would make cramps part of the afterlife. Snapping her head around to face what must be her final foes, she almost laughed as her eyes passed over the absurd sight of a naked Hoartrap capering on the brink of the softly buzzing Gate, holding aloft the great terror he had promised to summon forth to save the Cobalt Company—a fat black opossum, which hi
ssed but otherwise remained docile as the sorcerer nipped at its greasy skin with his teeth. Then all she could see was red as she faced the charging Crimson cavalry, snapping down her visor, planting her long, bearded spear in the ground, and drawing her sword. Choi and Fennec came up beside her, spears lowered and spurs ready for her order, and General Ji-hyeon Bong stood tall in her saddle to sound the attack, ready to seize what honor she could before receiving what most of the Star probably agreed was long overdue.

  Choplicker bounded over another frost-locked body, this one a girl soldier no more than thirteen or fourteen years old. Beneath the thin, winding sheet of snow her eyes were open, as was her mouth, and gaping widest of all was her too-thin breastplate, a ragged hole as wide as a grapefruit punched through the beaten bronze, pure white powder filling the cavity. The wound must have been caused by a pick even bigger than the one on the backside of Zosia’s war hammer. Whatever cheap heraldry the girl had worn had been torn loose in the battle, but Zosia knew she had been a Cobalt; the Imperial regiments didn’t arm children, though they were willing enough to put them to the blade. This was the third such youth they had passed on their jog across the gleaming white valley, and Zosia doubted it was an accident that Choplicker had chosen this particular route. Then again, the frozen valley was pocked with corpses as far as the eye could see, the Cobalt soldiers who post-holed through the snow on all sides of Zosia moving around or sometimes on top of the dead, heedless to whether they had been friends or foes. All that mattered was reaching their general before the Thaoans did, though Zosia highly doubted it would make much of a difference either way—even if they’d been out here at dawn, well rested and better organized, the sheer numbers of a fresh Imperial regiment would like as not have trounced the depleted Cobalt forces within the hour.

  Zosia ran even harder, and not because Choplicker led the way to a slaughter she was eager to take part in—she slipped and slid across the snowy battlefield because Ji-hyeon and her coterie of guards were less than a hundred yards away, and if she could reach the general before the battle she could show her the ruined Carnelian Crown that Choplicker had brought her, proof positive that something terrible had recently befallen Queen Indsorith… and Ji-hyeon in turn could show it to the Thaoan command, buying them time, if not more. Of all the provinces in the Crimson Empire, Thao was second only to Azgaroth in their fastidious devotion to the queen, and if Indsorith had lost her crown that raised some very interesting questions of domestic affairs, questions that a cagey colonel like Waits would surely want to consider before committing to today’s attack. No sense wasting a single resource defending the realm from without when you might soon be called upon to defend it from within.

  The Thaoan bugles sounded again, this time in harmony, and Zosia would’ve cursed if she’d had the breath. She was close enough now to see past the line of Singh’s dragoons, and those fucking Imperials had started a charge without even deigning to send out an envoy to ask for Ji-hyeon’s surrender. Most veterans get cagier with age, but it seemed the notoriously wary Colonel Waits was experiencing a second youth, overeager as a horny teenager at her first spring faire. Fast as Zosia had been rushing up behind Ji-hyeon and her mounted guards, she now cut to the right, meaning to put the nearby Gate between her and the rampaging Imperial army before doubling back into camp and out the other side, into the mountains. No one could say she hadn’t tried, but there was no way she could deliver the Carnelian Crown to anyone who could call off the battle now, and if she stayed for a fight this stupid she deserved exactly what she got. It was high past time she—

  Slipped to a stop, nearly falling in the snow as she saw what Hoartrap was up to on the edge of the Gate. None of the Cobalts panting past her seemed to notice, preoccupied as they were with the hundreds of horses galloping straight toward them, but the old wizard captured Zosia’s full attention, and not just because she’d never realized his tattoos flowed all the way down the crack of his ass. Choplicker had also noticed what the Touch was up to, coming back to her side with a whine, then looking back at Hoartrap with a growl, his patchy, washed-out fur bristling on his scabrous hide. Bad as he’d looked in the torchlit tent last night, in the clear morning light the old hound looked like he’d been boiled alive and somehow lived to wag the tail. Whatever weird shit the old warlock was doing to the squirming black animal he held in his arms didn’t agree with Choplicker, and Zosia couldn’t blame him—she didn’t like the look of it, either, and the keening buzz rising from the Gate couldn’t be a good sign.

  With a triumphant hoot, Hoartrap spread his arms wide over his head. In one hand he held something that looked a lot like an opossum but probably wasn’t by the scruff of its neck, and in the other he held the tip of its obscenely long tail. The poor devil squealed, and with quick flicks of his wrist Hoartrap began winding the tail around his arm, more and more of the bristly white length unreeling from the animal’s rump like silk from a caterpillar.

  Even by Hoartrap’s grody standards it was a pretty fucking gross spectacle, but Zosia knew he must have some strong motive for doing whatever the hells he was doing, here on the edge of the Gate with an enemy army barreling down on them. She had looked the other way plenty of times during the old days when he’d employed similarly gruesome methods with the bound devils he fed on to fuel his sorceries, and it was surely a devil he tortured now, not a real animal, but all the same Zosia found herself plowing through the shin-deep snow toward the warlock. The creature’s screams were too pained, Hoartrap’s methods too grotesque, and Zosia wouldn’t stand by and let him—

  Fast as he’d been unspooling the devil’s impossibly long tail, Hoartrap abruptly tossed the opossum away, over his altar and into the Gate. The animal gave a final, almost human wail, and then vanished into the blackness without a splash… but its tail still stretched from where it had disappeared into the dark surface to Hoartrap’s outstretched arm. Choplicker began barking fit to wake the corpses that Zosia stumbled over as she finally reached the circle Hoartrap had cleared in the snow, and the warlock staggered forward, his knee cracking into the little shrine he had set up atop his pack and sending red candles, black fangs, and a pyramidal stack of white purity rings flying onto the disturbed earth at the rim of the Gate. The tail he had wrapped around his forearm was taut, a quivering bowstring that vanished into the black portal, his milky skin bulging as the fleshy tether bit into his wrist. As he glanced over his shoulder toward Choplicker’s frenzied barks, Zosia didn’t think she’d seen the creepy behemoth this concerned since they’d summoned their first devils together, back in Emeritus.

  “Help!” the sorcerer cried, the frozen dirt crumbling around his bare feet as he slipped another few inches toward the waiting Gate, his crusty toes almost brushing the edge. “Pull me back, pull me back!”

  Tempting though it might’ve been to let him follow the devil he’d tortured down into the First Dark, the damage was done now, and there were worse things than having Hoartrap the Touch owe you his life. Ever since Maroto had saved him from the titanic devil queen their meddling had roused in Emeritus, the warlock had always looked out for the barbarian. Besides, on the far side of the Gate, the Thaoan cavalry had split to go around the supernatural obstacle, and on either side Singh’s cavalry engaged the swarming Crimson riders, so icing her old friend when they were about to be overwhelmed by Imperials anyway seemed too cold a play to run on anyone, even a bag of moldy dicks like Hoartrap.

  Bracing her boots as best she could on the icy grit, Zosia grabbed Hoartrap’s free wrist, his mammoth fingers closing around hers—and then a powerful jerk from whatever force held the other end of the opossum pulled them both off their feet, and even if Hoartrap had released her instead of tightening his grip Zosia would have been lost then, the momentum too much. She had tried to save that wickedest creature in all the Star, an eater of devils, and now the Gate would have them both. Like any mortal, she had wondered what lay beyond these ancient doorways to the First Dark, but also like any mortal,
she had dearly hoped she would never find out.

  The hopes of mortals are such fragile things.

  Sullen nearly stumbled when he heard a familiar buzzing sound, the wheeling, clashing, falling, dying blur of blue riders and red riders and horses horses horses suddenly forgotten, the wheezing Cobalt soldiers he had been easily outpacing suddenly overtaking him in the desperate charge to the conflict at the center of the valley. Hard as he’d been keeping his eyes off the open patch ahead that must be where the Gate lay, he’d run up almost beside it, and while it was issuing a quieter thrum than what he’d heard when the Faceless Mistress took him to her breast in Emeritus, there could be no mistaking the sound. She was coming for him, just as he’d known she someday would after he failed to carry out her will, and he turned to see her rising from the Gate, as radiant as she was terrible…

  Except it wasn’t the Faceless Mistress on the rim of the abyss but her sworn enemy, the one Sullen had to stop before she murdered an entire metropolis using fire and deviltry: Cold Zosia. She, her devil dog, and Hoartrap the Touch were not twenty paces away, their backs to him and, as he watched, the foul sorcerer began to slip precariously close to the edge of the Gate, and then Sullen saw what had happened—something dreadful had reached out of the First Dark and grabbed one of his arms, pulling him slowly but surely into the bottomless pit. Zosia slid across the slushy ground toward Hoartrap, paying no heed to the wild melee that had begun, the two cavalries weaving among one other, spears and swords flashing in the cold brilliance of the early winter sun. Both sides gave the Gate a wide berth, however, so there was nothing stopping Sullen from rushing over to help… or to help them both go over the side.