A Crown for Cold Silver

by Alex Marshall

  “I’ll be seeing you, Bang, count on that! Gonna keelhaul your ass!”

  “Then till we meet again upon the waves, fair Zosia!” called Bang, doffing an imaginary hat at Zosia as the rowers unlocked their oars. The sandaled feet of the customs agents were shaking the boardwalk as they approached.

  “Or beneath them,” Zosia growled, turning away from the dinghy to face the authorities. First these functionaries would be dealt with, then Princess Ji-hyeon would be tracked down, then Kang-ho would help her war against the Empire… and then Zosia would get her pipe back. First things first, though.

  “Zosia?” The Virtue Guard sounded startled, and then impressed. “Cold Zosia, the Stricken Queen?”

  “I am Moor Clell, a pipe-carver, come to trade my wares!” Zosia loudly announced in Immaculate to the arriving customs agents. Each Dominion had a dozen different local languages, few of which were shared with their neighbors, so most Raniputri were multilingual, and Immaculate was nigh universally used along the coasts of the Star. With a warning glare at the Virtue Guard, she said, “Moor Clell is my name, and my apprentice here is Keun-ju. Right, Keun-ju?”

  “Right,” said Keun-ju enthusiastically. “Definitely her apprentice.”

  “Then you are both under arrest,” said the lead officer, stepping back and drawing a gauntlet-sword in each hand. The five other pink officers followed suit, and Keun-ju’s three-tiger blade cut the air beside Zosia. Things had certainly changed, that she was the only one keeping her cool in a bad situation like this. Well, her and Choplicker—he rolled over on his back to invite a belly rub from the hostile new arrivals. “Moor Clell, tell your apprentice to sheath his weapon at once. You’re both in enough trouble already.”

  “What’s the charge?” asked Zosia, knowing they could probably take these officers, but also knowing they were on the wrong end of the territory to start chopping up government agents. It was one thing to kill a customs officer when you could just run across the border, but quite another when you had open sea behind you and an entire Dominion to cross. “And yeah, put that away, Keun-ju. You’re not helping.”

  After giving her a doubtful look, Keun-ju did as he was told, and the customs agents visibly relaxed. They didn’t sheath their weapons, though, and the leader said. “You are suspected of smuggling, conspiracy, and lying with animals.”

  “Lying with animals?” said Zosia, kicking Choplicker when he gave an amused snort. “Is this a joke?”

  “Do we look like jesters?” asked the jowly leader. “Abuse your dog again and we shall show you what wages a defiler of beasts is paid in Zygnema.”

  Choplicker barked his support of this plan as Zosia and Keun-ju allowed the customs agents to lead them down the long dock, and Zosia whispered, “Just you wait, fleabag, just you wait.”

  CHAPTER

  21

  An anonymous black-robed priest delivered Baron Domingo Hjortt to the Middle Chainhouse confessionals, and together they waited in the shadow of a gargoyle-wreathed column for the anathema who had murdered his son to leave her booth. Here he was, sixty-five years old, veteran of a half century’s worth of dangerous battles and the far deadlier arena of Imperial politics, and he felt as queasy and anxious as the day his mother had delivered him to Azgaroth’s military academy in Lemi. He had been a mere boy, but one on the cusp of manhood, and with an impressive military lineage to uphold. Years later, that scene had repeated itself… to a point. He had hidden his fears, as he knew his mother expected, but Efrain had but poorly concealed his nerves as they’d waited outside the dean’s office, the stripling shifting his weight from foot to foot as though it would somehow enable him to better carry the burden of destiny that bore down upon his narrow shoulders.

  At the time, he’d been annoyed with his son’s weakness, but now Domingo found himself imitating that scared little boy who haunted his heart, rocking from heel to heel in hopeless reflex. Catching himself in the act, he had to wonder if he’d always had the habit, if young Efrain had mimicked his father from the very beginning, and he’d just never been able to see it before now…

  Black oak creaked as the confessional’s door opened, and the bulky anathema oozed out of the narrow box. She seemed weak in the knees as she donned her mask and hurried out of the cavernous chamber. Domingo pictured himself sprinting after her and hacking her right leg out from under her with his cavalry saber. He knew the exact sound it would make, when his steel cut through flesh and shankbone, and smiled as he heard it in his mind. He imagined her screams for mercy echoing through the Middle Chainhouse, imagined her confessing it all, the truth coming out of her in bright spurts to match the crimson of her executioner’s dress uniform…

  “Baron?” Domingo blinked at the priest beside him, then cast a final glance at the anathema as she vanished out of the hall. He wondered if she had come clean for her crime—if there would be no need for this plot to go any further. For the first time in his life, here, in her house, he almost offered a prayer to the Fallen Mother, but caught himself. Everything happens, regardless of the hopes of mortals—on this, if nothing else, the Burnished Chain and the godless baron agreed absolutely.

  The hooded priest handed Domingo a skinny candle and directed him to the booth. As he opened the slot beneath the bench he saw the anathema’s far thicker tallow had burned low but still illuminated the compartment. He tossed his own in beside it and, without the slightest sense of regret or worry over blasphemy, blew them both out before closing the slot. Domingo’s pain was far sharper than a hot ass, and he had felt it every devil-praised minute of every day since word of his only child’s death had come to Cockspar. He felt no need to add to his misery out of lip service to the figment of some mad prophet’s imagination, no matter how fashionable the delusion may have grown in recent years.

  Before stepping into the confessional, he unbuckled his belt and slid off his saber so that he could actually sit in some remote proximity to comfort in the narrow box. Planting the scabbard between his feet and sitting down, he found the bench still plenty warm from its previous tenant; the confessional reminded him of the saunas of Flintland, with the added flourish of gruesome bas-reliefs etched into the wooden walls. A mesh face peered out at him from the iron grate, somewhere between masculine and feminine, angel and devil, and beyond it a shadow moved. After an awkward silence, Domingo sighed loudly enough for the woman on the other side to hear, but when she still didn’t speak, he begrudgingly went through the motions.

  “Mother, forgive me, for I am unclean.”

  “How long has it been since last you cleansed yourself?” asked the confessor, her insistence that they carry on this farce a patch of sandpaper grinding over his already bruised pride.

  “Never,” he said brusquely, only having known the appropriate opening from the plays his sister-in-law, Lupitera, was always dragging him to at the Iglesia Mendoza, Cockspar’s only decent theater. Confessional scenes were an easy way to get information to the audience, according to Lupitera. “I didn’t come here to play altar boy, Your Grace, so—”

  The Black Pope hissed at him through the grate, and Domingo checked himself. Whatever his feelings on her pagan customs, she was the only one who had reached out to him, the only one who had offered him something other than a red candle to burn at Efrain’s tomb. What kind of a military man was he, driving his only allies away with stubbornness?

  “Mother, forgive me, for I am unclean,” Domingo murmured, starting fresh. “I come here a stranger to your ways, a sinner seeking succor from the balm of the Burnished Chain. Forgive a pilgrim his weakness.”

  “Overselling it is even more insulting, Baron,” said Pope Y’Homa III, but she sounded impish rather than irate. “I sympathize with your weakness, and have from the first. That is why I reached out to you—a good man of little faith is far worthier than a woman of the cloth who betrays her vows.”

  “On that we are agreed,” said Domingo, though not without a twinge of guilt at what he’d done in the name of
goodness that very morning, what he was conspiring to do this very moment. It was not only the clergy who could play fast and loose with their vows. “It may interest you to learn that I am once more an active colonel of the Crimson Empire and agent of the queen.”

  “Did she make much noise about it?” Domingo didn’t like how eager for gossip about their queen the pope was, but it certainly hammered home her humanity—Y’Homa didn’t speak with the confidence of a vessel of the divine; she sounded like a teenager thirsting for canard. Which was all she was, really, but try telling that to the so-called civilized world who worshipped her as a god herself.

  “Questions were put to me, alternates suggested,” he said. “But the wise general never leaves the battlefield, and I am a nimble fencer with tongue and saber alike. Besides, what choice did she have but to accept my pledge? The Fifteenth is worth more to the Empire than every regiment from the Serpent’s Circle to Diadem, and she wants Azgaroth’s soldiers active, not twiddling their thumbs while the appointment process drags out for a new colonel.”

  It went without saying here as it had in the throne room that Chain-worship had broken out like a bad rash in Azgaroth, and if Queen Indsorith declined Hjortt’s offer she might end up with some born-again noble leading the Fifteenth instead of an open heretic. And yet here he was, conspiring with the Black Pope—it was almost funny.

  “Had my uncle enticed you into breaking your oaths sooner, the civil war would have ended faster, and to far happier result.”

  “I’ve broken no oaths,” said Domingo testily. “This morn I swore to protect the Crimson Empire, the same oath I swore fifty years ago, the same oath my son… the same oath my son gave when he took over command of the Fifteenth last summer. The same oath my mother swore before me. In the hundred years we’ve been a part of the Crimson Empire, no colonel of Azgaroth has betrayed their duty to the Crown.”

  “Not to the Crown, just to the fool who wears it, eh?” Y’Homa’s snide timbre grated almost as much as the truth behind her insult. “As I recall, you bucked the reign of the Stricken Queen more than any pony in the Crimson stable.”

  “I doubt you recall any such thing, considering you but were a twinkle in some cardinal’s eye when Indsorith cast the pretender down. The vows I swore were to King Kaldruut, long before that Cobalt witch ever took up arms against him. And I rebuked her rabble at every pass until she snuck into Diadem and murdered her way into the Crown. But I’m not here to discuss her history; it’s her future that interests me. Did you pry anything more out of Portolés? I saw her leaving the booth.”

  “Not as much as I had hoped, but her silence is just as damning as an outright confession,” said Y’Homa. “She is definitely a double agent of Indsorith’s, I’m sure of that now. And the anathema let slip that she’s being sent out of the city… which can only mean that the queen has ordered her to finish the assignment your son left uncompleted in the mountains—to track down and assassinate Zosia before the rest of the Star discovers that the Stricken Queen is still alive. Indsorith must want her killed quietly in her tent, rather than risk martyring Zosia a second time on some battlefield with countless witnesses.”

  The hated name sent unwelcome images flashing through Domingo’s mind. Bloody memories of bloody times: the rout at Yennek where the Fifteenth had stampeded over a mob of peasants, hooves and spears stained red as the riders’ standards; the forest outside Eyvind, where every tree was strung with hanged soldiers captured by the Cobalts; the madness at Nattop that could only be explained by deviltry; and the worse business at Windhand that he had only heard rumors of, but the rumors were bad enough. And now Cold Cobalt had risen from her grave to murder Domingo’s only child…

  Perhaps it was payback for the difficult time Domingo had given Zosia’s peasant army during the Cobalt War, or perhaps it was just a coincidence that Efrain had been the one Indsorith had sent to Kypck. It scarcely mattered. What did, what mattered more than Efrain’s murder or Queen Indsorith’s shielding that Chainwitch Portolés from justice, what mattered even more than the games the Crimson Queen and the Black Pope were playing with one another, was the simple fact that if Zosia had truly returned, all the Crimson Empire was in danger.

  “Have your spies delivered any more news?” Domingo asked.

  “My informants tell me they are close to a breakthrough,” said the Black Pope. “Queen Indsorith is playing this hand so close to her chest she might lose a card down her cleavage, but she is running out of time. Everyone already knows this rebel army terrorizing the south calls itself the Cobalt Company, and word is spreading that Zosia herself leads them.”

  “I return to Azgaroth tonight,” said Domingo. “I’ll have the Fifteenth ready to move before the summer’s out, and then we’ll run the Cobalt Company to ground and execute every single one of them. The Second Cobalt War will end before it starts.”

  “I thought you wanted to wait for more evidence before proceeding!”

  “Consider me convinced that these rebels need to be stopped,” said Domingo, not pleased to have his words parroted back at him by this girl. “I had assumed the queen’s reluctance to bring the full might of the Empire down on this new Cobalt Company was a calculated move, that she was conserving our strength to take Linkensterne back from those thieving Immaculates. That explanation makes less and less sense as the Cobalts grow bolder and bolder in their attacks, and still no royal order is given for the northern regiments to free Linkensterne before the Immaculates complete their wall.”

  “Don’t even get me started on the Immaculates,” said Y’Homa. “I’ve received intelligence that some important princess of theirs has supposedly been kidnapped by one of my missionaries. Every isle in the Norwest Arm is frothing mad about it. I have yet to work out if Zosia took the girl to leverage the Immaculates into aiding her rebellion, or if Indsorith is behind it for her own ends.”

  The third possibility was that Y’Homa had stolen the noble and would use her to bring the Immaculates to her cause when the Burnished Chain made another grab for the Carnelian Crown, but that went without saying. Domingo hardly expected the Black Pope to bring him in on every scheme; no, he was already far more deeply embroiled in her plots than he was comfortable with. The Fifteenth Colonel of the Crimson Empire, conspiring with the Burnished Chain—what would Domingo’s mother have said about such a scandal? Nothing appropriate for church, certainly.

  “Immaculates business aside, I am glad we are in agreement on your course,” said Y’Homa.

  “What kind of a father would I be if I didn’t consider your information?” said Domingo, flinching as he relived the pain it had brought him to hear that Efrain had been killed by none other than Cobalt Zosia, and that the Crimson Queen whom both father and son had faithfully served had known it all along. That sham interrogation of Sister Portolés in the Crimson Throne Room had only confirmed the truth—nobody else knew who had given Efrain the order to attack Zosia’s village, because the order must have come directly from Queen Indsorith herself, and she would risk the entire Empire to preserve the secret that Zosia had never actually died.

  “What kind of a colonel would you be?” said Y’Homa, clearly thinking he was every bit as pliable as he pretended to be when forced to attend court. “With the aid of the weapon I offer you, the Fifteenth alone could slaughter the Cobalts before their ranks swell any further. And with the Ninth and Third Regiments already harrying the rebels, I doubt you’ll have any trouble at all. What could be better for the continued peace of the Empire than an army of thugs eradicated without mercy, rather than awaiting the machinations of the queen to allow for their fall?”

  Remembering all the engagements he had taken part in over the years, Domingo could think of quite a few things better than open combat against well-armed, well-trained rebels led by the cagiest opponent he had ever faced, but he kept them to himself. Whatever her motivation, the Black Pope was right that the Cobalt Company had already quaffed barrels’ worth of Imperial blood, and their
thirst was unlikely to slacken as they grew in ranks and reputation. Better to kill them all, as fast as possible, for the good of the Empire. For the satisfaction it would bring him, to go deaf from their screams as his Fifteenth took them apart by inches. If all was as it seemed, and the Stricken Queen truly led this new Cobalt Company, there was the chance, however slim, to meet her on the field before the battle. And if that happened, if he had the chance to avenge his son and his old king and all the dreams of the Crimson Empire that Zosia had cast down into shit twenty-odd years ago, well, then his oath never to strike an enemy before the horns of combat have sounded might just be forgotten for a moment or two.

  “And what of the weapon you promised me, Your Grace?” said Domingo. “Now that I have fulfilled your terms, it is time you fulfill mine.”

  “With pleasure,” said the Black Pope. “When you leave the confessional pay a visit to the offices of Cardinal Diamond. He is expecting you, and will deliver something more deadly than any army. Now, before you and I never had this conversation, is there anything else I can answer for you?”

  How many times had he told himself that he’d been the same way at Efrain’s age, a little soft and a little spoiled and more than a little reluctant to ride to war? How many nights had Domingo lain awake telling himself that his son was worthy of his title and station? That he hadn’t somehow sired the sort of colonel the grunts would sing mocking songs about, a noble who bought his medals instead of earning them? How different would their lives have been if he’d given Efrain the kitten he’d wanted for his tenth birthday instead of a sword and a library of martial philosophy? But these were not the sorts of questions a deranged poppet with pretensions of divinity could answer, so he simply said, “It’s hard to believe the peasants were right all this time, isn’t it? They’ve been chanting it ever since she first fell from Diadem’s throne room: Zosia lives.”

  “Not for much longer, Colonel Hjortt,” said Pope Y’Homa III, Shepherdess of the Lost. “Not for much longer at all.”