“Just because he owes you don’t mean he’ll pay, and it certainly doesn’t mean he’ll play you straight,” said Digs, as though she was too thick to see that for herself. “I don’t trust him. I say we toss both map and compass in the first bottomless pit we find and go see my connection in Thao instead.”
“I look dopey enough to trust a devil-eating creeper? No, don’t answer that,” said Purna, since she had been the one to accept Hoartrap’s gifts when she visited him the day after the Second Battle of the Lark’s Tongue. “But I think he really wants us to find Maroto, why else give us the tools in the first place?”
“He really wants us to find something with those witch toys, but how do we know it’s Maroto? Call me old-fashioned, but when a beastly old geezer whom I’ve personally seen ghost a room full of Imperial officers gives me a supposedly magic map with an equally magic compass and says just follow the needle, I don’t immediately assume that’s such a swell idea. My gal in Thao, on the other hand—”
“I heard you the first hundred times,” said Purna, which was admittedly an exaggeration. He’d probably only mentioned the woman ninety-six or ninety-seven times, tops. “It’s our fearless leader you need to convince.”
“Sullen doesn’t trust Hoartrap and his tricks either!” said Digs, as though that were news.
“Well, he must trust him more than he trusts you, eh smart guy? Otherwise we’d have ditched the compass already and be en route to Thao to meet your dealer or whatever she is. The devil-noshing freak that you know, and all that—whoever this friend of yours is, she doesn’t owe me and Sullen and maybe even Maroto her life, so I don’t see her being instantly more reliable.”
“She operates on cold hard coin and a sizable commission, which I find far more dependable than our big bald friend with his inscrutable schemes and penchant for making people disappear,” said Digs, drumming his fingers on the tiny icicles in his mustache as if he were playing the world’s smallest, grossest xylophone. “Did he say anything else at all? Something that maybe didn’t seem like much at the time, but I dunno, might hint at some ulterior motive?”
“Not really? The only other thing that really stood out was his usual nastiness,” said Purna, not happy to be reminded. “Like, when I asked him about whatever this debt was that he owes Maroto he acted all wounded, and said didn’t it just break his heart that the Mighty Maroto never talked about the Touch to his girlfriend—real talk, Digs, did you ever get that vibe from me and Maroto? Romantically, I mean?”
“Ew.” Digs wrinkled his nose.
“That’s what I said—I think the goon was trying to provoke me with that one, even after I saved him from… whatever it was that devil queen was doing to him. But the rest of it? Shit, something about the way he said it all made me think he was being square for a change.”
“Well, even a curved knife cuts straight from time to time,” said Digs, which sounded kind of like a burn on her kukri but she let it go. “And when I said it might have been another Villain, I was thinking less of Hoartrap and more of Zosia—she seemed mad enough to do it. You should have heard her and Maroto going at one another, like cats and cougars. No, like dogs and wolves. No, like—”
“Sorry, I was too busy bleeding to death to notice what lousy old saw they were fighting like. Maybe if you’d paid more attention to what they were fighting about we’d have more to go on than a devildamned map and a definitely cursed compass!”
“Sorry, I was too busy preventing your insides from getting all over your outsides to take notes—maybe if you hadn’t let some Chainite poke you we wouldn’t be in this mess!”
“Point, Diggelby,” Purna mumbled, not really able to taste the cigarillo with her nose freezing off her face but craving the almost peaty warmth of the smoke all the same. “And between her rough-and-tumble show with Ji-hyeon and those prisoners at the Gate and then her going apeshit on that devil queen and her kiddos, we know Zosia’s bazonk enough to throw down on Maroto… but nah.”
“Nah? What is this nah? She’s batty, as stated, violent, as proven, and already had it in for Maroto before the big fight, as witnessed by the both of us—that’s evidence, girl.”
“That’s bunk, Digs, and I say it again: nah. Zosia wouldn’t play him that cold.” Maybe. Hopefully. Purna wouldn’t have expected Zosia to go kill-crazy on Ji-hyeon or hammer-happy on a horde of opossum people, either, but after the women’s duel at the Gate and Cold Cobalt’s unexpected appearance during the Second Battle of the Lark’s Tongue, it was pretty blooming obvious that predicting Zosia’s next move was best left to bolder gamblers than Purna… but she decided not to share her doubts with her emotionally feeble fellow, lest he snap like the delicate reed he was. When a second meticulous search of the Cobalt camp had failed to turn up Din or Hassan she had been devastated by the obvious implication, too, but while she was capable of grieving her Gate-gulped comrades and still keeping her head, Diggelby seemed on the verge of losing his altogether.
“Anyway,” said Digs, “I wasn’t asking what if Maroto’s dead, because that’s an easy one—if he’s bought it we go our own way, and the faster the better. I was asking what we do if he’s not, and we actually catch the king of the catfish.”
“Oh,” said Purna, deciding for the time being not to further interrogate Digs’s suggestion that they abandon the Cobalt Company if they found a Maroto-shaped corpse; that pickle could wait for its own jar. Or something, she’d have to work on that one. What had immediate relevance was Diggelby’s point: “If we catch him… when we catch him… Well, we find out why he left in such a hurry.”
“And?” Digs pressed. “What if our intrepid chief tells us that in addition to swearing an oath of peace to Indsorith back in the day he’s actually been working for the Crimson Queen ever since?”
“Then I say it’s bullshit,” said Purna, flicking her half-smoked (and thus still half-good) cigarillo into the knee-deep snow to punish Digs for the asinine suggestion.
“Well okay, let’s say he hasn’t been an agent for the Empire at all, up until now, but since Zosia rubbed him so raw he decided to punish her by going over to help her worst enemy. Maybe Ji-hyeon doesn’t even enter into his thinking, and maybe he thinks you’re dead so he doesn’t have much of a stake with the Cobalts.”
“Even if he did think I died, which is stupid—”
“Girl, I’m standing here right now talking to you and I’m telling you, the Tapai Purna I saw back on the field was deader than dog doo.”
“Don’t say dog doo,” said Purna. “It’s gross. And even if I was dead, you and Choi are still with the Cobalts, and he wouldn’t just leave you two.”
“I’d like to think so, I really would… but word around camp is that Maroto has something of a reputation for cutting out on his fellows in times of stress.”
“The camp can say that shit to his face,” said Purna. “My point is even if Maroto thinks I’m dead, and even if he’d turn his back on you and Choi after all the times we had, and even if this falling out with Zosia was as bad as you think, and even if he did decide to go work for the Crimson Empire… then…”
“Yes, what then?” said Digs impatiently. “This is my question from the get-go, what do we do if we find him and everybody’s been right about him?”
“We trust that they’re not,” Purna decided. “I’m not buying any of this canard until you and me and Maroto have a sit-down and figure out what’s what. And if that means fighting off his jerky nephew to buy him an exit or time to talk, I’m ready for it.”
“Me, too,” said Digs, ditching the butt of his own cigarillo and pulling his mitten back over his bluing fingers so they could bump knuckles. “And let’s not forget the Immaculate master swordsman while we’re plotting betrayal. I do wish Choi were here to tip the scales in our favor.”
“I wish she was here to tip the velvet,” said Purna wistfully, recalling the rawboned wildborn, and wishing there’d been time to see what was up before they’d parted ways. Even in P
urna’s more colorful imaginings Choi had a reproachful look to her features, as though she rather suspected she was but a figment of an undersexed girl’s fancy and was a little embarrassed about the matter. That was all right, Purna liked a little rose to the cheeks… “That’s my luck, right there, us getting saddled with another icky boy.”
“Your loss is my gain,” said Digs, “though I’ll miss Choi, too.”
“Yeah?” That right there was an intriguing development. “Which one do you fancy, or are you more of an equal opportunist? I have five dinars that says I can play matchmaker so craftily the target never—”
“Ew. Neither, thank you very much. When I said it was my gain I just meant you’re a lot more fun when you’re not drooling over another icky girl.”
“So if warrior women, brooding hunks, and romantic heroes are all out, what does that leave?” Purna knew she was being rude, pressing about a topic he’d never once addressed, but it was cold as a merchant’s heart out here and talking about sex warmed everyone up, didn’t it? “What are you after, old sprout? What’s Pasha Diggelby’s type?”
“Oh, Purna, I’m flattered, really, but—ew. You’re a dear friend, just not anyone I would ever, ever, ever—”
She socked him in the arm even harder than she had after he’d told her he survived the fight with the devil queen by “playing opossum.”
“All right, all right, though I thought it was obvious,” said Digs, looking winsomely into the snowy wilderness. “My type is Diggelby, but I’ve never been fortunate enough to meet myself, and I’m certainly not going to settle for anything less.”
That made a lot of sense, actually, but then something stuck out at her. “But the bet back in the Wastes when we first started caravanning together, the big contest to see who could be the first to bed Maroto—you put down twenty dinars!”
“I routinely lay wagers I never hope to collect in order to test the full extent of my majesty—you’d be surprised how often the Fallen Mother rewards my pride by letting me win the unwinnable,” said Digs. “And besides, I laid twenty-two on myself in the community kitty, yes, but I had you down for fifty dinars at three-to-one odds in private bets with Din, Hassan, and Princess Von Yung. You made me a tidy fortune when you conquered the beast.”
“I told you, we never actually did it!” Purna colored, far more annoyed at herself for eventually coming clean to her friends than she had been to rig that stupid bet in the first place. She’d needed cash in a hurry to keep up appearances, and it had been yet another of her brilliant plots that went off without a hitch, but while her close friends had previously kept a respectful silence concerning the perceived union, ever since she’d set the record straight one drunken night in the Kutumbans they had all given her endless hell about it. “I told you so, Maroto told you so, and I even offered to pay you back half of what I won, so—”
“Shhhhh, our gallant compatriots return,” said Diggelby, snatching the flask back and waving it at the two silhouettes emerging from the snow. The first rule of this whiteout weather was staying in pairs, and so far Purna and Digs had been able to insist they always buddy up on the admittedly manure-rich grounds that they had a lot of experience fighting together. Given the other two’s evident distaste for one another, it was only a matter of time before this wafer-thin excuse crumbled. “Yoo-hoo, anybody need a pick-me-up?”
“Quiet,” said Sullen, which seemed to be his favorite word in all the Star. You’d think a few days on the prowl with Purna and Digs would’ve loosened him up, but instead you could practically hear the squeaking of his asshole as it contracted to maximum tightness.
“Oooh, silence is of the essence, is it?” said Digs. “Did you narrowly evade some Imperial scouts? Or maybe wendigos hunt this bountiful glacier? Or—”
“There’s nothing,” said the sad-sack Immaculate, taking the flask out of Digs’s mitten and knocking it back like the seasoned drunk he wasn’t… and then coughing most of it up like the green kid he was.
“Well, nothing is something, eh?” said Purna, because she was going to stay positive even if it killed her; Diggelby was doing a decent job of acting like his carefree former self around Sullen and Keun-ju, but he couldn’t fool his best pal. From how assiduously he was not talking about Prince, she knew he must be missing his dog something ferocious, and she could tell that between Din and Hassan’s awful end and the giant devil queen that had almost given them a worse one, her old chum was close to the edge. Hoartrap’s compass was insistently steering them north on the map, but they’d found nary a Maroto-sized footprint to confirm their course, and a week is a long time to march on only the uncertain word of an evil wizard. Digs needed something he could latch on to, some sign that they weren’t just wandering into an even uglier trap than the ones they’d narrowly avoided back at the Lark’s Tongue. If they didn’t come up with something soon, she worried all the banter, booze, and bugs in the Star wouldn’t be able to keep him from melting into a wet and weedy puddle. Maybe they should try his connection in Thao after all—he’d presumably feel better, even if it did take them out of the way, but since their way currently seemed to be the middle of nowhere, what could it hurt? “So what sort of nothing is it today?”
“Nothing,” said Sullen, looking at her like she was the one with a skull as thick as a cannonball. Then, as though perhaps he’d overlooked an important detail, he said, “It’s quiet out there.”
“Well praise the Fallen Mother for that!” said Digs, but the look Sullen shot him said that no, maybe they’d better hold off on doing that just a little longer yet. For once, Purna agreed with the lunkhead’s disapproval—ever since they had learned who was responsible for the ritual that had opened a Gate underneath poor Din and Hassan and all the countless others, she didn’t care to hear any mention of the Burnished Chain or its beliefs, however sarcastically they were invoked.
“Shall we try the compass and map again?” said Keun-ju, but his sad, flat voice and his sad, flat eyes told the sad, flat truth—even if Hoartrap’s detailed map of the Star was accurate to scale, and even if the spiny black iron compass truly pointed them toward Maroto, they were currently lost in an absurdly vast tract of white wilderness, and the only one of their party who seemed good with directions was, as Purna had rather brilliantly put it, cartographically challenged. In light of Sullen’s distaste for their only possible means of finding Maroto, Digs had suggested the barbarian was tracking his uncle by smell alone, which was good for a laugh, but even such a blistering burn couldn’t warm them for long in the eternal snow.
“Don’t bother,” said Sullen, turning back the way he and Keun-ju had come after completing their morning’s investigation. “We keep east, we find the Heartvein. Can’t miss it—me and Fa seen it in our travels, and even if it’s frozen solid it’s too wide to cross without noticing you’re on it. We follow the river north, we find Diadem. We find Diadem—”
“Yes, yes, I know the bally chorus by now, you and General Ji-hyeon think he’s run off to the Crimson Queen just because he swore some stupid oath to her, like, a hundred years ago,” said Purna, pushing her horned wolf hood back on her face to remind their human bloodhound that she was, one, adorable, and two, hard enough not to mess with. “But if the whole point is catching Maroto before he reaches Diadem, our taking the long way round doesn’t seem wise, does it? He’s fleeing in a hurry, and since he can read a map—unlike certain other barbarians I could mention—he’s bound to take the most direct path, not the easiest. Which is probably why Hoartrap’s compass is telling us to go north, not east.”
“I thought of that,” said Sullen, the very idea of him thinking of anything more complex than how best to skin a wild aardvark or some such similarly silly beast beggaring belief. “But I don’t trust Hoartrap’s deviltry, and even if my uncle’s plotting his flight according to some chart, this blinding snow has robbed him of his tricks. What good is a map in a world without form?”
“What good is a map in a world without form�
��” Keun-ju repeated it softly, with maybe a hint of admiration, and even Purna had to admit it sounded sage on the nose, but when you really thought about it that’s what a world was, a place with form to it, so Sullen’s faux-wisdom could kiss her tips.
“Well, this is perfect, then—if we’ve almost reached the Heartvein then we’ve almost reached Thao,” said Digs, startling Princess as he cleared the snow out from between her earmuffs. “We take a few hours out of our busy day to go south instead of north and we’re there. As I’ve been saying all along, if we just talk to my connection she’ll be able to, you know, procure something that can help. It’s what they call her, you know, the Procuress, on account of—”
“Nah,” said Sullen, for maybe the fifty millionth time. “Told you, Ji-hyeon put me in charge, and that means we go where I say. And told you, too, I don’t trust witchcraft to find my uncle, neither Hoartrap’s charms nor the auguries of your connection.”
“None of us relish such means to our end,” said Keun-ju thoughtfully. “But if you are unsure if your map is accurate, it is wise to compare it to another, one crafted by another cartographer.”
Sullen’s brows furrowed, all these big words and talk of maps probably putting him out.
“Of course!” Diggelby made a funny motion with his mitten, and Purna knew him well enough to guess he’d probably tried to snap his fingers. “We double-check what Hoartrap’s compass is telling us with whatever the Procuress provides, and if they both point us in the same direction we know we can trust them to guide us true.”
“Hmmm…” said Sullen, which was better than the expected nah. “I don’t know if that follows.”
“But it’s more than we’ve got now, isn’t it, in this world without form?” said Purna. “We’ve got no tracks to follow, no recent Maroto sightings by passersby—nor passersby at all, far as that goes—and what happens if we don’t pick up something solid? Walk all the damn way to Diadem, hoping we bump into him? Or even better, arrive halfway across the Star, search a city so huge they had to hollow out a mountain to make room for everyone, and then walk all the way back here if it turns out he’s not there?”
A Blade of Black Steel Page 30