A Blade of Black Steel

by Alex Marshall

  “Not if you hit them hard enough!” she shouted, not caring that he couldn’t get the joke, and not caring that another newborn monster grabbed her from behind, because she just jabbed it off of her with the butt of her hammer and spun around, splattering its elongated skull with the pick end of her weapon before it could realize it had bitten off way more than it could chew. The monsters kept dropping from above and Zosia kept swinging and somewhere nearby Choplicker kept barking and Zosia couldn’t stop smiling, so pleased she could pop. This is what she’d lived for, once upon a time, and what she could live for again, she realized through the haze of ichors and scratching limbs—she’d been overthinking life as usual, when the whole truth of her existence was that Cold Zosia was happiest when she was doing what she did best, and what Cold Zosia did best was kill kill kill, kill everything, then kill some more.

  So it came as a profound disappointment when she was suddenly grabbed from behind and hoisted off her feet, into the air.

  It was too late for Choi, and it was too late for Ji-hyeon. Fellwing had regained enough of her vigor to take off again, winging this way and that as she rejuvenated herself on whatever invisible spoils she scavenged from the plentiful battlefield, but even if the owlbat had been at full strength, her plumage black instead of a washed-out ivory, Ji-hyeon doubted one small devil could protect her mistress from a foe of this magnitude. And even if Fellwing had been up for the challenge, Ji-hyeon wasn’t making her devil’s job any easier by charging straight at the massive humming horror that had eaten her friend.

  It was exactly the sort of attack her Honor Guard would have chided her for, an obvious frontal assault against a braced opponent when cunning and quickness would serve her better. But Choi wasn’t ever going to chide her again, and that brutal truth robbed Ji-hyeon of every hard-learned lesson, leaving only a burning ball of fury in their place. The ground flowed under her boots like a river that washed away her fatigue and pain as well as her wits, and she let the current take her, so intent on vengeance that the creature’s stature didn’t even register; her will alone would carry her up on a wave that would crest in the horrible thing’s horrible face, and she would plant her sword so deep in the glittering Gate of its eye that it could never be drawn free, a fitting tomb for Choi Bo-yung, Honor Guard of Princess Ji-hyeon Bong of Hwabun, and when Immaculate and Ugrakari pilgrims passed this way and saw the whale-sized bones of a devil queen bleached by the sun they would lay garlands of chrysanthemums around the pommel that jutted from the skull and—

  The same claw that had snatched Choi came in so fast Ji-hyeon didn’t see it until it was too late, and then the ground did indeed fall away, and her ambitions were left behind in the world of mortals as she was delivered to a reunion with her Honor Guard in the wet tomb of the devil’s belly.

  Things had almost seemed like they might be okay for a second there, which just went to show that Sullen never learned a damn thing. Zosia had saved him, and thick as the twisted, slippery monsters were coming down the wild old dame was bashing them open, giving Sullen a chance to catch his breath, draw a sun-knife, and try to find where he’d dropped his spear. But as soon as he began looking around, a flash of movement to his side caught his eye, and flinching from a blow that wasn’t even directed at him he turned in time to see Ji-hyeon run straight into the devil queen’s outstretched claw. It had her, it had Ji-hyeon, snatching her off the ground like a selfish child taking back a toy she had lent a friend, and he knew exactly where the abomination meant to put her.

  Sullen didn’t think, couldn’t think, just dropped his weapon and seized the nearest monster in both hands, pivoting on his feet for maximum leverage, and hurled the wee fucker straight up into the air, at the enormous paw that delivered Ji-hyeon to its pouch. It wasn’t until the silver-maned projectile flew from his hands that he realized he hadn’t grabbed a monster after all, but something far, far worse.

  Fast as witchcraft, Zosia returned to the harpyfish dream she’d endured back on Othean courtesy of a poisoning at the hands of Kang-ho and his husband, King Jun-hwan. It was a vision of flight and devils and desperation, Choplicker howling her on her way. The world had turned upside down, and she plummeted straight toward the border between a devil queen’s black chest and her pink belly. An arm as thick and solid as an ancient oak branch slid underneath to catch her, and there was no time to think, but that was fine, because she was done with thinking until further notice. Cold Zosia did what Cold Zosia did best, the overhead swing she’d been about to deliver to a far smaller target before being snared by this dream now put to even better use. She slammed the pick of her war hammer into the monstrous arm, then crashed into a hard-ass bed stuffed with quills and bones instead of goose down, and the dream ended as quickly as it began, returning Zosia to the quiet blackness of the First Dark.

  Purna skidded in the melting snow around the giant devil’s back legs, congratulating herself for having evaded all the smaller monsters swarming beneath their mother.

  Any fool could use her last pistol ball to fire a token of her regard into a giant’s face or waste the shot on one of her savage brood, but the Mighty Maroto would take a more devious route, one that packed a lot more hurting. Purna planted her feet and aimed her gun straight at the fell crevasse of the devil’s derriere, nicely exposed by its uplifted tail, and pulled the trigger. This is what happens when you eat someone you shouldn’t.

  And of all the devil’s own luck, the shot went slightly off target. A satisfyingly large segment of white flesh exploded off the base of the thick tail, though, right where it met the body, and the monster screamed the way monsters ought to, when faced with a champion of Purna’s quality. Then the whole ridiculous length of the tail came slapping down at her, the appendage seeming to have a mind of its own, and its coiled, bulbous tip looked like it packed a wallop; the knotted ball at the end of the tail was more than twice as big as Purna, easy, and came swinging toward her fast.

  But big partners are easily given the slip, something Purna had learned well from her brief acquaintance with the Crimson court. She jumped and shimmied, using moves she’d picked up in Serpentian ballrooms to evade bad dancers who got too close. When the huge corded club thudded down beside her, she nimbly dodged it and hacked into the mass with her kukri.

  The inward-curving blade might have been short but it was also sharp, just like its mistress, and it made an awful mess as she dragged it down the length of the balled-up tail-club. The sweet, pus-like stink of its thick grey blood wouldn’t just gag a maggot, it would make the poor beggar lose his lunch entirely, but Purna was made of sterner stuff than a corpse worm; she’d been around Din and Hassan when they’d been smoking bugs not even Digs would touch and was thus well accustomed to fetid smells. No, it wasn’t the stench that made Purna stagger back with a gasp, but what else emerged from the tall, widening gash she’d opened up in the knot of tail meat—another fucking monster, because of course it was.

  Fortunately, this one was a stillborn, as the biggest pups often were…

  Except no, as the injured tail lashed away from Purna and the hulking shape slipped out from the interior of its devilish chrysalis to lie steaming on the ground, she saw bubbles bursting in the monochromatic slime that webbed over its nostrils and mouth. Human nostrils, or close enough, and human lips, or close enough. Then its eyes fluttered open, and a retching gasp broke the film over its mouth. Even with her newfound, Maroto-like sense of calm, it took Purna a moment to recover herself and come up with a good line, but the naked, shivering figure gave her all the time she needed.

  “Hoartrap the Touch, as I live and breathe—I’d heard sorcerers always appeared when they were needed most, but isn’t this overdoing it?”

  So it wasn’t such a great line, but who was he to complain?

  Sullen would’ve felt bad for launching Zosia at the enormous arm that delivered Ji-hyeon to its pouch, but he was too busy feeling claws and teeth and whip-like tails pull him back down to the ground. He grabbed one
’s downy throat and squeezed until he felt a crack; he kicked another so hard its ribs snapped under his heel. The only thing Sullen hated more than the idea of hurting kids was killing animals he didn’t intend to use, but given the circumstances he wasn’t getting too choked up about it. The hissing, squealing pack were slightly more bipedal than their parent, but only just, and to make the whole situation even worse many of them still wore partially disintegrated blue or red tabards, the armor beneath melted or rusted by whatever foul process had remade their flesh. He’d probably passed some of them on the field that morning, back when they were normal folks, and now they had suffered a fate so fucking horrible Sullen had never before heard it suggested as a possibility in any of the songs; people were either born with the blood of shamans or without it, a simple truth the Star round, and monsters were born that way, too. One becoming the other didn’t seem natural, even in a world where mortals and devils still bumped shoulders from time to time, when the moon was full or your luck was shit.

  These thoughts drifted somewhere at the back of Sullen’s mind, but at the forefront nothing registered save the desperate need to execute extreme violence. At some point his bandolier had been ripped away, leaving him without a single sun-knife, but it took more than that to disarm a Horned Wolf. Punch, stomp, elbow, forehead, twist, break, punch again. Neither their teeth nor their claws were particularly sharp, which was why Sullen hadn’t bled out already, and when he blinked away the tears that a blast of carrion breath had brought to his eyes he saw why: while their faces had stretched into snouts, some still had human teeth in their sickly white gums, and while a few of them possessed talons, most had spindly fingers ending in normal fingernails. This seemed like a blessing, until his strength at last began to fail long before the onslaught did; being slowly eaten alive didn’t seem like much of an improvement on the hasty version of that fate.

  Another fell from the living, heaving canopy above, landing on Sullen’s belly and knocking the wind out of him, and then the giant mother must have taken a cautious step forward, because the drooping, partially deflated gut-bag now swung directly overhead, its mysterious interior still swimming with dark silhouettes undergoing dark transformations. Before, the overwhelming horror of the sight had robbed him of his ability to move, and that was when viewed at a distance. Now, so close he could have reached up and brushed the swollen pink wineskin with his fingers if he hadn’t been half-buried in dully gnawing monsters, the pulsing dance of figures within mesmerized him absolutely.

  Ji-hyeon. He easily picked her out from her squirming neighbors; the delicate curve of her bosom, the sway of her hips as she wriggled down to the bottom of the pouch. She pressed her face into the elastic membrane, as if leaning down to give Sullen a kiss, and through the grey-veined veil he saw she must be undergoing an even worse transformation than the rest, the teeth in her silently screaming mouth already as sharp as arrow points. She pushed harder, pressing her forehead into her womblike prison, the mutating soldiers piled atop her weighing her down, scrabbling at her with lengthening fingers. Then her head bowed entirely under the rubbery pressure of the distended pouch as she resigned herself to the inevitable… and that was when her small, sharp horn popped right through the pouch.

  Even seeing that, it took a moment for Sullen to realize the Immaculate face he glimpsed through the membrane didn’t belong to Ji-hyeon, but then he figured it out—it wasn’t his beloved who tried to escape the belly of the beast, but her bodyguard, Choi. The woman’s other horn had broken off halfway down before Sullen had ever met her, so it was a slow birth as Choi headbanged her way to freedom, her single sharp horn tearing the tough tissue wider and wider as boiling grey slime dripped down onto the oblivious monsters swarming Sullen. Her head slipped through, the shaman-blooded woman gasping as she desperately tried to widen the aperture by wiggling her shoulders. She managed to pop her left arm out, the fingers stretching down toward Sullen, toward the world of mortals… and then the heaving mass of half-formed monsters that filled the pouch above her began dragging her back inside.

  Sullen had thought he was done for, slobbery mouths biting down on each of his limbs, his whole body scratched and bleeding, wave after wave of opossum devils crashing over him every time he tried to rise… but seeing Choi begin to slide back inside the belly of the devil queen transformed something deep inside Sullen. He’d die down here, sure, but he’d die a fucking hero, or close enough—it didn’t matter if they ate him anymore, or if they did so fast or slow. All that mattered was making sure Choi escaped that living, pulsing, stinking hell. Maybe it was too late for her—it was almost certainly too late for him—but she was a wildborn, as the Immaculates called people like him and her, and he’d make sure they both went down together, with both feet set solidly in the world they’d chosen for themselves, hard a price as they’d both surely paid to be here. They were mortals, not monsters, and they deserved better than anything a devil could offer, even if the most they got out of their time on the Star was a clean death, fighting together against the First Dark.

  Choi’s head disappeared back up into the foamy pouch, her arm drawn in to the elbow, and then the wrist, her splayed hand all that remained… and then Sullen heaved himself out of the pile, rising from the furry waves like a seawolf leaping out of the surf of the Bitter Gulf to snatch an albatross out of the air. His palm slapped hers, slippery fingers tightened around each other, and as he dropped back down she came slipping out after him… only to become stuck halfway through, her waist lodged in the cavity. Sullen’s feet bounced on the backs of the frantic monsters that awaited them, and looking up at the slime-coated woman he saw her sharp teeth grit in pain, her red eyes watering, and then a plop of the grey gut froth landed on the sleeve of his tunic, smoke rising as the acidic substance burned through the wool.

  His heart broke, then, because he knew for all he’d tried to save her Choi had been dead as soon as she went inside the devil queen’s pocket, the fluids that churned through the incubation organ as caustic as a poison oracle’s potions. Hanging there by Choi’s greasy arm, Sullen felt something give above him, and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see her arm come off at the shoulder, strings of dissolving sinew stretched to breaking as he fell away with her devil-softened limb and the rest of her was pulled back inside… or worse, her entire upper half might be about to go, a slurry of acid-sizzling entrails following Sullen and her bisected torso to the ground.

  And then it happened, and he fell, and kept his eyes closed even as he slammed back onto the dubious pillow of thronged monsters. Her remains crashed into his chest, harder than he’d expected, and finally he looked, but only because the fiends were biting and tearing at him again, and it was too late for—

  Choi? The woman had seen better mornings, no doubt, but then Sullen supposed they all had. She was certainly quicker than he to stagger up and start laying into the devil-twisted creatures that mobbed them, her arms and legs a blur as she struck blow after blow. And looking down in wonder at his own unburned hand, and realizing the goo had chewed right through his thick shirt but left his chest unharmed, Sullen just had to smile, because it all made sense now. Choi had survived her passage for the same reason he would have, if he’d been stuffed in there and had the wherewithal to pull himself free—whatever evil the devil queen’s fluids worked on the flesh of pureborn mortals, it must not affect those born with the blood of shamans. Never in his life had Sullen been so happy for his oft-cursed heritage, and he almost laughed as he backhanded a squealing mutant…

  But then he remembered that the last time he’d seen Ji-hyeon, the devil queen had held her clenched in its fist, delivering her to that toxic pouch. He’d been overwhelmed by her brood before he’d been able to see if throwing Zosia into her path had done anything to help, and considering what a brilliant plan that had been, it seemed pretty fucking likely that all he’d accomplished was breaking Ji-hyeon’s neck, or Zosia’s, or maybe both. Ignoring his attackers, he craned his neck back to the r
uptured pouch, trying to pick out Ji-hyeon’s figure amid the contorted shapes, but if she was inside she wasn’t even recognizably human anymore… and in that grim moment, Sullen found himself hoping Ji-hyeon had died instead.

  Fast and dirty as Ji-hyeon’s life had ended, it came back to her in a smear of fur and claws and a bloody hammer. The oozing chasm of the devil queen’s stomach pouch lunged up to welcome her into hell, and then Zosia swatted her right out of the monster’s hand. There must have been a moment when they were falling together, the former general of the Cobalt Company and her illegitimate heir, but it was over before Ji-hyeon could blink. They landed together, anyway, on a bed of squealing, biting, clawing monsters, and it said a lot about the day she’d been having that this came as an improvement. Ji-hyeon still clung to her sword and, more importantly, her rage, rolling and kicking and hacking until she was back on her feet… only to fall over again.

  There were too many of them. The entire length of her blade was covered in clutching, almost-human claws, and while a few long fingers came loose and fell away in the struggle for the sword, the weapon was soon wrestled from her fist. It was over.

  Except it wasn’t. Foul gouts of grey blood rained down, and then he was there, just like a hero in one of his romantic verses, cleaving through a horde of devils to rescue his love. His hand, always so gentle with her, snatched her by the wrist and jerked her to her feet, so hard they bumped into each other, eyes meeting for only an instant before he reached past her and skewered another screeching monster. And even in this waking nightmare she saw the smile he tried to hide from her as he went back to work: not a proud, self-congratulatory grin, not a this-is-why-you-put-up-with-me smirk, but one born of overwhelming relief that he had found her in time.