It took the rest of the night before Zosia was satisfied she had done all she could, and looking at the wan girl she rather doubted it would be enough. It was so unfair it made her teeth ache. Whatever else Indsorith had achieved during her long, rough reign, one simple thing proved she was a hundred times the queen Zosia had been: she hadn’t given up, even when the odds seemed impossible, and kept fighting the malign influence of the Burnished Chain right up until the end. It should be Zosia lying on her deathbed, and this fierce, fearless woman standing over her.
Zosia wandered away from the bedchamber and through the obsidian halls, out onto the open terrace of the throne room. The gusting air cooled her clammy skin, but it was far too warm for the season. With the moon gone to the west and the stars lit overhead, Zosia was brought back to the mountainside above Kypck, where Pao Cowherd had died wrapped in Zosia’s only bedroll. My life for his, she had thought then, but was too afraid to say it, lest Choplicker grant her wish.
“My life for hers.” She said it now, looking not at the impartial heavens but her impartial devil. In answer he started licking her hands, just as he had back then, though this time she’d had plenty of water to wash the blood away. As if she ever could. “My life for hers, Chop, what do you say?”
He whined, a doleful sound, and she sighed.
“I hear you. Isn’t much of an enticement, offering something I don’t value myself, but it’s all I got,” she said, and looking into his sharp dark eyes, she wondered if her desires were as inscrutable and strange to him as his were to her. She gave him another rub behind the ears, and wandered over to the fire glass throne she’d abandoned all those years before. There was a second, slightly smaller cathedra set beside it, and from the silver chains entwined in its onyx arms she could guess who had occupied it. No matter, there was only ever one throne for the Cobalt Queen and she collapsed into it, staring numbly back at the only entrance to the open throne room. In the morning she would rise, walk back through that doorway, and go pull the sheets up over Indsorith’s slack mouth, her blind eyes, the battered crown she’d left on the queen’s pillow.
For the hour or two that remained before the dawn and the arrival of Ji-hyeon’s army, though, Zosia would sit right here in her old throne, watching the glow of Diadem’s burning streets play over the lip of the precipice, and indulge a luxury she’d long denied herself: she’d hope for a better tomorrow than she surely deserved.
EPILOGUE
I think this is a really bad idea, Cap’n,” Dong-won whispered in Bang’s ear, but she shoved him gently back into the bright green underbrush.
“That’s what you said about the mutiny that won us our ship, Bosun,” she reminded him.
“And what he said about that evasive maneuver into the Haunted Sea what wrecked her,” said Niki-hyun, forgetting whose pearl she was supposed to polish.
“And it’s also what Maroto told us about lighting a signal fire on the beach, but without that Dong-won never would’ve found us again,” said Bang, crawling forward on her knees to get a better look at the alabaster ruins that sprawled across the valley.
“Maroto?” asked Niki-hyun.
“Yeah, knuckleheads, the Mighty Maroto. He said he was Useful and useful he’ll damn sure prove—I’ll bet my bottom barrel our tall, dark, and almost handsome captive is none other than the Villain of legend. He recognized Cobalt Zosia’s pipe in nothing flat, and fits the songs down to his toes.”
“I don’t remember any songs where Maroto Devilskinner had white hair,” said Niki-hyun.
“Those songs first made the rounds before you were born,” said Bang. “Our meal ticket got old, same as your whiny attitude.”
“Well, I don’t remember Maroto being a total jackass in the songs, either,” said Dong-won, flicking a weird grey caterpillar off his wrist and into the succulent bushes. “Meal ticket?”
“Why do you think I want to get him back so bad?” asked Bang, trying not to let herself remember how hot his bottom had felt under her palm, lest color creep up her cheeks and betray her ulterior motives. “Every Arm on the Star’s got a bounty on him, and the Empire will pay more than the rest combined. We get the squid with the golden beak back to Diadem we’ll be up to our butts in doubloons, pieces of six, or whatever denomination most tickles your purse.”
Dong-won looked intrigued. Niki-hyun, less so: “You sure you’re not confusing an Imperial bounty with an impressive booty, Cap’n?”
“Sea gods damn it, I’ve told you a thousand times!” cried Bang, snatching off her handkerchief and snapping Niki-hyun in the nose with it. “None of this!”
“Ow!”
“No booty jokes! None! We’re pirates, not poseurs!”
“Sorry, Cap’n,” grumbled Niki-hyun, rubbing her face. “They’re just so easy, you know?”
“Easy pickings are overvalued. Would you eat a dead fish that washed ashore, or would you wait until you caught a live one?”
“Sorry, Cap’n.”
“Not as sorry as you’re going to be if I hear that word again,” said Bang, and returned to the topic at hand. “Now then, the sooner we’re in the sooner we’re out, as Dong-won’s daddy puts it, so let’s go.”
“Yeah, see, I don’t know about that right there,” said Dong-won, pointing at the open fields of waving marsh grass and prickly ferns between their position on the treeline and the nearest heap of rubble. “We have to cross all that open ground when you say they’ve got those squid-dragons on patrol, then we have to sneak through the ruins that looked about as big as Othean from back on the hill, and even assuming we do get that far without getting rumbled, we still have to find your boy and spring him from whatever clink they’ve got ’im locked in.”
“Assuming they haven’t ate him already,” said Niki-hyun helpfully. “Monsters do that, you know. Pretty much all the time.”
“Only one way to find out,” said Bang, getting up on her hands and knees to make a dash for it when the other two dragged her back down.
“No bounty’s worth dying for, Cap’n!”
“No booty, either.”
Snap.
“Ow! Sorry, sorry!”
“Last warning, Niki,” said Bang, retying her bandana and looking around the too-quiet jungle to make sure her crew’s racket hadn’t attracted any inhuman sentries. “Now look, you two, he’s worth a fortune, for one thing, and he’s crew, for another. We don’t give up on crew.”
“Who’s crew?” demanded Dong-won. “You have to serve on the boat to be crew. You have to be initiated to be crew. He’s not crew.”
“I may have, um, given him an impromptu initiation yesterday,” said Bang, squirming forward on her belly so they wouldn’t see her seditious flush. “And he definitely launched my dinghy, so I’d say that counts. He’s crew.”
“Crew we’re going to ransom to the Empire,” said Dong-won.
“I knew it came down to booty,” Niki-hyun muttered quietly, but not quite quietly enough for Bang to miss it. Forgetting where they were and what they were doing, she laid into the girl with a flurry of bandana snaps, Dong-won’s attempt to interrupt earning him a few sharp cracks of his own. When Niki-hyun was finally crying auntie and swearing the word was forever stricken from her vocabulary, Bang rolled off her with a final snap for good measure. She bumped into Dong-won’s boot, and was about to drag the idiot back to the ground when she realized he was still lying on his belly on the far side of Niki-hyun. Pursing her lips as she stared at the shiny black shell attached to the barbed leg and up to the rest of the spiny, midnight-carapaced humanoid, Bang came to the conclusion that she was good and screwed. And this was before the other hook-plated horrors emerged from the jungle around them, silent as sharks gliding through the Honeyed Deep.
As their captured crewmember would say, woof.
“Sorry for ever doubting you, Cap’n Bang,” Dong-won said as they were jerked to their feet by the grotesque, silent inhabitants of Jex Toth and shoved in the direction of the ruined city. “I th
ink you’ve hit on a foolproof way of finding out where they’re keeping good old Useless.”
“All part of my cunning plan,” said Bang, although in point of fact it wasn’t. Who knew, though, they might always put her in the same cell as Maroto, let her get in a few more good swings on his sweetness before they all met whatever gruesome end the monstrous army of Jex Toth paid to interlopers—stranger things had happened, and recently at that. It didn’t do much good to daydream, true, but at trying times like these a woman had to focus on what she might win instead of what she’d already lost, and work like a bound devil to make her own good fortune.
By Alex Marshall
THE CRIMSON EMPIRE
A Crown for Cold Silver
A Blade of Black Steel
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CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
WELCOME
DEDICATION
MAP
PART I: THE HOURS OF MORTALS CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
PART II: AND THE DEVILS OF DAYS CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
EPILOGUE
BY ALEX MARSHALL
ORBIT NEWSLETTER
COPYRIGHT
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Alex Marshall
Cover design by Lauren Panepinto
Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: May 2016
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Map copyright © Tim Paul
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Marshall, Alex (Novelist), author.
Title: A blade of black steel / Alex Marshall.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Orbit, 2016. | Series: Crimson empire ; 2
Identifiers: LCCN 2015049278| ISBN 9780316340663 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781478909361 (audio book downloadable) | ISBN 9780316340687 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Warriors—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Epic. | FICTION / Action & Adventure. | FICTION / Fantasy / Historical. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3613.A76993 B58 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049278
ISBNs: 978-0-316-34066-3 (hardcover), 978-0-316-34068-7 (ebook)
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